SAVING THE FUCKING WORLD vs. FEEDING MY FUCKING FAMILY BY KEEPING MY FUCKING JOB is not a tradeoff
No one asked you to make that tradeoff. How, for instace, does using a more fuel-efficient method of transport make you lose your job? How does using better insualtion to reduce heating and cooling energy use? You don't have to pollute to have a job.
Then it would be a good idea to demonstrate the facts and rationally deal with the problem rather than ignorantly implementing poorly thought out treaties.
Right. The US has been doing that? Or have they just been burying their head in the sand? If the US was doing ANYTHING about this instead of shooting the messenger, that might make sense.
i've been a slashdot fan since 1997. seems like the submissions, and comments, are getting further and further left.,
How strange. Seems the opposite to me.
Every story that mentions India, for instance, evinces a swarm of racist and jingoistic posts, many modded "insightful". Every article mentioning the word "evolution" gets hundreds of posts advocating creationism. Every article mentioning guns draws a bunch of gun rights advocates.
Perhaps the anonymous poster means there's more criticism of GW Bush. Well, there's more to criticise. Regardless of your political leanings, the one thing that unites most commentators is that GWB has royally fucked up everything he's touched.
Why the hell would we ratify Kyoto? It basically gives India and China a free pass (giving a competitive advantage to countries who are very serious competitors to us), and only slows the increase of CO2 (as opposed to keeping levels the same, or reducing it).
Of course, you can't lose an economic advantage just because you might SAVE THE FUCKING WORLD. Next quarter's stock prices are the only measure of the right thing to do.
And you're in a much better position to pressure China and India to sign on if you're already in compliance. Meanwhile, the US is still far and away the world's greatest producer of greenhouse gases. Not to mention the fact that much Chinsse industry is produced to order for US customers.
Andy Fisher Jan 11, 2007 16:22:40 GMT 8 pts The BIOS was tied to Vista launch. I think I've got it seperated now and moving again through the process for XP. It should show up under BIOS for XP soon.
Andy Fisher Jan 12, 2007 14:27:33 GMT 10 pts I would start looking on the web at the end of next week, around 19th. Because of MLK day on Monday it might be early week of 22nd.
This should be for all VT capable platforms but of course I'm sure you'll all be posting here if yours doesn't show up.:)
Yes, it would be nice for them to put it right in the/. post, since if you RTFA, you have to get all the way to the *fourth* post in the forum before it's spelled out for you!
That post uses the words, but does not "spell it out" as a definition, only the relative rarity of words beginning with V might lead one to guess that. You obviously already knew that and were looking for it, but the uninitiated wouldn't.
(BTW, Virtualization Technology, for those whose browsers are incapable of leaving the slashdot domain.)
If there is a practical distinction to be made here, I am not sure I can see it.
The inventive "Connecticut Yankee" of the 1790's wasn't playing with wooden gears and cogs as an intellectual exercise. He was in the business of making an affordable mantle clock.
You can't copyright a clock. What are you talking about?
Except, oh right, creating scarcity to allow creators to profit was the original constitutional purpose of copyright
Insightful, up to that point.
According to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, 1787: "the Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
You've swallowed Hollywood's line. Profit is supposed to be a carrot to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", not the purpose, though these days you'd never know that.
As for TFA, yes, what a load of crap. When did musings in random blogs become newsworthy?
Back in the 60s our local post office had a pneumatic tube inter-office mail, stick the capsule in and poof, it gets pushed to the destination.
For the youngsters amongst us, this was featured on Lost recently.
I have the impression from movies that at least in some large cities this was used to send packets and letters from one building to another in business districts in the 40s and 50s.
Since much of Saddam's army was disbanded, there are hundreds of thousands of ex-soldiers, with a grudge against the current govt and the occupiers, who have a detailed knowledge of all military installations, and very likely detailed survey maps of their own. In a civil war you're a fool to assume you can keep anything secret, let alone gross details of military bases.
measuring the xheight rather than some arbitrary quantity also does, and leave it at that.
No animosity. As for x-height, it's an important parameter, but there are others equally so. If you look at an AFM file, it's one of several dimensions listed (eg below). Font classification is a field fraught with arbitrary labels. One company's "bold" is another's "black" or "semi-bold", "demi" (as below) even "medium". "Gothic" can refer to a a 1920s style sans serif, or a German Blackletter.
