dive into mark

No Liberation (the free fonts from Redhat) fonts?

Chris on The ampersands of Linux

The thing is, I can modify any Cocoa program on OS X with a short python script to add features I want/need (using SIMBL, extended example here: http://livingcode.org/2006/tab-dumping-in-safari). And because my extension is built without modifying the code of the program (or having access to the code of the program) I can update the program freely and my extension keeps working (for the most part). Even though technically I could compile my own version of a program under Linux, I would have to learn a great deal more about the system, and synchronize my changes with the community or have to repatch my version whenever an update was released. I love Linux and run it on several devices, but I write code for the Mac (or the web) because I only have finite amounts of time.

Dethe Elza on Hello darkness my old friend

heh. My dad too; moved him from a G4-dual 500 to a G4 mac mini for his birthday (didn't want to mess with Intel transition if he didn't have to), and he's tickled. Carbon Copy Cloner still gets the job done - in under an hour, no less. For him, OSX has been the perfect balance, easy enough to use for his writing job @ the paper, but also with enough geek access that he's been teaching himself about ports, and correcting the Verizon rep about how mail.app interfaces with gmail over IMAP. Ubuntu is sweet, and freedom is awesome, but often people just want the heavy lifting done for them - that's why auto mechanics, landscapers, and building contractors all have jobs. Until my dad can do his own maintenance on Ubuntu with a copy of Disk Warrior that has one button to press, he'll be using Macs. (PS: say hi to the family for me)

chris lawrence on Hello darkness my old friend

Richard's car analogy is bogus. Find me an auto manufacturer that will take you to court for opening the hood of a vehicle you paid for.

Jonathan on Hello darkness my old friend

For more ampersand porn, Smashing magazine lists ten styles from freely available fonts: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/15/ampersands-with-attitude/

Assaf on The ampersands of Linux

Sad that we only have one fancy ampersand in Linux, being that urw palladio l doesn't have a fancy one in the regular version. I have urw chancery specified in my css framework, sencss, (Which I set out with the idea of offering good fonts for mac, windows and Linux.) For fancy ampersands in Linux that's the only option for now, and it looks nice, but more options are always better.

Kilian Valkhof on The ampersands of Linux

@David, the image seems to be a screen grab with sub-pixel hinting turned on, which is why the anti-aliasing will look bad on many monitors - it was rendered for Mark's monitor.

Daniel on The ampersands of Linux

i noticed that you approve comments on the last post. i just wanted to say that i am really note a conservative as the last post would indicate. i am actually a liberal and i am a web programmer. for example, i know what lambda functions are, i know that jquery is a great javascript framework, i know about computational theory and that halting problem is interesting, so the previous post was purely facetious. knowing that, i think you could annotate the comments or something to fit it in -- knowing that it is for comical purposes. thanks mark!

Anonymous on The ampersands of Linux

is that a fractal at the bottom?

intertubes cowboy on The ampersands of Linux

Simple & Interesting thanks

Mean Dean on The ampersands of Linux

Ugh. Dejavu/Bitstream Sans is a pain. The guy from Simplebits just recommended the very same I though: <span class="amp">&</span>

Federico on The ampersands of Linux

@Jacob: this post now shows the italic versions of the ampersands. You can still see the normal versions if you like.

Mark on The ampersands of Linux

Ok i broke down after seeing the man palace and got a nice big flat screen and got rid of cable and watch www.hulu.com thanks for the idea now i never see the outside of my office :-) life is good

David on Hello darkness my old friend

Mark: none of those typefaces have more interesting ampersands in their italics?

