Unfortunately, you don't have to wait for a particularly repressive official to get persecuted by such laws. You just have to be somebody with no political clout.
Classic case: not so long go, most states had laws against "sodomy" — basically, oral or anal sex. Theoretically, this law applied to everybody, but in practice it only got applied to gays. (Well, also rapists, but there it was just used to add counts to the existing charge.) Eventually, most states repealed these laws, but even the liberal Warren court refused to find this hypocrisy unconstitutional. Curiously enough, the remaining anti-sodomy laws were finally thrown out by the hyper-conservative Roberts court. That probably says a lot about the change in attitude towards homosexuality during that time period.
Westlaw says that the cited statute dates back to 1951, when a lot of anti-Communist statutes were being enacted nationwide.
When I went to college in the 70s, I had a number of jobs at the same state U I was attending. All University employees, including me, were required to sign an oath that they were "not a member of the Communist Party or any other organization which advocates the overthrow of the Government by force or violence". Naturally, I had to wonder what kind of namby-pamby insurrectionists Moscow was infiltrating our way, if they were willing to violently overthrow the government, but not lie about their willingness to do so!
This is not quite a dead issue. Quite recently, a Quaker hired to teach remedial math at Cal State East Bay lost her job after somebody noticed that she'd amended the mandatory oath she'd signed when she was hired. (The oath requires the signer to "support and defend" the California and U.S,. constitutions; not wanting to violate her religious principles, she'd inserted the word "nonviolently".) She was eventually rehired after the usual legal squabble, which ended with the state AG ruling that the unamended oath did not obligated the signer to do military service!
it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out.
Did you miss the part about networks being overwhelmed and major fight over who pays for the bandwidth? That's pretty major. Maybe not "dominating", but that's your word.
If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity and allowing children everywhere to get their homework done on time, there wouldn't be so much of a change.
Have you been following the news at all over the last two years? Just a few days ago, the FDIC felt compelled to rebut corruption allegations in a viral video. Other such videos has successfully promoted or destroyed movies, more or less put ACORN out of business, and a lot more. There are niche video stars who now make a living doing with schticks that nobody would have heard of without YouTube. Meanwhile, TV ratings continue to shrink...
There are also (sit down, this might be a bit of a shock) lots and lots of people who rarely, if ever visit youtube.
So? There are also lots of people who still don't have cell phones. In both cases, it's a reasonable choice, but it's not the way things are trending.
Besides the fact there are a lot of people that aren't convicted criminals that can't find work that don't resort to crime, but this guy had a job and chose to abuse that trust.
Did you even bother to read my post before writing that? Because you're just repeating the argument I was trying to shoot down.
you get convicted of stealing cash from the register what company in their right mind will hire you and why should they?
If that were true, then the recidivism rate would be 100%. But it's not, and never has been.
So, when a criminal does his time, gets out, and can't find a job, your only response is, "It's your own fault." That's just stupid.
There seems to be a widespread belief that if you have a social problem, all you need to do is find somebody to blame. As when ex-cons can't find work: it's their own fault for breaking the law. Moral myopia aside, that just doesn't work out. If a criminal has no chance to "go straight" you're guaranteeing that he'll go on comiting crimes.
Yeah, yeah, many ex-cons will do that no matter what. But does that mean we have to make it their only choice? Perhaps helping them find lawful alternatives sticks in your self-righteous craw, but ask yourself, is that any worse than paying the huge costs (about $22K per prisoner per year) of an ever-growing prison population? Not to mention the huge economic and human costs of the crimes this culture of punishment is facilitating.
I didn't say the flight was nonstop. Flights from the U.S. west coast to India can easily take 24 hours, including time for a refueling stop. And that's if both ends of the trip are major travel hubs. If you leaving from or going to the boonies, add an hour or two, and maybe a lot more if you have to wait on a connection.
