While we're at it, if you've never heard of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, you might want to look those up too. HTH.HAND.
Riding in a motor vehicle on city streets is a good deal more dangerous. For many Americans it's substantially the most dangerous thing they're willing to do EVER, and yet they do it many times a day.
Of course, there's *some* risk in _anything_ you do. Playing sports and working out, for instance, are likely to get you injured, but sitting at home all the time will buy you poor health twenty or forty years down the line. There's no such thing as a completely safe activity.
> All the sans serif fonts are eyesores to me, so I don't care what they recommend there > (why the heck would you ever make the digit 1, lower case l, and capital I look identical?)
For blocks of English text, you can get actually away with this, and the reader's mind fills in the distinctions at a subconcious level, based on context and the inherent redundancy built into the language. One reason to use them is that they tend to be more easily legible at small point sizes and/or at a distance. If the text is sufficiently small or distant that it's a little hard to see, the extra stuff on seriffed fonts competes with the essential letter shapes for the eye's attention and can make the text harder to read.
Of course, for stuff like source code what you want a fixed-width font. I tend to like ones that are mostly sans, i.e., all characters are visually distinguishable but most of them aren't decorated with superfluous feet everyplace. A few characters often have extra bits in these fonts merely to help them take up the allotted width, e.g., I generally has the lines across the top and bottom like they teach you to make the letter in elementary school, and lowercase i often has something similar. After a while you start to see those as part of the basic shape of the letter. I find these fonts simpler and easier on the eyes than fully-seriffed fonts. Andale Mono is a good example of the genre.
This is not to say that I don't like seriffed fonts. For some things I do. They look better in narrow columns, for instance, especially under full justification (which tends to do a number on sans fonts), and they look less "bare and stark" in larger point sizes, e.g., 16-point Arial just looks awefully plain, but Georgia looks nice at that size.
> Are you sure you can find one decent lawyer when you only have 10 total? I think > you need a much larger collection of lawyers before you'll accomplish that...
Yeah, it's kind of like Abraham, pleading with God not to destroy the city where his nephew was staying. He's thinking, "Hey, my nephew is basically a decent guy... okay, so he's done a couple of bone-headed things, like that whole business a while back where I ended up having to raise an army and rescue him... but basically he's a nice enough guy. I bet there are some other decent people. Maybe in a city that size there could be as many as fifty..."
So he begs God not to destroy the city if there are fifty righteous people in it, but God agrees to that *way* too easily, and Abraham has second thoughts, starts thinking about what the people of the city are like... say, what if there *aren't* fifty? So he asks God if he would spare the city if there were ten fewer righteous people, only forty. Again, God agrees with no argument... A couple of iterations later, Abraham's got God talked down to ten. Surely there are *ten* righteous people. I mean, there's Lot, and his family, and surely they must have some decent friends or something... ten should be no problem at all... right? WRONG. Ten? There's scarcely five. The city is toast.
How many decent, upright, honest lawyers do you suppose there are in North America?
I don't have an exact figure, but if you can prove there are fifty I will personally submit to using ed as my only text editor for a whole week. (No, I don't know how to use it without reading the man page. Normally I'm an Emacs user, so as you can imagine using ed would be rather painful. I'm extremely confident there aren't fifty decent upright honest lawyers in North America.)
I'm not saying I dislike the idea of making the plaintiff's lawyers share in the losses if the suit is unsuccessful, but I hardly think frivolous lawsuits would disappear.
> > When these fonts are freely avalible and routinely installed on 90+% of > > computers they might be acceptable to use instead of what's currently in use. > > They're freely available as part of both Vista and Office 2007. > I'd give it about a year until they've met your criteria.
That would give Vista the fastest adoption rate of any Microsoft Windows version so far. Given the way things look to be shaping up so far, you'll have to pardon me if I don't hold my breath while we wait.
As a point of reference, Windows XP, which was released in 2001, has not yet achieved a 90% level of adoption. More than 10% of all Windows desktops[1] are still Windows 2000, Windows 98, or some even earlier version. And of course that's completely leaving out the question of non-Windows systems.
As far as Office, I doubt it's ever got past 25%, for all versions of Office combined, though admittedly a high percentage of Office deployments are on corporate networks, which are especially likely to be among those systems still running W2K or even NT4. If you want to get a rough idea of how many Office deployments there are compared to Windows deployments, look at the amount of revenue each generates, then consider that the overwhelming majority of Windows copies are sold through the big OEMs, which get exceptionally good deals, but most Office deployments are sold at full retail price -- and a copy of Office costs more than even a retail copy of Windows, much less an OEM copy, much less the special low price the big OEMs pay.
90% is an exceptionally high figure. Almost nothing gets that kind of market penetration, in any industry. The original Core Fonts for the Web haven't got there yet, I'm quite sure, so I can't imagine these new C fonts would get there any time this decade.
--- [1] By "desktops" in this context I mean systems users use directly, where fonts matter.
So a laptop counts, but a file server doesn't. Which is why I didn't mention WS2003.
> Speaking as a programmer, I think the set is worth having just for Consolas.
The PDF in the article doesn't show all the characters I'd need to see to evaluate that.
It's less important for proportional fonts, which are mostly used for non-technical text in English or other human languages, but for a fixed-width font, which you're going to use to look at source code, logfiles, configuration files, and the like, it is critically important that all printable ASCII characters be clearly distinguishable visually; otherwise, the font may as well not exist, because you can't really use it.
There are precious few such fonts that really look good: the three best ones that I know about are Andale Mono, Lucida Console, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Well, I'm assuing we're only interested in TrueType/OpenType fonts, that bitmapped fonts and printer fonts (e.g., PS Type 1) don't count. So another one would be a welcome addition, surely.
> Consolas with no antialiasing... Painful, isn't it?
Still looks about five billion times better than Courier New.
But why does it *matter* what it looks like without font antialiasing?