Jacob Rus on The ampersands of Linux

I'm surrounded by mac hardware but I couldnt care less about Apple the company. The computers just happen to do what I want. I also have a PC running Windows for 3D software. Unfortunately, the software I use is typically not available for Linux. I tried, but the available comparable software was no where near the usability and grace of the mainstream software titles I use. I tried getting my father on Linux after he had quite an attack on his windows machine--I installed Ubuntu on his PC Laptop, but 3 weeks later he went and bought a mac. And I have to say, its SO MUCH EASIER to support ol' Dad over the phone when he's on a mac. If it crashes (and never has), it doesnt default to a command line interface. The average person does not like command-line interfaces, they just dont. It's hard for some to understand that, but its true. It's why computers weren't that popular in the home until that first Mac came out. I have never felt 'crippled' on my mac. perhaps its because i make CD backups of all my purchases anyways (and all info is preserved), perhaps i just havent wanted to subvert the OS into doing something it wasnt designed to do, but if anything, modern Mac's have been more of a liberation.

Court on Hello darkness my old friend

That's a far cry better than Windows's pretzel factory.

Lanny Heidbreder on The ampersands of Linux

Your finest post. Consider retiring at your peak.

Jim on The ampersands of Linux

Oops, somehow I dropped the italics while futzing with the styling. It's fixed; these are all italic ampersands now.

Mark on The ampersands of Linux

The antialiasing is painful.

David on The ampersands of Linux

Really, it's the "Ampersands of Free TrueType" It would have been better (lulzier) had you not left out Xwindows gems like 8x13 and bitmap 'Helvetica' (much less the corefonts overlap).

Fred Blasdel on The ampersands of Linux

Clearly Linux's Fancy Ampersand Factor (FAF) is lower than that of other operating systems. A sad state of affairs, to be sure.

Brad Fults on The ampersands of Linux

This has nothing to do with people not caring about their freedom. Free software proponents have done a very bad job, both in the PR department and in the usability side. Any point that ignores these facts is more likely wrong. For years binary interfaces (at several levels) have been kept intentionally unstable to discourage commercial vendors. Stallman has been a source of huge amazement for unsuspecting human beings. Distributions are still an incompatible bunch. Things don't work. Things are unusable. Free software developers are often arrogant and uncapable of understanding their users. People should be true heroes to fight for their freedom in these circumstances.

Bitter on Hello darkness my old friend

Some people build kit cars (Linux), some people appreciate elegant design and pony up the $$$ to drive BMWs or Audis (OS X), and some people just want something to haul the kids and all their crap to soccer practice, so they get a Suburban (Windows). Likewise, some people earn a living developing commercial, closed-source software (me) and some people work for the world's largest advertising company and have a different, somewhat idealized perspective (you). To each his own: it's a big world.

Richard on Hello darkness my old friend

That you stood in line for three hours to purchase a phone says much, much more about your views on Freedom 0 than any weblog post ever could. You don't really believe in Freedom 0. You believe in Cory's shiny happy futuristic version of Freedom 0, which is a lot different than the RTFM/SVN CO/GCC version of Freedom 0 which exists today. What did you say to your wife when she asked you to stand in line? "But honey, it won't play OGG files"? What was her response? There's your definiton of Freedom 0.

Mark on Hello darkness my old friend

Apple gadgets are all nice and pretty until Apple move the goal posts within their walled gardens (iTools, iPhoto, iTMS). And don't even think about running Linux when you have Apple items scattered about. You can't admin your AirPort base stations from Linux (unless you have a Windows partition or another PC nearby) nor play iTMS tracks (unless you stripped the DRM or enable hacks from certain projects that Apple Legal have already tried to shut down). Converting your contacts from Apple's Address Book to vcf isn't a clean process (URLs get screwed up for me) and exporting your mail from emlx to mbox is still a chore. I haven't even begun to touch upon Apple's continued battle to keep iPod syncing and DAAP sharing out of anything other than iTunes, iPhoto and iTunes metadata, the iPhone SDK NDA, the iPhone kill switch, ad nauseam. As it has been said, people don't care until DRM and lock-ins bite them in their arses. Just look at what happened with the Yahoo and MSN music stores. The iTMS isn't going to be around forever, folks.

MackDieselX27 on Hello darkness my old friend

(And that would be why we need Jesus to free us from our slavery, not just from our own stupidity, but that's part of it.)

