User talk:AlistairMcMillan/Archive3

Internet Explorer

I'm going to give it a shot at NPOVing it. I'd like to work with you on this one, perhaps modifying the language slightly. I don't want to reduce the impact of security however, but I'd like to give a stab at writing it from a slightly more neutral point of view. Any feedback you can give me in the process would be helpful! I'll start shortly, and I'll do it slowly so that I can give other parties time to assist me with the edits.

I figured you should know as your a major contributor to that article and obviously have a good deal of knowledge on the subject! - Ta bu shi da yu 03:10, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks mate... I'm going to let the FAC run it's course, then add it to peer review, then start work on the article. - Ta bu shi da yu 05:09, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Aerial bombing of cities

Thanks for the quick translation of the German text in the picture. I was wondering what "Benzine" had to do with bombing...

MalkinWatch

66.167.253.74 00:53, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC): I keep getting a database error trying to create Talk:Michelle Malkin so I'll copy my comment here:

66.167.253.74 00:53, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC): User:AlistairMcMillan restored a link to a three-month-old blog. When I removed it, I included a comment explaining why:

remove some random blogger's link; even if it is an anti-Malkin alternative, the guy has [sic: should have been "hasn't"] quite earned the right to be considered a professional. He uses his blog to publicize his Amazon wish list for goodness' sakes; his 12/31/2004 headline: "She noticed me! She noticed me!"

A more detailed and updated policy on Wikipedia:External links is in development; meanwhile I contend that the limited history of the blog and the anonymity of the author make it inappropriate to include this link in the list.

For now, I will annotate the link to save readers the trouble of following it, but I think it should be removed.

Please register an account. It is difficult to discuss the issue when your IP address changes regularly. AlistairMcMillan 01:31, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

66.167.138.65 07:16, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC): The database problem is no longer an issue. Discussion on Talk:Michelle Malkin is possible without an account... I rephrased the December 2004 annotation; any follow-up can go there...

Test

This is sentence one, it is the first sentence and is followed by sentence two. Sentence two follows sentence one and is followed by sentence three. Sentence three, follows sentence two and is followed by sentence four. Sentence four follows sentence three and is followed by sentence five. Sentence five follows sentence four and is followed by sentence six. Sentence six follows sentence five and is followed by sentence seven. Sentence seven follows sentence six and is followed by sentence eight. Sentence eight follows sentence seven and is followed by sentence nine. Sentence nine follows sentence eight and is followed by sentence ten. Sentence ten follows sentence nine and is not followed by any sentence. AlistairMcMillan 06:51, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Test

test

tset

AlistairMcMillan 09:26, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thanks for taking the time to fix my Apple Darwin link! Drernie 23:18, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism reporting

Hello, I noticed that you reverted edit by Mukhtalif2000 in Saudi Aramco. That user seems to be vandalizing only the pages listed on "my contributions". Can you please help to get a speedy block for that vandal?.

BTW: He is currently vandalizing Dhahran, Saudi Aramco, College Preparatory Center, and other pages. See the contributions (actually vandalism) of Mukhtalif2000 and its IP 12.151.162.14. I listed them both on Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress a few hours ago and still not blocked. Thanks.Eagle 19:07, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

Image:ENTERPRISE.JPG

Greetings. I don't know the image's source. However, knowing the source is not necessary for making a fair use claim; it's only required for a claim of fair dealing.

The most important part of image tagging is delineating between free images (GFDL, PD, etc) and fair use images. This one is obviously in the latter group. – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 13:38, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

Smudge (cat)

Peace restored at home (I didn't expect this to persist).

thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!

I just want to thank you so very very much for adding Rick Sternbach. After reading my user page, you may notice that I have a very strong "deletionist" policy towards Star Trek (and Star Wars, And Power Rangers, etc) articles. When I saw that so much of Mr. Sternbach's and Mr. Okuda's work had been purloined and made into these articles, and yet nothing biographical on either of them, I was livid. You deserve a medal for correcting this. Thank you. Thank you. Avriette 01:03, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

ditto for Michael Okuda. Rock on. Avriette 21:42, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Darth Sidious quotes

Yes, the quotations I added are all from Darth Maul's journal, creatively entitled Darth Maul.

