Slashdot Mirror


User: DuncMan

DuncMan's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
93
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 93

  1. Re:Welcome to the real world kid on Students Put UCLA Taser Video On YouTube · · Score: 1

    Aren't the USAmerican police supposed to "serve and protect" the general public? Since when did they become your masters such that you have to unquestioningly obey all their instructions? Are they your commanding officers? Did you sign some sort of contract which gives them authority over you? Just curious...

  2. Re:Multiple reasons... on Why Can't Microsoft Just Patch Everything? · · Score: 1

    Vista won't fix jack. As I read about how it's repeatedly rescoped, with proposed core features removed (though WinFS always sounded like a stupid idea to me) and plans to completely re-implement Windows were scrapped (it was supposed to be brand new, managed .NET code, remember?), It's little more than a new user interface (thank goodness, it's marginally less ugly than XP). As far as I can tell, underneath it's little more than another iteration of NT with some minor enhancements...

  3. Re:this is sad on Infinium Labs in Trouble Again · · Score: 1

    Nothing wrong with either the Lynx or the Jaguar. Neither were/ are "inferior". Atari in the late 1980s to mid 1990s were ingenious and inventive, and the Jaguar typifies that. Don't be embarassed about supporting them, Atari may have been the underdog but that had nothing to do with the quality of their products.

    If memory serves, the Atari Jaguar was a 64-bit console with custom chips and an unusually versatile controller, released at a time when other consoles were content to be 16-bit and PCs were getting over the initial problems of moving to 32-bit via 80386 and the new 80486. More at http://www.atariage.com/Jaguar/ .

  4. Re:It's good... on Ballmer - Trusting Vista and Battling Google · · Score: 1

    Man, if they're going to try to use _their_own_ innovation for the first time in their existence to compete... they're doomed. Simply doomed. I can hardly believe Ballmer fell that for that whole "freedom to innovate" scam.

  5. Re:Wow on BBC Open Source launched · · Score: 1

    This form the same country with a population which is still obstinately using imperial units around three decades after the metric units were introduced...

  6. Re:Haveing seen the pilot.. on Dr. Who Series Star Quits · · Score: 1

    What pilot? There was no pilot for this series/ season. They made the whole thing in one long shooting schedule. The first episode was completed a matter of weeks ago, by which time most of the entire season was already filmed and moving into post-production.

    Unless you mean the TV movie with Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann in the role, which was meant as a pilot, in which case you should ignore it. It's not connected to this new series/ season. Different actors, sets and tone.

  7. Re:Dudes named Jon Rock! on Jon Johansen Breaks iTunes DRM Yet Again · · Score: 1

    Wrong! So very wrong.

    "Jon" is lossy compression of "Jonathan". "Jon" is the 64kbps 8-bit-stereo MP3 of names. This is why it sounds so much like "John", a completely different name.

  8. Re:Top Gear on British TV Station Offers Downloads · · Score: 2, Informative

    IMHO, Fifth Gear is better than Top Gear. Top Gear seems gimmicky and laddish, while Fifth Gear focuses on doing interesting things with cars (and is, admittedly, a bit laddetteish). Fifth Gear also features many Top Gear alumni, while Top Gear seems obsessed with Jeremy Clarkson.

    As for other quality programmes from the UK, there are many. You may want to see Doctor Who from BBC Wales ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/ ).

  9. Five not nearly as bad as some people claim on British TV Station Offers Downloads · · Score: 1

    Five (it rebranded from "Channel 5" years ago) carries the various CSI series and various Law And Order series. They also show half decent movies (quality, not quantity) and have some awareness of their programmes (good advertising, clever use of programme or movie footage). I like the way they manage news programming, with unobtrusive bulletins at regular intervals.

    They seem to make good, inventive use of a limited budget.

  10. Re:Nice work - some minor suggestions for 'ya on Browser Detection of Website Statistics Services · · Score: 1
    I also have a Browser Info Page for those folks interested in seeing real-time what their browser is reporting.

    It's broken :-) . I'm in England, United Kingdom, not United States!

