It's a TIE Advanced x1. Although features developed for it were incorporated into the later TIE/IN Interceptor, the x1 had substantial differences, such as shielding and FTL capabilities. The mass-production craft resulting directly from the x series was the TIE/D Defender.
That brings back memories of playing the MS-DOS "Tie fighter" game from the mid 90s where you could pilot the Tie Advanced later in the game, IIRC it was also slightly faster than a standard Tie Fighter.
However from what I remember of the original movies though there was no reference to Vaders craft having shields or hyperdrive (maybe I'm wrong?).
So I wonder if the technical details of the craft were invented specifically for the game and then retrofitted into the overall mythos?
One thing that always amused me about star wars was that the Imperial forces must have had a military budget that would make global GDP look like pocket change but had such clearly flawed designs for all of it's equipment (crap fighters, walkers, death star etc) while the Rebels had stuff that worked much better. Was Lucas trying to say something about the inevitable result of the military industrial complex?
No, the idea was that the Empire was using clones for their pilots so they didn't give a crap whether they lived or died. Therefore they received the cheapest equipment possible. That way they could often win by sheer numbers. Only important people got nice equipment that would keep them alive.
On the other hand the rebels considered every pilot they had as rather important since they had so few. That, plus the fact they had so few in the first place, warranted more expensive yet more robust equipment.
So, as the rebellion continued, the rebels were winning more often than losing and were swaying more and more to their side. Which made it easier to obtain the same equipment. The Empire had to respond in kind because pilots started becoming important, especially the pilots that had learned how to win against superior equipment. Kind of sucks to lose your best pilots because you were too cheap to get them cheap shields. This led to the development of later TIE fighters that had shields and other "rebel" equipment. You didn't really see things like the TIE Interceptor's until Return of the Jedi time, which by then the rebels had the A-Wing to counter that as well.
This is the reason that TIE Fighter is one of the greatest games ever made. You don't know how much it sucks to face a highly trained opponent with superior equipment until you fly the TIE fighter into combat. It's like being the pilot of a flying trash can with two lasers attached to it. Also keep in mind that a common tactic of an X-Wing or Y-Wing pilot was to fully charge forward shields and just ram the poor guy in the TIE fighter. No need to debate who survived.
To improve the preview for Windows and Linux users, why don't you use Typekit with Nimbus Sans (a rather accurate Helvetica clone)? Many designers and typophiles won't trust a service that doesn't accurately render the type on a typographic product. Also, I'd rather see the flat front of a shirt than the current view when previewing how the text will be set.
I think you're looking at the wrong page. If you go to facebook.com while logged out, the "Log In" and "Sign Up" buttons use the technique described by the above poster.
It's not at all like that. The interesting thing seems to be the claim that Craigslist posts lack creativity, which Amazon reviews certainly do have. 3Taps is claiming the posts can't be protected by copyright, because you can't copyright facts. I think their case has merit.
My understanding was that, as the owner of a site, (even one that hosts mostly/completely content created by someone else), you get to dictate the terms on which any party accesses that site. It would be like if YouTube said that you may not access their site with anything but a web browser.
Strange that they went the copyright way, though. IANAL, but isn't accessing a service you've been explicitly forbidden to (via ToS or similar) a violation of the CFAA?
You are 100% wrong. The ad copy on craigslist IS copyright protected so it doesn't matter where you scraped it from. TOSs do govern the data whether or not you are viewing a cached copy or not. By your logic all TOSs are rendered useless if you browse the net via proxy servers.
You can scrape anything off the internet you like and do as you please...but you can't create a business out of it.
Site TOS don't really matter too much or else Google could never exist. They're mostly to limit the liability of the publisher and not to prevent anything with the accessor. Googlebot is not a lawyer, it can't decide the legal implications of scraping or what exact activity can be done with the data it finds.
Google also overlays facts it finds by crawling the web in maps (Google Places and the One Box results) and uses the creative contribution of other people to provide things like reviews inline on SERP. Google is a bad target to sue though because they will punch you right back in the face.
Are 3Taps verifying by hand that every scraped post are only facts? I've seen some pretty creative CL posts. Also it's been mentioned that assemblages of facts can in fact be copyrighted. See the Farmers Almanac.
You're right about that, and I think that's going to make their claim a bit unsteady. But I see an argument they might make:
1. Classified ads are facts, with negligible creativity put into their composition.
2. Facts are not copyrightable.
3. Therefore, 3Taps can scrape the ads.
4. If any ad actually does have creativity / an applicable copyright, the copyright holder can contact 3taps with a complaint.
Basically a "safe harbor" take on the whole thing. What do you think?
Feist v. Rural (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) seems to indicate the the arrangement of the facts is copyrightable, (if there is even a minimal degree of creativity) even though the facts themselves are not. The court held the alphabetic arrangement of names is not sufficient to warrant copyright protection, and it seems logical that mere temporal arrangement of classifieds would not merit protection either. However, it seems as though 3Taps would need to find a way to rearrange the facts presented within the advertizement, because that certainly is a creative process.
