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Comment: Useless buzzwords (Score 1) 156

by Splintax (#34761332) Attached to: Apple Patent Hints at Net-Booting Cloud Strategy

From TFS:

It may seem that Apple is moving slowly into the cloud computing age and that it has many assets that are simply not leveraged in what could be a massive cloud environment that could cause more than just a headache for Google and Microsoft.

This sentence means absolutely nothing. Editors are supposed to edit the content that appears on the site, not just act as gatekeepers. :-/

Comment: Re:Seriously? (Score 1) 460

by Splintax (#32651760) Attached to: Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter

as an engineer, I'm held to considerably higher standards than just about any other member of society in general. This applies both in my spare time and while taking part in my professional endeavors. A single complaint or gripe is easily misunderstood by the average schmuck who then manages to get the entire "issue" blown completely out of proportion and flung around all over the internet.

You sound pretty obnoxious. I don't think the "average schmuck" would treat an engineer any differently to any other professional (doctor, lawyer, accountant...) -- especially given that engineers have significantly less contact with the general public than other professions.

Comment: Re:Higher DPI and Gamut, please! (Score 1) 952

by Splintax (#31951920) Attached to: HDTV Has Ruined the LCD Market
The GP wants to increase text size. Decreasing the screen resolution works, but LCDs don't look nice when using non-native resolutions. Windows allows you to change the "DPI" (not really sure if this is a sensible way of describing the setting) so as to make fonts larger even while using a high resolution. Apparently, OS X doesn't.

Comment: Re:so, spammers just need servers... (Score 1) 202

by Splintax (#31826806) Attached to: Google Incorporates Site Speed Into PageRank Calculation
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Comment: Re:Try to skew their stats, if you must... (Score 1) 521

by Splintax (#31166602) Attached to: Did We Lose the Privacy War?

Unfortunately, many vendors' sites — including highly prominent ones like the Enom-registrar reject the sub-addressing e-mails as "invalid" — the verifying regular expressions must be too complicated for the dumb programmer wannabees, employed by these companies.

I've always assumed that that was not because the code couldn't handle an email address with a + in it, but because sub-addressing is a well-known trick and legitimate businesses want to stop you from using it (without being deliberately dishonest and stripping out everything following the +).

Comment: Re:Can an Australian brother... (Score 1) 197

by Splintax (#31110602) Attached to: Google Rejects Australian Censorship Proposal

explain to me what a) brought on these draconian laws/ideals b) what the opposition is doing against it? I've always (maybe naively) thought of Australia as a laid-back and liberal kind of a place.

As others have pointed out, Australia has a pretty socially-conservative citizenry. In fact, it's the less conservative of the two major parties (Labor) pushing the censorship legislation. The opposition (who actually call themselves the 'Liberal' party) are not attacking the legislation because it's not an important issue to the Australian public -- people are more concerned about energy policy than anything else at the moment.

Both the mandatory internet filter legislation and the AFACT v iiNet case have been mentioned on Slashdot several times, but neither have much presence in the Australian media. I've never seen either issue mentioned on a mainstream news broadcast, nor have I seen them appear before page 15 or so of the major newspapers in my state. The average foreign Slashdot reader knows a lot more about the 'censorship movement' in Australia than the average Australian.
