The Vent and Rant Thread

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Oh, but sometimes that's the best kind.

You first. I still have uses for my eyes...

(and yes, I knew what ScanAHand was from her description. But it was the result I was curious about.)

I assumed you might, but wished to clarify for others reading the thread.
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Dennis

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

You would be disappointed. I tend to buy *REALLY* high-end hardware, and then keep it for 8 years. At the time I sell it or give it away, it's worth nothing anymore.
...
I'd rather buy some extremely over the top hardware for the stuff I want to do, and then not touch it for 4 years or more, apart from replacing a graphics card or adding a hard disk.

I am in about the same boat as you, my 9+ year old PC needs to be upgraded. It has had an SSD added, some extra RAM, and a couple video card upgrades (hand-me-downs from a friend currently a Radeon 5870 noisemaker) but is otherwise unchanged since I got it in 2007. I would keep running it but it has begun to have issues on startup and is finally feeling very slow. My current PC has a Q6600 and started with a GeForce 8800GTS, this iteration I will probably end up with the i5-6600 or i7-6700 and a 1070. I probably won't even bother getting the K series since the only benefit is overclocking (meh.)

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

I am in about the same boat as you, my 9+ year old PC needs to be upgraded. It has had an SSD added, some extra RAM, and a couple video card upgrades (hand-me-downs from a friend currently a Radeon 5870 noisemaker) but is otherwise unchanged since I got it in 2007. I would keep running it but it has begun to have issues on startup and is finally feeling very slow. My current PC has a Q6600 and started with a GeForce 8800GTS, this iteration I will probably end up with the i5-6600 or i7-6700 and a 1070. I probably won't even bother getting the K series since the only benefit is overclocking (meh.)

Same here. My PC:

2008 Original: C2D E8500, 9600GT, 8GB, 74GB 10K RPM boot disk, 1TB HDD.
2011 Upgrade: C2Q Q8400 (second hand), GTX 560 Ti, 16GB, 128GB SSD, 2x 1TB HDD.

So I swapped out the CPU (second hand; was already out of production), graphics card, boot disk, and added 8GB RAM and an HDD. I sold it a few months ago, but that setup was (is) still faster than many new starter systems, especially if such a system doesn't have an SSD.

I've moved to an i7-6700K (cheaper than non-K on black Friday, and a bit faster too) and a GTX 1070 with 32GB of RAM. I expect to be able to use this system until 2024 or so, because I'm not afraid to run a game at "High" instead of "Ultra", or even to drop the resolution to 1280x800 on a 1920x1200 screen.

As long as a system delivers 45+ frames per second at the better settings, at 1920x1200 or 1280x800, I'm good. If I need to drop into Medium at 1280x800, I'm going to look for an upgrade.

Of course I could have gone even higher up the chain, getting an 8-core Xeon, a GTX 1080, 64GB RAM.... but there is a point at which a new computer becomes ridiculous for home use if you don't use it for some very special tasks. This system is high-end, but not yet in the "ZOMG, YOU CAN RUN THE ENTIRE INTERNET ON IT!" category.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Oh, but sometimes that's the best kind.

(and yes, I knew what ScanAHand was from her description. But it was the result I was curious about.)

The horror is: it's not one bloody font. One damn font wouldn't have driven me to that rant. It's HUNDREDS of them.

I have ~4K fonts. Yes, you read that right. It's just one of those things; they accumulate over time and seem to have offspring. Anyway, I do acquire specialty fonts, and many of them simply show up, with the aforementioned bundles, packages, and the like. The bundles at places like Myfonts aren't so awful (although, Gods know, they have some real doozies that have shown up lately), but those from all these "crafty" sites...mother of god.

I'll show you guys some. I'm a bit slammed at the moment, but, to quote Ahnuld...Uh'll be beck.


Hitch

[Katsunami]

If you need some input regarding fonts, ask me.

If it's not Verdana on screen, Deja Vu Serif of Georgia in print, I'm going to slam it though. So many fonts are so utterly terrible.

[Toxaris]

I like Sabon Next or Garamond as serif font in print. Coding I do primarily in Source Code Pro.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

The horror is: it's not one bloody font. One damn font wouldn't have driven me to that rant. It's HUNDREDS of them.

All in the same book file?

I have ~4K fonts. Yes, you read that right. It's just one of those things; they accumulate over time and seem to have offspring. Anyway, I do acquire specialty fonts, and many of them simply show up, with the aforementioned bundles, packages, and the like. The bundles at places like Myfonts aren't so awful (although, Gods know, they have some real doozies that have shown up lately), but those from all these "crafty" sites...mother of god.

I used to have about 2,500. I cut back quite a bit as I weeded out stuff that proved to be junk. (At the moment, I have about 250 installed.)

MyFonts is fairly good. Various of the free font sources exemplify "You get what you're willing to pay for."

I was grimly amused a while back by a bug filed against Mozilla involving slow Firefox startup. The issue proved to be in a Windows library that attempted to enumerate all fonts on the system when it was loaded. Mozilla then raised a bug with the Windows developers, and dug in to find out what IE and Chrome did, because they used the same library and were bitten by the same problem. (As I recall, the workaround involved delaying loading that library until later in the invocation so the browser would actually be up and running and the enumeration could occur in a background thread.)
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I like Sabon Next or Garamond as serif font in print.