Mark on Hello darkness my old friend

I guess, it's because everyone is, by their nature enslaved to their own desires and deeds because everyone rebels against God. So we, having no default freedom of our own, default to slavery. In everything. Including freedom (not that freedom 0 is the ultimate freedom but still).

Mark on Hello darkness my old friend

First, Lanny, that's horsecrap. What will probably happen if it is a widespread problem and the person is working with a distribution that has a good community behind it, like Ubuntu or Fedora, is they will post the problem to a newsgroup and others with the same problem will find it. Then, together, they will isolate the problem and come up with a workaround or, if one among them is a coder, a script of some type to rebuild the file. This happens ALL THE TIME in the ubuntu forums. Often bugs are generated in the public database with links to forum threads that contain enough details that the developers can isolate and correct the problem. How much time have you actually been a part of the Open Source community? It sounds like never to me.

Jim on Hello darkness my old friend

Sure everyone is happy now - but wait till they lose their home movies of their kids.

Stephen on Hello darkness my old friend

Re: the comments about the computer being, or wanted to be, a toaster... That was the point of the computing device. Turing wanted to move away from building one special purpose device for every new purpose, away from the restricted nature of physical hardware. In a very real sense, Freedom 0 is the reason the computer exists -- because of the need, or the desire, to be able to do with your device what you will. To see this brilliant concept artificially restricted and then accepted by the masses is ... well, if nothing else, incredibly sad.

Sohum on Hello darkness my old friend

To all Freedom Fighters: do you own/have a car? So you do. Why the double standards then?

Peter on Hello darkness my old friend

What kind of freedom that you guys are talking about? You're just repeating yourselves over and over without making sense even. "Proprietary software subjugates the user. It's an injustice. And the idea that it's good to get people using computers regardless of everything else is shallow and misguided. It's better not to use computers than to use proprietary software." -Richard Stallman in http://tinyurl.com/rmsandcomputers

Colin on Hello darkness my old friend

I totally agree with Dan "The freedom to use a program for any purpose is not as important as the ability to use the program for the specific purposes you’re interested in." I want to add my own perception to this " he freedom to use a program for any purpose is not as important as the ability to use the program in the easiest possible way"

Sachin on Hello darkness my old friend

At least there's some source, SOMEWHERE (I'm thinking of Darwin). And when I buy a laptop (desktop I can assemble from parts, at least), who do I want to give money to, Microsoft or Apple? Between the two, the underdog which has some non-trivial chunks as open source is the winner, for the moment, anyway. Plus, their stuff actually somewhat works most of the time. For me, where Linux was frustrating at times, Windows wasn't really that much less frustrating (ever programmed for Windows? oh, it's very entertaining), so it was rather moot for me: equally frustrating, but one of them is free (both as in beer and freedom). Duh. At least, when I balance from Mac OS X to Linux, I feel that I get SOMETHING in exchange for the loss of freedom, even if it's only skin-deep (which means it'll probably come to happen on Linux too soon enough)...

Pierre Phaneuf on Hello darkness my old friend

> So who decided on the AppleTV, you or the wife? Technically, our kids made the decision for us. I tried and tried to love my Neuros OSD, but my kids can't use it by themselves because they can't read yet. AppleTV displays cover art while you scroll through your movie collection, so both my 4-year-old and 2-year-old can find what they want to watch without waking us up in the morning. Sleep > Freedom 0

Mark on Hello darkness my old friend

What's there to be sad about? So OK, the Linux desktop still isn't quite there yet; it isn't as simple and solid as the Mac OS and the hardware integration is still less-than-perfect. Consider how difficult it would have been in 2001 to have your folks to use Linux full-time for any length at all. Answer: impossible. Thanks (largely) to Shuttleworth's Ubuntu, we've got a Linux that's making gigantic strides towards becoming the obvious choice. We're not there yet? OK, but we're dang close. I predict by 2010 we'll look back and this and remember when Linux was still nearly-but-not-quite-there and we'll tell stories about what it was like "back then." But of course, by then, no one (or rather, no one who has a clue) will argue that there's any reason to avoid Linux except for personal preference. The discussions about ease-of-use or convenience or whatnot will be moot and silly.