Are we having the same conversation? We're not talking about electronic entertainment in general, we're talking about e-readers. One of the limitations of an n900 is that you can't use it to read DRMed content. When I go on a very long plane ride, I take a lot of reading material, and it would be nice to save the bulk of books. Any device with a screen and lot of memory saves you the bulk, but unless you have some kind of DRM support, you're stuck with free (or "liberated") content, and for a long trip that won't cut it.
Reading stuff with graphics that won't fit on that tiny display.
Being able to use your reader during a prolonged separation from any power source. The N800 does do extremely well, but not the thousands of page turns (independent of time) that you get with an electrophoretic display.
Reading stuff that isn't available without DRM. Forget the religious issues for a minute: if you're on a 24-hour plane ride, you're soon going to get tired of reading what's available for free. It's good for distracting yourself for brief periods (and the main reason I pay those extortionate 3G data charges), but for serious anti-boredom, I want something that you have to pay for — which is never going to be available without DRM of some kind.
Right now I make do with a smart phone and a tablet computer for portable reading — but if I traveled more, I'd buy a Kindle faster than you can say "Best Seller" and screw the cost.
Dude, you just proved my point: if you dismiss anybody who disagrees with you as a liar and/or a moron, then a snarky comeback is an acceptable alternative to an actual argument.
Yours doesn't even make sense: ever since the neocons bullied everybody into accepting their terminology, "liberal" has been a dirty word. So an accusation of "liberal in name only" doesn't carry much weight.
Wrong! Conservatives of all types constantly debate and fight among inner circles.
There are conservatives that do that. They'd be among those that have retained my respect. Sometimes they even manage to change my lefty-liberal mind about things.
Then there are those conservatives who only know how to attack anybody who disagrees with them. They do not concede that anybody can honestly and intelligently hold contrary views: people with opinions they don't like are liars, stupid, or both. And they will never allow such a person the label "conservative", no matter how many conservative opinions they have — at best they're "conservative in name only." Our own Pudge is a prime example.
From where I stand, this second kind pretty much dominates conservative political groups and media right now.
You're right. Still, I seem to recall that ][s being used in a business environment always had a Z80 card. The CPU was more advanced than the Apple's 6502 (no hardware multiplication or division!), CP/M was more advanced than AppleDOS, and there was a lot of business and programming software for CP/M that never got ported to AppleDOS.
They always knew it was important. My point is that they've never been very good at dealing with business needs. The/// is a case in point: it was specifically designed for business, but was actually less popular with them than the ][.
I agree, except you have one thing backward. It's not that big business isn't a market they want. On the contrary, they've made many attempts to penetrate this market. Why even bother to have a rack mount server if you don't care about business customers? Or sophisticated internet technologies?
It's the other way around. Apple tries to sell to big business, but they pretty thoroughly suck at it. So a sort of economic Darwinism guarantees that the only Apple products that succeed are ones that sell well to individuals and small organizations. In other words, the person who uses the product is either the same person who makes the purchase decision, or has a lot of direct influence over that person.
That tends to slant their product line towards kewlness. But not always. Apple's first really successful product was the Apple ][. Note that this is not a proto-Mac, it's a proto-PC. Note the open bus, which encouraged the creation of third-party hardware extensions. This is the basic design paradigm that almost all desktop computers (and a lot of servers) follow to this very day. It's a good utilitarian system, like something from Dell, not a sleek, sexy proto-iMac.
Geeks know the ][ because it was a great hacking platform. But geeks didn't drive its success, business did. When business people discovered that they could pop in a Z80 card, run Visicalc, and do really sophisticated financial projections without hiring a programmer, they had to have them. It pretty much created the business PC market.
But if the ][ created the market, why didn't it create the market lock-in that the IBM PC did a little later? Because the biggest consumer of computing is big business, and Apple simply didn't know how to sell to them. I don't mean bad salesmanship, I mean they literally didn't have the ability to integrate and distribute them in the quantities large business would have needed. So Fortune 500 companies would go to Apple and say, "please sell us 1,000 Apple ][s with Z80 cards, disk drives, and monitors" and Apple would simply have no way of filling the order. All they knew how to do was to ship out job lots to their wholesalers, none of whom were set up to integrate systems this way.
