I heard a long Quirks & Quarks story about Vitamin D a few weeks ago. The US and Canadian RDAs for Vitamin D, 400 IU, are based on amounts meant to aid bone health, not for these other benefits. The amount in the typical multivitamin will be 400 IU, not the 800 IU recommended here. Unless you wash down your multivitamin with fortified milk every day, you're probably not going to ingest the amount Vitamin D they think you should. Balance that with your sunlight exposure in your region. I'm in New England so as long as I don't keep myself cooped up, I'll get enough Vitamin D from sunlight alone maybe half the year.
Your idea is stupid. Nevermind that you're talking about OCRing a medium that is already predominantly electronic text to begin with, OCR is not some magic wand. Even the best software makes errors even with very consistently laid out text. How are you going to OCR the menu items in the shitty Flash navigation that only shows up when you mouse over it?
Most sites don't provide mobile pages and many that do create them just by using a different CSS file. That said, the blind probably do use mobile pages and RSS feeds to read content in lieu of poorly designed web pages.
Until the blind come together and put their money where their needs are...
What money? The unemployment rate for the visually impaired is pretty high and many of the jobs they have do not pay well. Even so, some do pay, through the nose. JAWS, arguably the best screen reader product, costs almost 900 dollars. Even for that high price it can only really work well when site designers do follow the guidelines to make their sites accessible.
A @media print stylesheet won't consolidate a multi-page article into one page. Also, a stylesheet won't give the user a preview of what the printed version will look like or the choice to print the page with all the cruft.
Given the medium and "light entertainment" subject matter, I think you're doing a good job. I was going suggest adding a transcription of dialogue but then I got to the paragraph where you said that's what you're doing. Writing meaningful descriptions of visual information can be difficult and for a web comic I just don't think it's worth it (BTW, alt attributes are used for short descriptions and longdesc attributes are for, surprise, long descriptions and contain a URL for the description).
Keep in mind that there is definitely value in what you're doing. The large majority of people who are legally blind have some vision. Many people who use screen readers have some vision but listening to content and navigating by keyboard is more efficient. If readinga webcomic requires putting your face right up to the screen and looking at one panel at a time, the information you're providing can help that visitor decide whether the effort is worth it.
This allows people without facebook login's to see APPLICATIONS, not read your profile. But the first line of every add application agreement is:
Allow this application to...
Know who I am and access my information
Does this not mean the application can read my profile and if it can, could a malicious or careless app developer expose my profile information to the world?
Potential employers can't see your profile unless they submit a "friend request" and you accept them. Or unless you and someone at the company are members of the same network and you didn't change the default privacy settings for that network. Suddenly having an alum from your alma mater working in the HR dept. is maybe not so helpful.
Or maybe no one at the company is in your network but they pay an "information broker" who has a corral of stringers on the payroll who are members of many, many networks to view your profile.
http://maps.a9.com/ shut down last year. I found it useful for finding visual landmarks when traveling to an area I hadn't been to before. Other uses:
See an apartment building and its neighborhood when apartment hunting
checking business addresses to see if they look like a "real" business rather than a rented mailbox, an apartment, etc. to help with deciding whether or not to buy from them
Not only find restaurants near a location you're going to but also see what they look like. However, this requires the pictures to be relatively up-to-date as restaurants (as well as other businesses) tend to come and go quickly
The survey didn't say Daily Show made them better informed (about the 2004 presidential campaign), just that they were better informed that people surveyed who did not watch The Daily Show. It's definitely correlation, not causation. People who watched any late night comedy show (Leno, Letterman) were also better informed but not as informed as Daily Show watchers.
I don't get Comedy Central right now but I love both Daily Show and Colbert Report. I would say they inform me of issues in a way similar to scanning headlines does.
You're missing a bunch of.pngs with gradients and rounded corners. Not sure whether your browser's problem is it can't handle PNG or it can't handle CSS using images as backgrounds.
