I've been wondering about the release cycle of Debian. It seems to me that it's not at all thought out. For example, slink came out just as the 2.2 kernels and the new release of XWindows occured, neither of which made it in. It seems to me that those are pretty damn big pieces of a Linux system, and if any software update warrants a new release, then they would.
Does Debian actually have a roadmap? Do they say "OK, let's get these changes, and whatever minor packages are stable by this date, into a new release?" Or is it just "hey, I woke up this morning and decided, let's do a release!"
I think people wouldn't be clamoring so much for a new release if Debian had just planned to include the new XWindows and the new kernel in slink. Do they pay attention at all to what other projects are doing? Seems to me like they are on the road to once again miss out on a major kernel upgrade, if what we hear about 2.4 is true. Granted, it is a major pain to let a kernel settle in, but perhaps they could plan on doing a minor release in, say 4-6 months after 2.4 comes out, and hopefully is settled down?
I tried getting 2.2 up and running, but it turned out to be just a lot easier to go out and get Mandrake instead.
I still use Debian on my laptop, and I do like it a lot. I just wonder about their scheduling.
Not me! It'd just be my luck to be sitting in that thing when the universe underwent some sort of physical law change. ZAP!
Man, when I was a kid, I cringed at the Tesla coil thingy they have at Boston's museum of science. I still get sorta freaked when touching those plasma ball things that were such the fad in the early 90's.
And... oddly enough... I *love* watching thunderstorms. Go figure. Controlled displays of eletricity? Frightening. Uncontrolled chaos? Cool.
Real Audio thinks I'm Bob Yaya. I live in Peoria, which is inexplicably in the Marshall Islands. Zip code? 90210, of course. They don't bother verifying even that. I happily fill their systems up with junk. And when I reinstall, I blow away the old info and register with a new, bogus ID. I think I'll be from Timbuktu next time.
I think I just give them a bogus e-mail address each time. I don't think they require e-mailing you a registration key. If they did, I would just use one of many deflectors to bounce the e-mail for real, then shut down the account.
Of course, if they are on the ball, they can suss out a few things. For example, they probably log my IP address, which will tell them my ISP, which will give them my geographic region.
One thing I wonder about... isn't there rstrictions on getting information from minors? Is Real not collecting info when the registeree is under 12? Hm.
Another question... if Real did this for so long, how do we know tha there aren;t other sleeper programs out there that might not only be reporting what you do with them... but also what you do in general. Perhaps ICQ is silently watching your web browsing? Is AIM checking up on what programs you're running? Makes you wonder.
And, of course... if Real's player was open source, we'd probably have spotted this nonsense a while ago.
The point is, as a group of excluded people, geeks should have a bit of perspective about the issue of exclusion. Instead, they cry foul. Which makes their whole "woe is me, I live in the hellmouth" rant hypocrasy.
It's about inclusion. You know, reading./, you hear a LOT of whining about how geeks are excluded by society. You hear an awful lot of handwringing about how being different causes geeks to be ostracised, be left out.
And yet, here we have a group of people suing to force a company to stop excluding them, to simply make some allowance for the fact that they have different needs. And the geeks of./ howl their outrage. This makes me sick.
Listen, the visually impared are much more exluded from this society than being a geek will ever buy you. They can't drive. They have limited access to movies and TV. They have a hard time using computers in the first place, because so much software depends on a GUI. So, when all they ask is some changes be made to websites, so they can reap the benefits that you./ readers take for granted, you smack them down. You cry "PC!" You ask why they should be accomodated. "What are blind people doing on the web."
The Internet is too important to exclude any segment of our society from. Making accomodations for them is not hard work... it just takes a bit of planning. If AOL is unwilling to do that, and the folks bringing this case can argue to the courts that this is as exclusionary as building a mall or a hotel without wheelchair access, then more power to them.
Frankly, the response to this issue here revolts me.
Ironic choice... O'Reilly does have books on CD, which are probably more amenable to being used with a speech synthesizer. Most other publishers don;t do this.
Books, unlike websites, can by and large be scanned and read aloud by equipment available to the blind. So, your analogy is bogus.
The issue here, as the issue is with architecture, is that changes to accommodate the disabled are worth the hassle so that they can be included. People are just too lazy to do it. Unlike physical buildings, it's not a big deal to rearrange a web site after its built. The issue is not a few ALT tags though. Try browsing with Lynx, and image if you could only read the page, top to bottom. However, *some* effort should be put into making a web site accessible to the visually impared, when that site is as central as AOL, or Amazon, or other major commercial sites.
And, finally, I have to say that I am utterly fucking disgusted with the./ people who are whining about Political Correctness. We're not talking about some pointless argument over semantics. We're talking about locking out a portion of our community, a portion of the community that is already excluded from so much in our society, from the explosive growth in our economy and society taking place on the Internet. For a group of people who whine so much about being excluded, about being ostracized because they are different, this attitude is utter hypocrisy!
It always sort of irked me that most Windows games required full screen. Sure, most of my attention is going to be focused on the game, but still... I'd like to be able to respond to kicq messages, maybe do a quick glance at./ while the game is loading something, etc.
I picked up Myth: Soulblighter last week. I was very impressed with being able to run a for-real multimedia gmae under Linux. Still a few issues, though... sound doesn;t work under KDE... so I have to switch to gnome in order to play... but still, it rocks.
I'm psyched by this announcement. Heros of Might & Magic II was the only game in recently memory I actually played for any period of time... others, including, so far, Myth:( don't hold my interest for some reason. In general, I'm a bigger fan of strategy than FPS, so most of Loki's output are things I'd at least look at.