Seriously, are there any current systems still in widespread use that don't do antialiasing? IIRC, even Debian Stable now has a sufficiently recent X server as to include this feature, which probably means all major Linux distros do, and I know I've had it on FreeBSD for a while, so I imagine OpenBSD and NetBSD probably have it too, and I know WinXP does it. Of the major systems (for desktops and workstations), that pretty much leaves OS X and Solaris, unless I'm missing something. (VMS[1] and most other Unices are, if I'm not mistaken, pretty focused on the server side of things.) If OS X doesn't have font anti-aliasing, that would be hilarious, what with all its focus on visual style and everything. But I judge that unlikely, unless someone with a Mac can verify otherwise.
Solaris... okay, I don't know if Solaris has font antialiasing, and it plausibly might not. (Doesn't it have its own proprietary X server, forked from some early BSD release back in the seventies? So it might not necessarily have a feature just because XFree86 implemented it way back before the X.org fork. Then again, it could have it, if Sun implemented it. I just don't happen to know.)
Still, one platform out of the top eight or so, and it's not one of the top three... that's basically nothing. If they don't have font antialiasing, isn't that Sun's problem? I really can't see worrying about that when choosing a font.
I'm not saying I'd choose Consolas. Personally I'm rather partial to Andale Mono. Nonetheless, how it looks unaliased isn't really an issue, as far as I'm concerned.
--- [1] In any case, despite its historical importance, there is some question about whether VMS really counts as a current system any more, since HP doesn't seem to be treating it as a significant part of their product line or devoting significant resources to it. Compaq bought DEC for the Alpha chip technology, and VMS complemented that, so they might have kept VMS up somewhat, but HP didn't buy Compaq for any of that, but for their x86 PC business, and they don't seem to care very much about the DEC stuff. There are things I like about VMS, but at this point I am not at all sure I'd consider it a major OS any longer. And before someone says "BeOS", everything I just said about digital goes triple for Be.
Of those, only serif, sans-serif, and monospace have any consistent meaning in practice. Cursive is almost never rendered in an actual cursive-script font (if you know of any browser on any platform that does by default, I'd love to hear about it), and most the most popular OSes don't even ship, out of the box, with fonts that meet the CSS definition of a fantasy font face (what the rest of the world calls "decorative fonts", typically WAY more decorated than any normal serif font). Even on platforms where decorative fonts are typically available, browsers generally don't automatically use one of them when CSS says "fantasy", at least, not without the user having specifically configured the browser to use a certain font for that. Firefox doesn't even have a UI for specifying what fonts to use for cursive or fantasy.
> Cambria can serve as a replacement to both Georgia and Times New Roman
Unlikely. It has a worse (taller) aspect ratio than Georgia and doesn't look nearly as good in italic, and it's about fifty orders of magnitude shy of being as ubiquitous as TNR. (I'm not sure there is *any* other font as ubiquitous as TNR, or has ever been. Of course TNR is ugly, but nobody uses it because it looks good.)
> Calibri can replace Arial.
Again, Arial is at this point fairly ubiquitous, probably the third or fourth most ubiqitous font for all time, after TNR, Helvetica, and possibly Courier. (Courier is not very ubiqitous now, but in the bad old days before TrueType, the days of non-scalable screen fonts and separate printer fonts, it was.)
> Candara can replace Trebuchet MS and Helvetica.
Eh, maybe. Trebuchet is not very widly used in any case (though it is visibly heavier than Candara, which in some cases would be desirable; OTOH, Candara has a nicer italic), and Helvetica at this point is mostly a Mac font (though historically it was more widespread and important). Then again, do we _need_ a replacement for these fonts? Who uses them anyway?
> Consolas can replace Lucidia Console and Courier New
If Courier New could be replaced with a better-looking font, it would have been many times over, because just about every other fixed-width font *EVER* is better looking. As for Lucidia Console, I've never heard of it. (There's Lucida Console...)
> Can replace Georga and Palatino
Never heard of Georga. (Georgia? I thought Cambria was to replace that?)
> Corbel can replace Verdana.
It's hard to compare them, because the creator of the comparison document neglected to scale Verdana down a size so that it would roughly match the size of the other font. (Verdana runs about a size larger than most other fonts, e.g., Verdana 10 is about the same size as Arial 11. Dunno why Verdana runs large, it just does. I guess the font foundry made it that way. It's a nice enough font to make up for this, though. Looks better than Arial.)
> True, but in the short term we can generally say it's a good thing.
I don't know that we have enough information to say that with any certitude.
> Sunspots cause interference on earth nd are related to solar flares, which can in rare > instances damage electronics and present an increased level of risk to astronauts,
Yes, but they have other effects as well, probably more than we know about.
> It makes some wonder if it might be a calm before a storm, however.
That is possible.
It's also possible that it's an indicator we're approaching another extended period of reduced solar activity, much like the Maunder Minimum in the middle of the second millennium. If that were the case, we could be looking at significant global cooling in the next hundred years, if there was a causal relationship between the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. Of course, we don't really know if there was a causal relationship there; the two phenomena could have merely occurred at the same time for unrelated reasons. If we have another major sun-activity minimum in the next century, then it will be interesting to see if this one too is accompanied by global cooling, or not.
But we don't know that a minimum is approaching. The cycle could just be late, or as you say a single missed cycle could be the calm before a storm, or there could be something else going on that we don't understand.
The truth is, we don't know that much about the long-term cycles of solar activity, because we haven't been observing for long enough. The short-term (hours or days) and medium-term (eleven years) cycles we understand relatively well at this point, or think we do at any rate, but the criteria now used for counting sunspots were not established until the nineteenth century, well after the end of the last big minimum, much less any previous similar period. We won't really be able to see what the pattern is until we've observed a few of the long-term cycles, which it appears could take a few hundred years. And that's assuming that what I've been calling the "long-term" cycle is the longest cycle to know about, that there isn't, say, a multi-century cycle overlaid on top of it that governs things like the frequency and severity of the minima. If there were, we wouldn't have any way to know about it at this point.
> Can someone explain what this means to us in laymans terms? > I'm just a software geek. I know nothing of this "sun" you speak of.
It's another name for the NYF, i.e., the Nasty Yellow Face that appears periodically in the Really Big Room. It's also called the "Burning Face", the "Great Yellow Disc", "Sol", "Masaka", or "Daystar".
