I write MacOS installer applications for time to time. When I do I try to always get by with the minimum of rights needed to to do the task. The MacOS installer applications give this option and if you need administrator or root right the OS will ask for the password each time the installer is run.
Doesn't Vista ask for the admin password before running an application in that level? Or does it drop into that level of access without asking first?
I tried this on MacOS X version 10.4.8 (the latest version) I could not make the mac respond to voice commands being played from the speakers or from patching the sound out into a iMic. Here is what I did.
1. Ran the voice command option and configured it as apple suggests. 2. Made sure that the voice command understood my command by issuing several and getting the correct replys back from the system. 3. Recorded the command "What time is it?" 4. Played back the command with voice commands on.
The mac did not respond. I then tried the same thing with a patch cable between the output and a iMic USB audio adapter. It still would not respond from the recording bout will respond to my voice. I have no idea how Apple is able to distinguish where the voice is coming from.
I have often wondered if eBay is being used for money laundering. Here's how it might work.
Let's say you have $10,000 to launder. Your in some country with loose banking laws and you want to get it into the U.S. So you have a confederate list on eBay an expensive item that does not have registration on it, boat and cars are out but diamonds and rare coins are useful.
Now there really isn't any goods being sold here just an eBay auction to provide cover for where this $10,00 came from. The auction is set to exist for the minimum amount of time to avoid any outsiders form bidding and the description and placement of the item is such that will make it unlikely to be discovered. You might also add some shill bids on the item to make it all look legit.
So now our person with the money (person 1) "bids" on the item which he wins. He then sends to his partner the "payment" the dirty money via PayPal. The 'buyer' person 1, then sets up a normal U.S. based PayPal account and then the process is reversed with another fake item listed this time the partner (person 2) bids and pays into the normal U.S. based account the $10,000, the money being laundered, that money is then removed and used as normal as it now has what would appear to be a perfectly reasonable source, the sale of an the "items" on eBay.
I have watched my wife for years struggle with telling one bill from another. Hardly a day goes by that she does not come to me to do the simple task of separating out bills. It about time this was done. Here's some simple ways that this might be accomplished.
Eliminate the $1 bill in favor of a $1 coin. That means we stop printing $1 bills. In a few months they will wear out and disappear. The reason $1 coins have never recived wide acceptance is that we keep printing the bills. Stop printing the bills and people will use the coins.
Change the dominate color of the bills, many blind persons can still detect color so if we have red $5, blue $10, green $20 Yellow $50 and white $100 many people could quickly tell.
Have the bill slightly different sizes as they increase in value.
Print in 10 point Helvetica type on each side of the bill the value of the note. So each note would have "five dollars" for example. This would permit the blind to use reading devices which are common in public libraries to read the bills many blind persons, including my wife, own such devices and there are portable ones as well. This would avoid having to purchase a special device just to read currency.
Braille on bills would seem to be problematic to me. How do we keep it from becoming crushed down and unreadable. Perhaps a Canadian here can tell us if this is an issue with their currency.
At the risk of starting another flame war about why we should care about the blind...This system is unusable by the blind using a screen reader. You are unable to detect the location of the "buttons". I tested it with both the MacOS built in screen reader (VoiceOver) and a window add on (Jaws) screen reader.
So, in the U.S.,unless your looking to have the National Federation of the Blind, American Council of the Blind or the Justice Department come after you in court you would be well advised not to implement it in a commercial setting unless you have an alternate means of providing services.
And no, providing a physical store thirty miles down the road is not an alternate means, the blind don't drive remeber?
If you want to try out what the online world is like for the blind and you have a Mac running OSX 10.4 or better you have a screen reader built into the OS. Here are the very simplified instructions for getting it running so you can test a website.
Make sure your using Safari as your browser. Press command-F5, you will here the computer say "VoiceOver on" You navigate using the control, option and arrow keys Hold down the control and option keys and then press the arrow keys to move through the controls. When VoiceOver says "HTML content" press the control-option-shift-down arrow keys to interact with the content.
Now for the real test, control-option-shift-F11 will turn off the screen so you will learn what it is really like to try and navigate with out sight. pressing this command combination again will turn the screen back on.
