"Among them were Nobel-prize winning authors Seamus Heaney from Ireland "
Since when did the opinions of this little twerp matter?
Have you heard the verbal diarrhoea that "Famous Seamus" (as he is known in the poetic community) spouts?
Great poet he might be but some of his ramblings of various important political subjects of the day are barely coherent
And this man wants to set the agenda in the feild of intellectual property?
Be afraid, be very afraid...
On a point of definition for those who did not have the benefit of growing up in a rabidly religious community (as I did) who thought of the Revd Iain Paisley (UK/.ers will know all about this guy) as a "right on caring, sharing individual" (I kid you not).
The word which we translate as "fool" refers not to someone who is rather deficient in the clue department but rather to someone who is deficient in the morals department. I suppose in modern English it might be similar to referring to someone as a wanker.
Not that I have any problem with wanking you understand...:)
Speaking as a published author I can tell you that there is nothing that can replace the feel and smell and the sense of achievment when holding the first copy of your book.
That will be difficult to replace. Perhaps my views will change with the introduction and widespread use of the technology. I am willing to bet that it won't.
Books are created objects. The act of creating a dead tree based book is just as much a creative act as writing the thing in the first place. I think authors may be unwilling to give up this experience anytime soon
My euro0.02 worth anyway
Ian
Further information on this poster's latest book "Love,Sex,Death and Carrots" (ISBN 0 9521295 1 5) may be obtained by e-mailing interchangebwn@hotmail.com
I went out and found a soft toy which looked remarkably like my GF's (rather unusual) hearing dog, Jess. Stuffed it into a box with a sticker saying "Caution: Small dog in transit" - The post office must have shaken it and decided that it was either dead or not a real dog as the package arrived unmolested.
Oh and not forgetting the handmade card:)
Aparently both the GF and Jess liked it.
And this is my pathetic attempt to make up for not being around on the day itself. I am not worthy of her.
We should be making sites accessible to disabled people because firstly it is fundamentally the right thing to do. It is a matter of human rights.
We're not allowed to hang up signs any more (thankfully) which bar black people from certain drinking establishments or busses but when you exclude a disabled person from one of society's functions then you're just doing the same thing. Except you picked a different minority.
If you accept, as I do, this point of view then chickening out because "it's difficult" is not an option.
I'm probably being melodramatic here but what the hell, I'm part of an oppressed minority... Where would be be in the world if Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King had claimed "it's too hard"?
Watch out for us crips. We coming and we're damned angry!
BTW I may refer to myself as a crip, you, dear reader, may not.
Secondly there is an economic argument here. Here in Britain there are 6.2 million disabled people with 33 billions pounds to spend (I can't speak for the USA) and anyone who regularly excludes those people is likely to make less money than somone who does not exclude them. Excluding 6.2 million potential customers (UK only) seems to indicate a paucity in the clue department.
Thirdly, it's not hard.
Good design for disabled people is good design period. And this doesn't just refer to websites either.
Installing a ramp or having level access into your premises not only makes it accessible for people who use a wheelchair, it helps the photocopier engineer or the guy taking out the trash. It might just save you from a lawsuit or two.
It doesn't take much to make a site accessible for disabled people, this is not rocket science were talking about. Just follow the guidlines and after a while it just comes naturally.
How difficult can it be to use ALT tags when specifying an image? Or to ensure that you don't use colour alone to convey information and some other such blindingly obvious "tricks"
Judging by some of the sites I've auditted it's nigh on impossible!
It takes mere seconds to run a page through an accessibility checker like Bobby at http://www.cast.org/bobby/
[Begin Sermon]
Please do not refer to my community as "the disabled". We are disabled people, and everytime someone talks about disability issues without mentioning the word people then we as a society forget just a tiny bit more that this is a people issue.
If we keep forgetting hard enough and for long enough we'll be back to the dark days of the Third Reich where disabled people were shot, starved, experimented on like lab rats and then shot... The list goes on.
[End sermon - The preacher has left the building and was last seen planning mass civil disobedience with a bunch of fellow crips]
That does sound dangerous. 22 mph is a pretty fast clip. You could really get hurt. Try jumping out of your buddy's car at 22mph this weekend and see if you make it to work monday.
Falling off at 22 mph will hurt like a b@st@rd if you're dressed like the guy pictured with the article. You can expect to receive a fairly serious case of road rash which is deeply unpleasant - I know, I have intimate personal knowledge of the subject.
However the article was posted on the Motorcycle News web site so you could expect readers to have access to the appropriate protective clothing - Kneepads, spine and kidney protection vest, leathers (with armour) crash helmet etc.