I thought the most scariest thing was the allegation that information from Echelon was leaked to a private company in the US, so it could outbid a French company. I mean, most people probably expect the government has some sort of eavesdropping ability, and that information was being sifted through to catch "bad guys." But, if it's so easy to bend this to benefit some company, then it's obviously way out of control.
I'm hoping the outing of this technology will feed the interest with congress to have a look atthis thing. The potential for abuses here is so strong, that the mere allegation of this sort of action needs to be carefully looked by an oversight committee.
Heh... first the jukebox debacle, then they are implicated in leaving the gates unlocked and letting the unwashed hoards pillage the sacred city of DVD... not a good PR week for these guys.
Makes it seem like the folks over there aren't really on the ball.
Greater clarity in shared environments. For example, if you call up an app from some other server, you could see a link from the window back to that server. Or, if you are sharing an application window with someone (think something like VNC) you might be able to see which resources on the network (ie users) are connected to it.
I could image a virtual office, where everyone's windows can be seen, and easily sent to another user. Imagine looking around and seeing another uer's applications floating around their presence in space... (of course, you'd want to be able to pick which windows actually appeared in the shared space....)
Of course, you also have the ability to treat things on the computer as you would in real life. A background process would literally be in the background. It wouldn't distract you much, but just a single glance would tell you what it's up to, in general.
I think 3D is just one of the elements that will make the user interfaces of tomorrow. Voice, force feedback, 3D audio, intelligent agents, interfaces that are adept at reading moods and emotions, etc. all have their place. It's all about increasing the bandwidth in and the bandwidth out. Taking advantage of natural, physical affordances, and adjusting to how the user expects the system to act, rather than forcing the user to conform to the system is what will eventually make computers effortless to use.
We could also take advantage of natural habits to make computers easier to use. Ever notice that people look up when they try to remember something? It'd be natural for you to put your reminder databases above you in the user space. Simple things, like having alert noises from your apps use stereo so you have an idea where on your screen they came from, can add to ease of use.
I guess a 3D window manager on a 2D screen is a long way from any of these... but it is perhaps a tentative step in the right direction.
Actually, they released a patch that allows WABI to run on > 256 color displays. It will only use 256 colors, but it can cope with 16 and 32 bit displays.
They also released a patch that allows sound to work. I can now get the cheesy Win 3.1 startup sound. Ah! The nostalgia! (or is that nausea?)
Specifically, WABI cannot run any win 3.1 software that depends on the win32 extentions. This does leave a lot of software that can run, however. I do have 2 programs I would love to run under WABI that won't, due to this limitation: FrameMaker 5 and Pixar Typestry.
WABI works OK, but there are a few shortcomings. Quicken 98 runs, but I cannot access the modem or network under it, for some reason, so I cannot use it for online banking (Quicken requires that you register it before you can access the online banking features. Thanks, guys). SimCity 2000 (WIn 3.1 version) won't install.
Eventually, I plan on setting WABI up to that it will run in an Xnested server. Right now, it basically draws on the screen by itself, so its windows are always on top. Fairly annoying.
Of course, soon I plan to have a new PC capable of running VMWare, so I can use all of my current NT programs while still running Linux...
Ah, yes, the good 'ol/. tradition of responding without reading what you're responding to.
FYI, the article you didn't read mentioned spam in passing. It was not a "spammer's get whacked" article... that's the spin the person who submitted the article put on it.
The two victim's business dealings in general were the focus of the article. The fact that they manipulated stock, defauded people, etc. That they used spam as a part of that was only simply mentioned. When they mentioned potential suspects, they only said there was more than one gunman involved, most likely, that certain people (ex husband of one of the victim's gf) was cleared, and a strong suggestion that it was tied to their "shady business." No mention of spam.
There's no mention of net vigilantes wreaking horrible vengence on spammers. I'm dismayed that a few people here actually are assuming this is what has happened (and, even more dismayed that they seem to sort of be into it...).
You know, if you are against media hysteria, perhaps you should try to not jump to conclusions yourself.
Not. I could just imagine running into the machine room some morning. "Hey! Why is the network completely down! We have to ship today... and where's that music coming from?"
Of course, it might be neat to tie a router doing it's real job to an MP3 player, so it could play music in keeping with the state of the network... When you have low load, maybe some slow, quiet classical music. When the load is high, play some thrash or heavy metal:)
Do do the whole DOOM UI thing. When someone is pingbombing you, you get shot. Shoot back, and you ping bomb him... fun fun fun till the network dies.
You can patent processes by just describing them in enough detail. Take an idea, develop it to the point where it can be described in enough detail to be patented and... presto! You can patent it without havng to actually build anything.
This reminds me of Feynman's memoirs where he's describing how he pulled ideas out of his butt (like a nuclear powered airplane) and having them patented. He didn't have to get out a wrench and a pile of unranium to get the patent... just a fairly detailed idea is good enough. You think the guys who patented the centrifical birth assisting device that the Ig Noble awards folks recently gave an award actually built the damned thing? I hope not...
This, of course, is what's causing the problem. The patent system is equating any old idea with ideas that are reached after years of painstaking research. The latter, I think, do at least deserve some sort of protection, to encourage spending on R&D. The former are the ones causing problems.
I wonder if the Handspring folks were the push behind this... I'm definitly getting the impression that they are interested in innovating with the design of the Palm platform,, while Palm itself is settling for goofing around with the form factor.
While color is sweet, color plus cheap wireless connectivity (emphasis on cheap) would make these suckers really big-time.
Alas, 32 Mhz, while useful for the more data crunching that a higher bit display will require, still isn't enought to do the seriously neat stuff, like voce recogntion.