Apple did develop better business-oriented sales channels eventually, but their ability to create stuff that businesses want is still pretty limited.
Let's get our terminology of repression straight. The Ministry of Truth, as every fan of George Orwell knows, is in charge of lies. In other words, they do propaganda. Mind control is under the Ministry of Love.
I'm not saying your usage is erroneous. In some contexts it does make sense. This just isn't one of them. When you use language, you need to be sensitive to context, you can't just blinding plug in whatever definition suits you.
You seem to think that "art" refers to something that is fundamentally mysterious. A lot of art is, but that's not an intrinsic feature. The word itself has a lot different meanings. Here are some of the most fundamental, from the Oxford English Dictionary.
1. Skill in doing something, esp. as the result of knowledge or practice.
2. Skill in the practical application of the principles of a particular field of knowledge or learning; technical skill. Ob
3. As a count noun.
a. A practical application of knowledge; (hence) something which can be achieved or understood by the employment of skill and knowledge...
b. A practical pursuit or trade of a skilled nature, a craft; an activity that can be achieved or mastered by the application of specialist skills...
c. A company of craftsmen; a guild.
4. With modifying word or words denoting skill in a particular craft, profession, or other sphere of activity.
5. An acquired ability of any kind; a skill at doing a specified thing, typically acquired through study and practice; a knack. Freq. in the art of —.
Before you can offer an informed opinion as to what is and is not engineering, you need to read something by Henry Petroski. He defines it as "the art of rearranging the materials and forces of nature".
That said, I agree with you that ending the War on Drugs would eliminate our prison overcrowding problem. But the drug trade is, by its nature, violent.
The rapper/actor Ice-T made a very good point about this once. He admitted to an interviewer that he used to be involved in unspecified criminal enterprises. (Ironically, he now plays a cop on TV!) The interviewer asked him if his crimes were violent or non-violent. He responded that all profitable criminal activity is violent, because you have to use violence to keep your profits.
And though he didn't say this, you can see that the WoD is what makes the drug trade so obscenely profitable, and therefore violent. It never manages to wipe out the trade completely, only busting the smaller drug rings that would bring drug prices down if they were allowed to compete with the cartels.
It's "the" issue if you're talking about Sun's self-destruction. Except I was talking about why Oracle fired the people who did Linux accessibility (see TFA).
But since you raise the issue, I might as well address it. You're making the standard mistake about Sun's business model and why that model failed. Because Sun mostly made the news when something happened with its software initiatives, people tend to assume that software was the core of the business model, and the failure of these software initiatives was the direct cause of the failure of the business model.
One little detail: Sun was never a software company. They did software, and they had dreams of being a major player in the software arena. But all their attempts to realize these dreams failed, and their original hardware business was always crucial to their business model. This gets obscured because hardware doesn't make big news.
A few years ago, Sun released the X4600, which at the time was the most powerful 4 rack-unit x64 server on the market. (It was only recently supplanted — by another Sun product; I was the docs lead for both.) You probably never heard of the X4600 — 4U servers are just not that newsworthy. But it was a big profit center for Sun. Being able to cram more processing power into less rack space is a big deal for today's overcrowded data centers.
(It could have been even bigger if Sun's marketing and sales organization had ever come to terms with the fact that SPARC-based systems were a non-sell for most customers. Instead, they kept trying to sell SPARC boxes to people who didn't want them, and x64 systems never accounted for more than a small part of Sun's sales, despite the huge amounts Sun spent to move into this product area. I expect this to change under Oracle: SPARC systems will only be marketed to customers for whom they make sense, and other customers will no longer be told that they need to abandon their huge investments in x86 technology.)
Sun failed because their hardware business model failed; the failure of their software businesses hurt (and could have helped if they'd been successful) but were never crucial to the survival of the company.