However anyone wearing all this and riding this scooter thingy would look a total prat.
In a dedicated room in my house, I have put acoustic damping tile on the ceiling and the anachoic foam on the walls. On a budget, a mattress or cardboard eggcrate works as well.
This may be a bit excessive. It may be that previously the room was way too echoey and that these measures really are needed. However most people fall into the trap (as you might have done) of completely killing the reverb in the room.
This usually ends up producing really flat recordings which sound really quite odd. You then spend time putting back the reverb electronically which is costly and time consuming.
I might be wrong. This is not to be taken as hard criticism, it's just that I've seen this so often.
Decent microphones are fairly affordable. I don't mean the $50 budget mics, but the Shure SM58 and 58b series of mics go for under $200, and are the same microphones used both on the road and in the studio by a large number of bands.
The SM58 is NOT a recording microphone! They're brilliant live and I have and use a number of them myself. The SM58 is reliable and robust, it won't spring any surprises on you. To quote a TV ad from the UK..."It does exactly what it says on the tin"
I teach community courses on stage work and PA principles - you have no idea of the number of (talented) artists who are completely clue deficient when it comes to picking up and using a microphone - I always use an SM58 as it "looks like the microphones on TV" but I wouldn't want to use it in the studio.
I got mine at school.
It's a traditional Yorkshire (County[1]: Northern England) thing to simply add a Y to the end of any name to make it a nickname Hence I became Reedy.
I've since replaced the Y with an I to conform with various edicts on usernames in the companies I've worked for over the years.
Ian
[1] Some would say occupied nation. Are there many Yorkshire nationalists on/. ?
The following is not a joke. Minor changes have been made to protect the privacy of those too stupid for words.
I was sysadminning for a major UK law firm about 18 months ago when I learned of a case we were working on for an insurance company
It seems the insurance company were unwilling to pay for the loss of a 60000 tonne bulk cargo carrier which had run aground in the Carribean (in broad daylight, on a flat calm sea with unlimited visibility) because the captain was watching the GPS and not what was directly in front of the bows.
No need to go for such vuuting edge and expensive solutions.
I work to bring access solution to other disabled people and we often recommend the use of a device called a HeadMaster or the SEMERC head operated mouse (http://www.semerc.com) which costs GBP 199.00 in conjunction with an on screen keyboard.
Other solutions include a scanning keyboard/pointer controler using 1 or two switches, (eybrow switches, suck/puff devices etc). These can be set up for around GBP 200 to GBP 300
Access technologies do not have to be exotic or expensive or pinched from an attack helicopter.
The attitude that it has to be high tech is one of the reasons that disabled people are not getting the access solutions they need.
I am constantly faced by incredulous IT managers who seem to think that a GBP 200 solution cant be right because it only costs GBP 200 !
Try Ganetime International. They are a company offering fingerprint verification (or were doing so >3 years ago). They have a commercial interest but they seem to play cricket with a straight bat and they might be able to point you at some relevant research papers.
Contact details below
Worth an e-mail?
Oh and before anyone gets self righteous, no I don't work for them, own shares in them or anything like that.
Ganetime International
info@gane.co.uk
Gane International Ltd
29 Campus Road
Bradford Science Park
Bradford
BD7 1HR
UK
telephone: +44 (0)1274 732239
facsimile: +44 (0)1274 734428
OK there's probably gonna be a million posts saying the same thing but here's my £0.02 worth.
This "News" was reported by Tommorows World (UK science and tech TV magazine programme) about 10 years ago and I had a bit of a rant about it then.
Radio Amateurs have been doing this since Methuselah was a youngster. Meteor scatter transmissions have been going on around the world since at least the early sixties. Probably earlier, I'm not a radio historian
And while we're at it has anyone heard of packet radio? It's principles formed the basis of that little used and now largely irrelevant protocal know as IP.
It's even more strongly linked with the much hyped "new generation" of mobile phone services known as General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) which promises (but will not likely deliver) so much.
End of semi rant. Sorry folks.
Ian
Golf 1Charlie Foxtrot Tango - If it means anything.
Ex-Squeeze me ?
This is/. and we are teaching each other how to operate common search engines?
People who regard this as useful information should not under any circumstances be reading/.
If you want to read something beautiful then get yourself a library card.
I won't patronise you or the other/. readers by giving you a recommended list. I'll leave that to someone who will no doubt post as Anonymous Coward.
