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Comment Re:Spellink chekers. Duh! (Score 1) 285

"Derail" is the perfect word for it. The same thing happens to me. It's like there's a sudden and abrupt shift in the meaning of the sentence when (for example) there's a "your" when it should be a "you're". I have to start over and force myself to read the "your" as "you are", and even then I tend to get derailed a second time in the same place. If that happens in a second location in the writing, my mind starts to have trouble following what's being written, so after the third location of such an error, I have to give up and go read something else instead.

I used to be a vocal Grammar Nazi among people I'd instant message with when they'd make such mistakes, but too many people said "I don't care if I use it wrong"...

The nice thing about Wikipedia is that if I find a spelling or grammar mistake, it's easy enough to fix.

(Here's hoping I didn't make any typing errors in this comment!)

Submission + - Freshmeat Renamed to Freecode (freecode.com)

fatp writes: Freshment, operated by the same group as slashdot.org (under geek.net), announced to rename to Freecode. Patrick Lenz, Site director Freecode wrote in http://freecode.com/articles/whats-in-a-name: "Since all of us at Geeknet agree that this site and the community powering it have tremendous potential, even after more than 14 years of existence, we decided to change the name of the site, effective immediately, to Freecode".

On the frontpage of geek.net website, slashdot.org Freshmeat widget, the rename isn't effective yet.

Submission + - Droughts linked to global warming (wired.com)

Layzej writes: Two new papers indicate that we are likely already seeing some of the predicted impacts of global warming, The first used Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how many new record events you expect to see in a time series with a trend. They applied the technique to the unprecedented Russian heat wave of July 2010, which killed 700 people and contributed to soaring wheat prices. According to the analysis, there’s an 80 percent chance that climate change was responsible. The authors describe the methods and how they improved on previous studies here. The second studied Wintertime droughts in the Mediterranean region. They found that 'the magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone. This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.'

Comment Re:Nothing Like Mozilla's Browser Release Schedule (Score 1) 415

Is Chrome any better in this regard? Honest question. I've heard others talk about it having a rapid release schedule (before Firefox moved to one). And how do Chrome and Firefox compare on UI changes per release?

My mother uses Facebook and plays Bejeweled on it. Recently, there are massive lag times of a few minutes for some actions, such as sharing points. This lag isn't there with Firefox, and many of my mother's friends who play use Chrome. I installed Firefox on my mother's laptop, from this page here, but apparently that is the version four installer, and Firefox is nearing its version six release...

Rather than trying to customize Firefox 4 to look like Firefox 3 on my mother's PC, I told her the user interface (I gestured to the top area of Firefox we had open on her PC) would look a little different. It shouldn't affect anything my mother does to have the interface look a little different. Thanks to Firefox's interface becoming more Chrome-like, if Chrome is any better with memory use than Firefox, the day might come when I'm installing Chrome rather than Firefox for my mother.

Comment Re:Seriously, what the fuck! (Score 1) 371

... my comment is only valid if TFS is right about simply changing a parameter in the URL to access other accounts. No I didn't RTFA.

Says the article:

They simply logged on to the part of the group's site reserved for credit card customers - and substituted their account numbers which appeared in the browser's address bar with other numbers.

It allowed them to leapfrog into the accounts of other customers - with an automatic computer programme letting them repeat the trick tens of thousands of times.

To be fair, the article didn't state what the expert was an expert of. But I thought the same as the grandparent, and will be forwarding the article to co-workers so they can get a laugh from it.

Personally, I wonder how many people "looked around" at other accounts without looking suspicious in Citigroup's logs.

Comment Re:First comment on referenced article (Score 2) 177

Opera's actually removed its Qt dependency since 10.50:

Like Opera for Mac, the Unix version will have some big changes under the platform hood: it will no longer be necessary to have Qt installed.

It means [Qt] is totally removed and no longer required at all. Hence UNIX [Opera] required a bigger rewrite than the other platforms.

Comment Re:Part of a general pattern (Score 2) 426

You "pull the cord"? Please tell me that was a figure of speech because otherwise your public transport is in worse shape than I thought! :)

For US Americans such as myself who are used to either pulling a cord (horizontal cord that goes across the wall of the bus) or pressing a button (much less common from my experience) to signal a stop, what other methods are there? I'm genuinely curious. I did a quick Google search, but I don't seem to be able to come up with the right search terms to get a result that tells the methods of stopping a bus for various non-US bus systems.

Comment Stopped changing my sleep schedule last year... (Score 2) 333

...and it's been working out fine thus far.

Back during the last time change (autumn of 2010), I decided to not change my alarm clock's time. My computer and laptop would auto-adjust, and I'd still have to change the times on my DSLR camera, e-reader, and Nintendo DS. But the alarm clock time remains the same. When the alarm clock shows "9:30 PM", I go to bed (even though it's actually 8:30 PM). When the alarm clock shows "4:00 AM" (even though it's actually 3:00 AM), it sounds and I wake up.

The effect is that my day shifts by an hour twice yearly, but I do not. It was strange for the first week or two, having everything around me shifted by an hour (giving me an extra hour in the dark morning, and an hour less after work), but that's much better than the two weeks it would have taken me to even begin to adjust to an altered sleeping schedule.

Soon I'll find if shifting my day back (moving an hour from my morning to my afternoon) will feel as strange as it did in the autumn. One thing I do know for sure, I won't lose an hour of sleep in the transition.

