68236
submission
Piroca writes:
Font smoothing in OS X is one of the worst aspects of the system, yet few users dare to complain about it. The rationale behind Quartz font rendering is that anything in the screen should be rendered as they would while printing. Apple decided to turn off font hinting and perform anti-aliasing indiscriminately, thus adding artifacts to horizontal and vertical lines. It happens the end result is that fonts at small sizes are blurry and not very easy to read (which is exactly the opposite result expected from the anti-aliasing strategy, and renders the crispness of LCDs useless). Apple has been heavy-handed about this issue since OS X 10.1 by not acknowledging it and not providing configuration options to turn off anti-aliasing in small fonts while providing font hinting and choices for system fonts (the ubiquitous Lucida Grande is not hinted therefore it looks wrong when anti-aliased) as the old System 9 and Windows do. This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon (Leopard won't do anything about it, at least). For me, this is a problem because I have to develop on OS X and keep starring at blurry fonts the whole day gives me headaches. I'm pretty sure other developers out there have the same problem, therefore here goes my question: what do you do to cope with the troublesome font smoothing in OS X?
68168
story
lanc writes
"Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, tells the story of how he wrote the vi editor. The article at The Register delves into his motives, who instigated the project, and some of the quirks of leaving a 'gift to mankind'. From the piece: '9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens. So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.'"
68102
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Google's recent alliance with StopBadware.org seems to have taken a draconian turn. While many may have read about StopBadware.org tagging AOL software as "badware" recently, they now seem to be smacking down web sites based solely on anonymous and unconfirmed complaints. Google in turn blacklists the site and blocks it from search results with a very harsh advisory. Read one site owner's first-hand experience with the Google overlord.
68096
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
If you hate clunky graphing calculator interfaces or having to code in order to create a simple plot, here's a new web-based plotter. Based entirely on JavaScript using vector graphics, FooPlot supports scrolling like Google Maps and even does basic 3-D plots too.
From the website, plans include developing it into "a fully-featured graphing calculator with analytic tools, charting with Google spreadsheets, curve-fitting, and saving into portable formats".
68056
submission
A Smitten Rocket Scientist writes:
As reported in Sports Illustrated, Summer Williams is a full time aerospace engineer who works on the International Space Station. But she's got a side gig as a cheerleader for the Houston Texans! The fantasy woman of Slashdot readers everywhere actually exists....
68026
submission
JimCricket writes:
The fact that the traditional music industry is in decline becomes clearer every year. There have been many attempts to revive the industry online, but every attempt I've seen treats music as a product rather than as a service. Maybe that's the problem. Prior to the 20th century, music was always a services-only business. If you made money as a musician, it was through being paid to write symphonies, or to play in a king's court, etc. Work-for-hire services. Fast forward to the 21st century, and a new music company, TailoredMusic.com, is trying to create a services model for recorded music. Essentially they sell custom-order recorded music. Now that the existing industry is in a decline, is services something that should be taken more seriously? There are some interesting parallels with OSS here; the primary way most people make money with OSS is through offering services rather than selling shrink-wrapped product.
62972
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Northwestern University researchers report that by combining organic and inorganic materials they have produced transparent, high-performance transistors that can be assembled inexpensively on both glass and plastics. The possible upshot: Car windshields that display a map to your destination, military goggles with targets and instructions displayed before a soldier's eyes, or a billboard that doubles as a window.
