MrRage

According to Jobs, he's the only reason computers have typography whatsoever:

> Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

> None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

Quoted from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1422863/posts

Could you expand D being practically dead? or link to some sources on that? I haven't heard such strong statements about D before, and I'm curious to learn more.

> Since this was before 911 - the 'terrorists' in question were presumably the IRA, not sure they had much of an online presence back then.

You do know that 9/11 was not the first terrorist attack on the US by Islamic extremists, do you?

I've always preferred Window's font rendering because its very readable on a low DPI screen, which is most of the screens out there.

> TL;DR: Microsoft isn't turning around because they're still mostly ignoring the Internet.

I would suggest that Microsoft's floundering around in the mobile space is a bigger deal than ignoring the internet. e.g. it's not like Apple gets the web either.

There are a lot of movies that are rent only or even watch it only if I see it on TV. But good movies (for some definition of good) are worth multiple viewings.

I'm curious if you know anything about the band Fugazi. They've remained independent of the industry but have had a lot of success.

> "Revolver" by The Beatles is a good example - the record is quite uncomfortable to listen to on headphones because tracks are panned hard left or right, creating a completely artificial sound.

The Beatles were only preset for the mono mixing of most of their albums; they were not there for stereo mixes of albums like "Revolver." This probably just reinforces what you're saying, but I would like to think if they were around when the stereo version was mixed there wouldn't be as much hard panning. I believe they mixed "Abbey Road" in stereo and the mixing vastly better.

> Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems

I by no means am some Microsoft hater, but I'm amused about this tinted rose glass nostalgia for XP. It's easy to say XP is a good system now with the maturity of three service packs and the bad taste of Vista still in our mouths, but I remember all those years ago much dislike of XP around the internet. Among other things, it was a security nightmare that wasn't even fixed until SP2. You put release day XP on your machine and put it on the internet and you're machine will be probably hacked within the hour.

On the other hand not to many people stuck with Vista. A fully patched Vista installation works just fine nowadays. It still has higher system requirements, but those requirements are now 4 year old systems.

Droid Sans Mono looks nice to me, but if you can't tell a zero apart from a capital o then you're asking for 30 minutes of trying to figure a really stupid bug at some point in your life.

The site says they used a "contact microphone," so I assume what we're hearing is vibrations in the rocket not so much the air.

I think that's acceptable for video games, especially the sort of video games that Nintendo makes. For video content I don't think so. I'll watch upscaled DVDs for certain types of content (e.g. don't really care if episodes of Big Bang Theory are in 1080p), but for movies with great cinematography I want as much resolution as possible.

I agree with all you said, but why hate programmers? That just seems a bit personally offending. Why not instead hate new software projects?

Warning: The petition just got overtaken by an army of trolls.

But are these coal seams burning as fast as if you mined them and burned it for heat, electricity, etc?

Slower than golf?

I respectfully disagree, but I also acknowledge that this it is a very subjective judgment. Maybe I shouldn't pull a Roger Ebert and try to argue that something isn't art only to get flamed to death. But for me, personally, even if there's a lot of craft in an ad, to me it's still and ad.

If you think Old Spice makes excellent deodorant, body washes or whatever then by all means support them with your wallet. But why buy a product just because you liked the commercial? I just see that as being suggestible.

People didn't spend $500 on the Humble Indie Bundle so they would put out more ads did they? They wanted to support indie games, no?

These ads certainly had better aesthetics than most, but something dies inside me when an advertisement is considered art. I also don't understand why you would view buying Old Spice as a charitable donation.

I see. My point was that good advertising should increase sales not slow the decrease of sales. But I guess when you're running a business that's tanking the OP would be correct in calling the ad effective.

For those who are downvoting me, care to explain why I deserve it? Where am I wrong?

If that's the case then you can say the commercial is ineffective, because you can say that the commercial didn't raise sales. You can never conclusively say that the commercial raised sales when they're up or lowered sales when they're down, but the commercial surely didn't raise sales when they're down.

Isn't JRuby implemented in Java?

I didn't say you would loose your data. I said wipe out your data with the implication of it being wiped off your phone.

That being said, maybe my understanding of how iPhone updates happen is a little flawed. I'm not too clear if it wipes your phone clean and then resyncs everything after the update. Or does it keep your data on the phone during the upgrade?

It's pretty shitty to have to wipe out your data just to get it to function like it should.

Don't you mean a millisecond long sleep? I never saw a sleep function that interpreted its parameter as seconds. Edit: Well, now I know better.

I've been considering writing a desktop app. I've been wanting to get into the JVM action, but dimly remember being scared off by Swing years ago. What about Clojure makes it better at using Swing?

Full disclosure: I live in Texas so I see lots of trucks.

First it's clear that lots of people buy trucks. But from my experience only a fraction of the people who buy trucks actual use them to any extent. That is people buy them for commuting and as a status symbol. I rarely see a truck with anything in the bed or with scratches and dirt from being used to do work.

So what's shaky is I took this truck analogy with PCs to mean that PCs will be around and useful but only to "professionals". This may be the case with PCs in the future, I'm not arguing that. But I don't think that's true of people who buy trucks. Yes farmers and construction people use trucks, but they're really in the minority of truck drivers.

And this is not even considering SUVs which are really just trucks without a bed. My understanding is they're manufactured with the same frame and engines, and are considered trucks by regulators (so they have laxer safety regulations).

The context is trucks and SUVs (which are technically trucks) are wildly popular in the US, but less so in some areas like on the West coast. This remains true in large cities, i.e. it's not just a rural thing.

> PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around. They’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of x people

Boy, you can tell Jobs lives in a bubble, or else he would know this truck metaphor is shaky. Lots of people buy trucks, they just don't live where Jobs lives.