jw on Hello darkness my old friend

(edit typo: a Mac *or* a standard GNU/Linux box)

Free software user on Hello darkness my old friend

Almost all of my docs are plain text. All the apps I use are free software. The software I write is generally written in a high-level language and runs on most operating systems. As a practical matter, it doesn't really matter a *whole* lot to me whether I'm using a Mac on a standard GNU/Linux box. GNU/Linux tends to be easier to use, while the Mac tends to "just work" for things like multiple displays, external monitors, wireless networking, and sleep/awake (so Macbooks are handier for carrying around between multiple and varied locations). My level of contribution to the free software community stays about the same whether I'm using GNU/Linux or a Mac. Buying a Mac puts extra cash in Apple's bank account. I'm still looking for a company that sells a laptop that will run on nothing but free software.

Free software user on Hello darkness my old friend

FSF fan: "But the EULA of this program forbids you from doing x." Joe Blow: "But why would I want to do x anyway? I only want to do y, and besides, even if I wanted to do x, I'd need to spend six years getting a master's in computer science and another year tinkering with this thing to get it to do x." Selling people on freedoms they can't exercise themselves is, to put it mildly, an uphill battle.

Nathan Sharfi on Hello darkness my old friend

LOL well as long as it isn't M$, I'm not complaining. Though I hope you know Steve really is straight RIPPING you of $300-400 every time you buy a mac... Fedora Sulphur and Ubuntu Hardy ftw!

Sam on Hello darkness my old friend

I'm surprised that you overestimated people. You, of all people.

Don McArthur on Hello darkness my old friend

A decent portion of those people on this planet who can understand why control over technology might be important -- i.e., they actually understand that, and why, technology has real power -- want to increase and protect technological autonomy. Not everyone, of course, but enough to make a difference. However, the idea of technological autonomy remains as fundamentally inscrutable to the vast majority of technology's users as it is fundamental. Until we find some way to address that problem, the Apples of the world will continue to sex up and sell technological servitude while the disempowered line up to thank them for it.

Benjamin Mako Hill on Hello darkness my old friend

I'm going with the same frustrations. Windows users can't be taught anything but I'm dealing with the people who should know better.

Rob on Hello darkness my old friend

As a lowly user whose personal interpretation of Freedom 0 seems to be "the freedom to run whatever software the operating system comes with for very few purposes," I had to bail on Ubuntu when it upgraded in ways that left my Thinkpad half-functional. For the past few months I've been on a MacBook. No killswitches or brickings from on high yet! So much of my backsliding is hardware-based. I like shiny things. Free Software needs a shiny.

Mike Mariano on Hello darkness my old friend

Poor you. You're self-marginalizing yourself by choosing Linux and then you want to talk about buying Apple products? Please.

anonymous coward on Hello darkness my old friend

Jeena Paradies: Here you go.

Martin Wilson on Hello darkness my old friend

Sometimes, the need for things to "just work" becomes more important than "freedom".

Anonymous Coward on Hello darkness my old friend

You've made me die a little inside.

cry on Hello darkness my old friend

Steve Jobs took a dump on your face! Ha!

Ibod Catooga on Hello darkness my old friend

Let me add something to my earlier comment: You use iPhoto. You create a lot of metadata for your photos. Then its binary black hole database gets corrupted and you're SOL. You use [open source photo manager]. You create a lot of metadata for your photos. Then its open, documented, XML-or-whatever database gets corrupted, but you can run it through an XML validator or write your own script to fix it. Yay openness! Except you can't fix it if you're not a programmer of some variety, and you and I both know that any non-programmers faced with this problem will post on a forum, and they'll be told "If you want your problem fixed, code it yourself." Which is The Open Source Way and there's nothing wrong with that. But you can't say Free/open source software is the best for everybody when one of its biggest advantages is moot for 98% of the population.

Lanny Heidbreder on Hello darkness my old friend