The seller has the freedom to write text a description and include pictures. Photographs have a long history of copyright protection, as does written work. Simply copying the specification sheet for a particular model of TV into the ad, for example, might not be copyrightable, but how does 3Taps sort those from the rest?
I just stole this from a random Craigslist ad:
"Black futon in good condition. The mattress is a lot thicker than most futons. It is pretty easy to assemble. You must be able to pick it up though because I do not have a truck. I am moving in a week so I need to get rid of it, asking for 100 or better offer. Please use the link above to email me. "
That the object is a futon, that said futon is black, thicker than average, easy to assemble and in good condition are all facts. The seller could have presented those facts in any number of ways, but he or she chose this way (proper spelling, for example, and mostly written in complete sentences) because he or she thought that would generate a better response. The only way I can see 3Taps on solid ground is if they can take the ad text, use it to generate a set of facts, and rewrite the ad from that (analogous to the way the PC BIOS was reverse-engineered, but done mechanically (I can't imagine it would scale well to have humans rewrite the ads))
Excellent points, especially regarding photographs. I was thinking of that case already, and hadn't considered the arrangement of facts within a post; what came to mind first was the collection of posts as their own arrangement of facts.
Designer here. I recommend aligning your bullets with the paragraphs above and below for inline text, and hanging to reinforce the grid when you have blocks of content next to each other horizontally -- say, two paragraphs and a list.
Also, lbotos posted an excellent example of hanging quotes and other non-bullet punctuation.
If you find yourself liking typographic details like these, consider checking out The Elements of Typographic Style by Bringhurst. Old editions are cheap, and it's the best book on typography I've come across.
I think this makes perfect sense and is excellent advice! Typography and typographic style do not have rigid rules that exist in isolation but merely guidelines to better display and define groupings.
Typographically, this has horrible legibility: the letters are difficult to distinguish and recognize on an individual basis. This contributes to poor readability when the letters are grouped to form passages of text. This seems much more about compacting information in a human-decipherable format than creating a more readable alphabet.
There are no ascenders or descenders in a traditional sense, no contours or apertures, and there is no stroke contrast. Also, the baseline is thrown off in many words. Put this all together, and you have text that's miserable to read.
This isn't even to mention the difficulty of getting readers to abandon tradition.
In all, I'd consider this an interesting experiment, but a practical failure.
> letters are difficult to distinguish and recognize on an individual basis
The important part is that the words are not difficult to distinguish.
> Put this all together, and you have text that's miserable to read.
Interesting how you can come to that conclusion in a few minutes. It would be tempting to write off Kanji if you encountered it for the first time, no? Give it a try before you shoot it down out of hand.
Please explain the advantages of this over reading Braille dots (which lots of sighted people can do already), and please explain the lack of reports by sighted people saying "hey, I noticed that reading in Braille is faster and easier than with the regular alphabet."
Look at some text in braille and look at some text in dotsies. It looks pretty different. Dotsies letters are smashed together so the words look like shapes of their own. If you did that with braille it would likely be confusing due to each letter having 2 rows of dots, and it would be stretched out to about the same proportion as normal text.
Now you're aiming for the laurels of hieroglyphic writing, which has kind of lost almost every battle it fought with alphabets and syllabaries for the last couple of thousand years. It's not even convincing that this will be a good hieroglyphic system, let alone better than the alphabet.
True, but it's very rare that you see "be" and "ad" floating out in space by themselves. They are usually next to other words, which give them plenty of context. If they are by themselves, a dash or box can be added for context.
To clarify, we measured about 8000 Ohms of resistance through the head, using our electrodes. For some reason, our measurement was off. I'm assuming it's a problem with the electrodes. To fix this issue, we'd need constant monitoring and adjustable resistance. In no way was I planning on running 6mA through my brain.
I guess you're just braver than me but constant monitoring and adjustable resistance are the barest minimum features needed before I'd even consider running current through my brain.
I've been using precisely that solution for several months. It's perfect, and I have absolutely no worries about weight, because there are several screws along the length of each bar. My laptop and monitor go on one rack, and my keyboard and mouse are on another, about a foot beneath the first.
The most important part of design is sitting back and thinking about the impact your choices will make. What will a given element say about your product? How will it affect functionality? If you can ask these questions, you can achieve great design. It easy to be distracted by glossy aesthetics, but a simple, well-thought-out, polished, application is what your goal should really be.
So pay attention to every detail.
No pixel should go unexamined. It sounds hard, and at first it's tedious, but it quickly becomes habitual. You start to look at the corners of boxes, or unfocus your eyes after you read a logo.
If you're going to take this one step further, learn about typography and negative space. Specifically vertical rhythm and the use of 6.
Just like you can't "hack" a well-designed API, you can't "hack" good design. It takes effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to try ten variations before you choose an option.
It includes its own great list of other resources, including A List Apart and Thinking with Type.
I think a vast majority of websites ignore even basic principles like spacing, negative space, readability, and rudimentary concepts about typeface pairing.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/TIE_Advanced_x1