Here's the bottom line, like it or not. The ratio of us (computer types, you know, educated...) and them (everyone else) is about 50:1 in their favor. Why is that important? (Warning: I'm probably going to offend some with this...)
As long as an item, be it copy-protected CD, DVD, PS2 game, etc.. is sold at Wal-Mart, Target, and the like, a boycott will never succeed. If all of us stopped buying CDs tomorrow, Cletus T. Bohunk would still go out and buy his Fullscren copy of Spider-Man. He'd still by the Allman Bros. Greatest Hits (no offense to fans), and its not going to matter if it works in his computer, because he doesn't use that to play music like we do! He puts it in his $49 DVD player and listens to it through his 20 year old Magnavox TV speakers. Or he puts it in the $20 boom box he also bought from Wal-Mart. While I agree that if CDs stop playing in cars, there will be a huge outcry from the public, calling for boycotts simply won't work in such a small community as ours...
(Yes, I realize it isn't a SMALL community. But in the grand scope of US vs. the population in general, we don't measure up.)
So are you arguing that deaf and blind people are "behind the times?" The question is not one of technology, but one of technology's interpretation of bad web design.
You know why Lynx is frequently mentioned? Because it ignores your precious design. Not because its backward, but because with Lynx I don't have to wait for your Flash intro to finish before I can buy my airline tickets. I don't have to wade through six Orbitz pop-ups before I can check my flight schedule. I don't have to look at your "haute-couture" yellow and pink color scheme that the market department called "trendy, hip, and sleek". The issue is many things, but the lack of technology is not one of them.
The other tine in this is that Lynx most closely mimics what most common screen readers "see" when translating the web into speech. It ignores all of the s used for formatting rather than presenting tabular data. A screen reader will break down these tables into rows and columns, which is great fun when a screen reader tries to "interpret" a jigsaw'ed graphic that makes up a site's entire homepage. You sift through eighty links trying to find a single one, all of which have no alt tag.
One more thing: You want your e-Commerce site to deal with the government, directly or indirectly? All of this is a moot point. You'll have to do sooner or later, so suck it up. Do you want to fix legacy code or learn how to develop for the Web properly in the first place? Up to you, pal...
If you use fixed font size tags, this won't change a thing in the browser. Its akin to assuming the table will stretch and shrink when you tag it with a fixed height and width. It s just not gonna...
I think that a lot of people are missing the point made here. It is not private web designers that would be liable, nor would the companies who employ them. The standard, as it is now, just makes it mandatory for companies who wish to deal with the US government in their business. Following their own lead, as it were.
I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment that if all browsers followed standards, this wouldn't be as big an issue. And as for the ADA standards for web pages, I think you may be misinformed. Tables and scripting are not against ADA. The ADA simply lays down how these tools can be effectively used while not hamstringing screen readers and the like. For example, a table can be perfectly readable if you add an 'id' attribute to each tag and to each tag. I know that reworking legacy code could take years, but for new development this shouldn't be too terrible, right? Besides, aren't we moving to XML data and a transforming display layer anyway?
What happens to the automatic ticketing the first time a Senator or House member gets a ticket? I guarantee that the use of such enforcement will evaporate overnight.
Teddy Kennedy alone could fund a medium size metroplex, after all...
I'm a filmmaker as well as a developer, and here is how I see the issue. The DGA is doing what it's supposed to by protecting its members. The fact that someone is editing the films is not the real problem. This falls under Fair Use, and neither the studios nor the DGA can do anything about that. The problem is that someone is selling these videos like this. That is what the whole FBI thing on the front of videos is about. I can see the point of the consumers of these videos, but I agree with Martha Coolidge (after all, she did direct Real Genius...)
But Coolidge and other filmmakers argue the films are the creative property of the filmmakers and cannot be altered without permission. A person who is troubled by the content of a film should simply not watch it. Censoring it even temporarily is not an option, she argues. "We are talking about a technology that obliterates the intention of a movie. Parents can control what their child sees by not allowing it in the house."
Here's an analogy for those of you who aren't as familiar with filmmaking. Suppose you develop a schnazzy new algorithm for sorting through your company's client database. You toil over this thing for months until you've tweaked it to the point that it will not run any faster. You go to lunch, celebrating the fact that the method is a good as it can be. When you get back from lunch, you find that the asshole intern the company hired has taken your code out of CVS, changed the display parameters, and made it look like it ran a few millis faster. Now he looks like a god and you look like the asshole.
