Slashdot Mirror


User: samdutton

samdutton's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
16
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 16

  1. Eagles and flying machines on Bold Eagles: Angry Birds Are Ripping $80,000 Drones Out of the Sky (cetusnews.com) · · Score: 2

    Reminded me of a story my dad wrote back in the 60s: The Wedge-Tailed Eagle.

  2. I studied English and I work at Google on Google: Better To Be a 'B' CS Grad Than an 'A+' English Grad · · Score: 1

    Getting a high mark for English (which I didn't!) was very hard work, and required rigorous thinking and incredible discipline: read, re-read, analyse, research, discuss, write about (and memorise passages from) thousands of pages from dozens of texts. Too bad some people still have odd, old-fashioned ideas about the humanities – I'd be very interested in a candidate for a software engineer job who had CS skills and a top English degree.

  3. Re:stupid on Campaign To Kill CAPTCHA Kicks Off · · Score: 1

    The Ryan Air site now makes you watch an advertisement before viewing their CAPTCHA.

  4. Re:Phoenx, Arizona on Describe Any Location On Earth In 3 Words · · Score: 1

    ...or as they say in Australia, GAFA country. Almost three words... (First time I saw this was written over a map in the bar here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Weather_Station.)

  5. The Chrome Dev Tools are brilliant on Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy? · · Score: 1

    I've replied to a comment earlier, but I'd like to give a big thumbs-up to the Chrome Dev Tools.

    The Chrome tools are great to work with and at least as powerful as any of the other browser tools -- as this blog post shows.

    If you haven't used them for a while, I suggest you give them another try.

    (Full disclosure -- I work for Google.)

  6. Re:Going down in flames on Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy? · · Score: 1

    As far as debugging tools. Don't bother with Chrome. It's nearly worthless for Javascript testing or debugging.

    The Chrome Dev Tools are at least as good as Firebug now -- as this blog post shows.

  7. Re:Why is this surprising? on Julia Meets HTML5 · · Score: 1

    'Now, how about using Web sockets to set up some kind of P2P network whereby if someone else is viewing the same region as you are, your machines collaborate on the calculations...'
    Now we're talking! And an API for that while we're at it.

  8. Solid state, not hard drive on Hands-On With Google's Cr-48 · · Score: 1
    > The laptop obviously contains a hard drive for storing backup data ...

    The CR-48 has solid state storage, not a hard drive. 2GB apparently.

  9. Re:How is this news? Oh, its on the web!!! on Crowdsourcing the Department of Public Works · · Score: 1

    ...and the Australian equivalent, It's Buggered, Mate: http://its-buggered-mate.apps.lpmodules.com/

  10. The elephant in the room... on Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard Efforts · · Score: 1

    ...is Microsoft's lack of comment on video and audio. Who cares about the aside element?

    The future of HTML 5 in terms of hardware, software and the law is difficult to predict:

    • Mobile devices, gaming consoles, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and other consumer platforms continue to take internet market share from desktop or laptop computer browsers. (It's worth remembering that Xbox 360 TV and movie downloads consume nearly half as much bandwidth as YouTube.)
    • Within the next two years, movie downloads are predicted to amount to around one billion DVDs' worth of traffic per month.
    • Under European law, Microsoft may be forced to offer users a choice of browser when they install Windows.
    • Firefox, Safari and Chrome have all had significant recent updates. All now support the video and audio elements, along with other HTML 5 technologies. This may boost market share as developers dream up more HTML 5 applications.
    • The Adobe Air platform, Microsoft Silverlight and JavaFX and other RIA platforms are competing for dominance and blur the distinction between browser and desktop applications.
    • Three increasingly popular smartphone platforms – iPhone, Palm Pre and Android – run WebKit and not Flash or Silverlight. Microsoft has, as yet, been less successful with consumers on mobile platforms.
    • If widely implemented, HTTP Live Streaming might reduce the cost of video hosting and enable segmentation and clipping.
    • Google Wave could encourage take-up of the Google Chrome browser and the forthcoming web-oriented Google OS could make the HTML media element and other HTML 5 technologies far more ubiquitous.
    • The biggest and least predictable change may come from take up (or not) of push technologies such as Comet or Web Sockets.
  11. Already on the Mac: Show Password checkbox on Nielsen Recommends Not Masking Passwords · · Score: 1

    You already get this on Mac OS X, in some dialogs at least: a checkbox to select whether or not you want to hide the password while you're typing. Very useful when you're either not worried about the password, you're on your own, or trying to enter a slightly tricky password and not sure whether you got it right.

  12. Generation Twitter on Apple Introduces "MacBook Wheel" · · Score: 1

    I guess Mac users lose interest after 140 characters.

  13. Re:Perspectives on the deal... on Nokia Buys Trolltech · · Score: 1

    Take a look at the Qt Interest newsgroup and the Qt Labs blog.

    Forking hell...

  14. Re:25 million now... on UK Government Loses 15 Million Private Records · · Score: 1

    '25 million individuals' is the figure given by the UK chancellor Alistair Dowling in parliament.

  15. Meaning and message can't be separated on Designing With Web Standards · · Score: 1

    CSS gurus tend to assume that style, form and content can be separated.

    In reality, they're all mixed up.

    Think of a really good poem or film or advertisment -- where does content end and 'style' begin? Likewise for web pages.

    Of course it's good to get rid of font tags and separate CSS from HTML, but it's daft to think you can completely split semantics from presentation.

    Hence the problems people have naming CSS classes: from a quick look at Amazon's code, I found .n2 .clickable and .whiteBG next to .internalLink. MySpace has #copyRight as well as .borDkGrey -- and so on.

    Sometimes I wish we could just start again with something completely different: not HTML, not CSS.

  16. Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin on Why Emails Are Misunderstood · · Score: 1

    Trouble is -- well written English can also be ambiguous.

    I don't think Homer, Li Po, Chaucer, Goethe or Whitman used smileys.

    Shall I compare the to a Summer's day :-)

    I don't think so...