Who modded this up? There already is a law requiring (U.S.) businesses on the Internet to be ADA (with Disabilities Act) s/complaint/compliant/, it's called the *ADA.* Just because you stick and "e" or an "i" on the front of your business model doesn't mean you can just ignore laws that predate the web. Sometimes laws are passed or amended to clarify or define how they pertain or should be applied to new situations (as was done in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which only pertains to Federal IT), such as online commerce, but it's not an absolute requirement.
"...the internet is not treated the same way as the brick and mortar world." Sometimes. Sometimes! Fraud is still fraud, even when committed online. If Target instituted a policy not to sell to "niggers, spics, and jews" they'd get hit with a civil rights lawsuit whether is was at a brick 'n mortar store or their online store. This is the same thing. Their physical store has to be wheelchair accessible, their virtual store has to be accessible to the visually impaired.
The student is not playing the "look at me" game, it's the "look at them" game. Target is just a prominent example of a widespread problem. And it's not like this is out of the blue. Did you read the article? This student and others has been in communication with Target for many months, trying to pursuade them to fix their site, and only now is filing the lawsuit as those talks have gotten nowhere.
That's the first thing I thought as well when I read the GP.
It's probably a good thing that the FAS NOC is moving away from its various home brewed bits (to Cisco Network Registrar) but they are *not* the bits the Networld World article mentions.
And none of that has to do with the slowness and downtime for the FAS email servers or the downtime of the web server.
Umm... Somewhere else, not infecting everyone in your addressbook with the latest script-kiddie virus?
Bah, Outlook 2000 was secured years ago by a patch (issued in 2001 I believe) and subsequent versions have had such protection built in, and then some.
Microsoft specifically sabatoges the Macintosh version of office quite often.
That's false
Yeah? Where's Outlook for Mac? Even with the latest version of everything on the client and server, Entourage's list of missing Exchange client features is as long as my arm.
The Mac Business Unit has a pretty good track record for making decent programs and does sometimes have nice features prior to Office for Windows there's hardly feature parity between Office for the two platforms, particularly when it comes to "enterprise" features that leave Macs locked out of the organizations that use them.
Yes, but in a stroke of genius they screwed up that feature when they copied it (unless it's been fixed in later versions of OS X).
"That feature" being Cmd+Tab, I don't know how you mean they screwed it up. Early versions of OS X highlighted the program's icon in the Dock and later versions put the icons in the middle of the screen, more like Windows. The icon highlighting in the Dock might have been too subtle for some people but I wouldn't call it "screwed up."
Also, didn't they copy user-switching? But it's alright because they gave it a 3D animation, so it was innovative;-)
Apple's innovation of user switching was fixing what Microsoft screwed up, allowing user switching when a computer belongs to a domain. If XP is joined to a domain, you can't use user switching at all, even between local accounts. With OS X, you can switch between any kind of account, local, OS X server, or even Active Directory.
It would have been helpful if you included the Palm Desktop version number with which you're having trouble. The most recent version I've used, Palm 4.1 SP3 (looks like it was released in April '03), still only requires the user to be an admin during installation. It looks like 4.1.4 (April '04) is the newest downloadable version (some Palms, like the LifeDrive and the T5, don't have a downloadable version of their software).
My high school used Deep Freeze (back in '03) to keep the students from tampering with the machines too much. For the most part I didn't mind it (I lost several hundred words of homework because of crashes/reboots, but no biggie).
The solution to that is to make the default saving location a thawed partition so the contents will survive reboots. The file permissions on the partition should be set to Deny Execute so it can be used for documents but not to run downloaded programs (games, keyloggers, etc.).
Since reboots won't delete the contents of the thawed partition, you need a script to run nightly to delete them, otherwise it gets to be a real mess over time.
Yeah, against my recommendation we have a 1TB LaCie "Bigger Disk" as well as 2 320GB LaCie "Big Disks" which also happen to be used for audio files. All of these devices use multiple drives and RAID0. RAID0 is not RAID, there is no redundnacy and your data is actually at *greater* risk because you lose your data if any single drive fails.