FontName Bookman-Demi FullName ITC Bookman Demi FamilyName ITC Bookman Weight Demi ItalicAngle 0 IsFixedPitch false FontBBox -194 -250 1346 934 UnderlinePosition -100 UnderlineThickness 50 Version 003.001 Notice Copyright (c) 1985, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1997, 1998, 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.ITC Bookman is a registered trademark of International Typeface Corporation. EncodingScheme AdobeStandardEncoding CapHeight 681 XHeight 502 Ascender 717 Descender -228 StdHW 82 StdVW 167 StartCharMetrics 229
Still confused... The SI doesn't define measurements for particular things.
Metres are a unit of length. "Fonts" do not have a length. A digital font is a collection of hundreds, or thousands, of graphic designs. Just where you place your ruler to measure the size, in metres or furlongs, has to be defined. And there are differences of opinion. If you look at visually similar fonts from different foundries, you often find that if printed at the same point size, they are in fact obviously very different in "size".
"There are proposed metric units to measure type, but they are not offically part of the SI", is false or is based on incorrect understanding or doesn't make sense.
You apparently use mm, and you mentioned the quad. Those are proposed metric-derived units for measuring type. Does that make sense/is correct/true?
I see absolutely no reason why a program that is generally designed around metric font sizes should suddenly be forced not to be able to deal with legacy fonts
The reverse however is not true. "Legacy" software, utilities, and interpreters embedded in hardware will have problems with the new fonts and/or page description language. If you look at the PostScript page description languiage, or PDF, the point is ubiquitous. It's doable, of course, but at a cost. What benefits are there: please explain how my life will be easier?
True, but if you got used to the single decimal point, you'd barely even see it.
I'm familiar with the concept of the decimal point. If I had to use them I'd manage, but given a choice I prefer integers.
Well, yes. I thought it was a given that I thought millimetres were the optimal choice. Most proposals I've seen for using millimetres for measuring type cover this well and in more detail than I could on a slashdot post, so I suggest you read one
There were a bunch of metrication zealots who crossposted that in a font newsgroup a while ago. They got flamed to a crisp. I read it, I understand it, I still prefer the current system.
But really, it comes down to the same reason why I don't think we should be measuring tabletops in inches
I don't think the issues are the same at all. If I was multiplying by 25.4 and dividing by 72 every day I might see some utility in using metric units. But I NEVER need to convert font sizes to anything else. (If I was a signwriter, perhaps; but I lay out books.)
I am confused. Who needs to endorse it for it to be a proposed unit?
I said an official unit, part of the SI, not a "proposed" unit.
Again, I'm confused as unless I misunderstand you it was my post that said that.
Well, we're both confused as I don't know what "that" refers to.
Well, yes, but point-specced type is frequently two significant figures (10 point, 16 point, 72 point), whereas millimetre-specced type could also be two significant figures
I was talking about integers, i.e. no decimal points (usually), not significant figures.
The x-height is convenient because almost everything with type has lowercase letters so there's almost always something to measure off, and because most fonts look the same size if they've got the same x-height.
Yes, but it's only the relative x-height that matters. Whether you measure it in Angstroms, twips or points, doesn't matter. You just need to know that Adobe Garamond has a smaller x-height (392)Bookman (502). Whatever the units, it's the ratio that's important. And I'm reading these out of the AFM files, which would have to be redefined and rounded up or down if metrication was imposed, making a nightmare of compatibility, and vast expense to everyone who uses fonts professionally.
Simplify yes, by having all units of measurement for a given dimension differ only by powers of ten. If we're simplying by trying to make sure everything can be measured with integers, we'll end up with so many different units with different conversions (that, or measure everything in yoctametres).
When do you ever need to convert a font dimension to an absolute length? Perhaps if you're using display type, making a poster, you may want a capital to be 40mm, or 4m high. But for that you use a drawing app, and that usually does have the ability to measure type in any unit. So the computer takes care of any complications of conversions. However, I often do make hand calculations of font sizes and leading when laying out a book, and in that case it's just simpler to use integers.
As I said, if starting with a clean slate, I could imagine a metric point of.0001 m, but the quad is just a stupid hybrid unit. No SI units use a factor of 4. Possibly as the computer power becomes less and less a limiting factor (I still remember people rendering pages overnight, where now it's seconds) we could transition to microns, where 10 pt text would be something like 350 microns, a loss of simplicity but would allow precision without fractional sizes. But this is unlikely to happen for at least the next decade or two, I think.
the only (to my knowledge) and most common proposed metric unit to measure type is the millimetre. That is very much officially a part of the SI
Yes, the mm is an offical unit. But it isn't endorsed by anyone as the unit to measure fonts. (As you mention the Q is one other proposal.) And before you say you can measure any length in mm, if you note my post, it's not quite that simple and there would be a lot of argument as to how to do it.
