Re:Rock and Roll? Not that important in 1990s.
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 1
And since many more people prefer hiphop to rock and roll, it indicates that perhaps hiphop is superior. Rock and roll by the 1990s was relegated to the fringe where it stays today.
Look to the 1970s for the real "Rock and Roll Era"... a time when rock and roll was almost synonymous with the term popular music.
Rock and roll is not important in American musical history except where it contributed to the true dominant force, hiphop.
Sure, Rock and roll changed in the 1990s, but it was still a tempest in a teapot: a revolution in the fringe. Even then, remember that Grunge started in the 1980s, not the 1990s.
Learning Python is getting rather dated (version 1.5 or sumthin). As an alternate, I can recommend Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide Python by Chris Fehily. It's a thorough, well designed introduction for people who like to learn while doing. Most of the examples are done at the interactive prompt.
The chapters are well laid out and progress rationally: the separate chapters on Numbers, Strings, Lists, and Dictionaries are followed by Control Statements. Eventually Modules, Classes, and Exceptions are introduced.
At first impression, the visual quickstart layout is mostly wasted here. There aren't many screenshots to show. Most of the visuals are the interactive sessions explained in the surrounding text. However, the double column style of the quickstart guide flows better than a single column with examples peppered thoughout. For example, if you get the text description, you can just keep reading. You can cut over to the figures when you need more claification.
The Python book is newer, larger, and cheaper than O'Reilly's Learning Python. I think it's also a better introduction to the language. Programming students will appreciate the logical pace, and experienced programmers that are new to Python will like the well-organized chapters.
As regards to Python in a Nutshell, if you want a dead-tree reference, that covers all of the main concepts of the language thoroughly (and frequently insightfully), then this book is for you.
This is the equivalent of taking a novel by, say, Charles Dickens, editing it and perhaps adding another chapter, changing the title and claiming it as a new novel written by yourself. Really sleazy, IMHO.
Ever see the broadway show The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Thing is, once it's in the PD, you can do exactly that.
Now, taking a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and setting it in Space, now THAT's sleazy...
A documentation site that's just a skeleton wiki turned loose to the masses to be created won't happen. The signal will never exceed the frustration of not being able to find what you need.
I imagine a documentation site where the authors wrote a docs and posted them on-line. The public can annotate the docs, posting questions, improvements, clarifications, whatever, at the bottom of each page. I think MySQL does something like this.
The editors would need to sweep these pages regularly, read the annotations, and improve the documentation.
You could use a wiki for that as well, but vigilance is even greater. You will need to park somebody on the 'recent changes' page and monitor each change for quality.
In short, writing quality documentation is hard. You can use all types of goodies to make it easier, it still is hard.
I've worked for local and state governments for over 5 years now in different capacities and can honestly say two things...
Typical Users don't need much: The typical office worker needs e-mail and word processing. If they're lucky, they get a browser and an IM client. If they're making more money, they probably need a PIM, a spreadsheet, and presentation software. Just show them how they need to do what they need to do and they'll (hopefully) stay out of the way...
Atypical Users can adapt quickly to a new OS: If your job includes specialized software (for example, graphics packages, CAD, GIS, database) you will have more of a learning curve, but you should be able to climb it faster. Of course, this is also the group with the most problems, compliants, requirements.
The third group, system administrators, don't really count. True, they have the highest learning curve, and they're success if often tied to a particular platform, but since they're upgrading from Windows 95, they're screwed no matter what you do...
In short, the greater the number of power users, the more of a problem you will have. I'm guessing MA Dept of Revenue has a lot of data entry clerks, accountants, lawyers, and bureaucrats (all group 1 types). The people who maintain the databases and manage the data (group 2 types) will be greatly affected, but they'll probably be pleased to get away from Win95. And as usual, the SysOp gets the shaft.
vote on everything, just have the majority win (as opposed to unanimous, otherwise nothing would get done
In this manner you could end up alienating just under 1/2 of your standards group with any decision. Over multiple decisions, you'll end up with NOONE 100% happy.
Achieving 100% concensus on a standards is a pipe dream, but there is great power in adopting a standard that EVERYONE buys off on. Standards that are limited in scope, but have total approval, stand a much better chance of becoming an actual standard.
Remember, flags are also called "standards". Flags are usually created to represent a group that shares a common loyalty. It is convenient to think of a standard as a flag. If you tempt people's loyalty by creating a standard that doesn't have wide approval, there won't be much of a 'rally round the flag', and your standard is not very.
