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Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox said he believes the metaverse will one day become as essential as smartphones during a panel about the technology at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday. "On the back of his business card is gibberish explaining how he may be reached: a telephone number. A universal voice phone locator code. A P.O. box. His address on half a dozen electronic communications nets. And an address in the Metaverse."
Please forgive me for being (more than) a bit skeptical
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That a virtual world will be important in the future... almost for sure.
That Metaverse will be it... I am not so sure, I just hope not.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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it will be as important as his job moreover...
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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I am sure it will just as essential as Second Life. Like when German police wanted to enter SL for criminal investigations of SL avatar activities that were against German law ... (That is true! I believe the investigation was stopped almost before it had started, though.)
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Tools vendor JetBrains has published its annual survey of development trends, this time based on responses from around 29,000 developers, and it shows the declining use of PHP and Ruby. Yes on the first two, not convinced on the other two items
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If you're looking to buy a Windows 10 license online, you might want to hurry up — by the end of this month, Microsoft will officially stop offering Windows 10 licenses on its website. Soon it will only go to 11
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At this point I wouldn't purchase a Windows 10 only license anyway. I'd purchase a Windows 11 license and used the downgrade rights to Windows 10. However, I have discovered that newer Surface lines don't work as well with Windows 10 due to driver issues.
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You have a Surface? Which one, and how do you like it? (I've considered getting one in the past)
TTFN - Kent
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I'm a SMB (Small Medium Business) CIO and we have a fleet of Surface Pros and Surface Laptops. We also have a small number of Dell laptops and have been phasing out our Dell desktops. My users generally love their Surface machines. One thing I would recommend though, is that Surface Pro 8 and newer and Surface Laptop 5 and newer stick with Windows 11 as the Windows 10 audio (speaker and microphone) drivers simply aren't very good.
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Turns out Metal Gear Solid was onto something with its cardboard box disguises. Lockheed Martin begins production of the M-300 Battle Box
It starts at USD 3million, plus munitions
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Visual Studio 17.5 preview 3 introduces the first preview of the Spell Checker for C#, C++ and Markdown files. You have nothing to lose but your suing delarcations
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Microsoft is investigating an issue causing the Windows taskbar and Start Menu to become unresponsive and triggering Outlook and Teams login problems. Now renamed the Won't Start menu
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Aha... now the question is... will they deliver a fix?
Or just change the icons in the task bar?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Interesting. The article never mentions what version of Windows is affected.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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The comments on that article indicate this issue goes back to at least Windows 10 v1809. The problem is it's not only intermittent but also relatively rare so it's going to be hard to track down the underlying cause.
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The U.S. State Department is changing the decades-old tradition of using the Times New Roman font for internal documents. Perhaps Comic Sans would be more appropriate?
And don't get them started on the number of spaces after a period.
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So they're ditching Microsoft Word. That's where the Times New Roman "craze" started. As for readability, TNR sucks.
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obermd wrote: So they're ditching Microsoft Word. That's where the Times New Roman "craze" started. It is? I wasn't even aware that The Times had access to MSW during WW2.
I didn't even know that there was an MSW version that didn't allow you to choose from a number of different typefaces. What I have heard as a criticism of MS is that they strongly pushed sans serif typefaces - highly justifiable given the typical low resolution of matrix printers of the day, used by the great majority of MSW users. Serif fonts usually fared badly on matrix printers. The criticism was raised by typesetters with access to phototypesetters, often with analog font definitions - hardware way out of reach for the typical MSW user.
Times New Roman actually was in use years before WW2, but became important due to the paper shortage: It could fit more text per area unit than other typefaces, allowing The Times to bring more information in a given number of pages, or reduce the number of pages to save paper. I never noticed any pressure from MS towards Times New Roman, but if there was one, it might have been justified as a similar cost reduction factor, saving paper and possibly ink. I do recall proportional typefaces in general being more cost effective and paper saving, but that goes for all proportional (non monospace) typefaces, with no particular reference to Times New Roman.
"Readability" is to a large degree determined by current typographical fashions. Times New Roman was introduced because of its high readability, especially at small sizes. 40-50 years ago, typographers frowned at sans serif fonts: Serifs are absolutely required for the reader to follow the lines. (Last time I met typographers still insisting on this was a couple of years ago.) But then: If you print any serif font on a 72 dpi dot matrix printer, I certainly agree that it looks terrible. Then rather Arial!
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Word aside - that was a joke. MS Word used to use Times New Roman as the default font. Looking at a brand new Word document I see that it now uses Calibri (11 pt) as the default body font. This is much better. I do wonder how many of those State Deptartment employees realize that Microsoft has changed the default Word font, specifically to deal with readability issues.
