> This Zen parable is faulty wisdom (like so much of Mahayana and Vajrayana fanfiction)

Please don't promote sectarian strife here.

> When shading, the artist will just have to be very conscious of the angle of incidence from the light source.

The artist should be doing this already!

They are, or the result would look like crap.

As it happens, I'm working on something like this right now...

My current best solution is to use mouse/pen movement as cspline sample points, even when not drawing. The motion as you swing into a curve, even before the pen touches down, often predicts the trajectory of the pen stroke. (This also lets you "swing in" a circle without getting ugly linear segments).

This may be of limited utility on a touch-based device, however.

Try the Droid Sans Mono variant with slashed zero.

http://blog.cosmix.org/2009/10/27/a-slashed-zero-droid-sans-...

Thank you for this. I think this variant might tear me away from my long-time favorite, Inconsolata. It seems very close, yet even more readable. I love it.

I have (and I just did again). Maybe I should give it more time to warm up to it? If I can't get a slashed zero deja vu sans mono, I will just have to buy a hi-res screen so the zero dot is less ugly (should do anyway).

So, before submitting, I found a slashed version (saved) and I am now happy! I forget source, but can email to people who want.

Your mention of Kanji is particularly salient, as the blog post catches these skeuomorphic icons in the act of evolving from pictograms to ideograms...

Good point. In 100 years maybe physical floppy disks will be long-forgotten by everyone but museums and historians, but the icon will still be in everyday use.

And maybe the icon will change over time. As the public's consciousness of physical floppies dies away, maybe designers will feel freer to use a more stylized representation, like the Voicemail icon's representation of a...telephone handset? Cassette tape?

It's the tape inside a cassette. Like the old answering machines.

> In a perfect world having a list where 25% of the names are potential trouble-makers [...]

... would be pointless, as a perfect world would have no concept of "trouble".

"in a perfect world" is an English phrase. It means, in this context, "if this worked perfectly".

It is not a statement about the world in general.

You say idiom, I say chronic lack of imagination.

> down to Costa Rica and overland to Ecuador

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_Gap

Most people cross the Gap by boat. It's 'overland' in the sense that you don't have to get on a plane.

Should it be improved this way?

A hard real-time system can fail by running a piece of code too soon as well as too late.

OTOH, a soft real-time program like a video game or voice chat could profit from this.

So the box was more fun without the game cartridge...

Only if the game cartridge was in a game console and you were playing it.

You can prototype with the null-GC until you run out of memory...