Personally, I feel that font sizes of the form 'xheight/linehight mm' (e.g. 1.5/5 mm) has much to recommend itself.
I don't see any advantage myself. Why do would you actually care how many mm the x-height is? And the problem is that you immediately have to use tenths of mm, at least point specced type is mostly in integers (or halves).
Tradition is an important factor, I can put my type ruler on a book published 100 years ago and read off the type size and leading, and it's almost always simple integers. Integers are pleasant to work with, and the whole idea of metrication is to simplify.
Do you truly believe that developers added HTML support to their email clients because a bunch of marketers told them to?
Yes. Why else?
And if you think I'm a plain text Luddite, well I am, but there was (and still is) a "rich text" standard for formatting that can be used safely and economically, instead of the abortion that is Outlook/Frontpage HTML.
You've obviously never worked in marketing.
Marketing is all about that first impression.
We know why you want to do it. That's why we hate you and wish you would just die. It's cunts like you that lobby to prevent any laws being made to stop spam, because it might be used against you, and cunts like you that push email clients to send and display HTML in all its glory.
Check me if I'm wrong, but I think that we should thank Apple instead.
Probably that was a large part of Adobe deciding to use that. But the traditional American point was 1/72.27", so it was a fairly obvious way to simplify it.
Nevertheless, Apple's 72dpi screen was soon superseded. PostScript, the (PS) Apple LaserWriter and film RIPs, and Aldus PageMaker and all DTP software since are what cemented the PS point.
If Adobe had made, say 1/10 mm, as their point, it could easily have been different. But the times you need to translate points to real-world units are rare enough that no one in DTP is at all interested in doing it now and facing a task greater than Y2K to convert everything.
ne of the most common tasks in building is to find the centre of something - this is MUCH easier in imperial. If something is 28 3/4" to successively half it is trivial: 14 3/8, 7 3/16, 3/ 22/32 - only the last of these is remotely challenging. If something is 27.7cm this process is harder - and as this would often be marked as 2770mm which is harder still. Try it in your head.
1385mm. I'm no Rain Man, I found it trivial. Certainly easier than messing with feet, inches and fractions.
Put into Slashdot terms, note that if you get rid of the Imperial Inch, say goodbye to "point" font-sizes; no more will you be able to specify a simple 12pt (ie, 12/72 of an inch), but rather 4.233mm! Selection boxes just got wider, eating up all that valuable screen real-estate. Speaking of, no more DPI or PPI resolution metrics.
Bullshit. In almost every metric country, type is measured in points. Certainly from my personal experience, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, India and the UK, which are all metric in most respects. There are proposed metric units to measure type, but they are not offically part of the SI. And the idea of a font "size" is actually fairly arbitrary and fuzzy. It's generally defined as the smallest line spacing so that the descenders of one line do not collide with the ascenders of the line below. But there are many cases where this rule is violated. Consider it more like women's dress sizes rather than relating to a specific dimension.
Of course, we can thank Adobe for embedding their definition of the point = 1/72" in PostScript (which is slightly larger then the older traditional point.) Page sizes however are often quoted in mm.
However, I suspect you are trolling. If so, well done. I also have to suspect that the site linked in the summary , http://www.freedom2measure.org/ may be a parody.
The metric system has been almost wholly created and standardized by male scientists and bureaucrats. At the time, during which women were considerably less liberated than today, woman had virtually no say in the creation and, in many countries, the imposition of these units.
... This is an utterly arbitrary way of fixing the size of a degree. In fact, under SI, water freezes at 273.16 K.
...Since the readership of most international US publications is majority American, American units should come first. (In survey after survey, clear majorities of all age groups in the US are more comfortable with American units.)
If I had a website relying on ads and a reliable way to do it, I'd terminate accounts of people with an ad blocker right off the bat.
If that started to happen in a couple of weeks the adblockers would be modified to request your ads and replace them with 1 bit images. You'd never know.
Some sites like Wired use Flash interstitials to force you to watch a full screen ad before giving you the page. But I can't see a way to guarantee that ads as part of a page will be viewed. Anyway, all the trouble you go to to get rid of the freeloaders will make your service less attractive to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly sounds like you are.
No one asked you to make that tradeoff. How, for instace, does using a more fuel-efficient method of transport make you lose your job? How does using better insualtion to reduce heating and cooling energy use? You don't have to pollute to have a job.
You're going to pay Chinese to drive SUVs to work to replace those US drivers who catch a train?
At this point, if you require more proof, you're either a troll or an idiot.
Right. The US has been doing that? Or have they just been burying their head in the sand? If the US was doing ANYTHING about this instead of shooting the messenger, that might make sense.