  11. Re:"Consumers?"? on 4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X · · Score: 1
    So tell me again which Microsoft program slashdot uses to write these articles?

    The error would have taken place when the original submission was written by Morf, or before. He may have written it in a Microsoft application, or copy-and-pasted it from a document written with a Microsoft application, and Slashdot editors copy-and-pasted it from what he submitted. At no point would anyone know to translate the character codes.

    Of course, the spurious question mark may have originated in some other way- a simple typo, for example.

    Bah. 7 bit ascii was good enough for Dennis Ritchie, and it's good enough for me . . .

    A good, compatible approach. Follow it and you'll ensure that what you do can be read correctly, universally. But there's no need to call it "7-bit ASCII"- AFAIK there's no other kind of ASCII.

  12. Re:"Consumers?"? on 4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X · · Score: 1

    That's what standards are for; without them you'd be stuck at the "type stuff" stage, with everything having a different idea of how to talk to everything else.

    Would you like me to explain why Windows-1252 was a bad idea? A quick hint; it's like the difference between American and English, or slang and English.

  13. Re:"Consumers?"? on 4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X · · Score: 1

    Well, this is a tricky semantic one!

    I see a charset as a mapping between a character (useful for humans) and a number (useful for computers). As far as I can tell, UTF-8 is a way of encoding those numbers into other numbers. I don't think UTF-8 counts as a charset because it doesn't, in itself, define which numbers represent which characters. That's what Unicode does.

  14. Re:Only on Slashdot... on 4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X · · Score: 1

    And so say we all :-)

  15. Re:"Consumers?"? on 4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X · · Score: 2, Informative

    Mmm... Half true.

    UTF-8 is merely a means of expressing multi-byte Unicode codes in a way that can be passed through single-byte systems without corruption. Much like how UUEncoding protects 8-bit data (e.g. JPEG images) passing through 7-bit systems (e.g. Usenet).

    There's no need for it to be compatible with any charset because it's *not* a charset or any other means of representing characters. So the ç doesn't really have a different code in UTF-8 than in ISO-8859-1; it's just that the representation isn't a single byte with the value E7 hex.

    If UTF-8 was as compatible with ISO-8859-1 as it already is with ASCII (for simplicity for itself, rather than actual compatibility) then it would be complicated to the point of being useless.

    My understanding of UTF-8 is far from expert. A better resource (one of many I refer to regularly) is at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/ISO-10646-UTF-8 .html .

  16. Re:"Consumers?"? on 4 Linux Distros Compared To Win XP, Mac OS X · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's probably all down to the user-befuddling issue of charsets (also known as character sets, character codes, encoding etc.). In this case it's probably the fault of Microsoft and understandably ignorant Microsoft users.

    Microsoft (ab)use invalid (non-ASCII, non-ISO-8859, non-Unicode) codes to represent typographical sugar like prettier hyphens and backwards quotes in their own charsets. And if a system doesn't know what charset source material is in- or is told the wrong charset- then it can't correctly translate the material into some other charset.

    In this case, it may have been a non-standard quote (92 hex in Windows-1252), replaced by a simple question mark (34 hex in ASCII and supersets) because it wasn't valid in ISO-8859-1 (Windows-1252 and Unicode are divergent supersets of ISO-8859-1). I doubt the author could even tell the next person what charset they used.

    Hopefully divergent incompatible charsets (even the more modern ISO-8859-15) will die out as the world standardises on ASCII, ISO-8859-1 and Unicode according to their needs. I'd like to see Windows charsets die as well but it's another Microsoft lock-in method. I'd also like to see web sites etc. reject any submitted text containing non-ASCII codes (e.g. £) and insist that the user type charset-neutral entities instead (e.g. £). Or should I write those as £ and £ to make them look right?

    Having said all this, I'm constantly learning new quirks of charsets. There's an excellent resource at http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html , complete with images of glyphs for various charsets.

  17. Re:How to get Windows users into Linux on IBM Desktop Linux Pledge, One Year Later · · Score: 1

    What a load of crap. Moderators, this post should- nay, *must*- be modded *down*. There's nothing remotely insightful in it.