I surely hope not. The mess of standards (and frankly piss-poor coding)out there is already making life hard for a lot of people.
We can all make nice looking pages with a minimum of effort but people just putting in that minimum amount of effort is excluding many thousands of disabled users.
Browser-neutrality is vital to many disabled people who may be using alternative technologies to access the web.
Not closing off tables properly is a prime example. Failing to close off a table can confuse some screen reading software and render the page inaccessible to visually impaired people who use these methods.
Writing accessible pages is *not* rocket science, it has more to do with good coding than anything else.
The standards are published and freely available on the web. Just how long does it take to run a page through the appropriate validator?
I'm not inserting any links to validators, accessibility checking sites or W3C guidlines as anyone who is coding web-pages and doesn't already have the URLs engraved into their very souls shouldn't be coding web pages.
Ian
PS. See my profile for the basis of the above semi-rant.
I'd go for the projector every time. Especially at TV resulution and it gives you the option of getting *really* immersed in your favourite first person shooter.
You should go for the brightest projector you can find, > 2000 Lumens is good, just so you don't have to board up the windows to keep out the sunlight.
I've used projectors to do video backdrops for live performance poetry gigs and it sure is impressive.
I was fired (made redundant - the company was on the rocks) a few years ago from what would these days be called a dot-com startup (it was a telecoms setup). I understood by the need to escort me from the premises - I was after all in charge of the corporate network - but the real downer was not being allowed to take my company car which I was contractually entitled to for a month after dismissal.
"We'll take you to a train station and by you a ticket to wherever you want to go" said the finance director.
"Fine" said I
We duly proceeded - with the finance director driving MY car - to Reading (UK) train station whereupon the finance director got out. I pretended to fiddle with my seatbelt and when he'd got out I clamped the security lock around the gear leaver and handbrake (stick shift and parking brake for our USAnian readers) and stuffed the key into my y-fronts.
It was childish I know but I had the greatest sense of release when I chucked they key out of the train window fifty miles north.
Hmmm, I learned both (at my UK schools and colleges -I'm 31). I had a b*stard of a physics master who set us questions like "What is the speed of light in furlongs per fornight".[1] or "express standard air pressure as micro-pascals per cricket-wicket"[2]
This left me with a very strange mindset where when driving I think of (and can see) distances in metres but when I look out into the back yard I observe that it is 10 yards + two feet long.
My whatsit is x inches long [3] but the Leatherman Wave attached to my belt is y centimetres long.
One can mix systems but care is necessary.
NASA please note 9" != 9cm
Ian
Footnotes:
[1] The solution is left as an exercise for the reader.
[2] ONLY a Brit (or possibly a West Indian) could answer this #8-)
Some people swear by it.
If you want a white noise generator then find a local hearing aid supplier or your national organisation for Deaf people. Some Deaf people find that white noise helps to mask the effects of Tunnitus.
These units usually have other sounds such as "thunderstorm", "falling raindrops", "heartbeats" (sorry I'm reading from the catalogue as I type) and such like. They're generally battery powered.
Expect to pay GBP25 for basic to GBP70 for more exotic sounds.
Expect to pay GBP65-70 if you want a headphone socket, mains power and a timer which switches it off.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when did the opinions of this little twerp matter?
Have you heard the verbal diarrhoea that "Famous Seamus" (as he is known in the poetic community) spouts?
Great poet he might be but some of his ramblings of various important political subjects of the day are barely coherent
And this man wants to set the agenda in the feild of intellectual property?
Be afraid, be very afraid...
Ian
The word which we translate as "fool" refers not to someone who is rather deficient in the clue department but rather to someone who is deficient in the morals department. I suppose in modern English it might be similar to referring to someone as a wanker.
Not that I have any problem with wanking you understand... :)
Ian
The act of imparting clue to those users who have none. Often fatal for one party in the transaction. Legal consequences may incur.
That's gotta hurt whichever universe you come from.
Personally I prefer the Nokia 5110.
Ian
That's funny my GF's vibrator doesn't explode that often. Admittedly she tends to drive it a bit hard when I'm not around but...
Ian
That will be difficult to replace. Perhaps my views will change with the introduction and widespread use of the technology. I am willing to bet that it won't.
Books are created objects. The act of creating a dead tree based book is just as much a creative act as writing the thing in the first place. I think authors may be unwilling to give up this experience anytime soon
My euro0.02 worth anyway
Ian
Further information on this poster's latest book "Love,Sex,Death and Carrots" (ISBN 0 9521295 1 5) may be obtained by e-mailing interchangebwn@hotmail.com
Sorry for the plug but it had to be done.