Finally, it's sort of sad, because a color Palm would really cause a split in software development. Up until now, you could run just about everything out there on any Palm. I have a Pilot 1000 that's been upgraded several times, and I can use all of the latest software available. Once color comes out, I suspect developers will have to decide whether to support color or not... Oh well... I got way more life out of my 1000 than I every would have expected... certainly more than if I had bought a 1st generation WinCE device.
Uhh... considering that this book had to have been written *before* TPM came out and people registered their disappointment, I doubt it was a reaction to that.
I am curious as to how much involvement Lucas has in these books. Although, it does sound like the author was handed a plot... perhaps The Man does at least plot these suckers out.
I've never been really interested in the books. After looking at the official Star Wars timeline at the Official Star Wars web site, I see that in the books set after episode 6, the emperor comes back a bunch of times as a clone. Oh please. We've killed him off once, isn't that enough?
And from what this story said, it looks like now that Luke &co. kicked the emperor's butt a bunch of times, they now have to rumble with extra-galatic baddies. Reminds me of Star Trek (the Dominion) and the Wing Commander games. We've wiped out the bad guys... so here comes some badder ones.
Sometimes, you should realize when you come to the end of the story, and simply stop telling it.
This appears to be just free admission to the vendor booths, like the vast majority of conventions/industry shows I've seen (i.e. Seybold).
What makes free software possible is that software can be made freely available due to its nature. Having a convention, in a convention hall, with all of the costs that entails, would for the most part preclude having a free convention. I expect here that the exhibitors are picking up the tab, which is how it works usually with other big conventions. They realize they shouldn't charge to you walk around and be able to buy their products.
Now, of course, you could hold a really free convention if you could find someplace to hold it for free. Maybe a field someplace. And vendors and attendees could set up tents... and people could share food... BSDStock!
Unless you are local to the convention site, I suspect the free admission is not going to pack people in. There is still cost associated with getting to the convention. I doubt $10-$15 is going to make much of a difference either way. And if there is just free admission to the vendor area, it's not all that big a deal anyhow. The panels would be the things that would draw most people from further away.
You *NEVER* need to circunvent the package system. The package system never fails.
Yes, it can fail. It does so when the package maintainers fail. For example, I was just installing Slink on my laptop, and I noticed that XEmacs insisted that some sound processing library was required to install it. Excuse me? A sound processing library required for a text editor?
Also, dselect can be anal about requirments. I decided to install the PCMCIA modules. Dselect says "But wait! You need a kernel image package!" I already have a bleeding kernel! Wouldn't be able to boot the system without one, would I? So, I say no, I don;t want the kernel image package. But, when I go to install... sure enough, it decideds to install the kernel image package despite my having said no. Fortunately, I can just tell it not to configure the kernel, which prevents it from stomping the kernel I so carefully configured.
Yes, I know, apt is much better than dselect, but I'm waiting for apt to have a freindly front end.
Debian has its place amongst the constellation of distributions. I'm not sure that it's the best for the shrink-wrapped market of general novice users. I tend to think that anyone who would really benefit from the stability that Debian gives you would be smart enough to download it themselves, or know how to order from CheapBytes.
Being an all volunteer organization, it's hard for Debian to push out the versions that others, like Red Hat, manage to do. Slink is too long in the tooth. It's still using the 2.0 kernel series. Lots of software out there now require newer libraries. I got so frustrated that I switched from Debian over to Mandrake. Sure, it's a bit less stable, but it takes advatage of hardware that 2.0 kernels simply don't.
I'm sure a lot of people will say "just upgrade to potato." But, what's the point of having a release when to get the best software, you have to raid the unstable tree?
Debian is great for when the newest and the latest isn't really what you need. My laptop is a prety finiky piece of machinery. Red Hat tends to lock hard on it when doing stuff like using the sound card. Debian is rock-solid on it. I suspect, when I finally get a broadband connection and set up a small home server, that I'll be using Debian on that, too. On a server, the latest and greatest takes a back seat to what really works 24/7.
Technology and the street... in reverse?
on
Ask Bruce Sterling
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I'm not sure if it was you or another cyberpunk author who coined the phrase "the street finds its own use for technology."
I'm wondering, though, if the principle is starting to work in reverse. "Street" technology (well, at least technology born not of high-tech R&D labs, but rather by individuals for their own needs), like Linux and the WWW seem to be eaten up wholesale by big corporations these days.
Do you think that, in focusing on Big Corporate technology, that the pushing of this home-grown tech into the corporate sector has been overlooked in the cyberpunk genre?
Speaking of which, is there even such a genre anymore?
The whole Metric vs. English measurement is really bogus. The obvious issue here was that there was poor communications between JPL and their contractor.
I mean, even if the measurements were in the correct measurement system, without clear communications, you won't know exactly what the hell they are for. If JPL did not know for a fact that the numbers they were pushing into their system were the correct data, *including* the units of measurement, then they have no excuse for allowing that data into their system.
Obviously, they need better ways of communicating information with their contractors, including bundling of the measurement system, and some sort of failsafe test that would prove that the numbers they entered were correct.
Otherwise, even if you stipulate that everything sent to you be in metric, you still may screw up when someone submits something in mm when you expected cm.
I found the writeup a bit hard to follow at times, but I generally got the gist of it, especially the "let's go on down to the local exploit list and pick our method of getting root."
This makes me feel that security under Linux would really benefit from an automated update system of some sort. For a Red Hat install, especially one on a server, how hard would it be for the install program to go look at some ftp server run by Red Hat for critical updates? Then, at least, you'd be sure that your server was secure from all exploits known up until the time of your install.
You might also have a system that automatically checks these critical updates and alerts the sysadmin, offering to automatically install the update.