  18. Re:Still considering? on French Police Migrating To Linux · · Score: 1

    And I'm of French descent but consider myself English (admittedly, it was a couple of generations ago when the family left France for England and Canada).

    I don't much like England, or the rest of Britain/ United Kingdom, and tend to agree slightly with your comments. But I still consider them xenophobic and insulting. Even if someone is part of group X doesn't make it automatically OK for them to insult group X...

  19. Re:Still considering? on French Police Migrating To Linux · · Score: 1

    I'm off-topic here, but how did this litany of offensive xenophobic caricatures get modded as "interesting"? It shouldn't even qualify as "funny".

    The moderation of these comments is unusually poor (see various "troll" and "redundant" moderations elsewhere). What's going on?

  20. Re:8mb card for PCI? on Comparative CPU Benchmarks From 1995 to 2004 · · Score: 1

    I have little experience of all this, but it seems to me that choice of video card will only noticeably affect a CPU benchmark if drivers are being used which offload some of the CPU work onto the video card.

    If 3D or video work is being done in software on the CPU, then isn't the video card little more than the place to put bits you want to see on a monitor?

  21. Re:How long until... on New Spoofing Vulnerability in IE · · Score: 1

    How did this ill-informed apologist post get moderated "insightful"?

    There's several points in your post that I'd like to refute, but I'll quickly focus on just this one for now;

    malformed HTML, so common on the Web today, actually tends to CRASH Firefox while IE happily renders it as best it can and moves on

    I've never seen malformed HTML crash a Mozilla web browser (caveat: I mainly use the Seamonkey suite since I want e-mail too), but I'd rather that a program either refuses to deal with 'bad data' or (less ideally) stop executing than carry on and possibly be damaged by the bad data. I've seen databases and products damaged by programs which stupididly accepted and tried to process bad data.

  22. Re:Which button should be bigger? on User-centric GUI Design Explained to All · · Score: 1

    Wrong. Backwards, in fact.

    The buttons which should be biggest and easiest to find are the ones which the user needs to use at that moment, the ones which the user is looking for and doesn't know where they are already. Once a user has learnt where a button is then it can become 'normal' again- as long as it doesn't change location- but initially a user needs to be able to find what they're *looking* *for* easily, quickly and intuitively. Microsoft UIs generally get this wrong.

    True, the buttons which a user uses most often need to be located where they're quickest to reach, but that doesn't automatically mean biggest or in any particular location; it probably means nearest to whereve the user('s mouse pointer?) is. Interestingly, Microsoft Windows XP's Start menu gets this right.

    A subtle distinction, and I'm not sure if I've explained it well. Think about it?

  23. Re:Palm is dead on PalmOne Commits to Treo Fix · · Score: 1

    I actually moved from Symbian; I had a Psion Revo but its battery was getting old and unreliable, and I wanted colour, Java, USB, SD card and Bluetooth (my palmOne Zire 72 is terrific).

    I'm not sure if a PDA integrated into a phone would be a good fit for me (I prefer a modular approach with smaller devices), but if I were to get one then it would /probably/ be a Sony Ericsson P910 :-) .

    In any case, I won't waste my time with Windows Mobile ever again.

  24. Re:Palm is dead on PalmOne Commits to Treo Fix · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This group doesn't hate MS as such; it hates bad businesses which harm the IT industry and users. For the last few years that's been Microsoft. Next year it could be Linus Torvalds. Who knows?

    Anyhoo, palmOne and PalmSource are far from 'dead', though Microsoft's advertising might give that impression. Palm OS is still the most appropriate operating system for a PDA (sorry Linux), creating a versatile tool that happens to be a computer rather than a computer which happens to have PDA features.

    More at http://www.zdnet.co.uk/talkback/?PROCESS=show&ID=2 0020611&AT=39147405-39024180t-30000029c .

  25. Re:Detecting pirated passwords are easy... on Porn Site Sues Google Over Linked Images · · Score: 1

    Where porn sites are concerned, it's /all/ hard.