How strange. Seems the opposite to me.
Every story that mentions India, for instance, evinces a swarm of racist and jingoistic posts, many modded "insightful". Every article mentioning the word "evolution" gets hundreds of posts advocating creationism. Every article mentioning guns draws a bunch of gun rights advocates.
Perhaps the anonymous poster means there's more criticism of GW Bush. Well, there's more to criticise. Regardless of your political leanings, the one thing that unites most commentators is that GWB has royally fucked up everything he's touched.
Of course, you can't lose an economic advantage just because you might SAVE THE FUCKING WORLD. Next quarter's stock prices are the only measure of the right thing to do.
And you're in a much better position to pressure China and India to sign on if you're already in compliance. Meanwhile, the US is still far and away the world's greatest producer of greenhouse gases. Not to mention the fact that much Chinsse industry is produced to order for US customers.
You did say it was "spelled out". Not something one had to deduce.
Fisher is an HP employee.
That post uses the words, but does not "spell it out" as a definition, only the relative rarity of words beginning with V might lead one to guess that. You obviously already knew that and were looking for it, but the uninitiated wouldn't.
(BTW, Virtualization Technology, for those whose browsers are incapable of leaving the slashdot domain.)
I assume you meant to put a link there.
You can't copyright a clock. What are you talking about?
Insightful, up to that point.
You've swallowed Hollywood's line. Profit is supposed to be a carrot to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", not the purpose, though these days you'd never know that.
As for TFA, yes, what a load of crap. When did musings in random blogs become newsworthy?
For the youngsters amongst us, this was featured on Lost recently.
I have the impression from movies that at least in some large cities this was used to send packets and letters from one building to another in business districts in the 40s and 50s.
Since much of Saddam's army was disbanded, there are hundreds of thousands of ex-soldiers, with a grudge against the current govt and the occupiers, who have a detailed knowledge of all military installations, and very likely detailed survey maps of their own. In a civil war you're a fool to assume you can keep anything secret, let alone gross details of military bases.
No animosity. As for x-height, it's an important parameter, but there are others equally so. If you look at an AFM file, it's one of several dimensions listed (eg below). Font classification is a field fraught with arbitrary labels. One company's "bold" is another's "black" or "semi-bold", "demi" (as below) even "medium". "Gothic" can refer to a a 1920s style sans serif, or a German Blackletter.
Metres are a unit of length. "Fonts" do not have a length. A digital font is a collection of hundreds, or thousands, of graphic designs. Just where you place your ruler to measure the size, in metres or furlongs, has to be defined. And there are differences of opinion. If you look at visually similar fonts from different foundries, you often find that if printed at the same point size, they are in fact obviously very different in "size".
"There are proposed metric units to measure type, but they are not offically part of the SI", is false or is based on incorrect understanding or doesn't make sense.
You apparently use mm, and you mentioned the quad. Those are proposed metric-derived units for measuring type. Does that make sense/is correct/true?
I see absolutely no reason why a program that is generally designed around metric font sizes should suddenly be forced not to be able to deal with legacy fonts
The reverse however is not true. "Legacy" software, utilities, and interpreters embedded in hardware will have problems with the new fonts and/or page description language. If you look at the PostScript page description languiage, or PDF, the point is ubiquitous. It's doable, of course, but at a cost. What benefits are there: please explain how my life will be easier?
True, but if you got used to the single decimal point, you'd barely even see it.
I'm familiar with the concept of the decimal point. If I had to use them I'd manage, but given a choice I prefer integers.
Well, yes. I thought it was a given that I thought millimetres were the optimal choice. Most proposals I've seen for using millimetres for measuring type cover this well and in more detail than I could on a slashdot post, so I suggest you read one
There were a bunch of metrication zealots who crossposted that in a font newsgroup a while ago. They got flamed to a crisp. I read it, I understand it, I still prefer the current system.
But really, it comes down to the same reason why I don't think we should be measuring tabletops in inches
I don't think the issues are the same at all. If I was multiplying by 25.4 and dividing by 72 every day I might see some utility in using metric units. But I NEVER need to convert font sizes to anything else. (If I was a signwriter, perhaps; but I lay out books.)
I said an official unit, part of the SI, not a "proposed" unit.
Again, I'm confused as unless I misunderstand you it was my post that said that.
Well, we're both confused as I don't know what "that" refers to.
Well, yes, but point-specced type is frequently two significant figures (10 point, 16 point, 72 point), whereas millimetre-specced type could also be two significant figures
I was talking about integers, i.e. no decimal points (usually), not significant figures.