In some ways it's a very powerful monster, but in practice it's not a very important one, because there's no need to ever defeat it (if that's even possible). Mostly you can just avoid it, by staying out of the RBR or by sneaking through while the NYF is absent/sleeping. If you do enter the RBR during a time when the Nasty Yellow Face is awake and present, it has various negative effects, although none are immediately fatal. You can't really do anything to it, because it will never approach to within melee range, and it's not vulnerable to arrows. Given enough time it will scorch your skin with its gaze attack, but the effect accrues slowly enough that you can easily get away before the burning becomes unbearable (as long as you are aware of the issue and don't do something completely idiotic, like go to sleep under its gaze or wander so far out into the RBR that you get lost in it). The greater danger is to your eyes, which can be quickly blinded by the Face's intense burning gaze attack, so you should always use eye protection, and even then don't look directly at the NYF. (In this respect it is similar to anything else with a dangerous gaze attack, e.g., a gorgon. Keeping your face aimed down toward the floor is a standard tactic.) The NYF has never been known to follow anyone out of the RBR. Frankly I don't think it would even fit through the doors to most other rooms. It *will* use its gaze attack through a door or window into an adjascent room, but as long as you're at least two or three rooms away from the RBR you should generally not have to worry about the NYF at all.
You can't believe everything SEO consultants tell you. I'm not convinced all that garbage would really significantly improve their indexing. Indeed, I tend to think some of that stuff would actively *hurt* their relevancy ranking, especially the link-farm malarke -- I mean, seriously, linkshare? That just screams, "Our site doesn't have any actual content to make it relevant, so we're swapping links with other irrelevant sites so that we can pool our irrelevance and be obscure together!"
The best way to improve your ranking is to put interesting content on your site that people will want to look at, link to, tell each other about, and so forth. (Of course, what counts as "interesting" depends heavily on your target demographic.) The second best way is to make sure the search engine can actually read and index your content (that it's not, for instance, just a bunch of images without meaningful alt attributes).
Crosslinking from one part of your site to another can help, but Google *does* do that -- their main web search links to the image search, to the video search, to the news search, and so forth. And vice versa.
> > I'm thinking there has to be a provision for updating a program to a new > > version and yet allowing it to be recognized as still being the same program. > How would that be authenticated, in order to prevent various forms of malware > from "updating" a program to a new version? Would it involve code signing, > for which hobbyists do not have the $500 per year?
Actually, it could involve code-signing without requiring the developers to spend any money (other than for a little extra electricity their computers would use to do the work involved with computing the signature). If all you want is to prove that this new version was produced by the same people as the previous version, then it really just has to be signed with the *same* key that was used to sign something distributed with the previous version. There wouldn't have to be a certificate authority involved.
Indeed, if you were going to involve a CA, it would be for verifying *new* software, not updates.
Even without any code signing at all, installing updates is in any case restricted in all the same ways as installing new software.
First of all, even with the current state of affairs, the user needs admin privileges to install software (well, if it's being installed for all users of the system they do anyhow), so provided you take normal security precautions the user would _at least_ be prompted by sudo or UAC or what have you. (Yeah, I know, a lot of users are going to frob okay without reading it, but still, it's a barrier.)
Second, and perhaps more usefully, with application capabilities in place, apps like the web browser would not necessarily have the capability to launch programs that need admin privileges (e.g., installers). Obviously the web browser needs to be able to launch other programs (plugins if nothing else), but those don't need admin privs.
And third, when new software is installed, the user's going to be prompted to allow its capabilities.
> So if the user installs a new version of a program, would he or she need to always use Save As > on all documents created with the old version of the program because they "belong" to a program > file with a different SHA-256 hash? Would the user have to duplicate the browser profile every > time, say, Firefox updates itself?
What do you think? Would those scenarios be a good outcome that would enhance security more than they would detract from usability?
I'm thinking no. I'm thinking there has to be a provision for updating a program to a new version and yet allowing it to be recognized as still being the same program.
> So if the user wants to grant additional permissions to an application, such as granting > permission to access CDDB to an already-installed media player application, would the user > need to reinstall the application?
No, there should be a mechanism for the user to go back later and make changes.
Most users would never need to use it though, because they'd just frob "yes" at install time, thereby granting the application all the privileges it wants. Only users (or sysadmins) who choose to deny applications some of the privileges they want would ever need to go back and make changes later.
> And how would install-time capability management apply to interpreters for bytecode-compiled > languages such as Java and Python?
Ideally, if the OS can determine at launch time that the interpreter is going to run a certain file (e.g., because it's being launched by a shebang mechanism on Unix or a registry extension association on Windows), then in that case the permissions of the interpreted file would be granted by the OS, not those of the interpreter.
But in situations where the interpreter is launched first, and then used to open and run a file (which is possible with some interpreters), then the resulting program would by necessity have most of the permissions of the user.
Not that all of this implies that shells (both command shells and graphical shells) need the capability to launch a process with different capabilities. Most other applications would not need and should not have that ability.
> > Just one example: I know for a fact most media players would request permission to > > retrieve stuff from the internet, which they almost certainly don't strictly need > > Without CDDB or freedb, how are users who don't have time to transcribe the CD's > back cover supposed to get correct song titles?
I know about CDDB and consider it a cool feature, but in the first place it only applies when playing CDs, not when playing other types of files, and in the second place some people might just not care about having the media player display the track title. Especially if they listen mostly to pop music, where it's often blindingly obvious which track is playing even if you've never heard it before.
I am certain there are users who would prefer to deny the media player access to the internet. Heck, I once ran into a user who was upset that Firefox was connecting to the internet when started. I swear I am not making this up. Apparently the user was firing up the web browser to view local content, but the browser did not know this and proceded (due, as it turned out, to a Live Bookmark that was included in the default bookmark file, which the user had not removed) to attempt to reach the internet. The user became aware of this through security software and considered it to be unwarranted behavior. Now, that's extreme, but not wanting a media player to be fooling around on the internet is a lot less extreme, and the OS should provide the user (or the sysadmin) with the tools necessary to enact such policy.
