Fonts

The link above goes to a BBC Magazine piece on Helvetica, a font that you'll find almost anywhere. It's a Macintosh font, it's a logo slogan choice, it's something you perhaps didn't know the name of but saw everywhere.

However, another link on the page goes to BanComicSans.com, an attempt by two Canadians to push legislation to outlaw the use of Comic Sans in publishing. As many of you know, Comic Sans is that Windows default font developed first for use in help bubbles and then anything directed at a juvenile audience, such as a comic. Now, though, it's likely to be found on anything in attempts to connect with the consumer at a colloquial level. It may seem to be reasonable to the people pushing for its removal due to the fact that its ubiquity does no justice to the fact that it looks really out of place in the commercial environment, but no, it will not be banned. This is due to two main reasons: It's a ridiculous idea to make a government ban a typeface, and — hold your breath — it's a Windows (and now Macintosh) pre-load.

Because Windows operating systems come with fonts such as Comic Sans and Verdana that were developed for use by Microsoft, as well as fonts like Arial that are licensed from the Monotype Corporation, those fonts are probably going to be the ones you encounter in a world of small, fledgling businesses and MySpace-like placards. Decent fonts, such as Univers (I would say Helvetica, but that's a Macintosh pre-load), are not cheap, let alone free — so what choice do you really have if you're starting out or are just a regular guy writing invites to a house party? Even at that, you have the fact that such fonts will not render for many others on the Internet, so you're stuck with Microsoft pre-loads. Decent fonts, even non-Microsoft fonts, end up being in graphics.*

Personally, I don't like Comic Sans. I really don't like any of the Microsoft pre-loads, but Comic Sans is probably the most misused of all. I would use it for school activity worksheets or flyers, but that's where it stands; in my mind it's not even a good candidate for — well — comics! The line height is too high, upper-case letters are far from uniform, and mixed-case captions in comics never really took off (unless they were in Mad). Instead of banning it, though, I would probably seek to educate people in decent and tasteful graphic design and typography, and maybe call on Monotype, Linotype, ITC, Adobe, and Agfa to lower their rates.

* There are, however, a few notable exceptions: The websites for the Guardian and the Sun use Macintosh-native Geneva as their primary face. Also, Photobucket has started using Adobe-propagated and newly Macintosh-native Myriad in headers.

Texting

Di-di-dong, goes the chime emitted by AIM on a Sidekick. Someone's replied to what is construed to be an urgent message when it merely adds to the current drama consisting of anger over an unfaithful boyfriend. Sometimes it's a girlfriend. But whatever the case, texting is another feature of cell phones in which the purpose is defeated.

My main concern is the charge incurred by sending a line of text. On TMobile it's probably two cents to send a line of text, but compared to a five- or ten-cent minute, I'd say the vocal minute is more productive. I'll assume that the average person sends and receives four or five lines a minute: Usually in five lines you get about a quarter of the conversation done whilst the conversation is nearly over (about 80 percent) when the vocal minute passes. And it's a separate charge, one that many teens have compromised to pay for separately.

But what is the logic here? I happen to know that LiveJournal and Blogger allow you to blog from your mobile, but when people do, as I've observed from the blogs that link here via the Next Blog function, it's usually to send a picture, not necessarily text, but since it has to be posted as HTML it still counts as a line of text — two cents more. Compare it to taking photos on a digital camera and then uploading them onto your computer at night, when time is plenty. I'd take the latter any day. Plus which, for all cell phones (don't mention the Treo, Sidekick, or Blackberry to me; they're called PDAs no matter how you look at them), the lack of a QWERTY keyboard makes posting and recording difficult for the poster and potential reader; it's designed more for short recording and the usual speak on AIM.

Of course, this applies to the United States. In Europe and Asia (except China, where text messages are censored), texting is as useful as the vocal minute due to less reliance on the car. For the Americans, the fact that texting diverts your eyes off the road is another lack of support. We already have states passing laws against the use of cell phones whilst driving; with new studies coming out, they might push for harsher penalties on those texting whilst driving. In Europe, you're sitting on a train or walking much more than you can drive due to the city's unaccommodating layout, so it's a lot safer and more productive. They have an excuse, at the very least.

Note to self: Don't start this habit if stuck with the GoPhone for Christmas. The smilies have been knocked down and the tilde is starting to crumble away.

