This actually looks nice! I'd prefer a slide out horizontal keyboard like the X10 Mini Pro[1], but beggars can't be choosers.
I've never gotten used to the touch keyboard, since writing anything while code-switching multiple languages doesn't really work well with the predictive input. Especially if the other language has to be transliterated from a non Latin script.
Though the update policy doesn't sound too promising, 2 years of OS updates + 5 years of security updates is too short :/
Probably a dumb question, but how do you guys decide (and source) the book covers? I love how they look, but as a philistine can't put into words why.
Also thanks for doing this, I've read a bunch of stuff (GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett) that I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for this service.
The historical criteria is fine-art style oil painting. These days we’re starting to use first-edition cover art a bunch for more modern productions if it’s good quality. We also tend to use abstract oil paintings for sci-fi.[1] Obviously, all art is sourced from the public domain too. We’ve also started a database of confirmed-US-PD artwork that we can use for future productions.[2]
As Robin mentioned the typical style is "fine art oil painting", with some wiggle room allowed for exceptionally difficult cases (like Asian-themed books, as there just wasn't much fine art on that subject pre-1930).
We also require that the art have some kind of connection to the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art. Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must have been previously published.
(My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2], but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises behind her was just too good to pass up for Marx!)
1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more books from that era and onwards are entering the public domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if it's in the appropriate style. Fortunately for us, that era also happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so it's not hard finding beautiful art to use!
If their target audience is someone who remotes into a random machine because a opaque landing page them to, it's probably not gonna work very well. Those people are too busy sniffing glue.
This is my go to way of buying a new laptop. I've gone through 2 machines in the last 8 years (Dell 7270 and 7330). Both bought for <$400. Linux works ootb, though I haven't tried any of the more obscure distros.
Though now manufacturers are doubling down on soldered components, so buying a cheap machine and upgrading the components yourself is not really possible :(
Yep, same experience here, very good results with DELL Latitude E7240, E7260 and similar. Very rugged and Linux works like a breeze - on eBay from $179 (just checked again).
One is well advised to upgrade them to 16 GB RAM and put in a 1 TB SSD, and possibly a new battery. My better half wanted one of those again after I gifted her a brand new MacBook Air, so used she got to the DELL and Ubuntu running on it.
Same here, I somehow acquired a pirated copy of Flash when I was 10 or 11. Went through the included offline manual and within a few days somehow knew I'll probably end up doing this programming thing for the rest of my life :D
It's sad what happened to Flash, sure we have plugin free interactive content using JS but I'm not sure if anything has replicated the IDE. Though I guess the decline can also be attributed to the users moving onto other platforms. The kids making games moved on to making Android/iOS games and the animators moved to Youtube.
> Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover.
(And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether)
Both are correct, at least according to my memory: you used to be able to read tweets without an account, but that stopped, and it stopped before Musk took over.
There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time.
I work on building a support system right now at my job and this is the point I've been trying to make for the past few months. No, the AI chatbot should not have access to sensitive customer info. But our product manager is all-in on the hype and sees this as something that "deal with" later on.
Oh well, who cares if there's a breach, some idiot gets to put a shiny AI product on their CV and get that new promotion/job. Users be damned.
Spring and the associated enterprise spaghetti developers have done more damage to the platform rather than the language itself. I've managed to work for almost a decade with Java without using Spring at this point (and count myself lucky for it), but the chances of finding a new job with the same requirement are slimmer and slimmer now.
I've never gotten used to the touch keyboard, since writing anything while code-switching multiple languages doesn't really work well with the predictive input. Especially if the other language has to be transliterated from a non Latin script.
Though the update policy doesn't sound too promising, 2 years of OS updates + 5 years of security updates is too short :/
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_x10_mini_pro-3...