To get to the menus do command-option-m once for the main menu, twice for the utility menu and three time for the spotlight menu.
Here is a test I have wanted to do. Simply carry a paperback copy of the Quran with you through a TSA checkpoint. My bet is that you will be "randomly" selected for extra screening everytime. I would try this myself but I have given up on domestic air travel using Amtrak instead. Amtrak doesn't shake down their customers treating them like criminals.
Separate the "player" from the "clicker" that is the person watching the ball is not the person with the ear piece who is making the bets. It would then be much harder for the casino to figure out how the better was placing the bets as he would not have the clicker and computer on his person. To go one step further it should be possible to break all three apart. the "clicker" watches the table and clicks the timing device, the "computer" sits at the bar and is not playing at all he is simply there to carry the computer, the "player" has the ear piece an make the bets based on the signal he gets from the computer.
The other aspect would be to use radio frequencies that are not normally used so that the Casinos would not likely be checking for them. You could even add further complications by using infrared to communicate between the clicker and the computer and radio between the computer and the player.
An even better approach would be for the player not to have an ear piece at all. As I understand it the computer does not predict a give number but only what part of the wheel the ball is most likely to fall into. So we could have a "clicker" communicating with a computer. The person with the computer then sends very subtle signals to the player by how he sits or stands. The player can watch for the signals without any devices on his person. If all this were done at a smaller casinos in say, a place like Elko, Nevada where the staff would not be as sophisticated as they would be in Las Vegas or Reno or Atlantic City, one might be able to pul it off.
February 17 Minister for Schools and Adult Education Ibrahim Baylan released the report "Ten myths about the Swedish school". The same day Jan Björklund, the Swedish Liberal Party's education spokeman counterattacked, with the report "Ten truths about the school".
According to today's industry willed Baylan placed forward a report about the school during the weekend as gone. Last Saturday the done party leader Lars Leijonborg and Minister for Schools and Adult Education challenging clean Jan Björklund an initiative about order in the school.
Ministers Jens Orback and Mona Sahlin presented last Friday a report "Sweden will at last a stem time country on the integration area". The Swedish Liberal Party came with a reply that same day, in the form of a statement of integration spokeman Mauricio Rojas and two reports writen by the Member of Parliament.
But both party press spokeman Johan Jakobsson and party leader Lars Leijonborg rejects all rumours about the use of internal information in order to plan initiatives in the campaign.
- I have looked the through initiatives and can not find any connections, the is clean chances, says Lars Laijonborg.
He may medhåll of your partisekreterare - we do test initiatives each day so the is a clean coincidence, orders Johan Jakobsson SvD.se.
I am amazed at the number of these networks both closed and open. I recently did a bit of war driving in my town of Casper, Wyoming a working class city of 60,000 which is not near any other city. I plotted the resutls to a google map https://home.wmcnet.org/services/wifi/ while the results are not complete, I have only covered a part of the city, they do show that it is almost impossible to find a residential location which does not have access to an open wifi network. This in a small city in an isolated corner of the United States. what must the network maps look like in bigger more prosperous communities?
While it may be the case that the EEOC laws do not deal with education they clearly do deal with disability. If those computerized application devices can't be used by the blind, and I have never seen one that can be used by the blind, then the companies had better have some means for the blind to be able to apply or that is a violation of the EEOC laws.
If everyone starts using the spelling VIRI OR VIRII as the plural form of VIRUS then, over time it becomes the proper plural form. Unlike French, English has not governing authority on usage. Proper usage is what ever the common usage is. Words and usage can and do change in English even over a short period of time.
Just as with the iPod my bet is that this device will not be accessible to the blind or print disabled. How hard would it be to add DAISY http://www.daisy.org/ support to this. Daisy is the international standard for digital talking books produced by the various talking book libraries.
At some point organizations such as the National Federation of the Blind http://www.nfb.org/ are going to start to sue hardware makers, web sites and so on under the ADA for creating inaccessible products.
My bet is like the iPod there is no provision in this thing for the print disabled (blind or dyslexic) to be able to use it.
Really now how hard would it be to build DAISY http://www.daisy.org/ access into this, or other similar devices?