WP:FICT

I have stumbled upon WP:FICT and found you responded to User:Radiant! about it here: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Hasbro Darth Vader Voice Changer. The troubling part is that it appears it is Radiant that has created this "policy" and uses it as it was community decision. Sheesh, the talk page for WP:FICT didn't exist until I just made it. Please come voice your opinion at Wikipedia talk:Fiction. Cburnett 02:09, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

• Cburnett is mistaken. WP:FICT has a large consensus behind it (linked from there), I never claimed it to be policy, and I am not the only person using it. Radiant_* 14:27, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

Creating Articles w/ Categories

Good work creating new articles. When you create things, it helps tremendously to assign them to an accurate category (see WP:CG for info). If you're really not sure about categories, at least assign your new articles a stub category (see WP:SC for info). By assigning a category, you help make sure your new articles don't get lost as 'orphans' that are not associated with related topics. Feco

Sorry if I offended. I check the last few articles the user created, if most are lacking categories, I give them the tag. I don't like seeing good articles floating around w/out categories, b/c that greatly lessens their usefulness. Feco

thanks

Hey Alistair, thanks for cleaning up the Apple Computers article, you did a great job. I also want to say thanks for cleaning up the section I started about Apple taking on Bloggers. My writing isn't as good as others. also, what kind of Apple computer are you running on? --Zeerus 12:11, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

Re: Quartz multi-user support

The constraint of OS-X not supporting multiple remote graphical logins simultaneously is due to the following two facts:

• Apple does not possess a descent remote-desktop protocol. It only uses VNC, which really sucks (since it is only a framefuffer protocol). Microsoft, on the other hand, has licenced ICA from Citrix, which is a lot better.
• Quartz requires hardware accelerated rendring using a graphics card. Multiple simultaneously graphical logins would require the graphics card to multitask when rendering the screen of all users. Todays graphics cards does not support this (as far as I know).

I'm sorry, but I don't have any references on this topic.

--Fredrik Orderud 20:41, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree that the claim of Quartz not supporting mulit-user should have been backed up by a reference. But the facts that Apple OS-X...

• Does not have a remote desktop protocol with performance comparable to its main competitor (Windows)
• Does not support multiple (remote) simultaneously graphical logins, like Windows Server (over ICA/RDP) and UNIX/Linux (over VNC) supports.

still remains, whatever the reasons may be; and should be adressed by the article, since they are serious drawbacks compared to its competitors. What about rephrasing the argumentation a bit?

Regarding your local rendering argument: The idea of remote-desktop protocols is to render the graphics remotely, sending (almost) only screendumps over the network to the local machine. This yields significant better graphical performance (especially over low-bandwidth connections) compared to X-11, which renders locally.

--Fredrik Orderud 22:05, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

"Does not have a remote desktop protocol with performance comparable to its main competitor (Windows)." Mac OS X has ARD which allows remote login similar to RDP on Windows XP. Note that RDP on WinXP only allows one login at a time, basically equivalent to Mac OS X.

It is ARD in OS-X that I'm critizising. It is based on VNC, which has higher latencity (and poorer performance in general) compared to RDP/ICA. It also lacks support for audio redirection, remote disk drive mapping, clipboard sharing and printer mapping. Isn't this worse compared to windows?

Further, I wery much dislike your tone and politeness on this issue. I've tried to behave in a professional way, focusing on balancing the coverage of Apple operating-systems on wikipedia. If you look at the MS windows articles, you'll discover that they contain large portions of critique.

"Does not support multiple (remote) simultaneously graphical logins, like Windows Server (over ICA/RDP) and UNIX/Linux (over VNC) supports." Do you think it is right to compare Windows Server to Mac OS X? Perhaps you should add this criticism to the Mac OS X Server page. Also are you aware that the most recent version of ARD uses the VNC protocol? It is the X Window System that allows UNIX/Linux systems to offer multiple remote graphical logins.

OK, point taken. I'll move the criticism into the Mac OS X Server article. It is true that X of course offers multiple remote logins, but X wastes so much bandwidth so almost all UNIX users use VNC instead for remote logins.

Another correction. You said "The idea of remote-desktop protocols is to render the graphics remotely, sending (almost) only screendumps over the network to the local machine." The reason that Citrix ICA protocol works so well, is it does not send screen-dumps like VNC, it sends basic instructions like "draw a button of width x,y at point x,y" and the local machine does the rendering. AlistairMcMillan 22:26, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You are correct in that ICA works on a higher level of abstraction (and is thus smarter) compared to VNC, but it still requires the graphics to be converted into an almost rendered form (which is highly compressed) before transmitting the instructions to the client. A full local rendering would require ~100Mbps connection to acheive good interactive response (just look at the X-protocol in UNIX). Another problem facing the 3D-interface found in OS-X is that neither of the remote desktop protocols have any native 3D supports. The rendering must therefore be done remotely on the server first, presumably on the graphics card.

--Fredrik Orderud 23:30, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Tell me something. Honestly. Have you ever used Mac OS X? I'm getting the impression that you just want to criticise Mac OS X without actually having experienced any real problems.

