In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
<newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:44:28 +0100
<2325203.xYOdu4j4Gc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> ____/ Linonut on Tuesday 28 August 2007 12:49 : \____
>
>> After takin' a swig o' grog, Roy Schestowitz belched out this bit o' wisdom:
>>
>>> Microsoft is Out of Linux Facts
>>>
>>>
> http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=AF663B1C%2D6098%2D44D8%2DA61B%2D5C1C683E5DBE
>>
>> Microspeak:
>>
>> "On the Compare site you'll see a much richer, more dynamic
>> conversation with a broader cross-section of information to help
>> customers as they make pragmatic investment decisions," he
>> added.
>
> I read that again earlier and there was some nasty stuff towards the end (also
> a typo). The headline was eye catching. Matt isn't a Microsoft fan BTW. And he
> reads Boycott Novell.
>
>> Say, is there any way to get firefox to translate those frickin' unicode
>> characters that some articles have?
>
> Maybe it can be passed through some form/filter/pipe to 'purify'? I thought
> about it before. I have charset issues too.
I think the main issue is dumbness of website configuration
and/or design. Done properly, one would have a header of
Content-type: text/html;charset="utf-8"
or some such, and a dash character -- no, not U+002D
(HYPHEN-MINUS), but one of U+2010 (HYPHEN) ,U+2011
(NON-BREAKING HYPHEN), U+2012 (FIGURE DASH), U+2013 (EN
DASH), or U+2212 (MINUS SIGN) -- properly encoded.
Let's take U+2013 for giggles. That encodes into the
bytes 0xE2 0x80 0x93, a three-byte sequence in UTF-8.
Everything more or less works, though one might get boxes
if one doesn't have the right fonts, at the client level.
Not much the webserver can do about that.
However, if the website goofs up somehow, one gets
characters from the Latin-1 supplemental table, and in the
case of U+2010 one might see lower-case a with a circumflex
and two nonprintable control characters.
Another result is a question mark...presumably such is the
result of a misconfigured translator which only generates
US-ASCII for some reason.
The user has the option of selecting the encoding manually.
Caveat user in that case -- and it's a pity such is
necessary.
Word has the bad habit of using U+2013, if memory serves.
Another annoying issue is paired quotes. Word likes to
use U+2018 and U+2019; these encode into 0xE2 0x80 0x98
and 0xE2 0x80 0x99, respectively. U+0027 in ASCII is
the only one ASCII has. U+201C and U+201D are probably
more often used (these are double quotation marks).
It's been awhile since I've seen MSNBC generating question
marks, so it looks like they've gotten it more or less
right by now; certainly it looks better now than it did
some years back.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17152241/
in particular uses U+2018 and U+2019 for single, and
U+201C and U+201D for double quotes, at least AFAICT
visually. I am seeing them fine in Firefox and Konqueror,
and IE-on-WinE works reasonably well too, except for a
Javascript error. Even Dillo didn't screw up too badly,
though for some reason an ASCII double quote migrated to
another line. Dillo also complained that "Server didn't
send Content-Type in header". Not sure why Dillo didn't
see it; wget sees it, and a sniff using tcpdump sees it.
(Maybe Dillo needs to see quotes around "utf-8". MSNBC
doesn't send the content type that way.)
Lynx used U+0060 (GRAVE ACCENT), and otherwise didn't have
problems.
(The news story is otherwise unrelated to Linux).
>
>>> Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says
>>>
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>> | For example, a number of companies have moved back to Windows XP after
>>> | deploying Vista, Crawford said, before quoting Scott Granneman, an author,
>>> | entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis,
>>> | as saying, "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up
>>> | your Windows box, you just have to work on it."
>>> `----
>>>
>>> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2168426,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000616
>>
>> A friend at work, who likes Windows and knows how to use it well, got
>> Vista on a new computer. He found he didn't like it at all.
>>
>> So he's back on XP.
>>
>> But guess what?
>>
>> Windows XP drivers for a couple of key components (wireless and sound)
>> don't work on his new (desktop) machine.
>>
>> Incredible.
>
> Yes, many stories like this one... some say it's intentional and bound to get
> worse. Bad news for Linux? Au contraire. It'll make people more annoyed and
> more inclined to call it quits and gradually learn Linux (new partition/Live
> CD).
>
Assuming he has a new partition to play with, or can make
one using ntfsresize. It's not as easy as it should be,
but at least it's possible.
--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Useless C++ Programming Idea #992398129:
void f(unsigned u) { if(u < 0) ... }
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