The x-height is convenient because almost everything with type has lowercase letters so there's almost always something to measure off, and because most fonts look the same size if they've got the same x-height.
Yes, but it's only the relative x-height that matters. Whether you measure it in Angstroms, twips or points, doesn't matter. You just need to know that Adobe Garamond has a smaller x-height (392)Bookman (502). Whatever the units, it's the ratio that's important. And I'm reading these out of the AFM files, which would have to be redefined and rounded up or down if metrication was imposed, making a nightmare of compatibility, and vast expense to everyone who uses fonts professionally.
Simplify yes, by having all units of measurement for a given dimension differ only by powers of ten. If we're simplying by trying to make sure everything can be measured with integers, we'll end up with so many different units with different conversions (that, or measure everything in yoctametres).
When do you ever need to convert a font dimension to an absolute length? Perhaps if you're using display type, making a poster, you may want a capital to be 40mm, or 4m high. But for that you use a drawing app, and that usually does have the ability to measure type in any unit. So the computer takes care of any complications of conversions. However, I often do make hand calculations of font sizes and leading when laying out a book, and in that case it's just simpler to use integers.
As I said, if starting with a clean slate, I could imagine a metric point of .0001 m, but the quad is just a stupid hybrid unit. No SI units use a factor of 4. Possibly as the computer power becomes less and less a limiting factor (I still remember people rendering pages overnight, where now it's seconds) we could transition to microns, where 10 pt text would be something like 350 microns, a loss of simplicity but would allow precision without fractional sizes. But this is unlikely to happen for at least the next decade or two, I think.
Yes, the mm is an offical unit. But it isn't endorsed by anyone as the unit to measure fonts. (As you mention the Q is one other proposal.) And before you say you can measure any length in mm, if you note my post, it's not quite that simple and there would be a lot of argument as to how to do it.
Personally, I feel that font sizes of the form 'xheight/linehight mm' (e.g. 1.5/5 mm) has much to recommend itself.
I don't see any advantage myself. Why do would you actually care how many mm the x-height is? And the problem is that you immediately have to use tenths of mm, at least point specced type is mostly in integers (or halves).
Tradition is an important factor, I can put my type ruler on a book published 100 years ago and read off the type size and leading, and it's almost always simple integers. Integers are pleasant to work with, and the whole idea of metrication is to simplify.
Yes. Why else?
And if you think I'm a plain text Luddite, well I am, but there was (and still is) a "rich text" standard for formatting that can be used safely and economically, instead of the abortion that is Outlook/Frontpage HTML.
We know why you want to do it. That's why we hate you and wish you would just die. It's cunts like you that lobby to prevent any laws being made to stop spam, because it might be used against you, and cunts like you that push email clients to send and display HTML in all its glory.
Really. Did you do a survey? What proportion of people said they liked it? What proportion filtered it as spam and never read it?
Probably that was a large part of Adobe deciding to use that. But the traditional American point was 1/72.27", so it was a fairly obvious way to simplify it.
Nevertheless, Apple's 72dpi screen was soon superseded. PostScript, the (PS) Apple LaserWriter and film RIPs, and Aldus PageMaker and all DTP software since are what cemented the PS point.
If Adobe had made, say 1/10 mm, as their point, it could easily have been different. But the times you need to translate points to real-world units are rare enough that no one in DTP is at all interested in doing it now and facing a task greater than Y2K to convert everything.
1385mm. I'm no Rain Man, I found it trivial. Certainly easier than messing with feet, inches and fractions.
Bullshit. In almost every metric country, type is measured in points. Certainly from my personal experience, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, India and the UK, which are all metric in most respects. There are proposed metric units to measure type, but they are not offically part of the SI. And the idea of a font "size" is actually fairly arbitrary and fuzzy. It's generally defined as the smallest line spacing so that the descenders of one line do not collide with the ascenders of the line below. But there are many cases where this rule is violated. Consider it more like women's dress sizes rather than relating to a specific dimension.
Of course, we can thank Adobe for embedding their definition of the point = 1/72" in PostScript (which is slightly larger then the older traditional point.) Page sizes however are often quoted in mm.
However, I suspect you are trolling. If so, well done. I also have to suspect that the site linked in the summary , http://www.freedom2measure.org/ may be a parody.
Could anyone write that stuff seriously?If that started to happen in a couple of weeks the adblockers would be modified to request your ads and replace them with 1 bit images. You'd never know.
Some sites like Wired use Flash interstitials to force you to watch a full screen ad before giving you the page. But I can't see a way to guarantee that ads as part of a page will be viewed. Anyway, all the trouble you go to to get rid of the freeloaders will make your service less attractive to everyone.