I've absolutely used OS-X! My institute owns a Xserve with Mac OS-X Server, which I like wery much to use. The main drawback, however, is that only one person can log into it graphically at one time. This limitation does not excist on Windows Server, Solaris or Linux. Don't you think this is a fact worth mentioning in a article regarding OS-X Server?

You say "It is ARD in OS-X that I'm critizising." Your criticism on Mac OS X did not mention ARD, you were criticising Quartz.

How can a comment on OS-X "does not have a remote desktop protocol with performance comparable to its main competitor" relate to anything other than ARD?

You say "X wastes so much bandwidth". That sounds like a criticism pulled right out of a Slashdot comment. Do you have any experience or better yet a credible source (NOT a Slashdot commet) to back that up. You say "A full local rendering would require ~100Mbps connection to acheive good interactive response (just look at the X-protocol in UNIX)." You are saying that the X-protocol requires ~100Mbps connection? Again that sounds like something out of a Slashdot comment, rather than someone talking from experience. The X-protocol works quite happily with much less.

My colleague had to upgrade his network connection from 100Mbps to 1Gbps to be able to remotely stream DVD-playback over X-11 (he did not want to have his computer on his office due to noise). By comparison he found out that VNC were abe to stream DVD over "only" 100Mbps. This is of cause an extreme example, but it highlights the difference between uncompressed X-11 traffic and the compressed VNC framebuffer protocol.

If you want to add criticisms to any articles, please have credible sources to back them up. AlistairMcMillan 00:42, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've added the critisism of ARD encryption (which I see that you're already revoked), and Mac OS X Server terminal services support back. This time with some references, which I hope will please you.

--Fredrik Orderud 11:39, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Interface naming

Hey there, you seem pretty well-versed in OS X terminology, so maybe you can help weigh in on a nomenclature issue? I don't like how the interfaces all have non-standard names, can you give your opinions on my question/proposal at Talk:Mac OS X#Interface Article name standardization? --DropDeadGorgias (talk) 18:47, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

iTunes

It was on my Watchlist, no idea why.... however, I have a habit of getting into overly long revert wars over things like that... so I probably should have stayed out. Kiand 21:36, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Prometheus class section

Why the hell did you delete the specifications on the Prometheus class starship for Star Trek? Those are mostly canon references and it took people time to put that information in there. -Alyeska

Enterprise

Thanks for the image, but I'm fairly certain that in the dialogue of the episode, the three-nacelled ship is referred to as the Enterprise-E. I just added the disc into my Netflix queue, so I'll check it next week. I can understand the confusion, though, since a similar thing happened at the end of the DS9 series when the Defiant was replaced with another ship with a different designation. They kept using the same model for FX shots, so there was some bickering over what happened there. —User:Mulad (talk) 16:24, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

Google X

Re: keeping the link. Not sure why Crypto thinks it's self promotion; when I put that link in a long, long time ago it was right after Google X went down and source code was hard (impossible) to get at--it's not like it's not relevant!

Mac OS X

I have pulled the link again as I continue to see a ridiculously high alexa rank. Also, if you look at the site itself, it's clearly an adfarm. However, you should be careful of the WP:3RR, of which you are flirting with violating. If you need the article reverted again, let me know. I will block the IP if it continues the crusade. --DropDeadGorgias (talk) 18:13, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

I respect your view on arstechnica.com's Mac OS X reviews. However, their articles containing indepth information is written in a non-technical English. Easy to understanding and educational. I personally find it very informative to people other than computer programmers. Therefore, I put it on the Mac OS page. Their commercial site should not be a determining factor considering all the valuable information. Finally, I am NOT associated or affiliated with arstechnica.com in anyway. 2005.08.29

Tasman

You said "Take out "development ceased" sentence. IE Mac dev ceased, not Tasman. Tasman has gone on to be used elsewhere". Where actually? It would be nice that more details can be provided in the article. --minghong 09:11, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Kilmarnock Prison

Thanks for your note. I put a raison d'être on the talk page at Talk:List of United Kingdom prisons, but basically there were a multiplicity of formats in use for the naming of UK prisons (and so many redirects between the variations too) so I looked at what was in use. Leaving 'prison' in the title wasn't always accurate and the choice I made, I believe, works best. Given that I then went through and chased every link to every' listed UK prison I can guarantee all the links now work and that most have an additional (new) link to HMP aswell. --Vamp:Willow 22:08, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Enterprise "family portrait"