If you have a desperate need to know why then read the bio
Ian
Shouldn't that read "all google-eyed"
Oh and not forgetting the handmade card :)
Aparently both the GF and Jess liked it.
And this is my pathetic attempt to make up for not being around on the day itself. I am not worthy of her.
We're not allowed to hang up signs any more (thankfully) which bar black people from certain drinking establishments or busses but when you exclude a disabled person from one of society's functions then you're just doing the same thing. Except you picked a different minority.
If you accept, as I do, this point of view then chickening out because "it's difficult" is not an option.
I'm probably being melodramatic here but what the hell, I'm part of an oppressed minority... Where would be be in the world if Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King had claimed "it's too hard"?
Watch out for us crips. We coming and we're damned angry!
BTW I may refer to myself as a crip, you, dear reader, may not.
Secondly there is an economic argument here. Here in Britain there are 6.2 million disabled people with 33 billions pounds to spend (I can't speak for the USA) and anyone who regularly excludes those people is likely to make less money than somone who does not exclude them.
Excluding 6.2 million potential customers (UK only) seems to indicate a paucity in the clue department.
Thirdly, it's not hard.
Good design for disabled people is good design period. And this doesn't just refer to websites either.
Installing a ramp or having level access into your premises not only makes it accessible for people who use a wheelchair, it helps the photocopier engineer or the guy taking out the trash. It might just save you from a lawsuit or two.
It doesn't take much to make a site accessible for disabled people, this is not rocket science were talking about. Just follow the guidlines and after a while it just comes naturally.
How difficult can it be to use ALT tags when specifying an image? Or to ensure that you don't use colour alone to convey information and some other such blindingly obvious "tricks"
Judging by some of the sites I've auditted it's nigh on impossible!
It takes mere seconds to run a page through an accessibility checker like Bobby at http://www.cast.org/bobby/
[Begin Sermon]
Please do not refer to my community as "the disabled". We are disabled people, and everytime someone talks about disability issues without mentioning the word people then we as a society forget just a tiny bit more that this is a people issue.
If we keep forgetting hard enough and for long enough we'll be back to the dark days of the Third Reich where disabled people were shot, starved, experimented on like lab rats and then shot... The list goes on.
[End sermon - The preacher has left the building and was last seen planning mass civil disobedience with a bunch of fellow crips]
Ian
Falling off at 22 mph will hurt like a b@st@rd if you're dressed like the guy pictured with the article. You can expect to receive a fairly serious case of road rash which is deeply unpleasant - I know, I have intimate personal knowledge of the subject.
However the article was posted on the Motorcycle News web site so you could expect readers to have access to the appropriate protective clothing - Kneepads, spine and kidney protection vest, leathers (with armour) crash helmet etc.
However anyone wearing all this and riding this scooter thingy would look a total prat.
My euro0.02 worth
Ian
This may be a bit excessive. It may be that previously the room was way too echoey and that these measures really are needed. However most people fall into the trap (as you might have done) of completely killing the reverb in the room.
This usually ends up producing really flat recordings which sound really quite odd. You then spend time putting back the reverb electronically which is costly and time consuming.
I might be wrong. This is not to be taken as hard criticism, it's just that I've seen this so often.
Decent microphones are fairly affordable. I don't mean the $50 budget mics, but the Shure SM58 and 58b series of mics go for under $200, and are the same microphones used both on the road and in the studio by a large number of bands.
The SM58 is NOT a recording microphone! They're brilliant live and I have and use a number of them myself. The SM58 is reliable and robust, it won't spring any surprises on you. To quote a TV ad from the UK..."It does exactly what it says on the tin"
I teach community courses on stage work and PA principles - you have no idea of the number of (talented) artists who are completely clue deficient when it comes to picking up and using a microphone - I always use an SM58 as it "looks like the microphones on TV" but I wouldn't want to use it in the studio.
My £0.02 worth.
Ian
It's a traditional Yorkshire (County[1]: Northern England) thing to simply add a Y to the end of any name to make it a nickname Hence I became Reedy.
I've since replaced the Y with an I to conform with various edicts on usernames in the companies I've worked for over the years.
Ian
[1] Some would say occupied nation. Are there many Yorkshire nationalists on /. ?
I was sysadminning for a major UK law firm about 18 months ago when I learned of a case we were working on for an insurance company
It seems the insurance company were unwilling to pay for the loss of a 60000 tonne bulk cargo carrier which had run aground in the Carribean (in broad daylight, on a flat calm sea with unlimited visibility) because the captain was watching the GPS and not what was directly in front of the bows.
