Interestingly though, blind folks have far more trouble in interpreting the output of their phones. They can work with pressing a sequence of buttons to launch an app or place a call, but end up dead in the water when it comes to figuring out a message that appears on-screen.
Can't speak fully to the options, but the button size might not be the biggest deal for blind folks, based on my limited sample set. I work with a blind IT guy (fully without sight, not merely "low vision", and blind for >25 years), who went with a Blackjack II because it's one of the cheapest, easiest ways to get into a smartphone with full screen reader available (for $$$), and with integral GPS (which has some sort of megabuck$$ talking GPS software release due out soon).
Perhaps the fact he's very comfortable with reading Braille makes him okay with it, because I find the buttons obnoxiously small. He stopped by my desk when he upgraded from the Blackjack to Blackjack II (had me swap his SIM card), and I walked him around the perimeter of the keyboard, where the non-QWERTY keys live to familiarize him with the differences, and he went on his way.
Pretty funny too, as his screen still has the "Remove this sticker" sticker on it - he's left it in place to help protect it, and he has no use for it. I only wish I could help him figure out how to turn the screen off entirely since he'd save a ton of battery that way...
Screwed out of tax dollars, eh? Just curious, do you think there shouldn't be subsidies for any assistive devices for the disabled? I'd disagree with you, but I suppose I'd understand that.
If, on the other hand, you think blind folk are walking around getting rich off cool toys, think again. The world of the GUI has left blind people very much behind in the technical revolution. When the government and nonprofit agencies give away (or even subsidize) a device, it's more likely to look like a bag phone than an iPhone. And I'm not talking about the fashion aspect, but the difference in functionality and portability that my analogy suggests.
I don't have the time to give this rant^H^H^H^Hreply sufficient backup (I tried and deleted it), but I think you'll discover as I have, if you talk to a blind person about this, navigating the world on a daily basis is so inconvenient and exhausting that convenient, truly portable assistive technology can be just what makes a housebound, unemployed blind person able to instead get a professional job that contributes to the tax base.
A similar, but safe, solution, detailed below: RV antifreeze, NOT standard automotive antifreeze and certainly not windshield washer fluid, is safe for potable water systems. It's similar to automotive antifreeze, but uses "food grade" propylene glycol. Prevents pipe bursting down to -50F. Seems standard to still turn off water and drain what you can, then pour in the RV antifreeze everwhere water remains, like the toilet tank and bowl, and sink traps.
The Ansari family did indeed generously donate a great deal of money to the X Prize foundation, so much so that the prize name changed from the "X Prize" to the "Ansari X Prize." In no way would I want to take away from their generosity.
However, it's unfair to the many other people who donated gobs of money, years before the Ansari family's donation, to make the Ansaris out to be the sole investors. (Look at the donor list, linked above, and you'll see that many others were donating serious wads of cash as well.) The X Prize foundation was founded in 1994, and had announced $5 million in prize money in 1998. The Ansari donation (and subsequent name change) occurred in 2004.
The sad thing is that CNN has a recent article where they state matter of factly that MS invented AJAX in the 90's, when they created OWA (Outlook Web Access).
MS bashing aside, it kills me that something as vague as AJAX is touted as a specific technology with a birth date. The only thing with a birthdate is the term. Wikipedia says it's when Jesse James Garrett first coined the term, in an article dated 2/18/2005.
The BitTorrent feed seems fine; maybe it's just the traditional download mirrors? I downloaded install-amd64-minimal-2005.0.iso last night and it boots fine.
Computing a hash requires reading every byte
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 1
(Note: Psetzer, I'm not disagreeing with you, but rather commenting on somereplies to your post.)
Yes, that's the trick that some seem to be missing here when they talk about computing hash values faster than you suggest. You gotta read the whole file to compute a hash UNLESS you've only changed the last part of the file, in which case you could take the cumulative result and work from that point. If someone can show that the SHA-1 shortcuts the researchers found allow you to change data specifically at the end of the file, please correct me. Until then I'll assume that any assertions to the contrary are merely wild speculation.
