I think he looked into some special fonts, but they lacked our local language glyphs. For straight-up code that wouldn't be a problem (as everything is in English, though a project or two have localized comments), but the UI does need to have text.
I'll point him to those two fonts and see what he has to say. Thanks
Here's the funny thing, and I'm honestly not joking: one of these guys is using Comic Sans as his coding font, as he's dyslexic and it helps him. The other is using Tahoma, because it's very narrow.
Visual preferences vary. That is why we are able to set our own fonts and colours in our IDEs. It is strictly a personal thing. I'm a black-on-white guy, but the Tahoma guy from above is using the old Borland nineties colour scheme, yellow-on-blue. Strangely enough, I "grew up" on those same colours, and since switching to LCD monitors, I can't stand it any longer. No idea why...
We're talking about code here. Is anyone using anything but a monospaced font when viewing it?
Yes, plenty of people. I was using a proportional font for a while when I had a low-res monitor and needed more stuff on the screen. I have two coworkers using proportional fonts right now.
What is readable to one person might very well not be readable to someone else. That is why some people like their code on black backgrounds and some will get severe eye strain if they look at white-on-black for a couple of minutes.
Nevertheless, see the post above about monospaced fonts wildly differing in character width.
Out of curiosity, why do you prefer tabs? Seems like unless everyone has the same tab size set, it can make the code more difficult to read than spaces.
For the same reason why CSS was invented to style HTML. Tabs are entirely font-agnostic and they are semantic. Spaces are not, and are directly visual.
There are people who like two characters of indentation and there are those who like eight. Some like six! There are people who like proportional fonts for coding. There are people who like special narrow monospaced pixel fonts. Even Consolas on Windows, a very popular coding font, is narrower than the standard monospaced width, so code is less indented with Consolas than Courier.
Tabs are also easier on the eyes if you have "show special characters" turned on in your IDE. Also, tabs are easier to work with if you ever need to run some regex on your code.
There are no benefits whatsoever to using spaces, only downsides.
It's best if you watched some playthroughs on YouTube. Or TotalBiscuit's WTF on the game. Looks fun, but XCOM it is most definitely not.
That said... Xenonauts is probably what both you and I are waiting for.
How do I get the bundle in Europe? It seems that the promotion is only available to US residents, but my google-fu could have failed me...
I was very pleased to find that in both Borderlands 2 and XCOM Enemy Unknown, the super-annoying splash screens can all be disabled with a little light editing of
I hate those things, especially when the game developer doesn't let you skip them. (Borderlands 1, I'm looking at you. Ugh.)
Hello,
I picked up Borderlands 1 recenly, and there are two ways to disable the startup movies. The first is to edit an ini file if you have the Steam version, and the second is to add the "-nomoviestartup" parameter to the executable shortcut.
Is there likely to be a lot more of this type of thing out there that just hasn't been discovered?
Yes.
There are four known communication protocols (OldProtocol, OldProtocolIE, SignupProtocol, RedProtocol) and four classes of malware (SP, SPE, IP, FL).
This is SPE. FL was Flame. SP is unknown (though presumed early SPE), IP is also unknown.
IP uses SignupProtocol. It is presumed that RedProtocol is not yet implemented, although I'd lean towards "not yet discovered".
This is really, really precisely targeted stuff. Stuxnet went out - supposedly the Israelis modified it and a bug/feature let it spread - but the others were pretty much precisely guided towards the victims. Nobody has any idea what's out there and which operating systems these things are targeting. Given that the creators of this entire malware family have also utilized a completely new hash collision algorithm and managed to do things nobody ever did before, I wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty more malware unknowns where this came from.
Fascinating stuff. Evil stuff, but incredibly fascinating. To this date, nobody figured out how malware operators gained access to some Linux servers used for C&C, nor why their first action after logging in was to upgrade OpenSSH.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/10/security-vulnerability-in-firefox-16/
Great... How does that even happen?!
There is probably at least a few employees who can do a full day of productive work in 4-5 hours. Forcing them to sit out 8 hours, even on flexible basis, is very discouraging. Establish a reasonable goal per week, and have them do that in however many hours it takes.
I agree. I have 4-5 hours of productivity myself, and the rest of my time is just spent pretending to work or reading tech sites because that's how things go; management doesn't understand the amount of mental burnout that happens in IT.
If you need me to do something an hour before I'm supposed to go home, more often than not I will fuck things up severely. I'm done, my brain is pudding. I will make mistakes that could be published on TheDailyWTF. I will spend that hour doing something that I'd be able to do properly in five minutes next morning.
Still, flexible working hours are one step towards changing things around. I worked 9-5 at my last job for a while, then I slowly got them to let me eat at the office and go home early, then work flexible hours, then I got them to let me work from home occasionally, and finally, they just gave me "things to do this week" and I was free to do those things however I wanted to. That was especially nice during the winter, when days are short; I'd spend mornings and early afternoons walking around, cooking, etc, then working from home in the evening, being more productive than ever.
I quit because management changed. While they were willing to let me continue working on my own terms, I realized their business ideas were a colossal fuckup and I was on a sinking boat. Now I'm negotiating flexible working hours again and I don't doubt I'll be where I was in a year, maybe two. (The boat sank, by the way.)
Give them flexible working hours.
There's nothing worse than coming to work in the morning and trying to "work" after your kid puked the entire night and you haven't had half an hour of solid sleep, or if you have a splitting headache that just refuses to go away on its own, but would likely go away if you could nap or walk for a couple of hours (depends on the person).
IT is a line of work where flexible hours are possible. Give them that, but still keep work clocked every week.
Yes, I know SA is basically a hardware tabloid, but they usually get at least some things right...
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/09/27/intels-clover-trail-is-a-bloated-nightmare/
I'm not going to comment on anything they wrote; make your own conclusions.
Read the PDF, people, damn it, before jumping to conclusions.
The fonts used in the experiment were Eurostile as the grotesque and Frutiger as the humanist. Both of those are sans serif.
This is about shapes, form and spacing.
Can you even eat "nutritious" for two+ years on the journey? What does a protein paste do to your digestive system? What would the influences of radiation be on food; would the algae undergo mutation?
And once you get there, how do you grow more food and what kind?
How exactly do you feed people on the journey to Mars, what do they eat when they finally get there, and what type of food will even survive that long?
I haven't given this much thought, but it seems that food might be the hardest obstacle for longer travels. Screw muscle atrophy and bone density issues - how do you FEED travellers to Mars?
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