Many 'anonymizers' (read Libraries), ask for an ID before you can use the internet. How much information they retain is probably decided on a per library basis.
Regardless, law enforcement can access whatever records the library keeps if someone ends up doing something nefarious.
What I've learned from this internet thingie, is that privacy is mostly a by-product of poor record keeping. If you choose to 'stick out from the crowd' by establishing a record (ie: post on usenet or slashdot, build a website, publish a blog), then you don't really have much expectation of privacy. Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future, everyone will be famous, not for 15 minutes, but to 15 people.
That's why I'm generally against persistent cookies. There's really very little reason (short of convenience ala Slashdot's cookie) to have a cookie that exists longer than a session. Anything longer than that, and does not provide _me_ any utility, gets denied.
Of course, they wouldn't need to buy PyraLabs to do that. It's just a matter of (a) identifying which sites are 'blogs' and (b) setting up blogs.google.com (or better yet opinions.google.com) as a way to do blog-specific searches.
It's possible that massive indexing of blogs could provide the 'feedback' that Third Voice was trying to accomplish. I could search for blogs linking to a particular CNN story and 'presto' a list of opinions on that story.
Unlike ThirdVoice, which, IIRC, had little ability to filter trolls, Google would rank those blogs based on their PageRank algorithm.
Hmm... A website with comments and ranking? All we need now is karma and we've created an internet-wide Slashdot, google-style...:-D
Here's my pick for Best Supporting Actress, the only category where I've seen most of the performances.
Kathy Bates: Kathy Bates is great. But she's just playing Kathy Bates: goofy old broad. Frankly, she's never been better then her performance in Misery where she played Kathy Bates: scary old broad.
Julianne Moore: She was very good in the Hours. But she was far better in Far From Heaven. If she wins, she should give the Oscar to the little boy who played her son. He was excellent! On par with Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense!!
Queen Latifah: She was great in Chicago, especially Mamma Morton's Song. But her part in the movie and her performance wasn't as significant as her co-star and fellow nominee C Z-J.
Meryl Streep: Excellent work in Adaptation, but not as good as her performance in the Hours. She could have one for this performance, except I didn't like it when she became a <spoiler>gun-toting crazed druggie </spoiler> at the end...
Catherine Zeta-Jones: She stole the show. IMHO, she nearly upstaged Renee Zellweger (and that was hard to do). She can sing, dance, act, and smoulder. She's my pick for the winner.
Here's the voting strategy:
Kathy Bates and Queen Latifah won't get enough votes to win. Their parts were good enough to be nominated but not good enough to win.
Moore will have her votes cannibalized because she's also nominated for best actress.
Streep will get extra votes because she was great (IMHO better) in the Hours but didn't get nominated.
It comes down to Zeta-Jones v. Streep. If you compare both performances, ZJ should win. But I think Streep might get sympathy votes for her unnominated performance.
My prediction heretowith submitted to the permanent slashdot record on this date.
So, in your company, business people get to make technical decisions? Do technical people get to make business decisions, like how many weeks vacation the janitor gets?
I've got two questions for you:
Does management burn the midnight oil alongside you, or does he work a 40-hour week?
IMHO, it's the best introduction to UNIX geared toward the perspective of a Windows or Mac user first coming to UNIX.
PYTHON by Chris Fehily (ISBN 0-201-74884-3)
This is a Peachpit Visual Quickstart Guide. It's actually quite good and better than the (now quite dated)
Learning Python.
Code Complete by Steve McConnell (ISBN 1-55615-484-4)
It's a little dated (examples are in Pascal, that's sooo 1989!) but the concepts of good code construction are still relevant.
The Little Schemer by Friedman and Felleisen (ISBN 0-262-56099-2)
It probably makes sense to introduce young geeks to a Lisp-y language early, before their brains solidify and it takes them years to grok it. This one pretty much assumes you have no knowledge, but it doesn't assume you're an idiot or a dummy.
Finally...
HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Musciano and Kennedy (ISBN 0-596-00026-X)
This is the O'Reilly Koala Book. It's quite good and is revised regularly. Older editions are still useful because, vanilla HTML hasn't changed much since 4.0.
People may clamor "Writing HTML isn't coding!". It doesn't matter. The fact is, the internet is pervasive in the life of a young techie. Like "build your own radio" in the 1930s and "mess around with a jalopy" in the 1950s, building your own website is a similar challenge.