Yes, a good sysadmin wouldn't need this. But, the fact is, the number of servers going up out there outnumbers the number of good sysadmins. With people getting high-speed connections in their home, and the ability to set up their own servers, some way of making their setups more secure than a hoping what came in the box doesn't have many exploits would help.
As a technical writer, I of course face this problem a lot:)
There are quite a few reasons, some technology-related, some emotional/philosophical.
In general, you expect that things that are going to be read in-depth are going to be printed in my business. Why? Because people often want to read material such as this away from the computer, or want to be able to refer to it easily while they are doing something at the computer. It's still easier to look at a book you have open on your desk then to swap windows around so you can see a help window.
Also consider that the print-density of paper is such that we can pack more information into it. Online, you usually just have a single column of text. Any large diagrams will usually take up the entire reader window. On paper, we can have a single column of text, along with notes on the side. There is plenty of room for a diagram. Enough room, in fact (especially if you think of a book format, where there are two pages side-by-side) that we can actually *comment on it* along with just presenting it.
There's also the fact that reading paper is simply more comfortable for people. If my eyesight isn;t all that great (which it isn't, actually) I can bring the page closer so I can see it better, and still be able to read in a comfortable fashion. If I'm reading a screen, I have to lean in and crane my neck. Very unfomcortable.
Another factor is that it's easy to mark up a document when it's printed. I've yet to see an online system that does comments the right way. It would actually be easy to develop a system that would totally blow away the old-fashioned print it out and mark it with a red pen system... but no one has bothered to.
Of course, there are technological fixes that can take care of all these things. I won't go into them here.
The psychological reasons are harder to overcome. Some./'ers, rather predicably, called people who prefer paper to online "stupid" and "backwards." Question to you: of all the written correspondence that you have recieved in paper form, how much of it has been inadvertently lost or destroyed? Now, how much of your e-mail has suffered the same fate? As a simple practical matter, paper is more durable than electrons. If the network is down, I can still get at my paper printouts. If the hard drive crashes, I can still get at my paper copies of my documents. We're still not living in a totally fail-safe world computer-wise. And, especially consider many people don't know all that much about computers, and they have to rely on the guys systems to make backups and stuff like that. People who aren't geeks don't feel secure that they have control over their information unless it is printed.
Listen... we've been using print for archiving information for centuries (over a millenium, if you count the monks scribbling away in their scriptoriums). I think it's a wee bit premature to expect all of that to suddenly vanish with a poof overnight. And it has just been overnight. It's been barely 20 years since the desktop computer started to make inroads into the business and home. Without the long-term, large capacity storage options of CD-R, much of that history has seen the average computer simply unable to store the amounts of information that even a small business can generate.
And, with the move from print to online, we're not just going to see a revolution in the media, we're going to see a revolution in the way we all use and store information itself. If it was just a dead-tree to online edition transfer, we'd have no problems. No major uphevils in the fabric of many institutions. But, in this new era, we've got a load of questions to resolve.
In the past, we paid for "stuff." When I bought a CD, I had a physical object. You all, of course, have been hearing the dilemma of the music indistry and recording artists of late with MP3. Without "stuff" that actually has to change hands in order for their content to change hands, how do we make sure people can benefit from their labor? Should we just scrap the idea of selling information, be it a novel, a song, or your medical history, since that information can so easily be copied?
What about saving e-mail? Do companies have a requirement to store e-mail the same way they store other documents?
And, every few years, organizations switch from one platform to another: mainframe to mainframe, mainframe to PC, PC to PC, software program to software program. If a document you suddenly need wasn't converted from the system a few steps back, you're in trouble. Paper is always cross-platform.
Simply put: people know paper works. For sure.
And, there is the societal resistance to change. It's not really rooted in individuals, but in institutions.
Let me draw an analogy to the type of changes information technology can bring. Before Gutenburg invented the printing press, Europe had a single, fairly centralized religion: Catholocism. The word of God went from the Pope, down through the church hierarchy, and out finally to the unwashed masses. Why? Because that at the time was the best way to distribute the information. The masses couldn't read, since they had no need to. What they did from day-to-day could be accomplished without writing. God's word was in the bible, and bibles were rather scarce, as they took years, literally, to copy by hand.
Now, along came Gutenburg, and all of a sudden you could pop out hundreds of bibles in just days. People began asking why they needed the church hierarchy when they could read what God had to say for themsleves. "Wait," said the church, "you still need our guidence!" "Bull," said Martin Luther. And the Reformation began.
So... the changes that we have in our underlying information infrastructure can cause more than people to get anxious... they can cause wars. Institutions, government especially, will take time to catch up. I think it's actually a marvel that my bank, for example, lets me do my checking online through the Internet, when just 10 years ago that would have been science fiction. Human society and insitutions are simply not meant to work on Internet time. Nor should they.
Hmm... as I recall, wasn't Oliver North attached to the NSA in some manner? Perhaps he was just a military-type that was just acting as a liason for the NSA at the time, but that meant that most likely the NSA had their fingers in the whole Iran-Contra affair. If so, I wonder how much they were just "supporting" the operation.
I forget the exact statistic I heard back in college, but I had heard from math-types that a large number (perhaps a majority) of pure math PhD's end up working for the NSA in some capability or another. On the rare occasions that someone I have known mentions an acquantaince of theirs that is in upper-level mathematics, I always ask if they are working for the NSA. I think, so far, everyone one of them has at one point or another...
I recall a picture of a younger math professor at school (A really hip guy that invited students over to watch ST:NG every once in a while) sitting on a Cray. In the background the Crays stretched to what seemed like the horizon... This, of course, was taken at the NSA.
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I've been wondering about the release cycle of Debian. It seems to me that it's not at all thought out. For example, slink came out just as the 2.2 kernels and the new release of XWindows occured, neither of which made it in. It seems to me that those are pretty damn big pieces of a Linux system, and if any software update warrants a new release, then they would.