Bzzzzzzt!

I remember watching a programme about dog whistles; whenever someone blew into one, a dog would rush forth but humans would not be able to hear it. I then learned that it was because our eardrums aren't quite as good as those of dogs.

And then again, such quality can be limited to youngsters. Shortly before school started, a company produced a ringtone, 'Mosquito', that was configured so that only students could hear it. When school started for me, it turned out that the ringtone had become so popular that many techers knew what it was, What may seem as a disappointment may be that two of our teachers were able to hear it loud and clear; in fact, one, our marine biology teacher (I stopped her course to pursue Spanish last week), demonstrated it to other teachers. It turned out that she had been a musician and had kept her ears healthy that way. On the other side of the spectrum, though, our gym teacher — the same one that assigned the mechanical babies — was led into the room as Dan, one of the ringtone owners, played a sample for her. She couldn't hear it, so she made us turn around and raise our hands if we heard it. When most of us did, she accused us of lying and stalked out. The ringtone has proved so successful that I also heard shopkeepers intend to use the sound to drive hoodlums away.

Even so, I haven't seen the need to text in class or otherwise use a mobile phone during those hours. My stepbrother was ecstatic to receive one the Christmas before last, and ever since then he's wanted the best and the most expensive out of it; he's used that thing for more uses than it's been designed for, from what I can tell. I'm the exact opposite; since mine was not a flip phone and it kept turning on when I brushed against a wall, and I never had any cell phone numbers to keep anyway (only that of Tom, whom I haven't communicated with much since I started working), I stopped using it after four months of being forced to have it on me and gave it to one of my father's labour contractors. This Christmas, though, I may be getting one of Cingular's 'go' phones and, when I receive my licence, AAA services. The main concern in my family was being stranded on a dirt road, which I saw as the only use for a cell phone if ever there was one.

And there's also the possible meet-ups. Lily did mention calling Frostweaver via mobile once....

Microsoft on a Mac

Last March two hackers managed to get the Windows XP operating system running on a Macintosh computer with chips manufactured by Intel, thus winning $13,854 for the trouble and spurring Apple to think, 'What can we do to capitalise on this?' What they decided to do was use the feat to create a new feature for their upcoming Leopard operating system, which is to be called Boot Camp and will allow the hard drive to be partitioned to run both Windows XP and the Macintosh operating system.

As this feat promises compatibility with more programmes for Mac without having to wait for the company to release a modification of the programme that they released for the Windows computer, it's a sign that Apple is trying to roll right back at Windows for trying to buy them out and thus establish a monopoly more than six years ago. Having composed virtually everything on a Windows computer but having used a Macintosh as my first computer, you would probably visualise me as a sceptic that's afraid of the overwhelming possibilities that the hacking now affords Apple; compatibility means more acceptance in the corporate environment, which in turn will mean the evening out of costs, which, despite the frail popularity of Macs in the corporate world, are priced based on their visual material.

In other words, it's time to get a little more colour and variety into our lives, even if it does mean that extra penny.

The evil delays

So for about five years now, Windows XP has been the latest and most advanced workstation PC offered. For four years the PlayStation 2 has reigned over Sony’s immobile console line. And for about three years Office 2003 has been the top-of-the-line word processing programme for businesses, schools, and homes. Before then, their companies have had a habit of releasing version after version after version yet of their products. But Microsoft has realised that it was no longer possible for them to feign contention over one operating system that had two versions that were essentially upgrades from two other versions it had released; Windows XP Professional was the step up from Windows 2000, and Windows XP Home Edition was the upgrade from Windows Millennium Edition (albeit skipping the Tahoma-font interface step that Windows 2000 took). Sony’s release of the PSP showed the public that its computer entertainment division was indeed in the midst of change; even before the PSP was first proposed speculation on the PS3 was rife. And Microsoft’s Office XP software paled in comparison to Office 2003, which many workstations adopted from Office 97 or 2000 since they didn’t have time to go the extra step.

