Because MS didn't want to pay Arial was designed as a clone of Helvetica, or more specifically, a bastardized version of Grotesque with letters squeezed to match the metrics of Helvetica. Microsoft commissioned Arial to get around paying Adobe for Helvetica, as Microsoft was trying to push TrueType instead of Adobe's PostScript.
Arial, and Grotesque, and Helvetica, are very much print fonts.
Donald Knuth does indeed care deeply about fonts. Which makes the following all the more unfortunate: his Computer Modern Roman and Computer Modern Italic are terrible, terrible fonts.
Italic is particularly bad. Most of the circular letters (b,c,d,e,g,o,p,q,) have different shaped circles. Many of the slanted lines are at different angles. The whole thing looks like a tangled mess when italics are supposed to be fluid and clean.
Roman is bad too: all the bowls and circle lines are very thin. So thin that the text is quite unusually difficult to read compared to a good broad serifed font like Palatino or, heaven forbid, Schoolbook. Many of the metrics of the letters are inconsistent, though it's not as bad as Italic.
LaTeX users have been stuck with this awful font for years, and even now we're mostly stuck with it when we want to do math. Someone needs to come free us.
So this page goes on and on about what makes a good, readable web font. And their evidence for their claims?
Nothing.
I have no doubt that Verdana is a nice, readable font. It'd be nice to see people actually supporting their claims with evidence though, rather than just making up crap.
1..NET works with more languages than just C#. Here's a list of languages supported by.NET: http://www.dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx/. In contrast, Java only supports... well, Java.
How did Microsoft's marketing team manage to get so many people believe this lie?
As primarily a Mac user, I know rather little of the differences between KDE and Gnome. But Linus's call tells me all I need to know: Gnome is the better user interface.
Unix developers are not known for their quality interfaces. man == help? A dozen incompatable widget sets from Athena through KDE? The ability to modify your window manager through endless flat files, yet no way to do drag-and-drop between applications in a consistent manner? Much less cut-and-paste.
Coming from crappy-GUI-but-you-can-customize-it-all-you-like land, Linus is making the classic propeller-cap mistake: he thinks GUIs should have a myriad of options. Does he not realize that this is one of the primary reasons that Linux has failed in the userspace marketplace? Most computer users -- and by most I mean 98% -- do not wear propeller caps.
For these 98% non-Linuses, a user interface needs to do three things properly:
Be simple and intuitive.
Be consistent.
Be sufficient.
Linus wants a #4 Be Customizable, but in my experience people who complain about that have never themselves succeeded in making a UI for which the first three are true. I have absolutely no doubt that Linus falls in that category. Sounds to me like he needs to go sit in a corner and let the real GUI designers do their work.
I cannot speak to the controversy surrounding the Wikipedia situation, though I personally feel that mountains are being made of molehills and the benefits of Wikimedia's experiment are being shunted aside.
But enough of that. What I wish to ask is: does The Register have an editor? The writing in that article was god-awful. It's a bunch of rambling and musing and, yes, whining, and all in short, choppy half-paragraphs of long sentences that read like stream-of-consciousness. Spelling is also fun. What's "fulfil"? "grafitti"?The Register also seems to think that Wikipedia is based in Britain, and thus subject to Britian's ludicrous
But we were talking about electronics here, something Consumer Reports is astonishingly bad at. Their Mac coverage borders on the daftly ignorant. They famously reviewed the PowerPCs as "slow" but accidentally only ran interpreted 68000 programs on them, not the new ones. And they published a survey of virus trends which was so flawed that 17% of OS X users "reported" having a virus on their machines. They reported this as cause for concern, rather than realizing it was a signal that their methodology is flawed. And don't get me started on how little they know about PDAs.
I trust CR's car data. But for electronics I look elsewhere. They're incompetent.
In my experience, there is but a single decent release of Emacs for OS X: Carbon Emacs. Much as I love Cocoa, AquaEmacs is filled to the BRIM with bugs.
It's not to do with the CCD, it's to do with the implementation.
Implementation of what? Lens? Light sensor? Length of time the iris is open? Camera companies have had these things down to a science for decades. The crucial differentiator in a camera is the CCD. Which Canon and Sony share.
Sony's consumer cameras are known to take better indoor photos than competing Canons. My main Canon pocket camera at the moment (Ixus 50/SD400) takes mediocre indoor photos.
Weird Al Yankovic is an example. All of his hits are somebody else's music with Weird Al's lyrics. Lyrics are all he writes--well, he writes very little original music.
Uh, over half of the songs on a Yankovic album are originals. Including all of my favorites. Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung, Good Enough for Now, and One More Minute come to mind.
For years he's had a message on his Web site urging his fans not to post his lyrics on Web pages, and not to read Web pages with his lyrics on them, because they violate his copyrights and reduce his ability to collect royalties on his work.