Does Debian actually have a roadmap? Do they say "OK, let's get these changes, and whatever minor packages are stable by this date, into a new release?" Or is it just "hey, I woke up this morning and decided, let's do a release!"
I think people wouldn't be clamoring so much for a new release if Debian had just planned to include the new XWindows and the new kernel in slink. Do they pay attention at all to what other projects are doing? Seems to me like they are on the road to once again miss out on a major kernel upgrade, if what we hear about 2.4 is true. Granted, it is a major pain to let a kernel settle in, but perhaps they could plan on doing a minor release in, say 4-6 months after 2.4 comes out, and hopefully is settled down?
I tried getting 2.2 up and running, but it turned out to be just a lot easier to go out and get Mandrake instead.
I still use Debian on my laptop, and I do like it a lot. I just wonder about their scheduling.
Not me! It'd just be my luck to be sitting in that thing when the universe underwent some sort of physical law change. ZAP!
Man, when I was a kid, I cringed at the Tesla coil thingy they have at Boston's museum of science. I still get sorta freaked when touching those plasma ball things that were such the fad in the early 90's.
And... oddly enough... I *love* watching thunderstorms. Go figure. Controlled displays of eletricity? Frightening. Uncontrolled chaos? Cool.
Real Audio thinks I'm Bob Yaya. I live in Peoria, which is inexplicably in the Marshall Islands. Zip code? 90210, of course. They don't bother verifying even that. I happily fill their systems up with junk. And when I reinstall, I blow away the old info and register with a new, bogus ID. I think I'll be from Timbuktu next time.
I think I just give them a bogus e-mail address each time. I don't think they require e-mailing you a registration key. If they did, I would just use one of many deflectors to bounce the e-mail for real, then shut down the account.
Of course, if they are on the ball, they can suss out a few things. For example, they probably log my IP address, which will tell them my ISP, which will give them my geographic region.
One thing I wonder about... isn't there rstrictions on getting information from minors? Is Real not collecting info when the registeree is under 12? Hm.
Another question... if Real did this for so long, how do we know tha there aren;t other sleeper programs out there that might not only be reporting what you do with them... but also what you do in general. Perhaps ICQ is silently watching your web browsing? Is AIM checking up on what programs you're running? Makes you wonder.
And, of course... if Real's player was open source, we'd probably have spotted this nonsense a while ago.
Wow... way to miss the point.
The point is, as a group of excluded people, geeks should have a bit of perspective about the issue of exclusion. Instead, they cry foul. Which makes their whole "woe is me, I live in the hellmouth" rant hypocrasy.
It's about inclusion. You know, reading ./, you hear a LOT of whining about how geeks are excluded by society. You hear an awful lot of handwringing about how being different causes geeks to be ostracised, be left out.
./ howl their outrage. This makes me sick.
./ readers take for granted, you smack them down. You cry "PC!" You ask why they should be accomodated. "What are blind people doing on the web."
And yet, here we have a group of people suing to force a company to stop excluding them, to simply make some allowance for the fact that they have different needs. And the geeks of
Listen, the visually impared are much more exluded from this society than being a geek will ever buy you. They can't drive. They have limited access to movies and TV. They have a hard time using computers in the first place, because so much software depends on a GUI. So, when all they ask is some changes be made to websites, so they can reap the benefits that you
The Internet is too important to exclude any segment of our society from. Making accomodations for them is not hard work... it just takes a bit of planning. If AOL is unwilling to do that, and the folks bringing this case can argue to the courts that this is as exclusionary as building a mall or a hotel without wheelchair access, then more power to them.
Frankly, the response to this issue here revolts me.
Ironic choice... O'Reilly does have books on CD, which are probably more amenable to
./ people who are
being used with a speech synthesizer. Most other publishers don;t do this.
Books, unlike websites, can by and large be scanned and read aloud by equipment
available to the blind. So, your analogy is bogus.
The issue here, as the issue is with architecture, is that changes to accommodate the disabled
are worth the hassle so that they can be included. People are just too lazy to do it. Unlike physical buildings, it's not a big deal to rearrange a web site after its built. The issue is not a few ALT tags though. Try browsing with Lynx, and image if you could only read the page,
top to bottom. However, *some* effort should be put into making a web site accessible to the visually impared, when that site is as central as AOL, or Amazon, or other major commercial sites.
And, finally, I have to say that I am utterly fucking disgusted with the
whining about Political Correctness. We're not talking about some pointless argument over
semantics. We're talking about locking out a portion of our community, a portion of the
community that is already excluded from so much in our society, from the explosive growth
in our economy and society taking place on the Internet. For a group of people who whine
so much about being excluded, about being ostracized because they are different, this
attitude is utter hypocrisy!
It always sort of irked me that most Windows games required full screen. Sure, most of my attention is going to be focused on the game, but still... I'd like to be able to respond to kicq messages, maybe do a quick glance at ./ while the game is loading something, etc.
:( don't hold my interest for some reason. In general, I'm a bigger fan of strategy than FPS, so most of Loki's output are things I'd at least look at.
I picked up Myth: Soulblighter last week. I was very impressed with being able to run a for-real multimedia gmae under Linux. Still a few issues, though... sound doesn;t work under KDE... so I have to switch to gnome in order to play... but still, it rocks.
I'm psyched by this announcement. Heros of Might & Magic II was the only game in recently memory I actually played for any period of time... others, including, so far, Myth
I thought the most scariest thing was the allegation that information from Echelon was leaked to a private company in the US, so it could outbid a French company. I mean, most people probably expect the government has some sort of eavesdropping ability, and that information was being sifted through to catch "bad guys." But, if it's so easy to bend this to benefit some company, then it's obviously way out of control.