The first part of remedying this stint was to announce the names and features of entirely new products. Sony’s PlayStation 3 boasts a hard drive and an online gaming network that’s already being beefed up in an attempt to emulate another thing Microsoft can brag about, Xbox Live. Microsoft, however, has released beta versions of Windows Vista to valued supporters and subscribers to the corporation website and intends to release the final product in November to large companies — but it admitted that it wasn’t even near ready to take the product to market for home PCs. And Office 2007 hasn’t even left the drawing board yet, and even at that stage reviewers have criticised Microsoft’s option to discard the traditional menu-and-toolbar interface that characterises most products that run on a Windows machine. (They do so as well for products such as Windows Defender.) And Internet Explorer 7 betas have been released twice, both with serious holes that needed to be repaired and showed that it would never be compatible with Windows XP or lower-grade PCs. And they responded late to the urge to restrict compatibility to Windows XP by allowing Windows Live Messenger only to run on that operating system — and there exists no sign of a definite release date for that programme.

The reason for the lag can be traced back to the scheming that le to the products offered by the two companies. Office was released as an alternative to the faulty Microsoft Works programme (which is still on market but offers no compatibility with .doc or .xls files), Windows itself was the result of stealing the idea of a graphical user interface from Xerox, and Sony’s PlayStation consoles emerged from black-ops consultation with researchers from Nintendo. The first two eventually overshadowed Apple (who strangely haven’t released an new operating system in about five years, instead resorting to development of peripherals such as the iPod), and the PlayStation was released in 1993, three years ahead of the Nintendo 64 — thus walloping Nintendo in the videogame market by capitalising on slow reaction time. When the PlayStation was officially declared obsolete, Sony was about to move onto plans for its successor when a surprise onslaught of indicia made for Nintendo — more Mario games, the introduction of Pokémon outside Japan — caused a disruption. So plans were sped up and the PlayStation 2 was brought to market, coinciding with the new millennium.

If Sony was able to produce quality material under these constraints, we figured, it would be able to release the PlayStation 3 before Christmas with no problem. However, this is the point in which these consoles no longer are being restricted to playing games and offering multiple controller ports — they now have their own IP addresses and connect to a server just like the computer. Microsoft’s Xbox console achieved this shortly after the initial release, although Sony had promised these services just mere months before the PlayStation 2 was released. Not even two years ago the PS2 was able to do this — and last November Microsoft compounded the dilemma by bringing the Xbox 360 to market. However, this caused yet another problem that would lead to suspension of production of that console and the compromising of releases of Vista, which were promised for mid-2006. Microsoft’s research and development money situation had just taken a very sickening turn, propelled by doubt as to whether current hardware would be able to support the operating system at all.

So what happened?

Looking from the viewpoint of the companies that manufacture PCs and hardware — Dell, Intel, AMD, HP — the progress of technology in that sector, which has been rendered a mere tertiary industry by computer marketing and the creation of the programmes and games for those systems, is not fast. In order to support Windows Vista, Pentium will have to: a) release a new Pentium processor or b) create a version of Celeron or Pentium 4 that goes beyond the HT technology that was created to better support Windows XP. Depending on the size of upgraded programme files, new hard drives may have to be marketed to support the operating system, and low-end PCs that were shipped with Windows 98 but later were reformatted with Windows XP may not be able to upgrade to Vista. And don’t get me started on the amount of required DDRAM. Unsurprisingly, the potential insufficiencies of existing technologies provide an excuse for Microsoft to delay the operating system.

Another problem would be the servers. Windows Server 2003 is an emulation of Windows XP that is supposed to provide better support for these operating systems than Windows Server 2000 or NT. Here we have to ask whether Vista will work well with any of these network operating systems. If not, Vista should have a seventh flavour to Vista — Vista Server perhaps, or maybe another version of the Enterprise flavour. Of course, that would only drag the release date down further, so the smart thing would be to make Vista work enough like Windows XP to be compatible with network operating systems for the time being and prevent the Open Group and Novell from racing to the drawing board to create and commission new versions of UNIX and NetWare.

If entanglement with NOS manufacturers wasn’t enough to worry about, Sony has yet to create its own servers, thus refraining from an undependable ad hoc gaming network. Microsoft has luckily been a step ahead of this by creating gaming servers and allowing more than 10 people to be in rooms at the same time (which, of course, results in the proverbial Assault match on Halo 2). Current ad hoc networks such as Nintendo’s WiFi programme and peer-to-peer workstation networks lack a common service and thus are underpowered because the source for required files or gaming venues will shift from workstation or console to workstation or console. The PSP has this weakness as well, although it makes up for it by playing Internet browser when it’s given a computer network to hook up to (although it can’t participate in ad hoc computer networks). Hopefully when the PS3 is out and plans for the sequel to the PSP begin, the ad hoc technology will be scrapped and the new console will be able to connect to others via the servers that support the PS3, if ever they exist.