Films are not things that spring up overnight. Essentially, from a director's view, these "editors" are amateurs who are detracting from the movie's message. Whether that message is "Elizabeth Berkley can't act, but she CAN be nude," or "Tom Hanks is a fine father and hitman." is completely irrelevant. Choosing one movie to edit and not another hurts ALL films.
This could be considered a feature, rather than a bug... I know a number of Windows programmers who are direly searching for a way to code for Win2K by bypassing Active Directory. Apparently, they are more than happy with LDAP, and feel that AD has more problems than good points. So too are the publishers of Windows codebooks, as I'm told. LDAP is still the de facto standard for Naming and Directory services, and M$ is still smarting from not being able to "embrace and extend" it. (Then again, what do I know? I've coded for Windows before, but it's always been in Java)
A weiner? The guy runs Slashdot, News For Nerds, for crying out loud! And besides, she's not a long suffering girlfriend. She's a long-suffering Fiancee.
There is a scene in LOTR where the Hobbits are walking through a field. In the distance is a house, smoke coming from the chimney, and a man working outside. That's Tom.
I've seen interviews where the filmmakers are asked about Tom, and they reply he is in the film, the Hobbits simply do not stop there...
Didn't Dr. Jerry Hathaway head up a team of young scientists to do this once? I still remember a group of guys like Kent, Mitch, and the exceptional but eccentric Chris Knight building a five megawatt laser that, with a large rotating mirror, could vaporize a human target from space. Surely we could just turn that thing around, right?
How does understanding programming make you more P2P-savvy? My mother doesn't have to care about C to use Office... (And yeah, I said it. Microsoft. The products everyone hates, but has an 80% market share.)
In parts of the Midwest, if you are a Comcast subscriber you have a similar opportunity. Basically, you get the cable modem service, order the barebones $12.95 cable service, and because of the modem, all channels below 301 (or thereabouts) are unblocked. This isn't the pr0n channels or the PPV, but it does encompass Sundance East and West and some of the better channels in the system...
It is a long standing aphorism in the film business that films are never finished, simply taken away from their creators. In this case, apparently the creator has enough money and power to keep it as long as he likes... And I have to agree with the previous poster, it's beginning to seem that ANH and Empire were the flukes. Ever see Howard The Duck?
Interesting. It would seem that this decision is saying that if a publication is sued for libel, it can now be held to also promise that this will never run again. I can hear the tabloids blinking out of existence as we speak...
While natural selection and evolution are good cases for allowing animals to disappear (...then there's the running and the screaming...), it is my understanding that the Tasmanian Tiger was killed out due to overhunting my humans. Generally speaking, we killed it off before it's time, and thus it makes sense that we try to revive it.
Besides, didn't Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter) go looking for a TT earlier this year?
And if Microsoft put that much of their liquid capital into a market in which they have dreadfully little experience, their stock price would drop like a stone, depleting all of their reserves in a heartbeat.
It seems to be working for the Gotham City police department. Everytime I watch the old Batman Animated episodes, there are the GCPD blimps on patrol. If it's good enough for Commisioner Gordon, it's good enough for me.
Unionize, huh? Are you really that humbled by the "corporate power structure"? The only calls for unionization come about when people's skills are not up to par. Look at the laborers world. The reason for unions were to combat unsafe working conditions. Are you unsafe at your present job? Look at the Screen Actors Guild. The actors' union recently released figures that 4% of their group actually lives on the money they make acting. Yet the union collects dues from everyone. They also strike, keeping more people out of work. Unions serve only to further damage relations between the industry and the management of said industry, as well as keeping good people away from well paying jobs when the union management gets ticky, and decides to strike. Offshore outsourcing may not be the best in all situations, especially in a recession. But the programmers I know are just as lazy as those from overseas. Don't complain about generalizations if you can't defend yourself from one...
Not that I was around then, but I can't imagine that this is much different than when the printing press became prevalent in the "modern" world. True, fewer people had literacy then, but is the Internet's believability any different from the literacy then?
"They say, `He got it from the Internet.' They think it's the Bible."
Now I can go down to Kinko's, print out several thousand pages of my own words, walk to a binder down the street, and have those words leather bound. I can then have "Holy Bible" stamped in gold on the cover and spine and pass it out to people on the subway. How many people would believe that this is the word of God? (On that note, how many people believe the present, "real" Bible is the word of God?) The point I raise is simply that belief is all in the perception of the medium. Calling the Internet a "sewer" at its worst may be accurate, but it takes certain liberties.
This brings up the question of legality within a contract. If the software could be construed to be damaging to a system, is the contract (license agreement) valid at all? I seem to remember somthing to the effect that, if a contract spells out something illegal in its terms, it ceases to become a valid contract. Wouldn't this revoke all permissions and open the floodgates?