Here are some real numbers for computing various hash values using Crypto++ 5.2.1. Even on a 1.6 GHz Opteron, SHA-1 hashes are computed at a rate of 100 MB/sec. Even a truckload of Opterons won't finish the job any time soon.
The cornstarch/water mixture is an example of a STF (Shear Thickening Fluid), which has a non-Newtonian flow. A recent Slashdot post nicely explains how hitting water at high speed differs from hitting a STF at high speed.
1 a : the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community
b (1) : audible, articulate, meaningful sound as produced by the action of the vocal organs (2) : a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings (3) : the suggestion by objects, actions, or conditions of associated ideas or feelings <language in their very gesture -- Shakespeare> (4) : the means by which animals communicate (5) : a formal system of signs and symbols (as FORTRAN or a calculus in logic) including rules for the formation and transformation of admissible expressions (6) : MACHINE LANGUAGE 1
2 a : form or manner of verbal expression; specifically : STYLE b : the vocabulary and phraseology belonging to an art or a department of knowledge c : PROFANITY 3 : the study of language especially as a school subject
Starting with the very first definition, language must be understood by a community.
I will concede that the grammar Nazis carry things to an extreme. As much as it annoys me, I can understand text with common grammar issues (wrong verb tense, plural vs. singular) and common typographical errors. Beyond that, and I have to work harder to understand the text.
As errors approach infinity, the probability approaches zero that a "community" understands what is being said or written. Thus, this is not some sort of natural evolution of language. Language, particularly as described by definition 1a above, naturally evolves towards commonly understood phrases and word combinations. Uncommon or inconsistent spelling, usage or ordering of words will always get in the way of the understanding of the "community".
The funny thing is that, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, changing the font size using Ctrl+Mousewheel, and then changing back to the original size fixes the problem--until you refresh.
It is particularly strange that the only site where I have Firefox rendering issues is/. though....
Hahaha! I was just in the process of typing a response to the topic when I saw your post.
As a partner-in-crime on your endeavor, the details are exactly what I recalled (though you remembered more since the idea was yours and I was primarily the provider of the circular saw;-).
Read the question the person asked again. They're looking for long term storage, not a backup. The redundancy of RAID provides some assurance that your data will be around for the long term.
Back in the olden 386 days (about 12 years ago), I was doing a for-fee computer upgrade. Can't remember what the upgrade was, but I was getting paid $75, which at that point in life was well worth the effort involved. Whatever the upgrade was, it involved removing lots of power connectors and the like and then reconnecting them. You know how pretty much every 3.5" floppy connector is keyed? Well, this lovely machine didn't have that option.
Maybe I should mention at this point that my "customer" (also my boss at the time) was a lawyer, and a quite computer savvy one at that. She had all her finances on the machine. Turbo Tax records for multiple years, Quicken data, Checkfree eletronic payments... numerous personal documents in Word. I didn't make a backup of the hard drive before proceeding. I mean, I had nothing that could hold the drive's contents (it was a ~60MB MFM drive, one of those full-height 5.25" beasts), though I had plenty of floppies....
So, I simply plugged in all the plugs, figuring that they should be keyed, so polarity won't be a problem, right? Wrong. I got a "pop" and wisp of smoke from the floppy drive as soon as I hit the power switch. I immediately powered down. After assessing the situation, I disconnected the floppy drive, figuring I simply killed the floppy (bad enough, but could be worse). Wrong. The hard drive was unresponsive. At this point I started _really_ feeling the gut churn.
A combination of smarts and luck (and $$$) saved me. A friend and I noticed the drive still spun up, so it was mechanically okay. We theorized that the MFM controller was okay based on the error message we saw on boot. If I could find an identical drive, we may be able to swap out the circuit board with the dead drive. I scoured the local used computer stores and managed to find one that had the exact same drive, used, for $179 + tax. I bought that, and paid I forget how much for a new 3.5" floppy, and returned home. Nervously, my friend and I took out the Torx screwdrivers and removed the drive's circuit board. Swapping the boards did work, the computer booted back up, I got paid my $75 (net loss >$100), and forever have a great computer story to tell everyone to remind them how you can never be too careful with power connector polarity.