It seems like every time I hear from you you pose a false dichotomy. Not that it really matters, since my post was only half serious. But branding is a kind of strategy, which manipulates the consumer's perception of the product. And that's what you just described.
I agree, the headline's wrong. But not about what got broken. When did Sun ever make a "commitment to accessibility"?
Here's what they did have: their perpetual fantasy that they could come up with a desktop that would challenge Windows. Their latest form of this fantasy was Java Desktop System, which actually has nothing to do with Java. It's just a rebranded GNOME, ported to Solaris. When I was at Sun, Sun Rays running JDS were all over the place, and JDS was heavily pushed at our customers. Though even within Sun, use of Windows or Mac PCs (usually laptops) got more and more pervasive.
JDS has to comply with federal accessibility rules, or nobody will buy it. (Nobody bought it anyway, but that's another issue.) So Sun needs GNOME to have good accessibility support. Presumably that's why Sun started contributing accessibility development. That's how all corporate contributions to OS projects happen — it isn't generosity, it's the contributor needing the product to do something it doesn't already do.
I haven't seen any announcement, but it's to be expected that Oracle will finally put an end to this expensive and futile quest for a Windows-killer. Which is why you can't find JDS anywhere on oracle.com. (The old JDS page on sun.com redirects to Oracle's Solaris page.) If Oracle doesn't need JDS, then they don't need accessibility software.
One of many Sun windmill-tilting projects that are getting the axe.
You've heard of the novel "1984"? I don't think I've ever met anybody who didn't. Executive summary: big mean people run the world, control people's minds with lies, propaganda, and general meanness. There's a lot more to the novel than that, but that's usually all anybody cares to know about, along with conflating the imaginary dictatorship in the novel with whatever government you like least — the commies if you're an anti-commie, or the U.S. government if you're pissed off about red light cameras.
So Apple came out with a wonderful new product in 1984, and that proves that the novel was wrong. No more to it than that.
No, I did mean "get out more", hopefully to interact with non-geeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, you don't have to wait for a particularly repressive official to get persecuted by such laws. You just have to be somebody with no political clout.
Classic case: not so long go, most states had laws against "sodomy" — basically, oral or anal sex. Theoretically, this law applied to everybody, but in practice it only got applied to gays. (Well, also rapists, but there it was just used to add counts to the existing charge.) Eventually, most states repealed these laws, but even the liberal Warren court refused to find this hypocrisy unconstitutional. Curiously enough, the remaining anti-sodomy laws were finally thrown out by the hyper-conservative Roberts court. That probably says a lot about the change in attitude towards homosexuality during that time period.
Westlaw says that the cited statute dates back to 1951, when a lot of anti-Communist statutes were being enacted nationwide.
When I went to college in the 70s, I had a number of jobs at the same state U I was attending. All University employees, including me, were required to sign an oath that they were "not a member of the Communist Party or any other organization which advocates the overthrow of the Government by force or violence". Naturally, I had to wonder what kind of namby-pamby insurrectionists Moscow was infiltrating our way, if they were willing to violently overthrow the government, but not lie about their willingness to do so!
This is not quite a dead issue. Quite recently, a Quaker hired to teach remedial math at Cal State East Bay lost her job after somebody noticed that she'd amended the mandatory oath she'd signed when she was hired. (The oath requires the signer to "support and defend" the California and U.S,. constitutions; not wanting to violate her religious principles, she'd inserted the word "nonviolently".) She was eventually rehired after the usual legal squabble, which ended with the state AG ruling that the unamended oath did not obligated the signer to do military service!
Did you miss the part about networks being overwhelmed and major fight over who pays for the bandwidth? That's pretty major. Maybe not "dominating", but that's your word.
If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity and allowing children everywhere to get their homework done on time, there wouldn't be so much of a change.