Needless to say no-one involved was very happy
Ian
I work to bring access solution to other disabled people and we often recommend the use of a device called a HeadMaster or the SEMERC head operated mouse (http://www.semerc.com) which costs GBP 199.00 in conjunction with an on screen keyboard.
Other solutions include a scanning keyboard/pointer controler using 1 or two switches, (eybrow switches, suck/puff devices etc). These can be set up for around GBP 200 to GBP 300
Access technologies do not have to be exotic or expensive or pinched from an attack helicopter.
The attitude that it has to be high tech is one of the reasons that disabled people are not getting the access solutions they need.
I am constantly faced by incredulous IT managers who seem to think that a GBP 200 solution cant be right because it only costs GBP 200 !
Ian
Contact details below
Worth an e-mail?
Oh and before anyone gets self righteous, no I don't work for them, own shares in them or anything like that. Ganetime International
info@gane.co.uk
Gane International Ltd
29 Campus Road
Bradford Science Park
Bradford
BD7 1HR
UK
telephone: +44 (0)1274 732239 facsimile: +44 (0)1274 734428
This "News" was reported by Tommorows World (UK science and tech TV magazine programme) about 10 years ago and I had a bit of a rant about it then.
Radio Amateurs have been doing this since Methuselah was a youngster. Meteor scatter transmissions have been going on around the world since at least the early sixties. Probably earlier, I'm not a radio historian
And while we're at it has anyone heard of packet radio? It's principles formed the basis of that little used and now largely irrelevant protocal know as IP.
It's even more strongly linked with the much hyped "new generation" of mobile phone services known as General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) which promises (but will not likely deliver) so much.
End of semi rant. Sorry folks.
Ian
Golf 1 Charlie Foxtrot Tango - If it means anything.
This is
People who regard this as useful information should not under any circumstances be reading
Ian
I won't patronise you or the other
Ian
We can all make nice looking pages with a minimum of effort but people just putting in that minimum amount of effort is excluding many thousands of disabled users.
Browser-neutrality is vital to many disabled people who may be using alternative technologies to access the web.
Not closing off tables properly is a prime example. Failing to close off a table can confuse some screen reading software and render the page inaccessible to visually impaired people who use these methods.
Writing accessible pages is *not* rocket science, it has more to do with good coding than anything else.
The standards are published and freely available on the web. Just how long does it take to run a page through the appropriate validator?
I'm not inserting any links to validators, accessibility checking sites or W3C guidlines as anyone who is coding web-pages and doesn't already have the URLs engraved into their very souls shouldn't be coding web pages.
Ian
PS. See my profile for the basis of the above semi-rant.
You should go for the brightest projector you can find, > 2000 Lumens is good, just so you don't have to board up the windows to keep out the sunlight.
I've used projectors to do video backdrops for live performance poetry gigs and it sure is impressive.
Ian
My personal choice would be to locate their offices and then apply a liberal coating of napalm.
Hell is too good for these people.
Ian
"We'll take you to a train station and by you a ticket to wherever you want to go" said the finance director.
"Fine" said I
We duly proceeded - with the finance director driving MY car - to Reading (UK) train station whereupon the finance director got out. I pretended to fiddle with my seatbelt and when he'd got out I clamped the security lock around the gear leaver and handbrake (stick shift and parking brake for our USAnian readers) and stuffed the key into my y-fronts.
It was childish I know but I had the greatest sense of release when I chucked they key out of the train window fifty miles north.
Ian
This left me with a very strange mindset where when driving I think of (and can see) distances in metres but when I look out into the back yard I observe that it is 10 yards + two feet long.
My whatsit is x inches long [3] but the Leatherman Wave attached to my belt is y centimetres long.
One can mix systems but care is necessary.
NASA please note 9" != 9cm
Ian Footnotes: [1] The solution is left as an exercise for the reader.
[2] ONLY a Brit (or possibly a West Indian) could answer this #8-)
[3] For various and relative values of x
If you want a white noise generator then find a local hearing aid supplier or your national organisation for Deaf people. Some Deaf people find that white noise helps to mask the effects of Tunnitus.
These units usually have other sounds such as "thunderstorm", "falling raindrops", "heartbeats" (sorry I'm reading from the catalogue as I type) and such like. They're generally battery powered.
Expect to pay GBP25 for basic to GBP70 for more exotic sounds.
Expect to pay GBP65-70 if you want a headphone socket, mains power and a timer which switches it off.