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very good point. I concede...
Gol-darnit-
Here's the bottom line, like it or not. The ratio of us (computer types, you know, educated...) and them (everyone else) is about 50:1 in their favor. Why is that important? (Warning: I'm probably going to offend some with this...)
As long as an item, be it copy-protected CD, DVD, PS2 game, etc.. is sold at Wal-Mart, Target, and the like, a boycott will never succeed. If all of us stopped buying CDs tomorrow, Cletus T. Bohunk would still go out and buy his Fullscren copy of Spider-Man. He'd still by the Allman Bros. Greatest Hits (no offense to fans), and its not going to matter if it works in his computer, because he doesn't use that to play music like we do! He puts it in his $49 DVD player and listens to it through his 20 year old Magnavox TV speakers. Or he puts it in the $20 boom box he also bought from Wal-Mart. While I agree that if CDs stop playing in cars, there will be a huge outcry from the public, calling for boycotts simply won't work in such a small community as ours...
(Yes, I realize it isn't a SMALL community. But in the grand scope of US vs. the population in general, we don't measure up.)
So are you arguing that deaf and blind people are "behind the times?" The question is not one of technology, but one of technology's interpretation of bad web design.
You know why Lynx is frequently mentioned? Because it ignores your precious design. Not because its backward, but because with Lynx I don't have to wait for your Flash intro to finish before I can buy my airline tickets. I don't have to wade through six Orbitz pop-ups before I can check my flight schedule. I don't have to look at your "haute-couture" yellow and pink color scheme that the market department called "trendy, hip, and sleek". The issue is many things, but the lack of technology is not one of them.
The other tine in this is that Lynx most closely mimics what most common screen readers "see" when translating the web into speech. It ignores all of the s used for formatting rather than presenting tabular data. A screen reader will break down these tables into rows and columns, which is great fun when a screen reader tries to "interpret" a jigsaw'ed graphic that makes up a site's entire homepage. You sift through eighty links trying to find a single one, all of which have no alt tag.
One more thing: You want your e-Commerce site to deal with the government, directly or indirectly? All of this is a moot point. You'll have to do sooner or later, so suck it up. Do you want to fix legacy code or learn how to develop for the Web properly in the first place? Up to you, pal...
If you use fixed font size tags, this won't change a thing in the browser. Its akin to assuming the table will stretch and shrink when you tag it with a fixed height and width. It s just not gonna...
I think that a lot of people are missing the point made here. It is not private web designers that would be liable, nor would the companies who employ them. The standard, as it is now, just makes it mandatory for companies who wish to deal with the US government in their business. Following their own lead, as it were.
I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment that if all browsers followed standards, this wouldn't be as big an issue. And as for the ADA standards for web pages, I think you may be misinformed. Tables and scripting are not against ADA. The ADA simply lays down how these tools can be effectively used while not hamstringing screen readers and the like. For example, a table can be perfectly readable if you add an 'id' attribute to each tag and to each tag. I know that reworking legacy code could take years, but for new development this shouldn't be too terrible, right? Besides, aren't we moving to XML data and a transforming display layer anyway?
What happens to the automatic ticketing the first time a Senator or House member gets a ticket? I guarantee that the use of such enforcement will evaporate overnight.
Teddy Kennedy alone could fund a medium size metroplex, after all...
But Coolidge and other filmmakers argue the films are the creative property of the filmmakers and cannot be altered without permission. A person who is troubled by the content of a film should simply not watch it. Censoring it even temporarily is not an option, she argues. "We are talking about a technology that obliterates the intention of a movie. Parents can control what their child sees by not allowing it in the house."
Here's an analogy for those of you who aren't as familiar with filmmaking. Suppose you develop a schnazzy new algorithm for sorting through your company's client database. You toil over this thing for months until you've tweaked it to the point that it will not run any faster. You go to lunch, celebrating the fact that the method is a good as it can be. When you get back from lunch, you find that the asshole intern the company hired has taken your code out of CVS, changed the display parameters, and made it look like it ran a few millis faster. Now he looks like a god and you look like the asshole.
Films are not things that spring up overnight. Essentially, from a director's view, these "editors" are amateurs who are detracting from the movie's message. Whether that message is "Elizabeth Berkley can't act, but she CAN be nude," or "Tom Hanks is a fine father and hitman." is completely irrelevant. Choosing one movie to edit and not another hurts ALL films.
