Thirith on 22/7/2020 at 06:55
I may very much be into physical books, but If I was still working in academia, I think I would've loved having all the relevant literature on a tablet and being able to mark things, make notes, make it fully searchable and have it all in one place. If I was still teaching, I would love being able to project directly from a tablet, draw on it, underline and make connections there and then. I think that this would've also pushed me in the direction of reading more on electronic devices, because I was never a big fan of marking physical books with anything more permanent than pencil.
DESTINYR on 29/7/2020 at 21:02
Quote Posted by Thirith
Absolutely. I've bought one or two (physical) books where the typesetting was so unpleasantly bad that I stopped reading them.
I usually feel when I'm reading an unprofessional font in a book or e-book that the book itself is unprofessional/ childish/ possibly with inaccurate information. I would actually feel like I need to confirm the information. An easy, professional font makes the difference for me
Tocky on 30/7/2020 at 01:16
Every damn book I read these days has spelling or grammatical errors that should have been caught by the copy editor. It's jarring. How can they not catch them? Are they not reading them? Maybe they think big time authors don't make mistakes. Well they damn well do.
Pyrian on 30/7/2020 at 01:37
Maybe they don't have editors any more. What kind of books are you reading?
Kolya on 30/7/2020 at 19:33
Proof readers are costly and a lot of people don't care. It should be noted that the job of an editor goes far beyond proof reading and can make a middling book into a master piece.
But the trend is to read straight from the horses mouth, editing is decried as censorship or dilution and publishing houses need to save money, so there you go.
Tocky on 1/8/2020 at 17:59
I read all sorts of stuff but mostly science fiction and horror. The thing is, it's not just the books you might expect like self promoted stuff at conventions, even Stephen King novels are getting sloppy. The last I read was Harper Lee's last. Of course with her there wasn't a single mistake as a lifetime between novels leaves a lot of time for correction but even so it brings my estimation of others skill level down. They seem no better than me, maybe worse, as I've caught their mistakes. They aren't Gods after all. Oh well, at least they are better at putting commas where they go.
It makes me wonder if I could be a proof reader. Maybe I should offer my services to my old school bud, Frank Tuttle. Ack, I would have to read a lot of fantasy. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad. I just keep thinking whenever I see him again it's going to be like not thinking of elephants. I hate the "poof and then a dragon appeared" stuff. I've got to read some of his full length stuff someday though. That too has been hard to avoid in conversation.
Gray on 10/8/2020 at 05:49
Quote:
Windows used to be good and now it's shit
No, Windows was always shit, now it's just a different, more colourful flavour of shit. Don't confuse nostalgia with quality. And I say that as a Certified Microsoft Professional of several of their OS. I used to be a SysAdmin. Bleh, I spit on "user friendly", it's just another wording for "less control, more awful sucking"! :ahem: But I digress.
I do agree that certain things seem to go backwards and do not go to their logical, more efficient endpoints, but I blame that on business forces and marketing, not on the engineering advances. Things can always be improved, reinvented, re-engineered, but it's not always profitable no matter how efficient. I'm of the vastly unpopular opinion that marketing and advertising is the natural enemy of
everything, including engineering and environmentalism, so I tend to blame them for all the things I despise. I'm all for efficiency, in all senses possible. Greenpeace yes, Apple no.
Harvester on 10/8/2020 at 09:45
Well, I don't know, I mean I use Ubuntu on my work laptop and it's great for server stuff and Docker containers and the like, and PhpStorm works well on it. People are always touting the virtues of Linux, but frankly as a home OS I would never install it. Not even if I weren't a gamer, I just prefer Windows' GUI to the Ubuntu one. If I had no interest in playing games, I might've considered buying an iMac or MacBook for its OS and the way different Apple product I own (iPhone, Apple TV) work together flawlessly in the Apple ecosystem.
Nameless Voice on 10/8/2020 at 13:38
That's because Ubuntu's default desktop UI is, frankly, terrible.
It has that bizarre desktop/tablet shared design philosophy, while also having that useless top bar that Gnome Linuxes all have, which takes up space but does nothing useful, while sometimes stealing some (but never all) of your programs' menus.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop, that's the way to go. Very much like Windows, only it does it better than any modern Windows does. Probably better than even the "good" Windowses like 7.
There are other parts of Linux which are still terrible, but the desktop interface no longer is.
Now, as always, the big problems are always software that doesn't work (or work as well) on 'nix. Mostly looking at games and UE4.
Harvester on 10/8/2020 at 14:48
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
That's because Ubuntu's default desktop UI is, frankly, terrible.
It has that bizarre desktop/tablet shared design philosophy, while also having that useless top bar that Gnome Linuxes all have, which takes up space but does nothing useful, while sometimes stealing some (but never all) of your programs' menus.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop, that's the way to go. Very much like Windows, only it does it better than any modern Windows does. Probably better than even the "good" Windowses like 7.
There are other parts of Linux which are still terrible, but the desktop interface no longer is.
Ah I see. But sadly, I don't think the management at my company would approve of everyone installing their own Linux distro on the company provided laptops so at work I'm stuck with Ubuntu. As for software, I prefer Microsoft Office to LibreOffice by a large margin. And lately I've had two Linux freezes, where only the mouse cursor works, but nothing else, not even Ctrl-Alt-Delete or anything. I just finished a video call with a client where I wrote the changes they wanted to the system I'm building in a text file, and then the freeze happened. Had to press the power button for 5 seconds and reboot, text file gone. Such hard freezes I haven't encountered in Windows for years, so meh about Linux on that front. :erg: But doing server and Docker stuff on Windows is a huge PITA, so that's the other side of the equation. PhpStorm, my IDE, works about as well on Ubuntu as it does on Windows and so do Microsoft Teams (what we use for video calls) and Slack, so I have no preference either way.