You need only read about the misery in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to understand the inevitable outcome of being completely dependent upon the government for your very survival.
Funny, I (and I think most people) understood it to emblematic of the failure of conservative government.
Who is greedier? The capitalist who makes money or the socialist who takes it?
By definition, the capitalist.
Part of the definition of greed is that the money is beyond what the person needs. Socialism's goal is to assist those in need. That wasn't so hard now, was it?
As an old Obj-C coder, let me respectfully disagree with this. Reference counting does not handle cycles: that's a huge flaw. It forces Apple to promote a notion of "ownership" of object graphs which only works on a small scale. It does not work well: it merely reduces what you need to keep track of (but doesn't eliminate it) in return for a considerable amount of manual labor.
Untrue. LEGO is a trademark and a name for the company. It is not a plural or mass noun, but but is a coined phrase cobbled together from leg godt which means "to play well".
LEGO discourages use of the term "legos" because they are concerned it dilutes their trademark. They'd prefer we use the phrase "LEGO products" or "LEGO set" -- anything that would suggest it's a trademarked item. It has nothing to do with grammar.
Sir: your study has lots of pretty graphs and almost fifty pages of verbage. But the study had a sample size of 3 (!), making it statistically invalid by practically any measure. Indeed, the study itself admits as much:
The sample, although too
small to provide conclusive statistical comparisons, illustrates the methodology and
begins to shed light on some key model differences between the platforms.
The is another way of saying "no scientific conclusions may be validly drawn from my study, but I am going to draw some anyway". Further, you no doubt knew Microsoft would tout such invalid conclusions whether or not you did yourself. Do you believe this behavior is ethical?
Easier? How are you going to keep track of how much each trucks/truck company owes each state? That's going to cost a lot of overhead for administration and end up costing you more in the end.
Ahh, the miracle of GPS and odometers! It's like magic! A $250 device for a $100,000 rig.
Believe it or not, modern trucks often have this stuff built-in already, to guarantee compliance with a variety of federal or company regulations, including feedback on estimated delivery time, limits on how long drivers may drive in a day, and company-imposed rules about speed limits or routes.
Gee. $200 is a HUGE consolation against the $7k you get to spend on new batteries every 100k miles.
Um... the grandparent wasn't talking about user compensation. He was talking about incentive for a recycling industry for used Prius batteries. $200 is plenty incentive.
The only reason auto makers are investing and producing hybrids is to avoid bad press by the environazis.
Yeah. You know those automakers. Always under the thumb of the environmentalists.
Automakers are investing in hybrids for one reason only: because people are buying the Prius like there's no tomorrrow.
VW's Rabbit got 45-57 MPG back in the early 80's!!!
On diesel. Which has higher energy storage, weight, price, and refining costs. Not to mention enormously worse air quality impact. If you want to play the diesel MPG game, do so fairly: diesel has 147K BTUs per gallon, whereas gas has 125K BTUs. This means the Rabbit, at its very best, got 38 City 48 Highway. For a really, realy, really unsafe and crappy car. Compare this to the Datsun B210, another (slightly less) unsafe and crappy car, which got 36 City 48 Highway on gas.
The Rabbit would be an illegal car these days. After adding sturdier frames, air quality emissions tuning, safety features, and handling/acceleration that wasn't grotesquely mediocre, modern automakers are at present able to achieve about 40/35 in cars from Hyundai, Toyota, and Scion. And Volkswagon, if they tried.
RIM has gone over the judge's head before, appealing to congress to stop the judgement in the name of "national defense". Looks like they've gotten their wish.
Slashdot Mirror
Because MS didn't want to pay Arial was designed as a clone of Helvetica, or more specifically, a bastardized version of Grotesque with letters squeezed to match the metrics of Helvetica. Microsoft commissioned Arial to get around paying Adobe for Helvetica, as Microsoft was trying to push TrueType instead of Adobe's PostScript.
Arial, and Grotesque, and Helvetica, are very much print fonts.
Italic is particularly bad. Most of the circular letters (b,c,d,e,g,o,p,q,) have different shaped circles. Many of the slanted lines are at different angles. The whole thing looks like a tangled mess when italics are supposed to be fluid and clean.
Roman is bad too: all the bowls and circle lines are very thin. So thin that the text is quite unusually difficult to read compared to a good broad serifed font like Palatino or, heaven forbid, Schoolbook. Many of the metrics of the letters are inconsistent, though it's not as bad as Italic.
LaTeX users have been stuck with this awful font for years, and even now we're mostly stuck with it when we want to do math. Someone needs to come free us.
Nothing.
I have no doubt that Verdana is a nice, readable font. It'd be nice to see people actually supporting their claims with evidence though, rather than just making up crap.