Sure, a lot of people won't bother about it, but they should have the option.
> Unless Microsoft writes big scary warnings for all non-green permissions that become less > scary for publishers that can afford to pay $500 per year to VeriSign
I was thinking that the warnings would be the same irrespective of who publishes the software, but of course any given vendor might implement the thing badly, and Microsoft is no exception to that. Bear in mind, though, I was not talking specifically about Microsoft operating systems. Indeed, I would be somewhat startled if Windows were the first OS to provide such a permissions framework for applications. Actually, I would imagine that a somewhat obscure system would have to proof-of-concept the thing first, before it would be picked up by any major system, much less Microsoft.
> > An example of an orange permission would be deleting or changing any file to which > > the user has write access (as opposed to just files the app itself creates). > Including.txt,.html, or.odt files downloaded from the Internet
Absolutely.
> If an operating system won't let a word processor read these files,
*Reading* them would probably be green (extreme privacy nuts can always dive into the details and disallow whatever they want) and applications that can usefully serve as the primary opener for a certain file type would presumably want that, and request it at install time.
But *changing* any old file in the user's My Documents folder is rather scarrier.
> So any capability system will need to have a way to move files in and out of applications' > sandboxes. I haven't seen this in computer operating systems designed for home and home office use.
Two words: Save As.
(Yes, if you start disallowing apps from *reading* files they don't create, then you need a way to add an app to a file's whitelist, as it were. But I'd expect only the most extremely paranoid users to deny that permission to apps that they plan on actually using to open files, and extremely paranoid users will put up with a somewhat obscure interface for making exceptions.)
> > On the other hand, a lot of end users don't really want to install their own software in the > > first place, and if computers came with more of the software they need out of the box > But do computers come w
> Nay, nay. What he has scriven, he has scriven, and do thou read it as it stands.
s/he has/he hath/g;
I really should use Preview when posting in Elizabethan English. An unfortuate tendency I have to mix it up with Modern English, interchanging one with the other phrase by phrase until no recourse the reader hath whereby to divide the twain assunder.
> It's the pronunciation the one that's changed a lot, and that's why us non-native English > speakers are sometimes baffled by the incoherence of the English spelling.
Native speakers have trouble with spelling too. There are a number of reasons, but probably the largest one is that English spelling is strongly driven by etymology. Words of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic origin have one set of phonetic rules, and words of Greek and Latin origin have an entirely different set of rules. (Then there are words of French origin: if they came into the language before the Renaissance, they follow the Germanic phonetics, but if they came into the language during or after the Renaissance, they generally follow the French rules (which are even more inconsistent and, at times, outright bizarre (e.g., "hors d'oeuvre" (pronounced "or durv" (Yes, I am a lisp programmer. (Why do you ask?))))).)
As I said, there are other contributing factors to the difficulty of English spelling (e.g., most "long" vowels in the Anglo-Saxon phonetic system can be spelled several different ways, due to the mechanism by which vowel length is indicated; and yes, the question of what constitutes a "long" vowel versus a short vowel or dipthong is complicated by historic changes in pronunciation), but the etymological issue is, in my considered opinion, the really big one.
> Actually, written English hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages.
Define "much". The total size of the vocabulary has expanded more than tenfold. Verbs (except the being verb, which is highly irregular anyway) no longer inflect for person, which is a fairly major grammatical change completed in the last couple of centuries. Word order structures have become more rigid. The second person pronoun is no longer inflected for case (except the possesive, if you consider that to be a case in English, which is a whole other topic), nor for number in standard English. (Some local dialects have a way of indicating number; e.g., in Ohio the plural is "you guys" or "guys". Tennesee has "youins" or "yins" for the plural. But these forms are not standardized beyond the local region, and the form these dialects consider singular is the old plural objective form, the old subjective and singular forms having dropped out of the language.) The subjunctive mood has changed its forms significantly (though it's still quite weird and obviously not done changing). The verb that used to be implied if elided (come/go) is no longer implied and cannot be elided. These are just some of the changes in the last 400 years.
More changes are coming, too. Among other things, the first and third person are rapidly losing their inflection for case, as the changeover to a pure word-order case grammar continues. (You can already make yourself understood without using the correct case forms, though it makes a lot of people, myself included, want to cringe.) Also, the only remaining verb with inflection for person (the being verb) is probably losing some of its forms (err, some _more_ of its forms; come to think of it, it's already lost several of them), though it's too early at this point to be sure which ones are going and which ones are staying. Also, inflection for number is gradually regularizing -- I believe there was a story on slashdot recently about some math professors who had studied that phenomenon and were working on trying to make predictions about which verbs are most likely to regularize next.
If you think English hasn't changed since the Middle Ages, you should try reading Canterbury Tales without the benefit of a modern translation. It's available here: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales Good luck with that. I grew up reading old literature and am comfortable with Elizabethan English (the language of Shakespeare), but I have real trouble trying to read Chaucer in the original. There are whole sentences where I can't make out a single major word.
> first it's airplanes. The trains. Then it's city hall. Then it's everywhere.
Non sequiteur.
Trains? Maybe, but passenger trains are pretty much a non-starter in the US anyway, except for short-run trains in some of the major metropolitan areas.
If you want to argue that restricting any given mode of transportation is tantamount to preventing assembly, then the place to start is with the hoops you have to jump through to get a driver's license. I mean, you need an eye exam for crying out loud, how are the blind supposed to assemble? What about the underaged, who are too *young* to get a driver's license? Oh, wait, they in fact don't seem to have any trouble assembling when they want to do so.
Restricting the right to stand in front of city hall *would* be a violation of the assembly clause, clearly, but that's not even vaguely in the same category. City hall is a place, not a form of transportation. It doesn't follow.
Slashdot Mirror
> some of us have never heard of MST3K
Then look it up.
While we're at it, if you've never heard of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, you might want to look those up too. HTH.HAND.
Riding in a motor vehicle on city streets is a good deal more dangerous. For many Americans it's substantially the most dangerous thing they're willing to do EVER, and yet they do it many times a day.