Have you been following the news at all over the last two years? Just a few days ago, the FDIC felt compelled to rebut corruption allegations in a viral video. Other such videos has successfully promoted or destroyed movies, more or less put ACORN out of business, and a lot more. There are niche video stars who now make a living doing with schticks that nobody would have heard of without YouTube. Meanwhile, TV ratings continue to shrink...
There are also (sit down, this might be a bit of a shock) lots and lots of people who rarely, if ever visit youtube.
So? There are also lots of people who still don't have cell phones. In both cases, it's a reasonable choice, but it's not the way things are trending.
Besides the fact there are a lot of people that aren't convicted criminals that can't find work that don't resort to crime, but this guy had a job and chose to abuse that trust.
Did you even bother to read my post before writing that? Because you're just repeating the argument I was trying to shoot down.
you get convicted of stealing cash from the register what company in their right mind will hire you and why should they?
If that were true, then the recidivism rate would be 100%. But it's not, and never has been.
So, when a criminal does his time, gets out, and can't find a job, your only response is, "It's your own fault." That's just stupid.
There seems to be a widespread belief that if you have a social problem, all you need to do is find somebody to blame. As when ex-cons can't find work: it's their own fault for breaking the law. Moral myopia aside, that just doesn't work out. If a criminal has no chance to "go straight" you're guaranteeing that he'll go on comiting crimes.
Yeah, yeah, many ex-cons will do that no matter what. But does that mean we have to make it their only choice? Perhaps helping them find lawful alternatives sticks in your self-righteous craw, but ask yourself, is that any worse than paying the huge costs (about $22K per prisoner per year) of an ever-growing prison population? Not to mention the huge economic and human costs of the crimes this culture of punishment is facilitating.
I didn't say the flight was nonstop. Flights from the U.S. west coast to India can easily take 24 hours, including time for a refueling stop. And that's if both ends of the trip are major travel hubs. If you leaving from or going to the boonies, add an hour or two, and maybe a lot more if you have to wait on a connection.
Are we having the same conversation? We're not talking about electronic entertainment in general, we're talking about e-readers. One of the limitations of an n900 is that you can't use it to read DRMed content. When I go on a very long plane ride, I take a lot of reading material, and it would be nice to save the bulk of books. Any device with a screen and lot of memory saves you the bulk, but unless you have some kind of DRM support, you're stuck with free (or "liberated") content, and for a long trip that won't cut it.
That's fine, as long as you don't care about:
Right now I make do with a smart phone and a tablet computer for portable reading — but if I traveled more, I'd buy a Kindle faster than you can say "Best Seller" and screw the cost.
My quip about politics was meant as a joke. It was not meant as a personal attack. I'm sorry if it offended.
In the future, you might consider saying "I take offense at" instead of going on the offensive yourself.
Dude, you just proved my point: if you dismiss anybody who disagrees with you as a liar and/or a moron, then a snarky comeback is an acceptable alternative to an actual argument.
Yours doesn't even make sense: ever since the neocons bullied everybody into accepting their terminology, "liberal" has been a dirty word. So an accusation of "liberal in name only" doesn't carry much weight.
Wrong! Conservatives of all types constantly debate and fight among inner circles.
There are conservatives that do that. They'd be among those that have retained my respect. Sometimes they even manage to change my lefty-liberal mind about things.
Then there are those conservatives who only know how to attack anybody who disagrees with them. They do not concede that anybody can honestly and intelligently hold contrary views: people with opinions they don't like are liars, stupid, or both. And they will never allow such a person the label "conservative", no matter how many conservative opinions they have — at best they're "conservative in name only." Our own Pudge is a prime example.
From where I stand, this second kind pretty much dominates conservative political groups and media right now.
RTFA, snarkhead.
We're in flame mode, I see. When you grow up, you'll discover that people can disagree with you without attacking you.
You're right. Still, I seem to recall that ][s being used in a business environment always had a Z80 card. The CPU was more advanced than the Apple's 6502 (no hardware multiplication or division!), CP/M was more advanced than AppleDOS, and there was a lot of business and programming software for CP/M that never got ported to AppleDOS.