This could be considered a feature, rather than a bug... I know a number of Windows programmers who are direly searching for a way to code for Win2K by bypassing Active Directory. Apparently, they are more than happy with LDAP, and feel that AD has more problems than good points. So too are the publishers of Windows codebooks, as I'm told. LDAP is still the de facto standard for Naming and Directory services, and M$ is still smarting from not being able to "embrace and extend" it. (Then again, what do I know? I've coded for Windows before, but it's always been in Java)
A weiner? The guy runs Slashdot, News For Nerds, for crying out loud!
And besides, she's not a long suffering girlfriend. She's a long-suffering Fiancee .
There is a scene in LOTR where the Hobbits are walking through a field. In the distance is a house, smoke coming from the chimney, and a man working outside. That's Tom.
I've seen interviews where the filmmakers are asked about Tom, and they reply he is in the film, the Hobbits simply do not stop there...
Didn't Dr. Jerry Hathaway head up a team of young scientists to do this once? I still remember a group of guys like Kent, Mitch, and the exceptional but eccentric Chris Knight building a five megawatt laser that, with a large rotating mirror, could vaporize a human target from space. Surely we could just turn that thing around, right?
Confused about this post?
Okay, I understand your point now. Consider my remarks "cheerfully withdrawn".
How does understanding programming make you more P2P-savvy? My mother doesn't have to care about C to use Office...
(And yeah, I said it. Microsoft. The products everyone hates, but has an 80% market share.)
In parts of the Midwest, if you are a Comcast subscriber you have a similar opportunity. Basically, you get the cable modem service, order the barebones $12.95 cable service, and because of the modem, all channels below 301 (or thereabouts) are unblocked. This isn't the pr0n channels or the PPV, but it does encompass Sundance East and West and some of the better channels in the system...
It is a long standing aphorism in the film business that films are never finished, simply taken away from their creators. In this case, apparently the creator has enough money and power to keep it as long as he likes... And I have to agree with the previous poster, it's beginning to seem that ANH and Empire were the flukes. Ever see Howard The Duck?
Interesting. It would seem that this decision is saying that if a publication is sued for libel, it can now be held to also promise that this will never run again. I can hear the tabloids blinking out of existence as we speak...
While natural selection and evolution are good cases for allowing animals to disappear (...then there's the running and the screaming...), it is my understanding that the Tasmanian Tiger was killed out due to overhunting my humans. Generally speaking, we killed it off before it's time, and thus it makes sense that we try to revive it.
Besides, didn't Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter) go looking for a TT earlier this year?
And if Microsoft put that much of their liquid capital into a market in which they have dreadfully little experience, their stock price would drop like a stone, depleting all of their reserves in a heartbeat.
Can you ping me now? Good...
It seems to be working for the Gotham City police department. Everytime I watch the old Batman Animated episodes, there are the GCPD blimps on patrol. If it's good enough for Commisioner Gordon, it's good enough for me.
Unionize, huh? Are you really that humbled by the "corporate power structure"? The only calls for unionization come about when people's skills are not up to par. Look at the laborers world. The reason for unions were to combat unsafe working conditions. Are you unsafe at your present job? Look at the Screen Actors Guild. The actors' union recently released figures that 4% of their group actually lives on the money they make acting. Yet the union collects dues from everyone. They also strike, keeping more people out of work. Unions serve only to further damage relations between the industry and the management of said industry, as well as keeping good people away from well paying jobs when the union management gets ticky, and decides to strike. Offshore outsourcing may not be the best in all situations, especially in a recession. But the programmers I know are just as lazy as those from overseas. Don't complain about generalizations if you can't defend yourself from one...
Not that I was around then, but I can't imagine that this is much different than when the printing press became prevalent in the "modern" world. True, fewer people had literacy then, but is the Internet's believability any different from the literacy then?
"They say, `He got it from the Internet.' They think it's the Bible."
Now I can go down to Kinko's, print out several thousand pages of my own words, walk to a binder down the street, and have those words leather bound. I can then have "Holy Bible" stamped in gold on the cover and spine and pass it out to people on the subway. How many people would believe that this is the word of God? (On that note, how many people believe the present, "real" Bible is the word of God?) The point I raise is simply that belief is all in the perception of the medium. Calling the Internet a "sewer" at its worst may be accurate, but it takes certain liberties.
Can't exactly fire students who d'load pr0n. I wouldn't have finished high school, let alone college...
This brings up the question of legality within a contract. If the software could be construed to be damaging to a system, is the contract (license agreement) valid at all? I seem to remember somthing to the effect that, if a contract spells out something illegal in its terms, it ceases to become a valid contract. Wouldn't this revoke all permissions and open the floodgates?