The Bigger disk and one of the Big Disks both failed in the same month. Fortunately, the Bigger Disk files also existed elsewhere but replacing the contents of the Big Disk would have required re-digitizing hundreds of hours of recordings. They opted to send it to Drive Savers instead who restored it all, about ~240GB, for around $4000 (that price included some significant discounts). Consider that when pricing real RAID hardware or tape drives (LTO-3 tapes hold 400GB uncompressed, don't use compression).
The "take it home" method of off-site storage is not bad, even when the media are hard drives rather than optical or tape media, but get him off the RAID0 crap!
I have been tasked with defining a high-end, fully connected and extremely easy to use conference room, for our CEO, who is your classic non-computer-using person [...] without the knowledge of the underlying software used to create them (e.g. CAD drawings where he could make annotations, etc). Do any of you have recommendations for building the 'meeting room of the 21st century'?"
Other people can make recommendations about what is or is not good hardware/software for conference room use, none of it will really do what you've been tasked to provide. If it's all supposed to magically work when the operator (CEO) doesn't understand the technology, your best bet is to have a clever person in the room who not only does understand the system's components but also can do what the CEO means, not what he says, even anticipating what the CEO will want. Start with a Karl and teach him how to use the technology.
Their specs pages typically don't get into component manufacturers (except graphics cards) but in 2000 it's quite likely they would have used a chip from Intel for gigabit Ethernet.
I can understand why a gadget site might want to post about this device, they have articles on all kinds of crazy, overpriced stuff. Why give something with such a ridiculous price valuable attention on Slashdot?
Better to accept an Ask Slashdot question such as "The MPC is an interesting idea with a stupid pricing scheme. How might one construct something like this on their own?"
Exchange supports more than MAPI, it also supports IMAP and POP and has since the NT days. Entourage has *always* used IMAP as the protocol for accessing Exchange servers and Mail.app has always been able to do the same (I once configured Pine to check my Exchange account over IMAP, just for the hell of it). My guess is all Tiger's Mail.app adds is a preference interface that's more intelligible to someone entering Exchange account information (separate field for domain name) and possibly support for other authentication types. Guess what? Exchange also uses WebDAV for publishing calendaring and LDAP for directory services. Exchange is rather bloated (what do you want, it's groupware, not a mail server) and can be a bitch to administer but it's quite featureful out of the box.
It's not doing a sector by sector copy from one disk to an identically sized disk, it's copying the files from one drive to space *within* another drive. The receiving drive (or "drive") will most likely be on a separate server with space to hold multiple full and/or incremental copies. This is a very common feature of backup software, they do backups to more than just tape.
What makes this newsworthy is it's Microsoft so they'l likely undercut the prices of their competitors and use their insider knowledge of Windows and their server software to ensure that data (especially things like MS SQL server) is backed up in a restorable state with minimal/no downtime. Also, I think if it's integrated with the Volume Shadow Copy it can improve that technology's ability to allow restores by users (vs. admins) by offloading the shadow copy from the server to a dedicated backup server.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard a long Quirks & Quarks story about Vitamin D a few weeks ago. The US and Canadian RDAs for Vitamin D, 400 IU, are based on amounts meant to aid bone health, not for these other benefits. The amount in the typical multivitamin will be 400 IU, not the 800 IU recommended here. Unless you wash down your multivitamin with fortified milk every day, you're probably not going to ingest the amount Vitamin D they think you should. Balance that with your sunlight exposure in your region. I'm in New England so as long as I don't keep myself cooped up, I'll get enough Vitamin D from sunlight alone maybe half the year.
Alternate response:
So not being blond is a dealbreaker?