I'm hoping the outing of this technology will feed the interest with congress to have a look atthis thing. The potential for abuses here is so strong, that the mere allegation of this sort of action needs to be carefully looked by an oversight committee.
Heh... first the jukebox debacle, then they are implicated in leaving the gates unlocked and letting the unwashed hoards pillage the sacred city of DVD... not a good PR week for these guys.
Makes it seem like the folks over there aren't really on the ball.
Here are a few things, off the top of my head...
Greater clarity in shared environments. For example, if you call up an app from some other server, you could see a link from the window back to that server. Or, if you are sharing an application window with someone (think something like VNC) you might be able to see which resources on the network (ie users) are connected to it.
I could image a virtual office, where everyone's windows can be seen, and easily sent to another user. Imagine looking around and seeing another uer's applications floating around their presence in space... (of course, you'd want to be able to pick which windows actually appeared in the shared space....)
Of course, you also have the ability to treat things on the computer as you would in real life. A background process would literally be in the background. It wouldn't distract you much, but just a single glance would tell you what it's up to, in general.
I think 3D is just one of the elements that will make the user interfaces of tomorrow. Voice, force feedback, 3D audio, intelligent agents, interfaces that are adept at reading moods and emotions, etc. all have their place. It's all about increasing the bandwidth in and the bandwidth out. Taking advantage of natural, physical affordances, and adjusting to how the user expects the system to act, rather than forcing the user to conform to the system is what will eventually make computers effortless to use.
We could also take advantage of natural habits to make computers easier to use. Ever notice that people look up when they try to remember something? It'd be natural for you to put your reminder databases above you in the user space. Simple things, like having alert noises from your apps use stereo so you have an idea where on your screen they came from, can add to ease of use.
I guess a 3D window manager on a 2D screen is a long way from any of these... but it is perhaps a tentative step in the right direction.
Actually, they released a patch that allows WABI to run on > 256 color displays. It will only use 256 colors, but it can cope with 16 and 32 bit displays.
They also released a patch that allows sound to work. I can now get the cheesy Win 3.1 startup sound. Ah! The nostalgia! (or is that nausea?)
Specifically, WABI cannot run any win 3.1 software that depends on the win32 extentions. This does leave a lot of software that can run, however. I do have 2 programs I would love to run under WABI that won't, due to this limitation: FrameMaker 5 and Pixar Typestry.
WABI works OK, but there are a few shortcomings. Quicken 98 runs, but I cannot access the modem or network under it, for some reason, so I cannot use it for online banking (Quicken requires that you register it before you can access the online banking features. Thanks, guys). SimCity 2000 (WIn 3.1 version) won't install.
Eventually, I plan on setting WABI up to that it will run in an Xnested server. Right now, it basically draws on the screen by itself, so its windows are always on top. Fairly annoying.
Of course, soon I plan to have a new PC capable of running VMWare, so I can use all of my current NT programs while still running Linux...
Ah, yes, the good 'ol /. tradition of responding without reading what you're responding to.
FYI, the article you didn't read mentioned spam in passing. It was not a "spammer's get whacked" article... that's the spin the person who submitted the article put on it.
The two victim's business dealings in general were the focus of the article. The fact that they manipulated stock, defauded people, etc. That they used spam as a part of that was only simply mentioned. When they mentioned potential suspects, they only said there was more than one gunman involved, most likely, that certain people (ex husband of one of the victim's gf) was cleared, and a strong suggestion that it was tied to their "shady business." No mention of spam.
There's no mention of net vigilantes wreaking horrible vengence on spammers. I'm dismayed that a few people here actually are assuming this is what has happened (and, even more dismayed that they seem to sort of be into it...).
You know, if you are against media hysteria, perhaps you should try to not jump to conclusions yourself.
Not. I could just imagine running into the machine room some morning. "Hey! Why is the network completely down! We have to ship today... and where's that music coming from?"
:)
Of course, it might be neat to tie a router doing it's real job to an MP3 player, so it could play music in keeping with the state of the network... When you have low load, maybe some slow, quiet classical music. When the load is high, play some thrash or heavy metal
Do do the whole DOOM UI thing. When someone is pingbombing you, you get shot. Shoot back, and you ping bomb him... fun fun fun till the network dies.
...reminds me of that Monty Python episode where the cast was told the Queen would be tuning in...
Wasn't Linus invited to some big to-do in Finland thrown by royalty?
Brings to mind a few slogans...
Linux: Delighting the crowned heads of Europe.
Linux: Software by the people, propping defunct monarchies everywhere.
Linux: The crown jewel of OS's.
You can patent processes by just describing them in enough detail. Take an idea, develop it to the point where it can be described in enough detail to be patented and... presto! You can patent it without havng to actually build anything.
This reminds me of Feynman's memoirs where he's describing how he pulled ideas out of his butt (like a nuclear powered airplane) and having them patented. He didn't have to get out a wrench and a pile of unranium to get the patent... just a fairly detailed idea is good enough. You think the guys who patented the centrifical birth assisting device that the Ig Noble awards folks recently gave an award actually built the damned thing? I hope not...
This, of course, is what's causing the problem. The patent system is equating any old idea with ideas that are reached after years of painstaking research. The latter, I think, do at least deserve some sort of protection, to encourage spending on R&D. The former are the ones causing problems.
I wonder if the Handspring folks were the push behind this... I'm definitly getting the impression that they are interested in innovating with the design of the Palm platform,, while Palm itself is settling for goofing around with the form factor.
While color is sweet, color plus cheap wireless connectivity (emphasis on cheap) would make these suckers really big-time.