Comment Re:anime may be a bad sample subject (Score 1) 199

It depends on the dubbing company. The usual expectation for them is that the dub will not be for anime fans, but instead broadcast on TV as a general cartoon for non-anime-fans. Thus they'll often try to de-Japan the program.

It's almost hard to believe that they're still doing that, but at the same time I can see it for anything intended for children and to be played on television. I've been buying up straight-to-DVD releases from RightStuf.com the past four years.

I think "Seven of Seven" is the last one I remember that outright rewrote a few lines and a scene for the dub, which was due to the scenes involving English language and humor based on that. For example, in one scene in Japanese, a little American girl says to the main character, "Are you ready?" and the Japanese main character says, "Yes, I'm a lady." For the dub, the little girl says "Are you ready?" and the main character says, "Ready for what?" I guess "Bamboo Blade" had similar with an English-speaking character in a couple of episodes, where they gave her a "gangsta" way of talking in the English dub to compensate.

For series intended for televised released, I do agree with you, SuricouRaven. Brock making donuts rather than rice balls, everything done to Sailomoon by DiC, the cut-and-paste fest that was the US Cardcaptor Sakura (which I've read about, but thankfully not seen more than half an episode of, as well as watching the first movie dubbed just to quality I thankfully missed out on), and the effort to remove religion from Saint Tail (a series which takes place in a Catholic school, with a nun for one of the main characters! And that series didn't even make it to television as intended, so it was a straight-to-DVD), those are definitely something unnecessary for some of them, and outright disasters for the rest.

Actually, with those series in mind, I'd add to your list of changes: removing religion, removing things that might upset religious parents (such as tarot cards), removing scenes with comic violence (such as Melvin in Sailormoon being hit in the face with a party streamer), removing "inappropriate relationships" (making Zoicite female, and making Neptune and Uranus cousins in Sailormoon), and trying to change the target audience to increase viewership (making Cardcaptor Sakura into a series for young male viewers.)

For straight-to-DVD series that were clearly never intended for television release (as far as I would imagine), however, I know the next time I watch "Petite Princess Yucie", "A Little Snow Fairy Sugar", and "Bamboo Blade", it's going to be a coin toss to decide which language to listen in, because the dub is that good.

Comment Re:anime may be a bad sample subject (Score 1) 199

Really these people like dubbing?
I do not watch anime really, but in foreign films I much prefer subtitles. Dubbing always looks distractingly wrong.

Keep in mind, it's a little easier to dub an animated character's mouth being closed, open, closed, open, closed, open, closed from "ohayo" into "good morning" than it would be in a live action film, where the character's mouth and face have many frames of muscle movement.

This is actually an area where it seems (anime) dubbers sometimes cannot win. There will be a line said, and the only way to reasonably get the line to fit the mouth movements is to tweak it a little, changing the line while still retaining the same meaning, and fans will complain about it. But if they left the line as a direct translation, it wouldn't have fit the mouth movements, and fans will complain about that.

Granted, I haven't been a part of any anime forums in years, so maybe fans don't complain anymore?

Comment Re:anime may be a bad sample subject (Score 1) 199

Very few titles are dubbed well.

I'm as much a sub purist as the next sub purist, but there have been many very decent dubs by a number of companies in the past five years. Probably a few years even before that, but that goes beyond the start of my disposable income.

Anything that shows on daytime TV will probably be censored and reworded. However, many straight-to-DVD series I've seen were well dubbed, counting translation, voices for characters, voice acting, and even lip syncing most of the time.

I realize that whether a dub is liked or not is subjective. I loved the English dubs for "Princess Tutu", "Petite Princess Yucie", "Haibane Renmei", "Azumanga Daioh", "Bamboo Blade", and more. But I also had trouble tolerating the "Kanon" dub (due to voices), and "DNAngel" had some voices that were difficult for me to get used to. And I'm sure there are others I didn't care for in English that I simply don't recall offhand.

There will still be bad dubs out there, or (technically) decent dubs with bad voice actors (for the roles they're playing). That said, this isn't 1996. "Sailor Moon" and "Dragon Ball Z" are not representative of dubs from the last five or more years.

I'm saying this generally, not directed at v1 specifically for saying these are few well-dubbed titles. I'm going to assume v1's given a few dubs a proper chance in the past five years, but if anyone else is sour on dubs and hasn't, you could be missing out.

As for me, I'll continue to watch shows in Japanese first. It helps keep my meager Japanese vocabulary from worsening, and I get to enjoy the characters as they originally were. But I'll also enjoy it in English (if the dub is tolerable) as I can better sit back and relax while watching, not having to worry about giving each subtitle a one-second glance to take in the translation of each line.

Comment Cannot download without Javascript... (Score 1) 537

I must have spent about five minutes on the download page (third link in the summary) trying to find the download link. Turns out the download link only appears if one has Javascript enabled.

I will admit, I'm curious to see how they're handing the status bar's relocation. Guess I can enable Javascript for one page reload here.

Comment Re:I can't see anything on Facebook (Score 1) 97

It doesn't even take that much to see nothing on Facebook. I don't give Facebook Javascript access, and I found their new profiles don't load without Javascript. Then soon after, nothing else on the site loads without Javascript. I get essentially a blank page (with a few static layout items).

Doesn't matter to me as I only have a Facebook account so people can find me (recently reconnected with a childhood school friend, for example). I mostly just find it interesting that there is no Facebook for me with my no-Javascript setting.

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UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker

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