I wonder if there's a way to preserve their cloud.typography service through this. The article states that ownership of the fonts was transferred, but I imagine most designers would disdain the very idea of subscribing if the allegations turned out to be true.
Service aside, how is the company supposed to survive this? Even if Frere-Jones wins the trial and full damages are awarded, surely he'll want to leave the company. I can't fathom how you could keep collaborating with a partner who tried to scam you out of a life's work. That'd leave H&FJ with much weaker creative direction and a tarnished reputation.
Implications for cloud.typography are quite worry some. Fought to convince several agency clients to use the service in lough of image headlines -- would hate for this to affect the service or more likely its license agreement for specific faces. Not sure if cloud.typography is a separate legal entity or not which could continue to license FJ faces if there was a falling out.
On technical counts, I agree. The scenario of a poorly implemented filter reminds me of "porn before the Internet": young people learning the basic tricks to gain access to forbidden material and then spreading them within their groups. Even with physical pornography, doing this was neither complex nor particularly time-consuming.
However, I maintain that there's reason for concern when a government elects to make sexuality a matter of policy. Steering public opinion in a certain direction (making the filter opt-out sounds more like a "you shouldn't be doing it, perv" rather than a "it's entirely up to you, my well-adjusted friend!") and exerting control over exposure at the infrastructure level might not be censorship proper, but I wouldn't consider it harmless from a cultural perspective. Generally, I'm indeed bothered when my government wields morality to crusade against something of dubious consequence.
Granted, this comes from someone who considers the most common stances on pornography and sexual education largely detrimental.
This seems like one of the 10x productivity / mastery cases where your three minutes and creativity have produced something that would take me ages, even if you set me to the task of duplicating your design.
Are you willing to spend another 3 minutes producing a logo for an unrelated programming project? :-P
What brought you to develop this library rather than relying on Incanter/Colt?
The scope of HipHip seems different, of course, but there is enough of an overlap to warrant the question.
Incanter's default Matrix implementation is now Catrix as well - which is a Clojure friendli(er) wrapper over jBLAS matrices. https://github.com/tel/clatrix Check out the source.
Wonderful, thanks for the continuous updates. I hope you will keep gaining momentum around this initiative; having a solid community-supported set of benchmarks which routinely improves would be a true asset.
By the way, I would like to offer a UX suggestion: it would be nice if you could select one or more frameworks and have them highlighted in the result listings, so as to be able to notice their relative position at a glance.
Thanks for the feedback. The highlight is a good idea and I've created an issue for the suggestion [1]. I'll try to get that added in time for the next round.
A warning: this traditional, over-the-top gesturing is particularly common in certain cities and segments of population. (The kind of colourful things that short tourism&culture articles like to talk about.)
Elsewhere? Not so much. If you were so careless as to extend this stereotype to —say— the modern urban youth or the well-educated expat, you would likely be mocked as a clueless American tourist, and asked about how many guns you keep at home. :)
For perspective: I was born in northern Italy. Very few people within my social circles ever used any of the traditional gestures; when they did, they deliberately exaggerated the movements for comical effect, or put on a southern accent. Indeed, I have only recently discovered that gesturing is considered to be such a prominent, common feature of Italian culture... by reading English articles about it.
Well, those "segments" include most of the (disgraceful) Italian élite, so uhm. Just watch a political debate: you'll never find one without the making-a-point "vertical-OK" or the please-dont-talk-idiocy "join-hands-in-prayer", be it from Northern or Southern politicians, journalists, pundits, scholars or whatnot.
TBH, one of the effects of living abroad for more than a decade has been, for me, the loss of that smug Northern superiority complex. With all due respect to Giorgio Gaber, any pretence of Northern non-Italian-ness died with the first Berlusconi government.
It seems to me that downloading a subset of a typeface from a webpage would be less practical than downloading an entire collection from a torrent.
Concerning the service itself: according to their product page, H&FJ requires you to include a remote stylesheet rather than javascript. I would say this is the "minimum viable evil" if you are striving to centralize distribution of your webfonts; while annoying, there are some advantages for the user (in this case, free Akamai).
Edit: I just checked a couple of torrent search engines and, apparently, there are not many up-to-date torrents for H&FJ typefaces. In hindsight, I suppose that the population of individuals who are likely to share files illegally and that of professional/dedicated designers have very little overlap.
The people who download fonts from torrents know what they're doing. If it was trivial to copy fonts off of web pages, people would routinely violate H+FJ's license without even realizing it; H+FJ would be in the unpleasant position of having to police the Internet and educating all those people who'd be surprised to hear that the one piece of markup / technology they can't crib from another site is the font, but only if it's an H+FJ font, and...
I may or may not have had no trouble whatsoever pirating an enormous variety of fonts off a website I found with a quick google search. Maybe torrents just aren't where they are?
In my experience too, websites with direct downloads are better. It is easy to make webfonts even when FontSquirrel marks the font for copyright too if you have a software like FontLab. Just remove the designer/copyright information in the Font Info menu.
Ironically enough, the lead actor (Ulrich Mühe[1]) had really been under Stasi surveillance; a surveillance to which his then wife allegedly collaborated.
this is the most destructive aspect of surveilance state - it is not that the state, ie. its proper officers and facilities, are doing - after all one can reasonably expect them to do all sort of nefarious things one can imagine and thus one is considered reasonably warned, it is about anybody (even friends and family) can happen to be a secret informant and collaborator. In case of USA the secretly imposed gag orders is a big step toward it.
I signed up for Google Plus reluctantly, mostly just to use hangouts as Skype doesn't work on the ARM Chromebook.
I don't use Facebook and I host my own email, mostly because I'd like to keep my social graph private.
However, Google knows everyone I'd have added on Plus already - and offers to add them for me. How? They've all uploaded their address books, and they all use gmail.
80-90%+ of my social graph is already known to them, just because my friends have already given them the data. My lack of participation in Google Plus is insufficient.
It is the same with smart phones. Even if you don't install any apps or link any of your profiles (fb, g+, etc) all it takes is for one person you know to upload their address book to "find their friends" and suddenly there is linked: your phone #, email, fb (your picture included), g+, all in one spot, all without your permission or knowledge.
Even if you try and secure your data and privacy, unless everyone you know does the same thing it is pointless.
Well-designed email clients with proper privacy seem to be very hard to come by, and new players in that niche would be welcome. Particularly in the current climate, I would argue.
Yeah, what happened there? I had Eudora in the mid-90s running PGP integrated really nicely. I was talking with a friend how had never used PGP before and I realised somehow I just stopped using it and don't remember when. Maybe it was just the romantic ideal back then that we were important enough to have our mail read, or maybe it was that we actually personally knew the ISP admins and really knew they could read our mail.
Service aside, how is the company supposed to survive this? Even if Frere-Jones wins the trial and full damages are awarded, surely he'll want to leave the company. I can't fathom how you could keep collaborating with a partner who tried to scam you out of a life's work. That'd leave H&FJ with much weaker creative direction and a tarnished reputation.