Of course, there's *some* risk in _anything_ you do. Playing sports and working out, for instance, are likely to get you injured, but sitting at home all the time will buy you poor health twenty or forty years down the line. There's no such thing as a completely safe activity.
> All the sans serif fonts are eyesores to me, so I don't care what they recommend there
> (why the heck would you ever make the digit 1, lower case l, and capital I look identical?)
For blocks of English text, you can get actually away with this, and the reader's mind fills in the distinctions at a subconcious level, based on context and the inherent redundancy built into the language. One reason to use them is that they tend to be more easily legible at small point sizes and/or at a distance. If the text is sufficiently small or distant that it's a little hard to see, the extra stuff on seriffed fonts competes with the essential letter shapes for the eye's attention and can make the text harder to read.
Of course, for stuff like source code what you want a fixed-width font. I tend to like ones that are mostly sans, i.e., all characters are visually distinguishable but most of them aren't decorated with superfluous feet everyplace. A few characters often have extra bits in these fonts merely to help them take up the allotted width, e.g., I generally has the lines across the top and bottom like they teach you to make the letter in elementary school, and lowercase i often has something similar. After a while you start to see those as part of the basic shape of the letter. I find these fonts simpler and easier on the eyes than fully-seriffed fonts. Andale Mono is a good example of the genre.
This is not to say that I don't like seriffed fonts. For some things I do. They look better in narrow columns, for instance, especially under full justification (which tends to do a number on sans fonts), and they look less "bare and stark" in larger point sizes, e.g., 16-point Arial just looks awefully plain, but Georgia looks nice at that size.
Dude, the twentieth century is on the phone for you. They want their complaint back.
Seriously, it hasn't been like that in most distributions for a long time.
> Are you sure you can find one decent lawyer when you only have 10 total? I think
> you need a much larger collection of lawyers before you'll accomplish that...
Yeah, it's kind of like Abraham, pleading with God not to destroy the city where his nephew was staying. He's thinking, "Hey, my nephew is basically a decent guy... okay, so he's done a couple of bone-headed things, like that whole business a while back where I ended up having to raise an army and rescue him... but basically he's a nice enough guy. I bet there are some other decent people. Maybe in a city that size there could be as many as fifty..."
So he begs God not to destroy the city if there are fifty righteous people in it, but God agrees to that *way* too easily, and Abraham has second thoughts, starts thinking about what the people of the city are like... say, what if there *aren't* fifty? So he asks God if he would spare the city if there were ten fewer righteous people, only forty. Again, God agrees with no argument... A couple of iterations later, Abraham's got God talked down to ten. Surely there are *ten* righteous people. I mean, there's Lot, and his family, and surely they must have some decent friends or something... ten should be no problem at all... right? WRONG. Ten? There's scarcely five. The city is toast.
How many decent, upright, honest lawyers do you suppose there are in North America?
I don't have an exact figure, but if you can prove there are fifty I will personally submit to using ed as my only text editor for a whole week. (No, I don't know how to use it without reading the man page. Normally I'm an Emacs user, so as you can imagine using ed would be rather painful. I'm extremely confident there aren't fifty decent upright honest lawyers in North America.)
> Outcome: dissapearance of frivolous lawsuits
Wow. Your optimism knows no bounds.
I'm not saying I dislike the idea of making the plaintiff's lawyers share in the losses if the suit is unsuccessful, but I hardly think frivolous lawsuits would disappear.
> > When these fonts are freely avalible and routinely installed on 90+% of
> > computers they might be acceptable to use instead of what's currently in use.
>
> They're freely available as part of both Vista and Office 2007.
> I'd give it about a year until they've met your criteria.
That would give Vista the fastest adoption rate of any Microsoft Windows version so far. Given the way things look to be shaping up so far, you'll have to pardon me if I don't hold my breath while we wait.
As a point of reference, Windows XP, which was released in 2001, has not yet achieved a 90% level of adoption. More than 10% of all Windows desktops[1] are still Windows 2000, Windows 98, or some even earlier version. And of course that's completely leaving out the question of non-Windows systems.
As far as Office, I doubt it's ever got past 25%, for all versions of Office combined, though admittedly a high percentage of Office deployments are on corporate networks, which are especially likely to be among those systems still running W2K or even NT4. If you want to get a rough idea of how many Office deployments there are compared to Windows deployments, look at the amount of revenue each generates, then consider that the overwhelming majority of Windows copies are sold through the big OEMs, which get exceptionally good deals, but most Office deployments are sold at full retail price -- and a copy of Office costs more than even a retail copy of Windows, much less an OEM copy, much less the special low price the big OEMs pay.
90% is an exceptionally high figure. Almost nothing gets that kind of market penetration, in any industry. The original Core Fonts for the Web haven't got there yet, I'm quite sure, so I can't imagine these new C fonts would get there any time this decade.
---
[1] By "desktops" in this context I mean systems users use directly, where fonts matter.
So a laptop counts, but a file server doesn't. Which is why I didn't mention WS2003.
> Speaking as a programmer, I think the set is worth having just for Consolas.
The PDF in the article doesn't show all the characters I'd need to see to evaluate that.
It's less important for proportional fonts, which are mostly used for non-technical text in English or other human languages, but for a fixed-width font, which you're going to use to look at source code, logfiles, configuration files, and the like, it is critically important that all printable ASCII characters be clearly distinguishable visually; otherwise, the font may as well not exist, because you can't really use it.
There are precious few such fonts that really look good: the three best ones that I know about are Andale Mono, Lucida Console, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Well, I'm assuing we're only interested in TrueType/OpenType fonts, that bitmapped fonts and printer fonts (e.g., PS Type 1) don't count. So another one would be a welcome addition, surely.
> Consolas with no antialiasing ... Painful, isn't it?
... that's basically nothing. If they don't have font antialiasing, isn't that Sun's problem? I really can't see worrying about that when choosing a font.
Still looks about five billion times better than Courier New.
But why does it *matter* what it looks like without font antialiasing?