I suppose that we'll have to wait for the NFB http://www.nfb.org/ or the ACB http://www.acb.org/ to sue some hardware maker under the ADA before they will stop making these things that can't be used by the blind. That goes for Slashdot and it's imaged based posting requirement too.
Let's face ti folks Mane, New hampshire and vermont don't have very many cities but Google maps doesnt lable any of the ones that are there. As yo zoom in on nothern New England you will note that Portland, Bangor, Manchester and Burlington are not labled. Weld, Maine a town of fewer that 500 is put not Portland? what's with that?
Zoom in further and still these cities are not labled. What's going on? You have to be right on top of any of these cities before they get lables.
Well box office might be slow else where but in Casper, Wyoming it's doing very well indeed. (Insert jokes about nothing to do in Casper here.)
In a city/county of less than 60,000 people we have, count em folks, 17 screens. 13 of those screens are in our downtown core, two are in refitted classic theaters. All of the theaters have new sound and seating. The next closest screens to us are in Cheyenne nearly 200 miles away.
I predict here and now that it will be less than a month from the date of the release of MacOSX for intel before we are able to download a patch/hack to permit it to run on any PC clone.
My wife is blind and uses a dog. Seeing Eye Dogs do not, as some believe, lead the blind person to where they want to go. The blind must still know where they want to go and how to get there.
The dog simply helps them to avoid things like curbs, stairs and so on. It does so by simply stoping at them and waiting for the blind person to give them instructions as to what to do next.
It is perfetly possible to get lost with a dog.
We have seen all sorts devices of this type all the time canes with sonar, devices with GPS, you name it. The fact remains that nothing will ever subsitute for proper mobility training for the blind.
Go into the Mail folder of/Users/[yourusername here]/Library/Mail/Mail Bundles and remove any third party add on you may have.
Then restart Mail. It will then work. I found that an HTTP Mail bundle I had installed some time ago caused the new Mail app to do this. Once I removed it all was fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I write MacOS installer applications for time to time. When I do I try to always get by with the minimum of rights needed to to do the task. The MacOS installer applications give this option and if you need administrator or root right the OS will ask for the password each time the installer is run.
Doesn't Vista ask for the admin password before running an application in that level? Or does it drop into that level of access without asking first?
I tried this on MacOS X version 10.4.8 (the latest version) I could not make the mac respond to voice commands being played from the speakers or from patching the sound out into a iMic. Here is what I did.
1. Ran the voice command option and configured it as apple suggests.
2. Made sure that the voice command understood my command by issuing several and getting the correct replys back from the system.
3. Recorded the command "What time is it?"
4. Played back the command with voice commands on.
The mac did not respond. I then tried the same thing with a patch cable between the output and a iMic USB audio adapter. It still would not respond from the recording bout will respond to my voice. I have no idea how Apple is able to distinguish where the voice is coming from.
I have often wondered if eBay is being used for money laundering. Here's how it might work.
Let's say you have $10,000 to launder. Your in some country with loose banking laws and you want to get it into the U.S. So you have a confederate list on eBay an expensive item that does not have registration on it, boat and cars are out but diamonds and rare coins are useful.
Now there really isn't any goods being sold here just an eBay auction to provide cover for where this $10,00 came from. The auction is set to exist for the minimum amount of time to avoid any outsiders form bidding and the description and placement of the item is such that will make it unlikely to be discovered. You might also add some shill bids on the item to make it all look legit.
So now our person with the money (person 1) "bids" on the item which he wins. He then sends to his partner the "payment" the dirty money via PayPal. The 'buyer' person 1, then sets up a normal U.S. based PayPal account and then the process is reversed with another fake item listed this time the partner (person 2) bids and pays into the normal U.S. based account the $10,000, the money being laundered, that money is then removed and used as normal as it now has what would appear to be a perfectly reasonable source, the sale of an the "items" on eBay.
I have watched my wife for years struggle with telling one bill from another. Hardly a day goes by that she does not come to me to do the simple task of separating out bills. It about time this was done. Here's some simple ways that this might be accomplished.
Eliminate the $1 bill in favor of a $1 coin. That means we stop printing $1 bills. In a few months they will wear out and disappear. The reason $1 coins have never recived wide acceptance is that we keep printing the bills. Stop printing the bills and people will use the coins.