Fortunately, the drop in computer hardware costs has made similar tragedies much more bearable. Just last week, I had a screwdriver slip while prying the heat sink tab and killed a brand new motherboard. That 12-year-old stomach ache hit me for quite a while before I reminded myself that while this could've been very bad, it was only a $60 mobo. All the same, it's never fun to accidentally break things.
Admittedly, this is not a perfect solution, and others have suggested solutions to help. However, the following actually works quite well for me: I'm running IPCop, and have Squid enabled with a 2GB cache size. Not a huge cache, but big enough to pick up Windows Update stuff (and small enough to deliver maximal performance on a 128MB machine with RAM to spare).
When I install a new XP machine at home, all the updates are still in cache from my last install, so are downloaded at full wire speed.
I just installed my second XP machine, which is when I saw that all updates pulled from cache. (I think MS is wisely very cache-friendly on Windows Update.) I know, you have to have patched a machine already on your network, but it's nice because it doesn't require any specialized tools, and it doesn't require relying on an independent site like AutoPatcher that may go away (or charge) in the future.
You're kidding, right? Because dogs never chew anything....;-)
I've owned cats and dogs, and the chewing/scratching damage done by the cats is nothing compared to what one of my dogs has done. (And he's really not that bad.)
Just two days ago I caught him laying down by a power strip, beginning to chew on the attached power bricks. As others have said, I was careful to not scold him for chewing. I moved the power strip away from him and immediately ran to get two of his favorite chew toys and brought them to him, and praised him when he started chewing them.
He was bored and wanted to chew something. Telling him, "don't chew anything" ain't gonna cut it. However, telling him, "Chew this instead," is >99.99% effective. (Standard, obvious psychology stuff, but had to be said.)
My searching turned up news stories saying ~$3MM. The company's form 8-K from Feb. 2003 shows they took a one-time restructuring charge of $150MM. Is that where you got the number?
I'm very picky about comfort for cell phone and computer headsets, a similar but not identical application. In my case, stealthiness was not a big deal, but comfort was. The two big issues I found were discomfort from earbuds (both conventional earbud and gel), and both leave my ears feeling very uncomfortable after even short periods of time. The more conventional headset earpads make my ears hot even at normal ambient room temps.
Here's my favorite. This style uses an "ear clip" to essentially dangle an earbud-sized earpiece in front of the ear opening. The wire runs behind the ear (as with the sony headphones mentioned above), and there's something about how the earpiece only rests on the ear that keeps any heat issues down. I like this headset enough that I got an adaptor at Radio Shack to use this headset on my computer.
Agreed. The cry seems to be, "Patch our machines quickly, but not too quickly." We can talk on and on about Microsoft writing unstable software and make some pretty good arguments. However, the real problem is that it's a complex system that's designed to look easy. It only stands to reason that a complex system will have more vulnerabilities. (Again, in no way trying to defend Microsoft.)
So, we cry when Microsoft "allows" machines to not get patched. But can I really yell at my mom about this? She & Dad were under the impression this was easy! So now they need to learn a bunch of stuff about the technology--bzz, wrong answer.
Then we can cry when Microsoft makes the scary proposition of auto-updating machines. The fact is, these are tough choices to make, and none of the possibilities are without problems.
I think the auto-update with an opt-out is the best way to go. MS, for all its faults, I think has a decent track record on patches. I've never had an issue, nor known anyone who's had a patch break their machine.
I'm using Roadside America to plot out quirky fun stops on a 1200 mile road trip I'm making this weekend.
I'm getting a "new" car that I'm flying to Boston to pick up, then driving back home to St. Louis, all without taking any vacation days from work.;-) This means I want brief, silly things to look for along the way. Roadside America seems great for that, except I wish they had these plotted onto a map. Instead, I'm having to look at the list of cities with attractions, then try to see which cities I'll pass near/through on my trip.
In his interview, Joe Clark discussed this--if my memory serves correctly.