Plus, HTML is a gateway drug. First you're writing webpages by hand, then you add a form, then you're copying a CGI script to process the form. Then you're learning Perl so you can write your own scripts. Or you're writing a Python script that scrapes websites. When you think about it, HTML is a gateway to networked computing...
Things to avoid...
Anything by Dietel & Dietel. Those funny ants on the cover hide the fact that these are overblown college textbooks that drain any fun out of learning the language.
Anything that has a version number after it. No kid wants to read a book about "Microsoft Word 97". It's already 6 years out of date.
We're human beings, not cellular atomata. Granted the difference is slight...:-)
I remember reading Tom Peters years ago. Nordstrom's or some such company prided themselves in having a single page "Employee Manual" that said something like "In all matters, follow your own best judgement".
What Hock's quote means to me is that _if_ you have intelligent people, give them guiding principles and _leave them be_. Do not Mickey Mouse them with complicated rules. If you do, you will just be setting you, them, and your enterprise up for failure.
I just finished teaching a 2-day class in a computer lab that used Clean Slate. It works as advertised.
The biggest problem was having to reinstall the program I was teaching the second day.
Usually I make a habit of NOT logging onto websites when I'm using a strange computer. I did check one of my e-mail accounts while I was there. I think I'd better change my password now...:-O
IIRC, each editor is assigned an 'early day'. Apparently they get up early (as early as 6 AM, oh the horror!) to go through the queue and make sure our European Slashdotters have something to look at.
Frankly, that would be the perfect job for me. It's 6:15 AM on a Sunday and I'm wide awake.
It would be simple to figure out what day is Pudge's day and act accordingly.
----- Just in case anyone wants to accuse me of being OffTopic: here's a X11-related hint. Use fink to install The GIMP in the usual location and make the following AppleScript:
tell application "Finder"
launch application "X11" end tell
set results to do shell script "cd ~; DISPLAY=:0.0; export DISPLAY; PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin; export PATH ;/sw/bin/gimp >/dev/null 2>&1 &"
That makes an AppleScript that opens X11 and the GIMP. Find an appropriate JPG of "Wilbur" the GIMP mascot, paste it into the "get info" icon box, and PRESTO! The GIMP in your dock!
I downloaded that monstrosity, started using it and immediately hated it.
If I were Ken Burns, I'd want my good name back... Importing an iPhoto seems to take forever, and there seems to be a 33% chance of crashing.
The only good thing, that I can tell, is the easy import of iTunes Library as a soundtrack. It actually works as described.
I'm not that much of a iMovie user (the lack of a digital video recorder is the primary reason). Oh well, 4 (Keynote, iPhoto, Safari, and X11) out of 5 aint bad.
SVG is one of the few 'imaging technologies' that has very good support for accessibility. Each drawn object can have a title and a description, so whereas you see a "stuffed garbage can", the braille user-agent would output the desc text: "Garbage Can containing more than 1 MB of trash".
SVG could also be used for an org charts, and instead of having a long 'alt' tag would probably be out of sync with the 'gif', the blind user would be able to read the contents of each box, and depending on how the SVG is structured (with groups and defs), even get an idea of how the boxes are related.
Also, SVG supports CSS, so you can have different stylesheets for different media (screen, printer, cell-phone-screen, and even braille and audio).
As far as an imaging technology goes, since it's just another XML format, you can grab an XML document (say in the Weather Observation Markup Format) and use XSLT to output a nice SVG graphic showing the weather. (In fact, that's one of the example used in O'Reilly's SVG Essentials).
I've just started using SVG (with Python) as a way to transform map data from the US Govt and make nice little SVG maps for my browser (kind of like a hand-rolled Mapquest).
Programmers familiar with XML will be able to make some neat (albeit very ugly) stuff. Designers who know the fancier drawing tools will be able to make some pretty nice-looking stuff. Put 'em together and you can have some nice smart graphics. Will it replace flash? Who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
And since many more people prefer hiphop to rock and roll, it indicates that perhaps hiphop is superior. Rock and roll by the 1990s was relegated to the fringe where it stays today.
Look to the 1970s for the real "Rock and Roll Era"... a time when rock and roll was almost synonymous with the term popular music.
Rock and roll is not important in American musical history except where it contributed to the true dominant force, hiphop.