Times New Roman is a lousy font for anyone who has vision issues. It was the best font at the time because it was easy to print and there are very few possible letter/digit confusion options in TNR. However, it's significantly harder to read than other fonts. State is going to Calibri 11 pt, which is definitely better for those who have a hard time with fonts smaller than 12 pt (1/6th of an inch per line).
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But they replaced Arial, a sans serif typeface (not the serifed Times New Roman) with Calibri, another sans serif!
You do not 'replace' a serif typeface with a sans serif one! You can tell the users: "We suggest that you switch from serif to sans serif", but typographically, those are distinct worlds, not 'replacements' for each other!
The Wikipedia article on Arial states that "In Office 2007, Arial was replaced by Calibri as the default typeface in PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook" - but I saw the same change in Word.
Actually, I never saw Times New Roman being the default Word typeface. I've been working in Word at a number of different locations since Word 2.0, and of course at my home PC. I doubt that all the places I have worked changed the MS default, and I certainly did not on my home PC. Could MS be running different policies in Europe and in the USA? I see that Wikipedia also states that "In Office 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word" - but that could reflect US market.
A system manager may set up default style definitions applying to the entire organization. The US State Department could have changed their default from a serif to a sans serif typeface regardless of whatever decisions MS makes.
I have never before seen anyone turn Times New Roman down for poor readability! Quite to the contrary, I have repeatedly seen it praised for its 'excellent legibility coupled with good economy' (that is an MS wording, after they switched to Calibri). It has been pointed out that especially at small sizes, it is more readable than similar (serif) fonts.
I repeat what I wrote in my previous post: 'Readability' is strongly influenced by typographical fashions. Nowadays, sans serif is the great fashion, so it is more readable - according to current judgement.
When I was a kid, there was a similar change in handwriting taught in schools: In our parents' handwriting, the letters of a word was tied together - the pencil or pen looped over to the next letter (it was termed 'loop script'), very much like serifs. A handful years before I started school, the decorative curves and loops were replaced by simplified, straight lines (termed 'stave script'). Each letter was independent formed and mostly detached from other letters, like a sans serif typeface.
Old timers were very critical to the legibility of this stave script: Identifying words is far more difficult. New timers insisted that each individual letter is more distinct, less obscured by ornamentation, improving legibility. The war went on for many years - one of my playmates learned stave script at school, but at home his parents taught him proper loop script handwriting, and he never used the stave script for anything but hand-ins at school.
Not knowing the appropriate English search terms, I was only able to find Norwegian web pages to illustrate the hand script differences - but figures are language independent. For stave script, see Stave script[^] - even though the first three variants are claimed to be Norwegian, the handwriting I learned was more like #4 (French) and #5 (New Zealand).
Loop script samples can be seen at Loop script[^]. To me, the similarity with serif typefaces is quite obvious. Most Norwegians today would consider especially the last example to be very old-style, reminding them of the lace cloth of great grandma
Similarly, serif fonts are old style. However, even though I have seen some really heated argument among typographers, I have never seen them in serif vs. sans serif wars at anything approaching the intensity of the handwriting wars in my childhood. The two main styles have been accepted as side by side alternatives.
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I like Arial better than Calibri. Starting with Word 2007 TNR was the default body font. Arial was the default before that. And no, I don't know why MS changed but I heard rumors that Arial isn't free and the copywrite holder wanted money from MS to use it as the default font in Word.
As with all Serif fonts, TNR simply doesn't scale to smaller screens. Sans Serif fonts do scale to smaller screens but Calibri scales better than Arial. Also note that Verdana, which seems to be the default for most web-sites, is also a Sans Serif font.
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obermd wrote: As with all Serif fonts, TNR simply doesn't scale to smaller screens. Or let us say, serif fonts don't scale to poor resolutions, whether on screen or poor resolution dot matrix printers.
Screens/printers of today have the resolution to handle serif fonts 'reasonably' well. Screens of 20 years ago did not. That was a good reason for favoring sans serif. I guess that is part of the reason why serif fonts went out of fashion. I came to prefer sans serif myself.
Arial fills out the kegel (is 'cone' the English typography term?) more than Calibri. Even though they are both called '11pt', the Calibri letter shapes are smaller, providing more air between the lines. I always found it hard to follow the lines in a packed page of 11 pt Arial set on 11pt line spacing, so in everything I wrote, I set line spacing to 1.2, or if you like, 11/13pt. With Calibri, I have changed my default to 1.1 line spacing, or 11/12pt. The smaller character size also goes sideways, so more text is packed to the line. I don't think taht reduces readability. I think that Calibri 11/12pt is easier to read than Arial 11/13pt.
(Edit typo in par.2: Serif fonts went out out fashion, not sans serif!)
modified 20-Jan-23 22:08pm.
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No, still Word. It’s just that the default font in Word has become Calibri (and that’s what they’re switching to)
TTFN - Kent
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