Most sites don't provide mobile pages and many that do create them just by using a different CSS file. That said, the blind probably do use mobile pages and RSS feeds to read content in lieu of poorly designed web pages. What money? The unemployment rate for the visually impaired is pretty high and many of the jobs they have do not pay well. Even so, some do pay, through the nose. JAWS, arguably the best screen reader product, costs almost 900 dollars. Even for that high price it can only really work well when site designers do follow the guidelines to make their sites accessible.Asshole.
A @media print stylesheet won't consolidate a multi-page article into one page. Also, a stylesheet won't give the user a preview of what the printed version will look like or the choice to print the page with all the cruft.
Given the medium and "light entertainment" subject matter, I think you're doing a good job. I was going suggest adding a transcription of dialogue but then I got to the paragraph where you said that's what you're doing. Writing meaningful descriptions of visual information can be difficult and for a web comic I just don't think it's worth it (BTW, alt attributes are used for short descriptions and longdesc attributes are for, surprise, long descriptions and contain a URL for the description).
Keep in mind that there is definitely value in what you're doing. The large majority of people who are legally blind have some vision. Many people who use screen readers have some vision but listening to content and navigating by keyboard is more efficient. If readinga webcomic requires putting your face right up to the screen and looking at one panel at a time, the information you're providing can help that visitor decide whether the effort is worth it.
Another Slashdotter who's also a Facebook app developer has explained how an app can't make your profile information available to the world.
The rest of my post about how a "friend request" is not the only way to see a profile still stands.
Or maybe no one at the company is in your network but they pay an "information broker" who has a corral of stringers on the payroll who are members of many, many networks to view your profile.
The survey didn't say Daily Show made them better informed (about the 2004 presidential campaign), just that they were better informed that people surveyed who did not watch The Daily Show. It's definitely correlation, not causation. People who watched any late night comedy show (Leno, Letterman) were also better informed but not as informed as Daily Show watchers.
I don't get Comedy Central right now but I love both Daily Show and Colbert Report. I would say they inform me of issues in a way similar to scanning headlines does.
Daily Show Viewers Knowledgeable About Presidential Campaign, National Annenberg Election Survey Shows [PDF]
Google HTML version
You're missing a bunch of .pngs with gradients and rounded corners. Not sure whether your browser's problem is it can't handle PNG or it can't handle CSS using images as backgrounds.
Gradients and rounded corners are the new black.
Who modded this up? There already is a law requiring (U.S.) businesses on the Internet to be ADA (with Disabilities Act) s/complaint/compliant/, it's called the *ADA.* Just because you stick and "e" or an "i" on the front of your business model doesn't mean you can just ignore laws that predate the web. Sometimes laws are passed or amended to clarify or define how they pertain or should be applied to new situations (as was done in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which only pertains to Federal IT), such as online commerce, but it's not an absolute requirement.
"...the internet is not treated the same way as the brick and mortar world." Sometimes. Sometimes! Fraud is still fraud, even when committed online. If Target instituted a policy not to sell to "niggers, spics, and jews" they'd get hit with a civil rights lawsuit whether is was at a brick 'n mortar store or their online store. This is the same thing. Their physical store has to be wheelchair accessible, their virtual store has to be accessible to the visually impaired.
The student is not playing the "look at me" game, it's the "look at them" game. Target is just a prominent example of a widespread problem. And it's not like this is out of the blue. Did you read the article? This student and others has been in communication with Target for many months, trying to pursuade them to fix their site, and only now is filing the lawsuit as those talks have gotten nowhere.
That's the first thing I thought as well when I read the GP.
It's probably a good thing that the FAS NOC is moving away from its various home brewed bits (to Cisco Network Registrar) but they are *not* the bits the Networld World article mentions.
And none of that has to do with the slowness and downtime for the FAS email servers or the downtime of the web server.
Mothers I'd Like to Fund.
Umm... Somewhere else, not infecting everyone in your addressbook with the latest script-kiddie virus?
Bah, Outlook 2000 was secured years ago by a patch (issued in 2001 I believe) and subsequent versions have had such protection built in, and then some.