Sure, Rock and roll changed in the 1990s, but it was still a tempest in a teapot: a revolution in the fringe. Even then, remember that Grunge started in the 1980s, not the 1990s.
Another book for adults...
Learning Python is getting rather dated (version 1.5 or sumthin). As an alternate, I can recommend Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide Python by Chris Fehily. It's a thorough, well designed introduction for people who like to learn while doing. Most of the examples are done at the interactive prompt.
The chapters are well laid out and progress rationally: the separate chapters on Numbers, Strings, Lists, and Dictionaries are followed by Control Statements. Eventually Modules, Classes, and Exceptions are introduced.
At first impression, the visual quickstart layout is mostly wasted here. There aren't many screenshots to show. Most of the visuals are the interactive sessions explained in the surrounding text. However, the double column style of the quickstart guide flows better than a single column with examples peppered thoughout. For example, if you get the text description, you can just keep reading. You can cut over to the figures when you need more claification.
The Python book is newer, larger, and cheaper than O'Reilly's Learning Python. I think it's also a better introduction to the language. Programming students will appreciate the logical pace, and experienced programmers that are new to Python will like the well-organized chapters.
As regards to Python in a Nutshell, if you want a dead-tree reference, that covers all of the main concepts of the language thoroughly (and frequently insightfully), then this book is for you.
I was just looking at O'Reilly's Mac OS X Hacks in the book store after work today and they had a HOWTO on the Darwin Streaming Server.
It appeared to be a real step-by-step run down. I might have to go back there and peruse it more thoroughly... Heck, mebbe I'll buy da ting...
Ever see the broadway show The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Thing is, once it's in the PD, you can do exactly that.
Now, taking a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and setting it in Space, now THAT's sleazy...
Two guys, neighbors, both running Jaguar, both on the same cable modem subnet.
:-)
I mean, what are the odds? They're so low to be trivial!
(Caveat: I've been a Mac user since 1984, so this slam is just good natured ribbing...)
According to the article, this happened 20,000 years ago...
*yawn*
A documentation site that's just a skeleton wiki turned loose to the masses to be created won't happen. The signal will never exceed the frustration of not being able to find what you need.
I imagine a documentation site where the authors wrote a docs and posted them on-line. The public can annotate the docs, posting questions, improvements, clarifications, whatever, at the bottom of each page. I think MySQL does something like this.
The editors would need to sweep these pages regularly, read the annotations, and improve the documentation.
You could use a wiki for that as well, but vigilance is even greater. You will need to park somebody on the 'recent changes' page and monitor each change for quality.
In short, writing quality documentation is hard. You can use all types of goodies to make it easier, it still is hard.
The third group, system administrators, don't really count. True, they have the highest learning curve, and they're success if often tied to a particular platform, but since they're upgrading from Windows 95, they're screwed no matter what you do...
In short, the greater the number of power users, the more of a problem you will have. I'm guessing MA Dept of Revenue has a lot of data entry clerks, accountants, lawyers, and bureaucrats (all group 1 types). The people who maintain the databases and manage the data (group 2 types) will be greatly affected, but they'll probably be pleased to get away from Win95. And as usual, the SysOp gets the shaft.
The Academy... We would like to thanks it, we would.
NO! Trickies they did, for giving it to Paul Newman... We hates it forever!!!
Now WE have the precioussss... yes yesssss...
I wonder if Martin Landau is still available...
Riiight, because as we all know it was AOL that created the Internet, not DARPA...
Hobbies:
When you get to college, listen to Monk, Miles, Sarah Vaughn, Joe Williams, and Clifford Brown. Find a jazz trio and sing with them non-stop.
Work:
Take more computer classes in college. Try to learn C before all that beer kills your brain cells.
Forget about biology grad school. It wasn't worth it.
When someone mentions SGML to you in 1990, you should say "I'd like to learn more about that".
When you move to Chicago, you should try to become a fireman.
Love:
You should be more outgoing with cute girls in High School. You were not as goofy as you thought you were.
Breaking up with Carole in college was an extremely dumb idea.
Do not go to Europe with Kathleen.
That woman with the faux leopard skin shoes is the love of your life. Do not f*** it up.
In this manner you could end up alienating just under 1/2 of your standards group with any decision. Over multiple decisions, you'll end up with NOONE 100% happy.
Achieving 100% concensus on a standards is a pipe dream, but there is great power in adopting a standard that EVERYONE buys off on. Standards that are limited in scope, but have total approval, stand a much better chance of becoming an actual standard.