Unix developers are not known for their quality interfaces. man == help? A dozen incompatable widget sets from Athena through KDE? The ability to modify your window manager through endless flat files, yet no way to do drag-and-drop between applications in a consistent manner? Much less cut-and-paste.
Coming from crappy-GUI-but-you-can-customize-it-all-you-like land, Linus is making the classic propeller-cap mistake: he thinks GUIs should have a myriad of options. Does he not realize that this is one of the primary reasons that Linux has failed in the userspace marketplace? Most computer users -- and by most I mean 98% -- do not wear propeller caps.
For these 98% non-Linuses, a user interface needs to do three things properly:
Linus wants a #4 Be Customizable, but in my experience people who complain about that have never themselves succeeded in making a UI for which the first three are true. I have absolutely no doubt that Linus falls in that category. Sounds to me like he needs to go sit in a corner and let the real GUI designers do their work.
[Maybe I need an editor. Pressed that submit button... :-) Continuing...] ... and thus subject to Britain's ludicrous libel laws.
But enough of that. What I wish to ask is: does The Register have an editor? The writing in that article was god-awful. It's a bunch of rambling and musing and, yes, whining, and all in short, choppy half-paragraphs of long sentences that read like stream-of-consciousness. Spelling is also fun. What's "fulfil"? "grafitti"?The Register also seems to think that Wikipedia is based in Britain, and thus subject to Britian's ludicrous
And don't forget all those high-volume sites using Visual Studio.
Luke's First Law of the Computer Industry: Quality is inversely proportional to Popularity.
But we were talking about electronics here, something Consumer Reports is astonishingly bad at. Their Mac coverage borders on the daftly ignorant. They famously reviewed the PowerPCs as "slow" but accidentally only ran interpreted 68000 programs on them, not the new ones. And they published a survey of virus trends which was so flawed that 17% of OS X users "reported" having a virus on their machines. They reported this as cause for concern, rather than realizing it was a signal that their methodology is flawed. And don't get me started on how little they know about PDAs. I trust CR's car data. But for electronics I look elsewhere. They're incompetent.
In my experience, there is but a single decent release of Emacs for OS X: Carbon Emacs. Much as I love Cocoa, AquaEmacs is filled to the BRIM with bugs.
Where?
Part of the definition of greed is that the money is beyond what the person needs. Socialism's goal is to assist those in need. That wasn't so hard now, was it?
As an old Obj-C coder, let me respectfully disagree with this. Reference counting does not handle cycles: that's a huge flaw. It forces Apple to promote a notion of "ownership" of object graphs which only works on a small scale. It does not work well: it merely reduces what you need to keep track of (but doesn't eliminate it) in return for a considerable amount of manual labor.
JAIR is a great journal. But I believe the flagship journal in AI is still Artificial Intelligence.
LEGO discourages use of the term "legos" because they are concerned it dilutes their trademark. They'd prefer we use the phrase "LEGO products" or "LEGO set" -- anything that would suggest it's a trademarked item. It has nothing to do with grammar.
The is another way of saying "no scientific conclusions may be validly drawn from my study, but I am going to draw some anyway". Further, you no doubt knew Microsoft would tout such invalid conclusions whether or not you did yourself. Do you believe this behavior is ethical?
Believe it or not, modern trucks often have this stuff built-in already, to guarantee compliance with a variety of federal or company regulations, including feedback on estimated delivery time, limits on how long drivers may drive in a day, and company-imposed rules about speed limits or routes.
Ummm... how about the simpler: make trucks pay a per-mile road-destruction tax to the state they're presently in?
Um... the grandparent wasn't talking about user compensation. He was talking about incentive for a recycling industry for used Prius batteries. $200 is plenty incentive.
Yeah. You know those automakers. Always under the thumb of the environmentalists.
Automakers are investing in hybrids for one reason only: because people are buying the Prius like there's no tomorrrow.
On diesel. Which has higher energy storage, weight, price, and refining costs. Not to mention enormously worse air quality impact. If you want to play the diesel MPG game, do so fairly: diesel has 147K BTUs per gallon, whereas gas has 125K BTUs. This means the Rabbit, at its very best, got 38 City 48 Highway. For a really, realy, really unsafe and crappy car. Compare this to the Datsun B210, another (slightly less) unsafe and crappy car, which got 36 City 48 Highway on gas.
The Rabbit would be an illegal car these days. After adding sturdier frames, air quality emissions tuning, safety features, and handling/acceleration that wasn't grotesquely mediocre, modern automakers are at present able to achieve about 40/35 in cars from Hyundai, Toyota, and Scion. And Volkswagon, if they tried.
RIM has gone over the judge's head before, appealing to congress to stop the judgement in the name of "national defense". Looks like they've gotten their wish.