Outlook Express on the other hand...
The Mac Business Unit has a pretty good track record for making decent programs and does sometimes have nice features prior to Office for Windows there's hardly feature parity between Office for the two platforms, particularly when it comes to "enterprise" features that leave Macs locked out of the organizations that use them.
Apple's innovation of user switching was fixing what Microsoft screwed up, allowing user switching when a computer belongs to a domain. If XP is joined to a domain, you can't use user switching at all, even between local accounts. With OS X, you can switch between any kind of account, local, OS X server, or even Active Directory.
It would have been helpful if you included the Palm Desktop version number with which you're having trouble. The most recent version I've used, Palm 4.1 SP3 (looks like it was released in April '03), still only requires the user to be an admin during installation. It looks like 4.1.4 (April '04) is the newest downloadable version (some Palms, like the LifeDrive and the T5, don't have a downloadable version of their software).
Since reboots won't delete the contents of the thawed partition, you need a script to run nightly to delete them, otherwise it gets to be a real mess over time.
Yeah, against my recommendation we have a 1TB LaCie "Bigger Disk" as well as 2 320GB LaCie "Big Disks" which also happen to be used for audio files. All of these devices use multiple drives and RAID0. RAID0 is not RAID, there is no redundnacy and your data is actually at *greater* risk because you lose your data if any single drive fails.
The Bigger disk and one of the Big Disks both failed in the same month. Fortunately, the Bigger Disk files also existed elsewhere but replacing the contents of the Big Disk would have required re-digitizing hundreds of hours of recordings. They opted to send it to Drive Savers instead who restored it all, about ~240GB, for around $4000 (that price included some significant discounts). Consider that when pricing real RAID hardware or tape drives (LTO-3 tapes hold 400GB uncompressed, don't use compression).
The "take it home" method of off-site storage is not bad, even when the media are hard drives rather than optical or tape media, but get him off the RAID0 crap!
Power Mac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet)
1 07
That's the official product name from Apple's specs page. Introduced in July 2000, the 400MHz model was at the lowest end (highest was dual 500MHz).
Power Macintosh G4 (Gigabit Ethernet)
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=43
Their specs pages typically don't get into component manufacturers (except graphics cards) but in 2000 it's quite likely they would have used a chip from Intel for gigabit Ethernet.
Witches' tits.
I can understand why a gadget site might want to post about this device, they have articles on all kinds of crazy, overpriced stuff. Why give something with such a ridiculous price valuable attention on Slashdot?
Better to accept an Ask Slashdot question such as "The MPC is an interesting idea with a stupid pricing scheme. How might one construct something like this on their own?"
Exchange supports more than MAPI, it also supports IMAP and POP and has since the NT days. Entourage has *always* used IMAP as the protocol for accessing Exchange servers and Mail.app has always been able to do the same (I once configured Pine to check my Exchange account over IMAP, just for the hell of it). My guess is all Tiger's Mail.app adds is a preference interface that's more intelligible to someone entering Exchange account information (separate field for domain name) and possibly support for other authentication types.
Guess what? Exchange also uses WebDAV for publishing calendaring and LDAP for directory services. Exchange is rather bloated (what do you want, it's groupware, not a mail server) and can be a bitch to administer but it's quite featureful out of the box.
It's not doing a sector by sector copy from one disk to an identically sized disk, it's copying the files from one drive to space *within* another drive. The receiving drive (or "drive") will most likely be on a separate server with space to hold multiple full and/or incremental copies. This is a very common feature of backup software, they do backups to more than just tape.
What makes this newsworthy is it's Microsoft so they'l likely undercut the prices of their competitors and use their insider knowledge of Windows and their server software to ensure that data (especially things like MS SQL server) is backed up in a restorable state with minimal/no downtime. Also, I think if it's integrated with the Volume Shadow Copy it can improve that technology's ability to allow restores by users (vs. admins) by offloading the shadow copy from the server to a dedicated backup server.