Sabon Next is not universally beloved: http://www.printmag.com/featured/flawed-typefaces/

Though I do admire the work of Jan Tschichold, designer of the original Sabon.

Coding I do primarily in Source Code Pro.

I have that here as well.
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Dennis

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I've moved to an i7-6700K (cheaper than non-K on black Friday, and a bit faster too) and a GTX 1070 with 32GB of RAM. I expect to be able to use this system until 2024 or so, because I'm not afraid to run a game at "High" instead of "Ultra", or even to drop the resolution to 1280x800 on a 1920x1200 screen.

As long as a system delivers 45+ frames per second at the better settings, at 1920x1200 or 1280x800, I'm good. If I need to drop into Medium at 1280x800, I'm going to look for an upgrade.

Nice!

I saw a deal today for an i7-6700K, GTX 1080, 256 GB SSD, blah blah blah for about $1200 and about wept because I can't jump on it right now. I have been planning on an upgrade early next year due to the issues my computer has been having and the components cost more than that, without install, the OS, and a bunch of additional stuff they tacked on for "free" like LED keyboard, gaming headset, etc. Hopefully there is something similar when I get my tax return back.

Although I do admit I enjoy the process when I am doing it. Just as long as I don't need to do it often.

[Katsunami]

If you're going to wait longer than 3-4 months with the upgrade, you can just as well wait for the Kaby Lake CPU's. They'll be appearing somewhere in Q1 next year.

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Although I do admit I enjoy the process when I am doing it. Just as long as I don't need to do it often.

I don't mind building the computer; I dislike picking the parts. It costs too much time. Weeks of reading reviews.

I often know what I want from the get-go. The hard part is reading which stuff is best for the price. Which graphics card is the quietest, which case has good cable management and quiet fans and doesn't fall apart, which CPU-cooler has a quiet fan and still cools well, which SSD is the fastest for the money at this time, and so on.

Building only takes two hours or so.

Then installing and configuring all the software takes two weeks (installing it just before I need it).

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by CRussel

oh, bit Hitch. Where is a screen shot of this atrocity so we can all marvel at it??

(And yes, I DO know the difference between a typeface and a font, though no one seems to care any more. )

Charlie:

Far be it from me to disappoint you. Ironically, the even-worse-than-these are not in my font manager, or at least, not easily accessible, but these are just a FEW, for your viewing pleasure.

These are the (mostly) LEGIBLE awful ones. I kid thee not. People expect you to PAY for these. (And here you thought shopping on Dafont was bad, eh? Nyet. Try Creative Market, HungryJpeg, MightyDeal...they host the REAL doozies.)

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Charlie:

Far be it from me to disappoint you. Ironically, the even-worse-than-these are not in my font manager, or at least, not easily accessible, but these are just a FEW, for your viewing pleasure.

These are quite bad enough, thank you.

These are the (mostly) LEGIBLE awful ones. I kid thee not. People expect you to PAY for these. (And here you thought shopping on Dafont was bad, eh? Nyet. Try Creative Market, HungryJpeg, MightyDeal...they host the REAL doozies.)

I've seen other "handwriting" fonts. They are all subsets of what I think of as "novelty" fonts, and I've never understood why anyone might use them at all. (I recognize intellectually that people do. I've just been mostly spared seeing the results, thank $DEITY.)

That they are offered for sale means somebody buys them. I'd rather not know who...
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Dennis

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If you're going to wait longer than 3-4 months with the upgrade, you can just as well wait for the Kaby Lake CPU's. They'll be appearing somewhere in Q1 next year.

Hopefully mid-February. The preliminary reports on Kaby Lake aren't very optimistic but I will wait for final results if they aren't out by then anyway. Either way, it might drop prices for current chips and allow me to splurge a little elsewhere. It is possible that Zen will shake things up too. Unlikely but possible.

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Charlie:

Far be it from me to disappoint you. Ironically, the even-worse-than-these are not in my font manager, or at least, not easily accessible, but these are just a FEW, for your viewing pleasure.

These are the (mostly) LEGIBLE awful ones. I kid thee not. People expect you to PAY for these. (And here you thought shopping on Dafont was bad, eh? Nyet. Try Creative Market, HungryJpeg, MightyDeal...they host the REAL doozies.)

Hitch

About the only "handwriting" font I would consider would be something approximating a hand drafting font. Some old architectural drawings are works of art and it might be interesting to make some stylistic plans of my house or something. My own handwriting is not up to the task these days.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

About the only "handwriting" font I would consider would be something approximating a hand drafting font. Some old architectural drawings are works of art and it might be interesting to make some stylistic plans of my house or something. My own handwriting is not up to the task these days.

Hi:

I'm actually quite fond of architectural/drafting hands. I spent the bulk of my former career in the RE Development Biz (yup, me and the new Prez; in fact, we once shared an architect!*) and grew to love drafting hands. :-)

Hitch

*NOT that way. Get your minds OUT of the gutter!