I don't know if you have Starship Enterprise on your watchlist, but an anon is insisting on trying to shoehorn back that group shot of the different ships. I agree that the individual images work better. I've had to revert twice in the last 24 hours so I can't do so again without violating the 3 Revert Rule. Just thought I'd give you the heads up since you were the one who flagged it initially. I didn't mind the image at the beginning, but now we have individual pics, that works a lot better (you can barely see the NX-01 in the group shot). Cheers! 23skidoo 02:09, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

The anon is clearly in violation of the three-revert rule. Do you know where this can be reported? 23skidoo 17:45, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

Formatting quotations

I saw that on Axis of Evil you changed the format of the multiparagraph quotation from Bush. As I read the Manual of Style, the previous format was correct:

Longer quotations may be better rendered in an indented style by starting the first line with a colon. Indented quotations do not need to be marked by quotation marks. In a quotation of multiple paragraphs not using indented style, double quotation marks belong at the beginning of each paragraph, but only at the end of the last paragraph.

Use quotation marks or indentations to distinguish quotations from other text. There is normally no need to put quotations in italics unless the material would otherwise call for italics (emphasis, use of non-English words, etc.). (from Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation marks

There was some discussion on the talk page about how to indent. Most people use the colon but there are some reasons to prefer the <blockquote> tag that I've used here on your talk page. Putting that difference aside, though, it seems to me that this quotation should go back to its previous format. JamesMLane 19:53, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. I've made the change. In general, I think we should try to make the quote "stand out" only in the sense of making it clear what is and is not quoted. Using italics to emphasize something is usually too POV, I think. JamesMLane 01:59, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Attempted compromise

I've tried to attempt at the compromise on the Prometheus specifications. Please reply to my comment in Talk:Prometheus_class_starship _before_ performing any edits. Bluap 15:48, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Star Trek tidying

Hi Alistair: You are doing a great job on tidying up the List of Starfleet starship classes and Borg starships. As I type that latter article name, it occured to me that it should be Borg starship or List of Borg starships. I preferred the former so I have made the change and started to bypass the redirects but "real life" has just demanded my return so I have left the job barely touched. --Theo (Talk) 07:59, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip

Dear AlistairMcMillan:

Thank you very much for the ~~~~ tip.

I hope this is the correct way to send a message. As a new "wikkipedian" (there's a neologism for ya), I've obviously got a lot to learn.

I decided not to use the ~~~~ because it rather immodestly inserts my name into the article, where it manifestly does not belong. There's got to be another way to allow my identity to be discoverable to others without such ostentation.

I apologize, in advance, if this is not the way to send a message to you. PainMan 14:55, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Wasn't suggesting you were suggesting...

I wasn't suggesting your insert your username on the article pages.

The thought never crossed my mind. I followed your directions rather too literally. The preview page showed my moniker rather glaringly in the middle of the article's text. Viewing the page history, I now see my name; as well as the earlier notations of my IP address.

I must confess I don't see the point in posting IP addresses rather than usernames. IP addresses can lead your straight to my machine whereas my moniker leads you only to my wikki profile.

Thanks again for helping to school me. I appreciate it.

PainMan 15:30, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Main article cleanup: Star Trek

Hi Alistair. I would like to work together to push for Star Trek to be a featured article. However, I feel that the article as it stands is a mess and requires a complete rewrite. The information presented is fine, but can stand some improvement. Please help by contributing your opinions to Talk:Star Trek. Thanks. -- AllyUnion (talk) 22:51, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Voyager links

Hello, AlistairMcMillan. Thanks for your work with updating links. I am confused though, why you changed these links. — Knowledge Seeker দ 03:25, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining, and for fixing all those links. I know they are a pain to fix (I remember when I moved Starship Voyager); however, in my opinion, modifying others' comments should entail considering what their intention was (sometimes I leave them, sometimes I might pipe them to a new location). Anyway, it's a minor issue; keep up your good work! — Knowledge Seeker দ 07:15, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Edit war on K'Vort class starship

Please discontinue edit warring over whether K'Vort class starship should be a redirect or not. Please instead discuss on the talk page and come to a consensus. I would also ask that all editors refrain from characterizing edits pertaining to a content dispute or significance dispute as "vandalism". Kelly Martin 03:28, May 27, 2005 (UTC)

I've given up

I've decided that trying to go for a compromise isn't going to work, so have taken the pages off my watchlist. I agree with your reasoning that the weapons counts aren't sound. However, to be honest, I've got better things to do. Bluap 05:12, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Adminship

It seems you've been nominated for adminship by User:BeBop. He didn't put a note here so I decided to let you know. Howabout1 19:34, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Heya

You still about? What do you think of the Windows 2000 page? Was also going to create articles for each of the different strands of Windows 2000 Server, etc. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:48, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Windows 2000