Alas, 32 Mhz, while useful for the more data crunching that a higher bit display will require, still isn't enought to do the seriously neat stuff, like voce recogntion.
Finally, it's sort of sad, because a color Palm would really cause a split in software development. Up until now, you could run just about everything out there on any Palm. I have a Pilot 1000 that's been upgraded several times, and I can use all of the latest software available. Once color comes out, I suspect developers will have to decide whether to support color or not...
Oh well... I got way more life out of my 1000 than I every would have expected... certainly more than if I had bought a 1st generation WinCE device.
Uhh... considering that this book had to have been written *before* TPM came out and people registered their disappointment, I doubt it was a reaction to that.
I am curious as to how much involvement Lucas has in these books. Although, it does sound like the author was handed a plot... perhaps The Man does at least plot these suckers out.
I've never been really interested in the books. After looking at the official Star Wars timeline at the Official Star Wars web site, I see that in the books set after episode 6, the emperor comes back a bunch of times as a clone. Oh please. We've killed him off once, isn't that enough?
And from what this story said, it looks like now that Luke &co. kicked the emperor's butt a bunch of times, they now have to rumble with extra-galatic baddies. Reminds me of Star Trek (the Dominion) and the Wing Commander games. We've wiped out the bad guys... so here comes some badder ones.
Sometimes, you should realize when you come to the end of the story, and simply stop telling it.
This appears to be just free admission to the vendor booths, like the vast majority of conventions/industry shows I've seen (i.e. Seybold).
What makes free software possible is that software can be made freely available due to its nature. Having a convention, in a convention hall, with all of the costs that entails, would for the most part preclude having a free convention. I expect here that the exhibitors are picking up the tab, which is how it works usually with other big conventions. They realize they shouldn't charge to you walk around and be able to buy their products.
Now, of course, you could hold a really free convention if you could find someplace to hold it for free. Maybe a field someplace. And vendors and attendees could set up tents... and people could share food... BSDStock!
Unless you are local to the convention site, I suspect the free admission is not going to pack people in. There is still cost associated with getting to the convention. I doubt $10-$15 is going to make much of a difference either way. And if there is just free admission to the vendor area, it's not all that big a deal anyhow. The panels would be the things that would draw most people from further away.
Yes, it can fail. It does so when the package maintainers fail. For example, I was just installing Slink on my laptop, and I noticed that XEmacs insisted that some sound processing library was required to install it. Excuse me? A sound processing library required for a text editor?
Also, dselect can be anal about requirments. I decided to install the PCMCIA modules. Dselect says "But wait! You need a kernel image package!" I already have a bleeding kernel! Wouldn't be able to boot the system without one, would I? So, I say no, I don;t want the kernel image package. But, when I go to install... sure enough, it decideds to install the kernel image package despite my having said no. Fortunately, I can just tell it not to configure the kernel, which prevents it from stomping the kernel I so carefully configured.
Yes, I know, apt is much better than dselect, but I'm waiting for apt to have a freindly front end.
Debian has its place amongst the constellation of distributions. I'm not sure that it's the best for the shrink-wrapped market of general novice users. I tend to think that anyone who would really benefit from the stability that Debian gives you would be smart enough to download it themselves, or know how to order from CheapBytes.
Being an all volunteer organization, it's hard for Debian to push out the versions that others, like Red Hat, manage to do. Slink is too long in the tooth. It's still using the 2.0 kernel series. Lots of software out there now require newer libraries. I got so frustrated that I switched from Debian over to Mandrake. Sure, it's a bit less stable, but it takes advatage of hardware that 2.0 kernels simply don't.
I'm sure a lot of people will say "just upgrade to potato." But, what's the point of having a release when to get the best software, you have to raid the unstable tree?
Debian is great for when the newest and the latest isn't really what you need. My laptop is a prety finiky piece of machinery. Red Hat tends to lock hard on it when doing stuff like using the sound card. Debian is rock-solid on it. I suspect, when I finally get a broadband connection and set up a small home server, that I'll be using Debian on that, too. On a server, the latest and greatest takes a back seat to what really works 24/7.
I'm not sure if it was you or another cyberpunk author who coined the phrase "the street finds its own use for technology."
I'm wondering, though, if the principle is starting to work in reverse. "Street" technology (well, at least technology born not of high-tech R&D labs, but rather by individuals for their own needs), like Linux and the WWW seem to be eaten up wholesale by big corporations these days.
Do you think that, in focusing on Big Corporate technology, that the pushing of this home-grown tech into the corporate sector has been overlooked in the cyberpunk genre?
Speaking of which, is there even such a genre anymore?
The whole Metric vs. English measurement is really bogus. The obvious issue here was that there was poor communications between JPL and their contractor.
I mean, even if the measurements were in the correct measurement system, without clear communications, you won't know exactly what the hell they are for. If JPL did not know for a fact that the numbers they were pushing into their system were the correct data, *including* the units of measurement, then they have no excuse for allowing that data into their system.
Obviously, they need better ways of communicating information with their contractors, including bundling of the measurement system, and some sort of failsafe test that would prove that the numbers they entered were correct.
Otherwise, even if you stipulate that everything sent to you be in metric, you still may screw up when someone submits something in mm when you expected cm.
I found the writeup a bit hard to follow at times, but I generally got the gist of it, especially the "let's go on down to the local exploit list and pick our method of getting root."
This makes me feel that security under Linux would really benefit from an automated update system of some sort. For a Red Hat install, especially one on a server, how hard would it be for the install program to go look at some ftp server run by Red Hat for critical updates? Then, at least, you'd be sure that your server was secure from all exploits known up until the time of your install.
