This story is based solely on some personal thoughts and speculation by legendary eccentric ex-Doctor Tom Baker. Someone has taken certain comments out of context and run with them. Read http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/news/drwho/2003/10/01/71 26.shtml carefully.
To the best of my knowledge, Tom has no influence on the casting etc. of the new Doctor Who but he often has interesting insights to share (his autobiography is wonderful).
Personally, I know Paul McGann will be excellent if he has the opportunity to continue as The Doctor and I intend to tell/ ask/ beg him to pursue the part whenever I see him or his agent. I don't see any reason why we need to move on to a new Doctor, though some of the rumoured candidates are promising.
And anyone criticising the TV movie is deluded- it was excellent in so many, many ways (the TARDIS! the costumes! the dialogue! Sylvester! Paul!) and it's quite remarkable that so few concessions were made to the absurd desires of the American producers involved.
Re:Not as big a security risk as you guys think
on
Windows ATMs by 2005
·
· Score: 1
Guys... you have to realize these ATMs (unix, windows, other) are NOT on the public internet. They're not even on the same network as the workstation computers inside the bank.
Then please explain this choice quote from Gwenn Bezard's article;
They would prefer Windows, a platform they consider "open" in that it is compatible with their internal corporate networks.
The banks interviewed may really be considering attaching their ATMs to their LANs- I'm not sure that it means whatever secure network normally connects ATMs.
The easy way to avoid speeding tickets- whether automated or not- is to DRIVE SAFELY AND STOP EXCEEDING THE SPEED LIMIT! Obviously.
Speed limits are meant to safeguard lives- yours, pedestrians, cyclists, everyone- not to personally irritate you. I'd be happy if anyone (including my girlfriend, father, or mother) caught exceeding a limit were banned from driving for a few months. A fine is getting off easy for this irresponsible and dangerous behaviour.
I can't stand people who whinge about how they got a ticket just because they were going faster than they needed to along, say, a road used by school children and the elderly.
It seems to me that my number one peeve is that on Linux, sound is an awkward minefield in which timing is everything, and fonts are tricky to manage and use.
Look at these known issues for Netscape 7.10;
Linux: On Linux, there may be problems with ESD Audio and Flash.
Linux: Netscape will hang if a Flash plugin tries to play audio and the audio device is already in use. Workaround: Stop the audio device and return to that page.
Linux: Loading a page that contains a Flash plugin may cause Netscape to lock up if you are using an audio application.
... they boil down to "flash will sulk if something else is making a sound at the same time". Ridiculous! Other operating systems allow programs to throw sound out without making the user jump through hoops.
Sure, we've got various 'better' ways to do sound, with sound daemons in Gnome and KDE et al, but it seems that most software from outside those projects are still written for OSS- and aren't ESD and ARTSD also interfaces to OSS?
How about enhancing the existing OSS (since lots of people use it) so that it looks the same but transparently allows more than one thing to use it? And then gradually make any existing sound daemons merely thin compatibility layers to the new, shareable, OSS?
Am I missing something? Probably...
I'd like font management to be easier, more coherent, too. How about a helpful wizard which will show you all the fonts anywhere in your filesystem and help you organise them together (including removal of duplicates from different foundries, reporting of both file and font names, renaming files to match the font name, etc.) and generate the configuration for X et al?
I haven't seen anything like that on Freshmeat, I'll look harder.
It's a new Windows API designed to turn Windows into a virtual machine like Java so it can be architecture independent.
[snip]
It's about MS getting off x86-32 and into a larger world of ia64, amd64, and maybe even ppc64.
Windows NT was billed as cross-platform, portable, Windows. Microsoft dropped platforms, even DEC's excellent 64-bit Alpha, until they were down to just Intel's pedestrian 32-bit 80386. If your claims are true then explain why Microsoft woudl repeat something they already tried and abandoned?
This will make Windows more portable than *nix.
Er... *nix can be, and has been, ported to pretty much anything which has a C compiler and a pulse. I find it very hard to believe that;
Microsoft care at all about portability (beyond their prescribed platforms)
Windows can ever be as portable as *nix.
Apropos all this, if the world is so desperate for 64-bit CPUs- or Windows on 64-bit CPUs- why did everyone walk away from Alpha? A perfectly good 64 bit platform which was available around a decade ago.
Tom Baker had his moments- and there were a lot of them, when he failed to shine it was through poor script/ story or pornographic over-use of K9- but he was a product of and for his time.
Tom's Doctor was an unpredictable loon, an idiot savant solving problems with ludicrous coincidence and verbal sparring.
I prefer either Jon Pertwee's 3rd Doctor or Sylvester McCoy's 7th Doctor, but I like what I've seen of Paul McGann's 8th Doctor.
It's actually impossible to do a definitive "top/ favourite Doctor" because they're all meant to be different (unlike, say, James Bond) and they're all excellent. Just different degrees or types of excellence.
