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Comment Re:What's with the stupid hat? (Score 2, Insightful) 120

It just irritates me Americans just seem to instantly think of a 30 year old movie as the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Australia

And that's the point, it's a useful piece of iconography on an American site to make 'em go "Australia". It's like having pictures on a menu so the unlettered folk can point at the food they'd like and grunt "four".

I don't think there's an icon for Ireland but if there was, what would it be? Text now and win a prize!

Text "A" for: A Leprechaun!
Text "B" for: A Shamrock!
Text "C" for: Government corruption and petty revenge!
Text "D" for: A bishop covering up a priest's sexual abuse of altar boys!

ENTER NOW!

Comment Re:"East European" (Score 5, Insightful) 381

Cheap cop-out.

You're in a mass-market. You can not expect the majority of users to know anything about computers. You can debate that point all you like, but that's how it is. Saying otherwise is like saying only car mechanics should be allowed to drive cars.

No, it's more like saying "people should know how to drive before taking their car on public roads"

Comment Re:Post ideas here. (Score 1) 427

There were about 5 dictionary words correctly recognised in the right-way-up version (with a lot of partial recognitions) and a lot of junk in the upside-down. I'm wondering now if there are easily recognised patterns in the junk without the overhead of naively running each "word" (even filtering out /[^a-zA-Z]/) through a cached subset of the language or performing some approx. string matching. Something like counting long, uninterrupted sequences of alpha chars perhaps?

Don't like replying to myself, but an interesting pattern has emerged passing a value of certainty of 100 to gocr (-a 100).

The amount of output is significantly larger (~50-100% more bytes) on recognisable text than upside-down and is very low on images (either way up).

Now, experiment with this or go to the pub?

Comment Re:Post ideas here. (Score 2, Interesting) 427

I'm sure there's another way around, but gocr on the top or bottom section wouldn't provide enough data to "overrule" the header / footer, and doing the whole document would be pretty wasteful of computing time...

Well, I just did 2 gocr runs (with defaults) on a fax and its rotation, took about 4 seconds total on a VM sitting on a fairly over-subscribed box. The rotation itself took a negligible amount of time. Not implemented any automatic detection but what would be the overhead there?

There were about 5 dictionary words correctly recognised in the right-way-up version (with a lot of partial recognitions) and a lot of junk in the upside-down. I'm wondering now if there are easily recognised patterns in the junk without the overhead of naively running each "word" (even filtering out /[^a-zA-Z]/) through a cached subset of the language or performing some approx. string matching. Something like counting long, uninterrupted sequences of alpha chars perhaps?

It all falls apart on diagrams/handwritten contents... :)

Comment Re:Post ideas here. (Score 4, Informative) 427

I work at a federal regulatory agency which is having the same issue. They were asking IT/tech/computer people if there was a solution around. Nobody knew of any software that auto rotates images based on text. Anybody? Reply here.

Run gocr on the document (run 1), rotate it 180 degrees and run gocr on that (run 2).

If (no of dictionary words(run 2) > no of dictionary words(run 1)) {
        doc = rotated doc;
}

Comment Re:Screw PHP, I write everything in C (Score 1, Insightful) 295

I'd like to point out that long before xkcd there was userfriendly, and that in my circle we still like to and this sort of joke by saying "magnets" and giggle. The "Edward Lorenz, the butterfly and the chaos theory" punchline seems a bit forced (unless you go for the 'M-x butterfly' twist to make the emacs guy get the attention ;) )

XKCD is occasionally amusing, UF never was.

Also, inodes? They're talking about DOS... sheesh!

Comment Re:Dear FSF (Score 1) 1634

Frankly, it doesn't matter if it happens to OS X. What matters is that it could become the standard going forward...

This is where I tuned out.

What are you doing posting on slashdot? Haven't you called a series of interminable meetings to sap the time and will from your colleagues?

Comment Re:But why? (Score 1) 497

Well the problem here is the saved games are remote and you have to have an authenticated version to connect to it. So a cracked game is not the solution. Or the cracker will have to enable a local save game engine. Which will be tricky to say the least.

A solution might be for the crack to implement a network service of its own which authenticates the gameplay (ugh, it strikes me more now how awful this Ubisoft idea is) and saves files to some local location. Add a hosts file entry or a small patch to the game binary to use the local crack service instead of the real remote one.

Comment Re:I'll stay in my sofa (Score 2, Interesting) 376

English is not my native language.

In french we say "Assis dans un fauteuil". This means literaly "sat in an armchair". Sorry for this french-ism.

Strange... I do sit in a chair, but I sit on a sofa. It's not a French-ism, it's just another of those wonderful quirks of the English language - even native speakers don't get it right a lot of the time.

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