They always knew it was important. My point is that they've never been very good at dealing with business needs. The /// is a case in point: it was specifically designed for business, but was actually less popular with them than the ][.
I agree, except you have one thing backward. It's not that big business isn't a market they want. On the contrary, they've made many attempts to penetrate this market. Why even bother to have a rack mount server if you don't care about business customers? Or sophisticated internet technologies?
It's the other way around. Apple tries to sell to big business, but they pretty thoroughly suck at it. So a sort of economic Darwinism guarantees that the only Apple products that succeed are ones that sell well to individuals and small organizations. In other words, the person who uses the product is either the same person who makes the purchase decision, or has a lot of direct influence over that person.
That tends to slant their product line towards kewlness. But not always. Apple's first really successful product was the Apple ][. Note that this is not a proto-Mac, it's a proto-PC. Note the open bus, which encouraged the creation of third-party hardware extensions. This is the basic design paradigm that almost all desktop computers (and a lot of servers) follow to this very day. It's a good utilitarian system, like something from Dell, not a sleek, sexy proto-iMac.
Geeks know the ][ because it was a great hacking platform. But geeks didn't drive its success, business did. When business people discovered that they could pop in a Z80 card, run Visicalc, and do really sophisticated financial projections without hiring a programmer, they had to have them. It pretty much created the business PC market.
But if the ][ created the market, why didn't it create the market lock-in that the IBM PC did a little later? Because the biggest consumer of computing is big business, and Apple simply didn't know how to sell to them. I don't mean bad salesmanship, I mean they literally didn't have the ability to integrate and distribute them in the quantities large business would have needed. So Fortune 500 companies would go to Apple and say, "please sell us 1,000 Apple ][s with Z80 cards, disk drives, and monitors" and Apple would simply have no way of filling the order. All they knew how to do was to ship out job lots to their wholesalers, none of whom were set up to integrate systems this way.
Apple did develop better business-oriented sales channels eventually, but their ability to create stuff that businesses want is still pretty limited.
Let's get our terminology of repression straight. The Ministry of Truth, as every fan of George Orwell knows, is in charge of lies. In other words, they do propaganda. Mind control is under the Ministry of Love.
I'm not saying your usage is erroneous. In some contexts it does make sense. This just isn't one of them. When you use language, you need to be sensitive to context, you can't just blinding plug in whatever definition suits you.
Unless you're in politics, of course...
You seem to think that "art" refers to something that is fundamentally mysterious. A lot of art is, but that's not an intrinsic feature. The word itself has a lot different meanings. Here are some of the most fundamental, from the Oxford English Dictionary.
1. Skill in doing something, esp. as the result of knowledge or practice.
2. Skill in the practical application of the principles of a particular field of knowledge or learning; technical skill. Ob
3. As a count noun.
a. A practical application of knowledge; (hence) something which can be achieved or understood by the employment of skill and knowledge...
b. A practical pursuit or trade of a skilled nature, a craft; an activity that can be achieved or mastered by the application of specialist skills...
c. A company of craftsmen; a guild.
4. With modifying word or words denoting skill in a particular craft, profession, or other sphere of activity.
5. An acquired ability of any kind; a skill at doing a specified thing, typically acquired through study and practice; a knack. Freq. in the art of —.
Before you can offer an informed opinion as to what is and is not engineering, you need to read something by Henry Petroski. He defines it as "the art of rearranging the materials and forces of nature".
Sorry, that's wrong. Non-violent offenders only account for 1/3 of the prison population.
http://www.november.org/razorwire/rzold/20/20021
That said, I agree with you that ending the War on Drugs would eliminate our prison overcrowding problem. But the drug trade is, by its nature, violent.
The rapper/actor Ice-T made a very good point about this once. He admitted to an interviewer that he used to be involved in unspecified criminal enterprises. (Ironically, he now plays a cop on TV!) The interviewer asked him if his crimes were violent or non-violent. He responded that all profitable criminal activity is violent, because you have to use violence to keep your profits.