As an aside, I wish Colin Baker had had a chance to develop his Doctor. All those postponements and cancellations meant that we never really had a chance to see what he could do with the role.
Mr_Silver wrote: So there is a prime chance here for a Symbian licencee (and even Apple) to walk in, produce a desirable PDA with all the features above and literally clean up.
Symbian's progenitor was Epoc, originally from Psion. Psion's range of PDAs were the most elegant and powerful PDAs I'd seen, years ahead of what else was on the market. This was probably their fatal mistake- excellent PDAs before the PDA market was ready, big enough, knew what it wanted.
If you can find one, grab an end-of-stock Psion Revo or Psion 5mx and you'll be surprised. Carefully designed, smoothly integrated hardware and software. For example, I love how I can tweak the contacts database on my Revo to suit me, but it'll still synchronise smoothly with my Nokia mobile phone via IR. And there's a spreadsheet, database, word processor, e-mail client, et al, all packed into a compact 8MB device.
Given that Psion were squeezed out of the PDA market they created by Palm (with cheap, simplistic electronic diaries/ contacts managers) and Microsoft (with flashy, expensive, aggressively marketed uber-devices), I can't see a Symbian licensee (effectively) re-entering and dominating the PDA market.
I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think the area where Psion played is big enough to be financially viable.
Quaryon wrote: I'm coming to the opinion that the English language has actually changed so that "loosing" is now a valid spelling of the word. I hate it, I must admit, but you see far more people spelling it this way than the correct way ("losing"), and I guess that's how language changes.
This is a confusing point. And I'm going to have to disagree... I think.
People are still using "lose" and "loose" (and the various derivative words) correctly when speaking, but they're getting the spelling confused. So the affected languages haven't changed- these people just can't, or won't, spell correctly.
Yes, yes, I'm off-topic as hell. I'm a bad person.
Er, no, that's *not* what the "alt" attribute is for.
My understanding is that the text in an "alt" attribute is to be used by a web browser which cannot, or has been asked not to, show the image itself. Typically this should be a description of the image, or perhaps even an textual representation of the image (mmm, ASCII-art).
It can also be used to convey any information which is held in the image (e.g. an image of a pie chart could have the percentages in an "alt" attribute).
Nothing to do with robots or search engines, even if they 'misuse' them that way. Some web developers misuse an "alt" attribute to provide 'tooltips', having misunderstood it's purpose based on the behaviour of some web browsers.
This was already on Advogato yesterday. A lot of people got upset, there where some flame wars and everything was explained by the Mozilla developers in this article.
Since nothing really happend and the article above gives a trivial way to enable the preference. Why was this posted a day later on Slashdot anyway?
Because not everyone who reads SlashDot reads Advogato? I'd never heard of it before...
SlashDot is a news site that tries to cover all sorts of things that are of interest to it's readers[1], and one of those things is how the Mozilla development is going.
The discussions are fairly secondary to the articles themselves, IMHO. If the article covers everything and makes further discussion/ flamage redundant, so what?
Why do people insist on criticising and nitpicking SlashDot's excellent, free, service? If they think they can do better then why don't they either help out, or create a complementary service somewhere[2]?
[1] and also attracts advertisers with some very cool products... I can dream of that big lottery win and what to spend it on:-)
> Oh super. So we'll end up with a symlink-riddled filesystem like latter versions of Solaris.
In what way would Red Hat be responsible for this? I still don't get it... What exactly are Red Hat doing that's so wrong, except being very popular and having a nifty (imho) package management tool (it certainly took away a lot of my headaches)? If companies want to supply their products in only one distribution format (.rpm,.deb,.tgz,.c, whatever...) or configured for only one GNU/ Linux distribution, then that's their decision, and if you don't like it then take it up with them instead of griping about the builders of the distributions.
My god, what are they thinking? Most of that page is either outright wrong, lying, or so vague as to be useless. And whoever wrote it is obviously incompetent (not just technically)- check out all the typos, half-done sentences, and "note to self"s all over the page.
And whats with the link to www.lwn.net at the end? I think I'll take a copy of this page to show to my grandchildren.
Even if a PHB reads and believes the lies (about some rather vaguely-defined feature points), surely they would be curious about how poorly written it is... Wouldn't that also do MS some harm?
Still, though, it does make me slightly nervous; MS is obviously swaggering and talking loud, and often people are more impressed with a big, confident image than real figures. --
I don't think Umax's sales/ support/ technical people are very smart...
As far as I can tell from talking to them, when people say "what is the protocol you use for talking to your PP scanners?" they think they are saying "please write a linux scanner driver." and reply that they don't support Linux. We're not asking them to, we just want information...
They also seem to think that if they released the information that would allow Linux users to use their scanners, it would damage their sales. Go figure...