Seriously, are there any current systems still in widespread use that don't do antialiasing? IIRC, even Debian Stable now has a sufficiently recent X server as to include this feature, which probably means all major Linux distros do, and I know I've had it on FreeBSD for a while, so I imagine OpenBSD and NetBSD probably have it too, and I know WinXP does it. Of the major systems (for desktops and workstations), that pretty much leaves OS X and Solaris, unless I'm missing something. (VMS[1] and most other Unices are, if I'm not mistaken, pretty focused on the server side of things.) If OS X doesn't have font anti-aliasing, that would be hilarious, what with all its focus on visual style and everything. But I judge that unlikely, unless someone with a Mac can verify otherwise.
Solaris... okay, I don't know if Solaris has font antialiasing, and it plausibly might not. (Doesn't it have its own proprietary X server, forked from some early BSD release back in the seventies? So it might not necessarily have a feature just because XFree86 implemented it way back before the X.org fork. Then again, it could have it, if Sun implemented it. I just don't happen to know.)
Still, one platform out of the top eight or so, and it's not one of the top three
I'm not saying I'd choose Consolas. Personally I'm rather partial to Andale Mono. Nonetheless, how it looks unaliased isn't really an issue, as far as I'm concerned.
---
[1] In any case, despite its historical importance, there is some question about whether VMS really counts as a current system any more, since HP doesn't seem to be treating it as a significant part of their product line or devoting significant resources to it. Compaq bought DEC for the Alpha chip technology, and VMS complemented that, so they might have kept VMS up somewhat, but HP didn't buy Compaq for any of that, but for their x86 PC business, and they don't seem to care very much about the DEC stuff. There are things I like about VMS, but at this point I am not at all sure I'd consider it a major OS any longer. And before someone says "BeOS", everything I just said about digital goes triple for Be.
Of those, only serif, sans-serif, and monospace have any consistent meaning in practice. Cursive is almost never rendered in an actual cursive-script font (if you know of any browser on any platform that does by default, I'd love to hear about it), and most the most popular OSes don't even ship, out of the box, with fonts that meet the CSS definition of a fantasy font face (what the rest of the world calls "decorative fonts", typically WAY more decorated than any normal serif font). Even on platforms where decorative fonts are typically available, browsers generally don't automatically use one of them when CSS says "fantasy", at least, not without the user having specifically configured the browser to use a certain font for that. Firefox doesn't even have a UI for specifying what fonts to use for cursive or fantasy.
> Cambria can serve as a replacement to both Georgia and Times New Roman
Unlikely. It has a worse (taller) aspect ratio than Georgia and doesn't look nearly as good in italic, and it's about fifty orders of magnitude shy of being as ubiquitous as TNR. (I'm not sure there is *any* other font as ubiquitous as TNR, or has ever been. Of course TNR is ugly, but nobody uses it because it looks good.)
> Calibri can replace Arial.
Again, Arial is at this point fairly ubiquitous, probably the third or fourth most ubiqitous font for all time, after TNR, Helvetica, and possibly Courier. (Courier is not very ubiqitous now, but in the bad old days before TrueType, the days of non-scalable screen fonts and separate printer fonts, it was.)
> Candara can replace Trebuchet MS and Helvetica.
Eh, maybe. Trebuchet is not very widly used in any case (though it is visibly heavier than Candara, which in some cases would be desirable; OTOH, Candara has a nicer italic), and Helvetica at this point is mostly a Mac font (though historically it was more widespread and important). Then again, do we _need_ a replacement for these fonts? Who uses them anyway?
> Consolas can replace Lucidia Console and Courier New
If Courier New could be replaced with a better-looking font, it would have been many times over, because just about every other fixed-width font *EVER* is better looking. As for Lucidia Console, I've never heard of it. (There's Lucida Console...)
> Can replace Georga and Palatino
Never heard of Georga. (Georgia? I thought Cambria was to replace that?)
> Corbel can replace Verdana.
It's hard to compare them, because the creator of the comparison document neglected to scale Verdana down a size so that it would roughly match the size of the other font. (Verdana runs about a size larger than most other fonts, e.g., Verdana 10 is about the same size as Arial 11. Dunno why Verdana runs large, it just does. I guess the font foundry made it that way. It's a nice enough font to make up for this, though. Looks better than Arial.)
> Thanks, you made a trekkie laugh.
Masaka is waking!
> True, but in the short term we can generally say it's a good thing.
I don't know that we have enough information to say that with any certitude.
> Sunspots cause interference on earth nd are related to solar flares, which can in rare
> instances damage electronics and present an increased level of risk to astronauts,
Yes, but they have other effects as well, probably more than we know about.
> It makes some wonder if it might be a calm before a storm, however.
That is possible.
It's also possible that it's an indicator we're approaching another extended period of reduced solar activity, much like the Maunder Minimum in the middle of the second millennium. If that were the case, we could be looking at significant global cooling in the next hundred years, if there was a causal relationship between the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. Of course, we don't really know if there was a causal relationship there; the two phenomena could have merely occurred at the same time for unrelated reasons. If we have another major sun-activity minimum in the next century, then it will be interesting to see if this one too is accompanied by global cooling, or not.
But we don't know that a minimum is approaching. The cycle could just be late, or as you say a single missed cycle could be the calm before a storm, or there could be something else going on that we don't understand.
The truth is, we don't know that much about the long-term cycles of solar activity, because we haven't been observing for long enough. The short-term (hours or days) and medium-term (eleven years) cycles we understand relatively well at this point, or think we do at any rate, but the criteria now used for counting sunspots were not established until the nineteenth century, well after the end of the last big minimum, much less any previous similar period. We won't really be able to see what the pattern is until we've observed a few of the long-term cycles, which it appears could take a few hundred years. And that's assuming that what I've been calling the "long-term" cycle is the longest cycle to know about, that there isn't, say, a multi-century cycle overlaid on top of it that governs things like the frequency and severity of the minima. If there were, we wouldn't have any way to know about it at this point.
Maybe we'll get another little ice age! That would be, like, really *cool*.
> Can someone explain what this means to us in laymans terms?
> I'm just a software geek. I know nothing of this "sun" you speak of.
It's another name for the NYF, i.e., the Nasty Yellow Face that appears periodically in the Really Big Room. It's also called the "Burning Face", the "Great Yellow Disc", "Sol", "Masaka", or "Daystar".