You might also have a system that automatically checks these critical updates and alerts the sysadmin, offering to automatically install the update.
Yes, a good sysadmin wouldn't need this. But, the fact is, the number of servers going up out there outnumbers the number of good sysadmins. With people getting high-speed connections in their home, and the ability to set up their own servers, some way of making their setups more secure than a hoping what came in the box doesn't have many exploits would help.
As a technical writer, I of course face this problem a lot :)
./'ers, rather predicably, called people who prefer paper to online "stupid" and "backwards." Question to you: of all the written correspondence that you have recieved in paper form, how much of it has been inadvertently lost or destroyed? Now, how much of your e-mail has suffered the same fate? As a simple practical matter, paper is more durable than electrons. If the network is down, I can still get at my paper printouts. If the hard drive crashes, I can still get at my paper copies of my documents. We're still not living in a totally fail-safe world computer-wise. And, especially consider many people don't know all that much about computers, and they have to rely on the guys systems to make backups and stuff like that. People who aren't geeks don't feel secure that they have control over their information unless it is printed.
There are quite a few reasons, some technology-related, some emotional/philosophical.
In general, you expect that things that are going to be read in-depth are going to be printed in my business. Why? Because people often want to read material such as this away from the computer, or want to be able to refer to it easily while they are doing something at the computer. It's still easier to look at a book you have open on your desk then to swap windows around so you can see a help window.
Also consider that the print-density of paper is such that we can pack more information into it. Online, you usually just have a single column of text. Any large diagrams will usually take up the entire reader window. On paper, we can have a single column of text, along with notes on the side. There is plenty of room for a diagram. Enough room, in fact (especially if you think of a book format, where there are two pages side-by-side) that we can actually *comment on it* along with just presenting it.
There's also the fact that reading paper is simply more comfortable for people. If my eyesight isn;t all that great (which it isn't, actually) I can bring the page closer so I can see it better, and still be able to read in a comfortable fashion. If I'm reading a screen, I have to lean in and crane my neck. Very unfomcortable.
Another factor is that it's easy to mark up a document when it's printed. I've yet to see an online system that does comments the right way. It would actually be easy to develop a system that would totally blow away the old-fashioned print it out and mark it with a red pen system... but no one has bothered to.
Of course, there are technological fixes that can take care of all these things. I won't go into them here.
The psychological reasons are harder to overcome. Some
Listen... we've been using print for archiving information for centuries (over a millenium, if you count the monks scribbling away in their scriptoriums). I think it's a wee bit premature to expect all of that to suddenly vanish with a poof overnight. And it has just been overnight. It's been barely 20 years since the desktop computer started to make inroads into the business and home. Without the long-term, large capacity storage options of CD-R, much of that history has seen the average computer simply unable to store the amounts of information that even a small business can generate.
And, with the move from print to online, we're not just going to see a revolution in the media, we're going to see a revolution in the way we all use and store information itself. If it was just a dead-tree to online edition transfer, we'd have no problems. No major uphevils in the fabric of many institutions. But, in this new era, we've got a load of questions to resolve.
In the past, we paid for "stuff." When I bought a CD, I had a physical object. You all, of course, have been hearing the dilemma of the music indistry and recording artists of late with MP3. Without "stuff" that actually has to change hands in order for their content to change hands, how do we make sure people can benefit from their labor? Should we just scrap the idea of selling information, be it a novel, a song, or your medical history, since that information can so easily be copied?
What about saving e-mail? Do companies have a requirement to store e-mail the same way they store other documents?
And, every few years, organizations switch from one platform to another: mainframe to mainframe, mainframe to PC, PC to PC, software program to software program. If a document you suddenly need wasn't converted from the system a few steps back, you're in trouble. Paper is always cross-platform.
Simply put: people know paper works. For sure.
And, there is the societal resistance to change. It's not really rooted in individuals, but in institutions.
Let me draw an analogy to the type of changes information technology can bring. Before Gutenburg invented the printing press, Europe had a single, fairly centralized religion: Catholocism. The word of God went from the Pope, down through the church hierarchy, and out finally to the unwashed masses. Why? Because that at the time was the best way to distribute the information. The masses couldn't read, since they had no need to. What they did from day-to-day could be accomplished without writing. God's word was in the bible, and bibles were rather scarce, as they took years, literally, to copy by hand.
Now, along came Gutenburg, and all of a sudden you could pop out hundreds of bibles in just days. People began asking why they needed the church hierarchy when they could read what God had to say for themsleves. "Wait," said the church, "you still need our guidence!" "Bull," said Martin Luther. And the Reformation began.
So... the changes that we have in our underlying information infrastructure can cause more than people to get anxious... they can cause wars. Institutions, government especially, will take time to catch up. I think it's actually a marvel that my bank, for example, lets me do my checking online through the Internet, when just 10 years ago that would have been science fiction. Human society and insitutions are simply not meant to work on Internet time. Nor should they.
Hmm... as I recall, wasn't Oliver North attached to the NSA in some manner? Perhaps he was just a military-type that was just acting as a liason for the NSA at the time, but that meant that most likely the NSA had their fingers in the whole Iran-Contra affair. If so, I wonder how much they were just "supporting" the operation.
I forget the exact statistic I heard back in college, but I had heard from math-types that a large number (perhaps a majority) of pure math PhD's end up working for the NSA in some capability or another. On the rare occasions that someone I have known mentions an acquantaince of theirs that is in upper-level mathematics, I always ask if they are working for the NSA. I think, so far, everyone one of them has at one point or another...
I recall a picture of a younger math professor at school (A really hip guy that invited students over to watch ST:NG every once in a while) sitting on a Cray. In the background the Crays stretched to what seemed like the horizon... This, of course, was taken at the NSA.