Try contacting a manager and point out that if the information was released, more (linux using) people would be happy to buy their scanners- managers *love* getting extra sales...
Slashdot Mirror
This story is based solely on some personal thoughts and speculation by legendary eccentric ex-Doctor Tom Baker. Someone has taken certain comments out of context and run with them. Read http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/news/drwho/2003/10/01/71 26.shtml carefully.
To the best of my knowledge, Tom has no influence on the casting etc. of the new Doctor Who but he often has interesting insights to share (his autobiography is wonderful).
Personally, I know Paul McGann will be excellent if he has the opportunity to continue as The Doctor and I intend to tell/ ask/ beg him to pursue the part whenever I see him or his agent. I don't see any reason why we need to move on to a new Doctor, though some of the rumoured candidates are promising.
And anyone criticising the TV movie is deluded- it was excellent in so many, many ways (the TARDIS! the costumes! the dialogue! Sylvester! Paul!) and it's quite remarkable that so few concessions were made to the absurd desires of the American producers involved.
Then please explain this choice quote from Gwenn Bezard's article;
The banks interviewed may really be considering attaching their ATMs to their LANs- I'm not sure that it means whatever secure network normally connects ATMs.
The easy way to avoid speeding tickets- whether automated or not- is to DRIVE SAFELY AND STOP EXCEEDING THE SPEED LIMIT! Obviously.
Speed limits are meant to safeguard lives- yours, pedestrians, cyclists, everyone- not to personally irritate you. I'd be happy if anyone (including my girlfriend, father, or mother) caught exceeding a limit were banned from driving for a few months. A fine is getting off easy for this irresponsible and dangerous behaviour.
I can't stand people who whinge about how they got a ticket just because they were going faster than they needed to along, say, a road used by school children and the elderly.
Why is this rated as "Score: 4, Funny"?
Seems pretty serious and insightful to me, a fair prediction of America's reaction based on their recent behaviour... I wish it weren't so.
My Mandrake (8.1) box was incredibly unstable until I altered lilo.conf to disable devfs and just use the traditional /dev/ directory.
I'm sure it's a great idea and all, but it's not much use if the few benefits are outweighed by inconvenience.
What, in practical terms, does it do for me anyway? The hardware in my boxes rarely, if ever, changes.
It seems to me that my number one peeve is that on Linux, sound is an awkward minefield in which timing is everything, and fonts are tricky to manage and use.
Look at these known issues for Netscape 7.10;
... they boil down to "flash will sulk if something else is making a sound at the same time". Ridiculous! Other operating systems allow programs to throw sound out without making the user jump through hoops.
Sure, we've got various 'better' ways to do sound, with sound daemons in Gnome and KDE et al, but it seems that most software from outside those projects are still written for OSS- and aren't ESD and ARTSD also interfaces to OSS?
How about enhancing the existing OSS (since lots of people use it) so that it looks the same but transparently allows more than one thing to use it? And then gradually make any existing sound daemons merely thin compatibility layers to the new, shareable, OSS?
Am I missing something? Probably...
I'd like font management to be easier, more coherent, too. How about a helpful wizard which will show you all the fonts anywhere in your filesystem and help you organise them together (including removal of duplicates from different foundries, reporting of both file and font names, renaming files to match the font name, etc.) and generate the configuration for X et al?
I haven't seen anything like that on Freshmeat, I'll look harder.
Windows NT was billed as cross-platform, portable, Windows. Microsoft dropped platforms, even DEC's excellent 64-bit Alpha, until they were down to just Intel's pedestrian 32-bit 80386. If your claims are true then explain why Microsoft woudl repeat something they already tried and abandoned?
Er... *nix can be, and has been, ported to pretty much anything which has a C compiler and a pulse. I find it very hard to believe that;
Apropos all this, if the world is so desperate for 64-bit CPUs- or Windows on 64-bit CPUs- why did everyone walk away from Alpha? A perfectly good 64 bit platform which was available around a decade ago.
Tom Baker had his moments- and there were a lot of them, when he failed to shine it was through poor script/ story or pornographic over-use of K9- but he was a product of and for his time.
Tom's Doctor was an unpredictable loon, an idiot savant solving problems with ludicrous coincidence and verbal sparring.
I prefer either Jon Pertwee's 3rd Doctor or Sylvester McCoy's 7th Doctor, but I like what I've seen of Paul McGann's 8th Doctor.
It's actually impossible to do a definitive "top/ favourite Doctor" because they're all meant to be different (unlike, say, James Bond) and they're all excellent. Just different degrees or types of excellence.
As an aside, I wish Colin Baker had had a chance to develop his Doctor. All those postponements and cancellations meant that we never really had a chance to see what he could do with the role.
The last 'web cast' Doctor Who they (BBCi) made was "Real Time", with Colin Baker as the 6th Doctor. I thought it was rather good.
x .shtml .