In some ways it's a very powerful monster, but in practice it's not a very important one, because there's no need to ever defeat it (if that's even possible). Mostly you can just avoid it, by staying out of the RBR or by sneaking through while the NYF is absent/sleeping. If you do enter the RBR during a time when the Nasty Yellow Face is awake and present, it has various negative effects, although none are immediately fatal. You can't really do anything to it, because it will never approach to within melee range, and it's not vulnerable to arrows. Given enough time it will scorch your skin with its gaze attack, but the effect accrues slowly enough that you can easily get away before the burning becomes unbearable (as long as you are aware of the issue and don't do something completely idiotic, like go to sleep under its gaze or wander so far out into the RBR that you get lost in it). The greater danger is to your eyes, which can be quickly blinded by the Face's intense burning gaze attack, so you should always use eye protection, and even then don't look directly at the NYF. (In this respect it is similar to anything else with a dangerous gaze attack, e.g., a gorgon. Keeping your face aimed down toward the floor is a standard tactic.) The NYF has never been known to follow anyone out of the RBR. Frankly I don't think it would even fit through the doors to most other rooms. It *will* use its gaze attack through a door or window into an adjascent room, but as long as you're at least two or three rooms away from the RBR you should generally not have to worry about the NYF at all.
HTH.HAND.
> Is this a GOOD thing or a BAD thing?
It's a thing we can't really do a whole lot about at the moment, other than to watch and see what happens.
You can't believe everything SEO consultants tell you. I'm not convinced all that garbage would really significantly improve their indexing. Indeed, I tend to think some of that stuff would actively *hurt* their relevancy ranking, especially the link-farm malarke -- I mean, seriously, linkshare? That just screams, "Our site doesn't have any actual content to make it relevant, so we're swapping links with other irrelevant sites so that we can pool our irrelevance and be obscure together!"
The best way to improve your ranking is to put interesting content on your site that people will want to look at, link to, tell each other about, and so forth. (Of course, what counts as "interesting" depends heavily on your target demographic.) The second best way is to make sure the search engine can actually read and index your content (that it's not, for instance, just a bunch of images without meaningful alt attributes).
Crosslinking from one part of your site to another can help, but Google *does* do that -- their main web search links to the image search, to the video search, to the news search, and so forth. And vice versa.
> > I'm thinking there has to be a provision for updating a program to a new
> > version and yet allowing it to be recognized as still being the same program.
> How would that be authenticated, in order to prevent various forms of malware
> from "updating" a program to a new version? Would it involve code signing,
> for which hobbyists do not have the $500 per year?
Actually, it could involve code-signing without requiring the developers to spend any money (other than for a little extra electricity their computers would use to do the work involved with computing the signature). If all you want is to prove that this new version was produced by the same people as the previous version, then it really just has to be signed with the *same* key that was used to sign something distributed with the previous version. There wouldn't have to be a certificate authority involved.
Indeed, if you were going to involve a CA, it would be for verifying *new* software, not updates.
Even without any code signing at all, installing updates is in any case restricted in all the same ways as installing new software.
First of all, even with the current state of affairs, the user needs admin privileges to install software (well, if it's being installed for all users of the system they do anyhow), so provided you take normal security precautions the user would _at least_ be prompted by sudo or UAC or what have you. (Yeah, I know, a lot of users are going to frob okay without reading it, but still, it's a barrier.)
Second, and perhaps more usefully, with application capabilities in place, apps like the web browser would not necessarily have the capability to launch programs that need admin privileges (e.g., installers). Obviously the web browser needs to be able to launch other programs (plugins if nothing else), but those don't need admin privs.
And third, when new software is installed, the user's going to be prompted to allow its capabilities.
> So if the user installs a new version of a program, would he or she need to always use Save As
> on all documents created with the old version of the program because they "belong" to a program
> file with a different SHA-256 hash? Would the user have to duplicate the browser profile every
> time, say, Firefox updates itself?
What do you think? Would those scenarios be a good outcome that would enhance security more than they would detract from usability?
I'm thinking no. I'm thinking there has to be a provision for updating a program to a new version and yet allowing it to be recognized as still being the same program.
> So if the user wants to grant additional permissions to an application, such as granting
> permission to access CDDB to an already-installed media player application, would the user
> need to reinstall the application?
No, there should be a mechanism for the user to go back later and make changes.
Most users would never need to use it though, because they'd just frob "yes" at install time, thereby granting the application all the privileges it wants. Only users (or sysadmins) who choose to deny applications some of the privileges they want would ever need to go back and make changes later.
> And how would install-time capability management apply to interpreters for bytecode-compiled
> languages such as Java and Python?
Ideally, if the OS can determine at launch time that the interpreter is going to run a certain file (e.g., because it's being launched by a shebang mechanism on Unix or a registry extension association on Windows), then in that case the permissions of the interpreted file would be granted by the OS, not those of the interpreter.
But in situations where the interpreter is launched first, and then used to open and run a file (which is possible with some interpreters), then the resulting program would by necessity have most of the permissions of the user.
Not that all of this implies that shells (both command shells and graphical shells) need the capability to launch a process with different capabilities. Most other applications would not need and should not have that ability.
> > Just one example: I know for a fact most media players would request permission to
.txt, .html, or .odt files downloaded from the Internet
> > retrieve stuff from the internet, which they almost certainly don't strictly need
>
> Without CDDB or freedb, how are users who don't have time to transcribe the CD's
> back cover supposed to get correct song titles?
I know about CDDB and consider it a cool feature, but in the first place it only applies when playing CDs, not when playing other types of files, and in the second place some people might just not care about having the media player display the track title. Especially if they listen mostly to pop music, where it's often blindingly obvious which track is playing even if you've never heard it before.
I am certain there are users who would prefer to deny the media player access to the internet. Heck, I once ran into a user who was upset that Firefox was connecting to the internet when started. I swear I am not making this up. Apparently the user was firing up the web browser to view local content, but the browser did not know this and proceded (due, as it turned out, to a Live Bookmark that was included in the default bookmark file, which the user had not removed) to attempt to reach the internet. The user became aware of this through security software and considered it to be unwarranted behavior. Now, that's extreme, but not wanting a media player to be fooling around on the internet is a lot less extreme, and the OS should provide the user (or the sysadmin) with the tools necessary to enact such policy.