Change the dominate color of the bills, many blind persons can still detect color so if we have red $5, blue $10, green $20 Yellow $50 and white $100 many people could quickly tell.
Have the bill slightly different sizes as they increase in value.
Print in 10 point Helvetica type on each side of the bill the value of the note. So each note would have "five dollars" for example. This would permit the blind to use reading devices which are common in public libraries to read the bills many blind persons, including my wife, own such devices and there are portable ones as well. This would avoid having to purchase a special device just to read currency.
Braille on bills would seem to be problematic to me. How do we keep it from becoming crushed down and unreadable. Perhaps a Canadian here can tell us if this is an issue with their currency.
At the risk of starting another flame war about why we should care about the blind...This system is unusable by the blind using a screen reader. You are unable to detect the location of the "buttons". I tested it with both the MacOS built in screen reader (VoiceOver) and a window add on (Jaws) screen reader.
So, in the U.S.,unless your looking to have the National Federation of the Blind, American Council of the Blind or the Justice Department come after you in court you would be well advised not to implement it in a commercial setting unless you have an alternate means of providing services.
And no, providing a physical store thirty miles down the road is not an alternate means, the blind don't drive remeber?
Isn't this http://www.iptc.org/pages/index.php prior art?
Yes
If you want to try out what the online world is like for the blind and you have a Mac running OSX 10.4 or better you have a screen reader built into the OS. Here are the very simplified instructions for getting it running so you can test a website.
Make sure your using Safari as your browser.
Press command-F5, you will here the computer say "VoiceOver on"
You navigate using the control, option and arrow keys Hold down the control and option keys and then press the arrow keys to move through the controls.
When VoiceOver says "HTML content" press the control-option-shift-down arrow keys to interact with the content.
Now for the real test, control-option-shift-F11 will turn off the screen so you will learn what it is really like to try and navigate with out sight. pressing this command combination again will turn the screen back on.
To get to the menus do command-option-m once for the main menu, twice for the utility menu and three time for the spotlight menu.
Greg Kearney
Here is a test I have wanted to do. Simply carry a paperback copy of the Quran with you through a TSA checkpoint. My bet is that you will be "randomly" selected for extra screening everytime. I would try this myself but I have given up on domestic air travel using Amtrak instead. Amtrak doesn't shake down their customers treating them like criminals.
Separate the "player" from the "clicker" that is the person watching the ball is not the person with the ear piece who is making the bets. It would then be much harder for the casino to figure out how the better was placing the bets as he would not have the clicker and computer on his person. To go one step further it should be possible to break all three apart. the "clicker" watches the table and clicks the timing device, the "computer" sits at the bar and is not playing at all he is simply there to carry the computer, the "player" has the ear piece an make the bets based on the signal he gets from the computer.
The other aspect would be to use radio frequencies that are not normally used so that the Casinos would not likely be checking for them. You could even add further complications by using infrared to communicate between the clicker and the computer and radio between the computer and the player.
An even better approach would be for the player not to have an ear piece at all. As I understand it the computer does not predict a give number but only what part of the wheel the ball is most likely to fall into. So we could have a "clicker" communicating with a computer. The person with the computer then sends very subtle signals to the player by how he sits or stands. The player can watch for the signals without any devices on his person. If all this were done at a smaller casinos in say, a place like Elko, Nevada where the staff would not be as sophisticated as they would be in Las Vegas or Reno or Atlantic City, one might be able to pul it off.
February 17 Minister for Schools and Adult Education Ibrahim Baylan released the report "Ten myths about the Swedish school". The same day Jan Björklund, the Swedish Liberal Party's education spokeman counterattacked, with the report "Ten truths about the school".
According to today's industry willed Baylan placed forward a report about the school during the weekend as gone. Last Saturday the done party leader Lars Leijonborg and Minister for Schools and Adult Education challenging clean Jan Björklund an initiative about order in the school.
Ministers Jens Orback and Mona Sahlin presented last Friday a report "Sweden will at last a stem time country on the integration area". The Swedish Liberal Party came with a reply that same day, in the form of a statement of integration spokeman Mauricio Rojas and two reports writen by the Member of Parliament.
