I disagree. Full justification is less legible than left justification because it removes the positional cue of varied line lengths, and monospaced font for body text decreases information density for no good reason, which also hurts legibility by forcing unnecessary eye movement. I don't usually complain about typography because Firefox's Reader View can usually fix it, but here Reader View makes the diagrams unreadable. Instead, the font can be changed easily enough with the Web Developer Tools, but the text justification is more annoying because it's specified multiple times for different blocks of text.
Funny, I find this one of the more ledgible blogs i've seen recently :) Isn't it personal preference? Same with, dare I say it, line length. I have colleagues that insist 80 characters is ideal, I think it is terrible and should be illegal.
But more to the point, I am pretty sure it is in reference to not being bloated with crappy JS spyware, no moving photos when scrolling, no ads, no subcribe popups, no 'you only have free 2 articles left', no overriding the f'ing text selection so i cannot copy paste code... So not medium.com basically.
Sure the font and justification could have been different, to each his own. But yeah, I was referring to the simplicity, the table layout, prudent use of color and the absence of JS.
I find the web to be unusable without configuring a Pi-Hole to be my DNS server.
I think he is saying that the web was meant to be difficult to read.
He is expressing nostalgia for a time when information gathering had exciting new possibilities because of the internet was new, but before we over optimized the soul out of everything.
It's a slippery slope, because certainly the page could be more readable, and most people would want that, but then what's the next improvement? Sidebar links to similar blogs you might like?
I agree with you; there have been studies that showed both that left justified text and proportional typefaces are generally more legible.
I wonder though - for long-time coders like a lot of the audience here - have we become inured to reading monospaced fonts, such that we read them easier and are therefore an anomaly in such studies?
I know I cannot code at all with variable-width fonts, but is that because I'm old school and grew up coding in the Time Before when there were only monospaced fonts?
Not to sound like an old man, but kids today will never know the joy of walking up to the cabinet and going head-to-head (side-to-side?) vs another live player. There's something about the live experience that online play can't match. And yeah there's a few arcades still out there, but it's pretty niche.
Being born in 1985, I never got to experience the arcade glory days (although I had my fair share of arcade fun), but my teenage years corresponded to their successors, the Internet cafés, or cybercafés as we called them. Oh man, a 10 vs 10 LAN match of Counter Strike was glorious, lots of noisy teenagers shouting at each other, booing the opposite team, cheering a particularly good play... As you say, you can't have the same experience online.
I'm a bit sad for today's kids, they have much faster hardware and connections that we did, but they will never get to experience the same excitement.
Sadly - I have been dying to find split screen mode games for RPGs to play with kids and it is really slim picking out there. I keep hearing the economics of building games for this (space, content, ux etc) are just not worth it. sigh!
They're born out of passion, they are wasteful, often mis-designed, and hilarious fun to build. At the end you have a bulky retro kiosk to remember 30 years ago.
The huge letdown is when no one wants to be Player Two. The nostalgia high isn't from the cabinet or joystick or rom or screen, it's from two people with incredible enthusiasm to share an ephemeral context of Ryu-vs-Ken together.
8,000 bucks of home entertainment system can dim the lights, drop the curtains, and play matrix 4, but give me a 15 inch TV, Mario Kart, some milk crates to sit on, and some kid bent on destroying me in battle mode. I'll remember one of these in another 30 years.
On the other hand, I'm definitely noticing how much I rely on nostalgia to feel happy. That is its own topic.
Talk about nostalgia is seductively dangerous mate. Bit like those Perma pods on the Inception movie. May end up stuck there for ever (not a bad proposition at times though)!!
This is a situation where it was not possible to properly fix the problem due to constraints beyond the designer's control. Coming up with the best solution given a set of requirements and constraints is the definition of design, and is where design overlaps with engineering. Fixing the workflow problem that resulted in a potentially embarrassing mistake to go unspotted until 3 days before shipping would be an example of good management...
Fixing things is always a question of improvement vs cost. If the graphics rom is already manufactured, there's a lot of cost to make new ones. Better to make changes to the program rom which hasn't been sent out yet and may likely be smaller and less expensive than the graphics rom anyway. Typically arcade machines may get one or two program updates but usually no graphics or audio updates.
That’s funny. I’ve been in it for 20 years and I feel like we should be okay with hacks like this more. Isolated fixes like this usually don’t cause any knock-on effects, get the job done, and usually don’t change much. Of course, hacks in code that needs to be touched frequently or affects lots of other code is a different story.
I noticed it right away. I am naturally a very accurate speller, though. I think it has to do with the ability to more or less visualize words. My wife can't visualize them. She struggles with spelling and wouldn't have noticed the mistake in the article at all.
I'm not sure visualization is necessary -- I can't visualize much at all, and definitely don't visualize words, but misspelt words are immediately obvious to me. They don't look right -- so maybe you need to have a memory of the way words look, but you don't need to be able to actively recall it (ie visualize them) ?
I've always assumed that spelling ability was linked to reading a lot when young, but that's just my personal experience so there's probably research somewhere saying that theory's wrong :-)
As an aside, it's a minor miracle that reading is possible at all (ie that we can do it fluidly and without conscious effort rather than as a laborious decoding and sounding out process). There's no inherent reason why the visual and language parts of the brain should be so capable of working together -- they never evolved to do it.)
> The GFX ROM and the 68000 instructions ROM as burned separately. The problem Akiman describe is that the GFX ROM had been burned but he could still make changes to the instructions.
The sprite data was already burned to ROMs, but they could still change the code.