Sorry to take so long to reply... have been flat out with work and replying during my lunch break. Thanks for the encouragement! I've been meaning to tell you, if I ever get a chance I was thinking of setting up a Wikiproject that just dealt with Microsoft issues. Interested? - Ta bu shi da yu 03:07, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Stay Away

Alistair, stay away from me. I have never seen you involved in Stargate related pages, and now less then a week after I've be involved in them you show up removing my work. This could be construed as a personal vendetta on your part. Alyeska 03:36, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Microsoft notice board

Are you interested? I hope to get info on Microsoft related topics up2date, accurate and presented neutrally. - Ta bu shi da yu 02:44, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

lots of edits, not an admin

Hi - I made a list of users who've been around long enough to have made lots of edits but aren't admins. If you're at all interested in becoming an admin, can you please add an '*' immediately before your name in this list? I've suggested folks nominating someone might want to puruse this list. Thanks. --

Speaking of which...I was rather surprised to see this here. I thought, er, yeah, the old cliche, I thought you were an admin. :) I run into your great edits all over the place. We seem to have all the same basic nerd-interests. ;-) You have been here since 6 March, 2004, and have garnered over 10,000 edits. Are you interested in adminship? func(talk) 7 July 2005 04:40 (UTC)

Avi

It is acceptable to cut and paste to do a merge when the page you are moving the text to already exists. This problem existed because the wrong redirect was set up in the first place. Your reasons for reverting this do not address the issue of where the the material on "Edward Irving Wortis" really belong, which is on that page since that is his name. With your changes, other valid uses of Avi will now need to select another link to find what they are looking for. I really think that my changes are correct and will be clearly more so in the future as the other Avi entries are added. So I'll ask that you revert your changes. We don't want to get into a revert war and it's usually better in the long run to have the DAB as the name page and not the article unless what is there is clearly the significant use and in this case it is not in my opinion. Vegaswikian 00:52, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• I forgot to add that in a cleanup that I did, the most frequent reference to the Avi article was for the video format and not for Wortis. So, by reverting the changes, it is likely that you are directing most people who enter avi to a page they are not expecting. So your assumtion about what is linked there as justification is based on a cleanup that was done and not on what editors have actually put into the articles. Vegaswikian 01:42, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Yes, I did a merge and not a move. The redirect prevented the move. It is acceptable to do a merge as long as you comment that you did this in the description on the changes. I did that. The edit history is still retained at the old article to meet the GFDU requirements. If you are concerned about the history, you can request that an admin merge the history to the new page. How articles are named here should be based on the standards for this Wiki and not based on how many results you get from some other web site. If the article should called Avi, then it probably should be moved to Avi (author) which would be better then were it is now, but I still believe that is the wrong place. Vegaswikian 01:54, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • Your question about pointing to the edits for the avi redirects. They were done a while ago. Don't know if they were done on my current signin or as an anon user. I have too many edits to search through them to try and find this info. Sorry. Vegaswikian 01:57, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
    • You said The article itself says the author is "better known" by his pen name. All the links that currently point at the article, are all referencing the author, no-one else. The article should be named based on the standard of what do people think the thing/person/object is called. What the author is better know as does not mean that it has rights to an article name. That is determined by what is the most common useage for that name. The fact that links were cleaned up over time is not a reason that can be used to justify keeping something at that place. If you look at Wikipedia:How_to_rename_(move)_a_page#Page_histories it explains a little about page histories again pointing out that what I did was not the best way but the only way without deleting the proper name and its redirect. So again, I'll make the point that this article is not correctly named and that more users will get there in error then do lokoing for the content of that artice and that is in fact why the changes I made should be reverted. The fact that this person is commonly know as Avi is not the issue. Vegaswikian 28 June 2005 05:20 (UTC)
    • Also look at Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Use_common_names_of_persons_and_things which I think clearly explains why the authors page should not be at Avi. Vegaswikian 28 June 2005 05:36 (UTC)

Direct links

Please do not edit my user talk page such that some stupid link is made direct. It makes it seem as though I have new messages.—Kbolino 01:18, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

That's okay. Is there some benefit to avoiding the redirect? I doesn't seem to be an HTTP redirect, just a MediaWiki thing.—Kbolino 01:24, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

"Edit conflict" - sorry, misunderstanding...

I'm sorry - miscommunication. I happened to be editing two VfD pages at the same time you were, thereby bringing up the "Edit Conflict" page. Someone else(I have no idea why), claimed that there was some kind of editorial conflict over Star Trek pages, on one of the VfDs. These things are unrelated. Sorry about the confusion... (copied from my talk page) JesseW 02:31, 4 August 2005 (UTC)