You can refresh your memory at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/realtime/inde
Perhaps you're not referring to the last 'web cast' Doctor Who adventure, if so what are you referring to?
Mr_Silver wrote:
So there is a prime chance here for a Symbian licencee (and even Apple) to walk in, produce a desirable PDA with all the features above and literally clean up.
Symbian's progenitor was Epoc, originally from Psion. Psion's range of PDAs were the most elegant and powerful PDAs I'd seen, years ahead of what else was on the market. This was probably their fatal mistake- excellent PDAs before the PDA market was ready, big enough, knew what it wanted.
If you can find one, grab an end-of-stock Psion Revo or Psion 5mx and you'll be surprised. Carefully designed, smoothly integrated hardware and software. For example, I love how I can tweak the contacts database on my Revo to suit me, but it'll still synchronise smoothly with my Nokia mobile phone via IR. And there's a spreadsheet, database, word processor, e-mail client, et al, all packed into a compact 8MB device.
Given that Psion were squeezed out of the PDA market they created by Palm (with cheap, simplistic electronic diaries/ contacts managers) and Microsoft (with flashy, expensive, aggressively marketed uber-devices), I can't see a Symbian licensee (effectively) re-entering and dominating the PDA market.
I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think the area where Psion played is big enough to be financially viable.
Quaryon wrote:
I'm coming to the opinion that the English language has actually changed so that "loosing" is now a valid spelling of the word. I hate it, I must admit, but you see far more people spelling it this way than the correct way ("losing"), and I guess that's how language changes.
This is a confusing point. And I'm going to have to disagree... I think.
People are still using "lose" and "loose" (and the various derivative words) correctly when speaking, but they're getting the spelling confused. So the affected languages haven't changed- these people just can't, or won't, spell correctly.
Yes, yes, I'm off-topic as hell. I'm a bad person.
I think the English and American languages also need the help of;
sigh... that should read "... without losing functionality". Two very different words.
Er, no, that's *not* what the "alt" attribute is for.
My understanding is that the text in an "alt" attribute is to be used by a web browser which cannot, or has been asked not to, show the image itself. Typically this should be a description of the image, or perhaps even an textual representation of the image (mmm, ASCII-art).
It can also be used to convey any information which is held in the image (e.g. an image of a pie chart could have the percentages in an "alt" attribute).
Nothing to do with robots or search engines, even if they 'misuse' them that way. Some web developers misuse an "alt" attribute to provide 'tooltips', having misunderstood it's purpose based on the behaviour of some web browsers.
Because not everyone who reads SlashDot reads Advogato? I'd never heard of it before...
SlashDot is a news site that tries to cover all sorts of things that are of interest to it's readers[1], and one of those things is how the Mozilla development is going.
The discussions are fairly secondary to the articles themselves, IMHO. If the article covers everything and makes further discussion/ flamage redundant, so what?
Why do people insist on criticising and nitpicking SlashDot's excellent, free, service? If they think they can do better then why don't they either help out, or create a complementary service somewhere[2]?
[1] and also attracts advertisers with some very cool products... I can dream of that big lottery win and what to spend it on :-)
[2] also known as "put up or shut up" :-)
> Oh super. So we'll end up with a symlink-riddled filesystem like latter versions of Solaris.
.deb, .tgz, .c, whatever...) or configured for only one GNU/ Linux distribution, then that's their decision, and if you don't like it then take it up with them instead of griping about the builders of the distributions.
In what way would Red Hat be responsible for this? I still don't get it... What exactly are Red Hat doing that's so wrong, except being very popular and having a nifty (imho) package management tool (it certainly took away a lot of my headaches)?
If companies want to supply their products in only one distribution format (.rpm,
My god, what are they thinking? Most of that page is either outright wrong, lying, or so vague as to be useless. And whoever wrote it is obviously incompetent (not just technically)- check out all the typos, half-done sentences, and "note to self"s all over the page.
And whats with the link to www.lwn.net at the end? I think I'll take a copy of this page to show to my grandchildren.
Even if a PHB reads and believes the lies (about some rather vaguely-defined feature points), surely they would be curious about how poorly written it is... Wouldn't that also do MS some harm?
Still, though, it does make me slightly nervous; MS is obviously swaggering and talking loud, and often people are more impressed with a big, confident image than real figures.
--
I don't think Umax's sales/ support/ technical people are very smart...
As far as I can tell from talking to them, when people say "what is the protocol you use for talking to your PP scanners?" they think they are saying "please write a linux scanner driver." and reply that they don't support Linux. We're not asking them to, we just want information...
They also seem to think that if they released the information that would allow Linux users to use their scanners, it would damage their sales. Go figure...
Try contacting a manager and point out that if the information was released, more (linux using) people would be happy to buy their scanners- managers *love* getting extra sales...