Sure, a lot of people won't bother about it, but they should have the option.
> Unless Microsoft writes big scary warnings for all non-green permissions that become less
> scary for publishers that can afford to pay $500 per year to VeriSign
I was thinking that the warnings would be the same irrespective of who publishes the software, but of course any given vendor might implement the thing badly, and Microsoft is no exception to that. Bear in mind, though, I was not talking specifically about Microsoft operating systems. Indeed, I would be somewhat startled if Windows were the first OS to provide such a permissions framework for applications. Actually, I would imagine that a somewhat obscure system would have to proof-of-concept the thing first, before it would be picked up by any major system, much less Microsoft.
> > An example of an orange permission would be deleting or changing any file to which
> > the user has write access (as opposed to just files the app itself creates).
> Including
Absolutely.
> If an operating system won't let a word processor read these files,
*Reading* them would probably be green (extreme privacy nuts can always dive into the details and disallow whatever they want) and applications that can usefully serve as the primary opener for a certain file type would presumably want that, and request it at install time.
But *changing* any old file in the user's My Documents folder is rather scarrier.
> So any capability system will need to have a way to move files in and out of applications'
> sandboxes. I haven't seen this in computer operating systems designed for home and home office use.
Two words: Save As.
(Yes, if you start disallowing apps from *reading* files they don't create, then you need a way to add an app to a file's whitelist, as it were. But I'd expect only the most extremely paranoid users to deny that permission to apps that they plan on actually using to open files, and extremely paranoid users will put up with a somewhat obscure interface for making exceptions.)
> > On the other hand, a lot of end users don't really want to install their own software in the
> > first place, and if computers came with more of the software they need out of the box
> But do computers come w
> Nay, nay. What he has scriven, he has scriven, and do thou read it as it stands.
s/he has/he hath/g;
I really should use Preview when posting in Elizabethan English. An unfortuate tendency I have to mix it up with Modern English, interchanging one with the other phrase by phrase until no recourse the reader hath whereby to divide the twain assunder.
> Eh? Pray thee scribe thy missive again perchance.
Nay, nay. What he has scriven, he has scriven, and do thou read it as it stands.
> It's the pronunciation the one that's changed a lot, and that's why us non-native English
> speakers are sometimes baffled by the incoherence of the English spelling.
Native speakers have trouble with spelling too. There are a number of reasons, but probably the largest one is that English spelling is strongly driven by etymology. Words of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic origin have one set of phonetic rules, and words of Greek and Latin origin have an entirely different set of rules. (Then there are words of French origin: if they came into the language before the Renaissance, they follow the Germanic phonetics, but if they came into the language during or after the Renaissance, they generally follow the French rules (which are even more inconsistent and, at times, outright bizarre (e.g., "hors d'oeuvre" (pronounced "or durv" (Yes, I am a lisp programmer. (Why do you ask?))))).)
As I said, there are other contributing factors to the difficulty of English spelling (e.g., most "long" vowels in the Anglo-Saxon phonetic system can be spelled several different ways, due to the mechanism by which vowel length is indicated; and yes, the question of what constitutes a "long" vowel versus a short vowel or dipthong is complicated by historic changes in pronunciation), but the etymological issue is, in my considered opinion, the really big one.
> Actually, written English hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages.
Define "much". The total size of the vocabulary has expanded more than tenfold. Verbs (except the being verb, which is highly irregular anyway) no longer inflect for person, which is a fairly major grammatical change completed in the last couple of centuries. Word order structures have become more rigid. The second person pronoun is no longer inflected for case (except the possesive, if you consider that to be a case in English, which is a whole other topic), nor for number in standard English. (Some local dialects have a way of indicating number; e.g., in Ohio the plural is "you guys" or "guys". Tennesee has "youins" or "yins" for the plural. But these forms are not standardized beyond the local region, and the form these dialects consider singular is the old plural objective form, the old subjective and singular forms having dropped out of the language.) The subjunctive mood has changed its forms significantly (though it's still quite weird and obviously not done changing). The verb that used to be implied if elided (come/go) is no longer implied and cannot be elided. These are just some of the changes in the last 400 years.
More changes are coming, too. Among other things, the first and third person are rapidly losing their inflection for case, as the changeover to a pure word-order case grammar continues. (You can already make yourself understood without using the correct case forms, though it makes a lot of people, myself included, want to cringe.) Also, the only remaining verb with inflection for person (the being verb) is probably losing some of its forms (err, some _more_ of its forms; come to think of it, it's already lost several of them), though it's too early at this point to be sure which ones are going and which ones are staying. Also, inflection for number is gradually regularizing -- I believe there was a story on slashdot recently about some math professors who had studied that phenomenon and were working on trying to make predictions about which verbs are most likely to regularize next.
If you think English hasn't changed since the Middle Ages, you should try reading Canterbury Tales without the benefit of a modern translation. It's available here:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales
Good luck with that. I grew up reading old literature and am comfortable with Elizabethan English (the language of Shakespeare), but I have real trouble trying to read Chaucer in the original. There are whole sentences where I can't make out a single major word.
> first it's airplanes. The trains. Then it's city hall. Then it's everywhere.
Non sequiteur.
Trains? Maybe, but passenger trains are pretty much a non-starter in the US anyway, except for short-run trains in some of the major metropolitan areas.
If you want to argue that restricting any given mode of transportation is tantamount to preventing assembly, then the place to start is with the hoops you have to jump through to get a driver's license. I mean, you need an eye exam for crying out loud, how are the blind supposed to assemble? What about the underaged, who are too *young* to get a driver's license? Oh, wait, they in fact don't seem to have any trouble assembling when they want to do so.
Restricting the right to stand in front of city hall *would* be a violation of the assembly clause, clearly, but that's not even vaguely in the same category. City hall is a place, not a form of transportation. It doesn't follow.