Then we have the Blu-ray dilemma. This technology — which is supposed to increase playing quality and storage space for CDs and finally make them directly writable on the computer — has been delayed for years on end now, and Sony’s mistake was trying to invest in this technology to include, in any primitive form, in the PS3. Because of the diversion of money to this and the letdown that occurred, Sony is hard-pressed to develop just the right technology for the PS3, so the product remains on the drawing board for more months now.

Finally, you have expectations from the consumer. Office 2007 is expected to provide XML support and specific features for different areas of work (such as government work or school). Whilst it promises new features, the mounting criticism it has received for its ‘innovative’ toolbar interface has reached breaking point — it’s not exactly in the style of Microsoft to eliminate the menu bar at top and force the icons to change once a certain situation such as track changing and macro recording arises, and it’s certainly the goal of the company to provide enough access to make everything they want readily accessible. So the concept is constantly being revised, thus delaying the release of the new version. As for the PlayStation 3, the consumer will not want to depend on loose memory cards, but instead will want a hard drive that can be transferred from one console to another, a concept that is currently being considered. And when Windows Vista ships out, it should for starters include more resistance to threats than Windows XP has and than Internet Explorer 7 currently carries — bye-bye Norton!

When you look at the small print, you start to realise that the delays of the PS3, Vista, and Office are founded in more matters than we really have control over. When Windows XP came out, it was released in two significant versions to upgrade two older operating systems, 2000 and ME. Now that Vista is coming in seven flavours geared for business, the home, school, and third-world countries, more research will have to be done to ensure that the final product both meets personal standards and is compatible with existing versions and is prepared for future releases that require the use of the operating system. And when the PS3 is released, it should come in a format that helps — which means adopting a proper network standard for once and ditching the Spiderman font on its cover.

The proxies

When I came to my school everyone was talking about the Novell BorderManager proxy that everyone had to go through in order to access the Internet. Back then the filter blocked on general subject and often denied access to sites that were part of the curriculum, so the filter had to be adjusted. At the end of freshman year it had been programmed to return false on certain URLs, and it stayed that way until recently.

The reason for the inefficacy of the filter then was how easy bypassing it was. The filter was set in place only when the Internet Options (whose window wasn't blocked!) had the proxy checkboxes ticked and the proxy pointed to 10.10.1.2:8080. On certain computers (including six in the library), the checkboxes could just be unticked and the filter would be lifted, since there was an unintentionally planted LAN in the school. It became a pasttime to look for computers that were connected to the forbidden LAN — until Christmas break ended. When we returned, the school was in the process of changing all of the computers, and from how they were all formatted the 'forbidden LAN' now encompassed the entire campus.

This was until today, when a scrap of paper landed on my table at lunch. Inscribed on it were several arrangements that I recognised as numbers and ports — and from what the passer told me, they were proxy directions that he used to get around the filter that replaced BorderManager two weeks before. Because the new blocker was in the way of most of the network, the passer had to look at home for public pointers; at school many of them worked but the administration had quickly caught on to the scheme and cut off the proxies. Such methods exercised by the students, however, were signs that the king-must-die perseverance of the student body to get to MySpace was not about to let up.

Recently I read in an article in the Press of Atlantic City about the Vineland district's blocking method and the cause for blocking certain sites such as MySpace. Apparently there has been a rash in attacks that resulted as a result of what was posted on the site, which has led to an expulsion hearing in California for someone that outlined a death plan on their profile page as well as increased sex attacks.

For these reasons — and the fact that the site was vestigial in administrators' eyes, referring to its devolution from one of the dating sites that eHarmony and Match.com are now — and the students' clamour to the site to arrange online meetings or, in the cases of those with social impediments, outlets of communication, MySpace will continue to be blocked. Each proxy will be blocked. And when it comes to the fact that people are using that site to communicate with others whenever they can scavenge for free time, they should consider forums, many of which are mercifully unblocked and offer experiences similar to those found on MySpace chatrooms.

And pooh pooh to those on PKMN.NET that go there!