And though he didn't say this, you can see that the WoD is what makes the drug trade so obscenely profitable, and therefore violent. It never manages to wipe out the trade completely, only busting the smaller drug rings that would bring drug prices down if they were allowed to compete with the cartels.
It's "the" issue if you're talking about Sun's self-destruction. Except I was talking about why Oracle fired the people who did Linux accessibility (see TFA).
But since you raise the issue, I might as well address it. You're making the standard mistake about Sun's business model and why that model failed. Because Sun mostly made the news when something happened with its software initiatives, people tend to assume that software was the core of the business model, and the failure of these software initiatives was the direct cause of the failure of the business model.
One little detail: Sun was never a software company. They did software, and they had dreams of being a major player in the software arena. But all their attempts to realize these dreams failed, and their original hardware business was always crucial to their business model. This gets obscured because hardware doesn't make big news.
A few years ago, Sun released the X4600, which at the time was the most powerful 4 rack-unit x64 server on the market. (It was only recently supplanted — by another Sun product; I was the docs lead for both.) You probably never heard of the X4600 — 4U servers are just not that newsworthy. But it was a big profit center for Sun. Being able to cram more processing power into less rack space is a big deal for today's overcrowded data centers.
(It could have been even bigger if Sun's marketing and sales organization had ever come to terms with the fact that SPARC-based systems were a non-sell for most customers. Instead, they kept trying to sell SPARC boxes to people who didn't want them, and x64 systems never accounted for more than a small part of Sun's sales, despite the huge amounts Sun spent to move into this product area. I expect this to change under Oracle: SPARC systems will only be marketed to customers for whom they make sense, and other customers will no longer be told that they need to abandon their huge investments in x86 technology.)
Sun failed because their hardware business model failed; the failure of their software businesses hurt (and could have helped if they'd been successful) but were never crucial to the survival of the company.
It seems like every time I hear from you you pose a false dichotomy. Not that it really matters, since my post was only half serious. But branding is a kind of strategy, which manipulates the consumer's perception of the product. And that's what you just described.
I agree, the headline's wrong. But not about what got broken. When did Sun ever make a "commitment to accessibility"?
Here's what they did have: their perpetual fantasy that they could come up with a desktop that would challenge Windows. Their latest form of this fantasy was Java Desktop System, which actually has nothing to do with Java. It's just a rebranded GNOME, ported to Solaris. When I was at Sun, Sun Rays running JDS were all over the place, and JDS was heavily pushed at our customers. Though even within Sun, use of Windows or Mac PCs (usually laptops) got more and more pervasive.
JDS has to comply with federal accessibility rules, or nobody will buy it. (Nobody bought it anyway, but that's another issue.) So Sun needs GNOME to have good accessibility support. Presumably that's why Sun started contributing accessibility development. That's how all corporate contributions to OS projects happen — it isn't generosity, it's the contributor needing the product to do something it doesn't already do.
I haven't seen any announcement, but it's to be expected that Oracle will finally put an end to this expensive and futile quest for a Windows-killer. Which is why you can't find JDS anywhere on oracle.com. (The old JDS page on sun.com redirects to Oracle's Solaris page.) If Oracle doesn't need JDS, then they don't need accessibility software.
One of many Sun windmill-tilting projects that are getting the axe.
I guess I just don't know how to think different. BTW, does anybody know what model Mac the Mahatma used?
You've heard of the novel "1984"? I don't think I've ever met anybody who didn't. Executive summary: big mean people run the world, control people's minds with lies, propaganda, and general meanness. There's a lot more to the novel than that, but that's usually all anybody cares to know about, along with conflating the imaginary dictatorship in the novel with whatever government you like least — the commies if you're an anti-commie, or the U.S. government if you're pissed off about red light cameras.
So Apple came out with a wonderful new product in 1984, and that proves that the novel was wrong. No more to it than that.
No, I did mean "get out more", hopefully to interact with non-geeks.