But both party press spokeman Johan Jakobsson and party leader Lars Leijonborg rejects all rumours about the use of internal information in order to plan initiatives in the campaign.
- I have looked the through initiatives and can not find any connections, the is clean chances, says Lars Laijonborg.
He may medhåll of your partisekreterare
- we do test initiatives each day so the is a clean coincidence, orders Johan Jakobsson SvD.se.
I am amazed at the number of these networks both closed and open. I recently did a bit of war driving in my town of Casper, Wyoming a working class city of 60,000 which is not near any other city. I plotted the resutls to a google map https://home.wmcnet.org/services/wifi/ while the results are not complete, I have only covered a part of the city, they do show that it is almost impossible to find a residential location which does not have access to an open wifi network. This in a small city in an isolated corner of the United States. what must the network maps look like in bigger more prosperous communities?
While it may be the case that the EEOC laws do not deal with education they clearly do deal with disability. If those computerized application devices can't be used by the blind, and I have never seen one that can be used by the blind, then the companies had better have some means for the blind to be able to apply or that is a violation of the EEOC laws.
Ok. THIS IS IT!
If everyone starts using the spelling VIRI OR VIRII as the plural form of VIRUS then, over time it becomes the proper plural form. Unlike French, English has not governing authority on usage. Proper usage is what ever the common usage is. Words and usage can and do change in English even over a short period of time.
Next meeting you have try out the Meeting Cost Calculator http://w3.wmcnet.org/meetingcalc/
Of course you can always use User Agent Switcher http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/
in Firefox to make the site think your using IE.
Just as with the iPod my bet is that this device will not be accessible to the blind or print disabled. How hard would it be to add DAISY http://www.daisy.org/ support to this. Daisy is the international standard for digital talking books produced by the various talking book libraries.
At some point organizations such as the National Federation of the Blind http://www.nfb.org/ are going to start to sue hardware makers, web sites and so on under the ADA for creating inaccessible products.
My bet is like the iPod there is no provision in this thing for the print disabled (blind or dyslexic) to be able to use it.
Really now how hard would it be to build DAISY http://www.daisy.org/ access into this, or other similar devices?
I suppose that we'll have to wait for the NFB http://www.nfb.org/ or the ACB http://www.acb.org/ to sue some hardware maker under the ADA before they will stop making these things that can't be used by the blind. That goes for Slashdot and it's imaged based posting requirement too.
Let's face ti folks Mane, New hampshire and vermont don't have very many cities but Google maps doesnt lable any of the ones that are there. As yo zoom in on nothern New England you will note that Portland, Bangor, Manchester and Burlington are not labled. Weld, Maine a town of fewer that 500 is put not Portland? what's with that?
Zoom in further and still these cities are not labled. What's going on? You have to be right on top of any of these cities before they get lables.
Well box office might be slow else where but in Casper, Wyoming it's doing very well indeed. (Insert jokes about nothing to do in Casper here.)
In a city/county of less than 60,000 people we have, count em folks, 17 screens. 13 of those screens are in our downtown core, two are in refitted classic theaters. All of the theaters have new sound and seating. The next closest screens to us are in Cheyenne nearly 200 miles away.
Price of a first run movie is $8.00 here.
I predict here and now that it will be less than a month from the date of the release of MacOSX for intel before we are able to download a patch/hack to permit it to run on any PC clone.
While few remeber it there really was a game called SimEarth.
My wife is blind and uses a dog. Seeing Eye Dogs do not, as some believe, lead the blind person to where they want to go. The blind must still know where they want to go and how to get there.
The dog simply helps them to avoid things like curbs, stairs and so on. It does so by simply stoping at them and waiting for the blind person to give them instructions as to what to do next.
It is perfetly possible to get lost with a dog.
We have seen all sorts devices of this type all the time canes with sonar, devices with GPS, you name it. The fact remains that nothing will ever subsitute for proper mobility training for the blind.
Go into the Mail folder of /Users/[yourusername here]/Library/Mail/Mail Bundles and remove any third party add on you may have.
Then restart Mail. It will then work. I found that an HTTP Mail bundle I had installed some time ago caused the new Mail app to do this. Once I removed it all was fine.
Good points.