Remember, flags are also called "standards". Flags are usually created to represent a group that shares a common loyalty. It is convenient to think of a standard as a flag. If you tempt people's loyalty by creating a standard that doesn't have wide approval, there won't be much of a 'rally round the flag', and your standard is not very.
If I were George, I'd immediately invoke the "Franklin Maneuover" and head for Sloane Square.
Many 'anonymizers' (read Libraries), ask for an ID before you can use the internet. How much information they retain is probably decided on a per library basis.
Regardless, law enforcement can access whatever records the library keeps if someone ends up doing something nefarious.
What I've learned from this internet thingie, is that privacy is mostly a by-product of poor record keeping. If you choose to 'stick out from the crowd' by establishing a record (ie: post on usenet or slashdot, build a website, publish a blog), then you don't really have much expectation of privacy. Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future, everyone will be famous, not for 15 minutes, but to 15 people.
That's why I'm generally against persistent cookies. There's really very little reason (short of convenience ala Slashdot's cookie) to have a cookie that exists longer than a session. Anything longer than that, and does not provide _me_ any utility, gets denied.
That _is_ brilliant.
:-D
Of course, they wouldn't need to buy PyraLabs to do that. It's just a matter of (a) identifying which sites are 'blogs' and (b) setting up blogs.google.com (or better yet opinions.google.com) as a way to do blog-specific searches.
It's possible that massive indexing of blogs could provide the 'feedback' that Third Voice was trying to accomplish. I could search for blogs linking to a particular CNN story and 'presto' a list of opinions on that story.
Unlike ThirdVoice, which, IIRC, had little ability to filter trolls, Google would rank those blogs based on their PageRank algorithm.
Hmm... A website with comments and ranking? All we need now is karma and we've created an internet-wide Slashdot, google-style...
Here's my pick for Best Supporting Actress, the only category where I've seen most of the performances.
Kathy Bates: Kathy Bates is great. But she's just playing Kathy Bates: goofy old broad. Frankly, she's never been better then her performance in Misery where she played Kathy Bates: scary old broad.
Julianne Moore: She was very good in the Hours. But she was far better in Far From Heaven. If she wins, she should give the Oscar to the little boy who played her son. He was excellent! On par with Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense!!
Queen Latifah: She was great in Chicago, especially Mamma Morton's Song. But her part in the movie and her performance wasn't as significant as her co-star and fellow nominee C Z-J.
Meryl Streep: Excellent work in Adaptation, but not as good as her performance in the Hours. She could have one for this performance, except I didn't like it when she became a <spoiler>gun-toting crazed druggie </spoiler> at the end...
Catherine Zeta-Jones: She stole the show. IMHO, she nearly upstaged Renee Zellweger (and that was hard to do). She can sing, dance, act, and smoulder. She's my pick for the winner.
Here's the voting strategy:
Kathy Bates and Queen Latifah won't get enough votes to win. Their parts were good enough to be nominated but not good enough to win.
Moore will have her votes cannibalized because she's also nominated for best actress.
Streep will get extra votes because she was great (IMHO better) in the Hours but didn't get nominated.
It comes down to Zeta-Jones v. Streep. If you compare both performances, ZJ should win. But I think Streep might get sympathy votes for her unnominated performance.
My prediction heretowith submitted to the permanent slashdot record on this date.
So, in your company, business people get to make technical decisions? Do technical people get to make business decisions, like how many weeks vacation the janitor gets?
I've got two questions for you:
Does management burn the midnight oil alongside you, or does he work a 40-hour week?
Have you tried XP?
</rant>
IMHO, it's the best introduction to UNIX geared toward the perspective of a Windows or Mac user first coming to UNIX.
PYTHON by Chris Fehily (ISBN 0-201-74884-3)
This is a Peachpit Visual Quickstart Guide. It's actually quite good and better than the (now quite dated)
Learning Python.
Code Complete by Steve McConnell (ISBN 1-55615-484-4)
It's a little dated (examples are in Pascal, that's sooo 1989!) but the concepts of good code construction are still relevant.
The Little Schemer by Friedman and Felleisen (ISBN 0-262-56099-2)
It probably makes sense to introduce young geeks to a Lisp-y language early, before their brains solidify and it takes them years to grok it. This one pretty much assumes you have no knowledge, but it doesn't assume you're an idiot or a dummy.
Finally...
HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Musciano and Kennedy (ISBN 0-596-00026-X)
This is the O'Reilly Koala Book. It's quite good and is revised regularly. Older editions are still useful because, vanilla HTML hasn't changed much since 4.0.
People may clamor "Writing HTML isn't coding!". It doesn't matter. The fact is, the internet is pervasive in the life of a young techie. Like "build your own radio" in the 1930s and "mess around with a jalopy" in the 1950s, building your own website is a similar challenge.
Plus, HTML is a gateway drug. First you're writing webpages by hand, then you add a form, then you're copying a CGI script to process the form. Then you're learning Perl so you can write your own scripts. Or you're writing a Python script that scrapes websites. When you think about it, HTML is a gateway to networked computing...
Things to avoid...
Anything by Dietel & Dietel. Those funny ants on the cover hide the fact that these are overblown college textbooks that drain any fun out of learning the language.
Anything that has a version number after it. No kid wants to read a book about "Microsoft Word 97". It's already 6 years out of date.
We're human beings, not cellular atomata. Granted the difference is slight... :-)
I remember reading Tom Peters years ago. Nordstrom's or some such company prided themselves in having a single page "Employee Manual" that said something like "In all matters, follow your own best judgement".
What Hock's quote means to me is that _if_ you have intelligent people, give them guiding principles and _leave them be_. Do not Mickey Mouse them with complicated rules. If you do, you will just be setting you, them, and your enterprise up for failure.
I just finished teaching a 2-day class in a computer lab that used Clean Slate. It works as advertised.
:-O
The biggest problem was having to reinstall the program I was teaching the second day.
Usually I make a habit of NOT logging onto websites when I'm using a strange computer. I did check one of my e-mail accounts while I was there. I think I'd better change my password now...
IIRC, each editor is assigned an 'early day'. Apparently they get up early (as early as 6 AM, oh the horror!) to go through the queue and make sure our European Slashdotters have something to look at.
/sw/bin/gimp > /dev/null 2>&1 &"
Frankly, that would be the perfect job for me. It's 6:15 AM on a Sunday and I'm wide awake.
It would be simple to figure out what day is Pudge's day and act accordingly.
-----
Just in case anyone wants to accuse me of being OffTopic: here's a X11-related hint. Use fink to install The GIMP in the usual location and make the following AppleScript:
tell application "Finder"
launch application "X11"
end tell
set results to do shell script "cd ~; DISPLAY=:0.0; export DISPLAY; PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin; export PATH ;
That makes an AppleScript that opens X11 and the GIMP. Find an appropriate JPG of "Wilbur" the GIMP mascot, paste it into the "get info" icon box, and PRESTO! The GIMP in your dock!
I downloaded that monstrosity, started using it and immediately hated it.
If I were Ken Burns, I'd want my good name back... Importing an iPhoto seems to take forever, and there seems to be a 33% chance of crashing.
The only good thing, that I can tell, is the easy import of iTunes Library as a soundtrack. It actually works as described.
I'm not that much of a iMovie user (the lack of a digital video recorder is the primary reason). Oh well, 4 (Keynote, iPhoto, Safari, and X11) out of 5 aint bad.
Funny how you mention half-blind.
SVG is one of the few 'imaging technologies' that has very good support for accessibility. Each drawn object can have a title and a description, so whereas you see a "stuffed garbage can", the braille user-agent would output the desc text: "Garbage Can containing more than 1 MB of trash".
SVG could also be used for an org charts, and instead of having a long 'alt' tag would probably be out of sync with the 'gif', the blind user would be able to read the contents of each box, and depending on how the SVG is structured (with groups and defs), even get an idea of how the boxes are related.
Also, SVG supports CSS, so you can have different stylesheets for different media (screen, printer, cell-phone-screen, and even braille and audio).
As far as an imaging technology goes, since it's just another XML format, you can grab an XML document (say in the Weather Observation Markup Format) and use XSLT to output a nice SVG graphic showing the weather. (In fact, that's one of the example used in O'Reilly's SVG Essentials).
I've just started using SVG (with Python) as a way to transform map data from the US Govt and make nice little SVG maps for my browser (kind of like a hand-rolled Mapquest).
Programmers familiar with XML will be able to make some neat (albeit very ugly) stuff. Designers who know the fancier drawing tools will be able to make some pretty nice-looking stuff. Put 'em together and you can have some nice smart graphics. Will it replace flash? Who knows.