Somewhere in his [lengthy] responses he suggested that considering accessibility in user interface design will result in a solution that's better for all. (I at least bought his arguments.;-)
Technical != nerdy != academic
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is an interesting insight, and it's sad to think of things being drawn along economic lines like this.
However, on the brighter side, there's another group of pessimists that have believed we'd have a technocracy, where techies rule the world (scary thought with plenty of jokes), and the non-technical ignorant masses left to collect minimum wage by flipping burgers. I've always considered this view to be too extreme. There are many fields that have technical aspects to them. Ever listen to the gibberish that car mechanics spout? They may not be nerds, and may not have college degrees, but I'd argue that they're extremely technical. Those same skills - especially troubleshooting and understanding how little details make a bigger thing work - are the exact skills that everyone needs, from programmers to network administrators.
I know a car mechanic who's picked up on the computer stuff to the point that he asks questions about trade-offs and disadvantages of PPPOE, DHCP and static IP addressing, and understands the difference between bandwidth and latency. I know many IT professionals that don't have that kind of knowledge. Of course, I know many IT professionals that became so because it was the cool career field, not because of an interest in computers.
In that sense, I think it's a very positive thing: the world now knows you don't need to be a wiry, pasty-faced, greasy dork to be good with computers. The thing that might be scary to those of us (you know who you are) who really just want to hide out in a glass room until we vest in our 401(k), this could be scary, and certainly should be taken as a wake-up call. Most of what we do with computers in the business world is inherently practical. We can draw all the cute diagrams and use the latest buzz words, but the core value we add is primarily through practical construction of some simple, maintainable systems. Fancy Visio diagrams don't change that.
As another aside, a couple years ago I was amazed to overhear conversation between two gentlemen behind me in line at Best Buy. They were the standard fare burly rednecks, with unkempt beards, in camoflage coveralls, but what they were discussing was rather different from the stereotype. With missing teeth and bad grammar, one was educating the other on why he should upgrade his video card, discussing details about how the amount of RAM as well as the RAMDAC spped and features such as T&L affect frame rate. And the other redneck dude gave all impressions of understanding the conversation.
In conclusion: the world is changing, computers aren't only in the hands of the "have"s, and in my opinion this isn't a completely horrible thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly though, blind folks have far more trouble in interpreting the output of their phones. They can work with pressing a sequence of buttons to launch an app or place a call, but end up dead in the water when it comes to figuring out a message that appears on-screen.
Can't speak fully to the options, but the button size might not be the biggest deal for blind folks, based on my limited sample set. I work with a blind IT guy (fully without sight, not merely "low vision", and blind for >25 years), who went with a Blackjack II because it's one of the cheapest, easiest ways to get into a smartphone with full screen reader available (for $$$), and with integral GPS (which has some sort of megabuck$$ talking GPS software release due out soon).
Perhaps the fact he's very comfortable with reading Braille makes him okay with it, because I find the buttons obnoxiously small. He stopped by my desk when he upgraded from the Blackjack to Blackjack II (had me swap his SIM card), and I walked him around the perimeter of the keyboard, where the non-QWERTY keys live to familiarize him with the differences, and he went on his way.
Pretty funny too, as his screen still has the "Remove this sticker" sticker on it - he's left it in place to help protect it, and he has no use for it. I only wish I could help him figure out how to turn the screen off entirely since he'd save a ton of battery that way...
Screwed out of tax dollars, eh? Just curious, do you think there shouldn't be subsidies for any assistive devices for the disabled? I'd disagree with you, but I suppose I'd understand that.
If, on the other hand, you think blind folk are walking around getting rich off cool toys, think again. The world of the GUI has left blind people very much behind in the technical revolution. When the government and nonprofit agencies give away (or even subsidize) a device, it's more likely to look like a bag phone than an iPhone. And I'm not talking about the fashion aspect, but the difference in functionality and portability that my analogy suggests.
I don't have the time to give this rant^H^H^H^Hreply sufficient backup (I tried and deleted it), but I think you'll discover as I have, if you talk to a blind person about this, navigating the world on a daily basis is so inconvenient and exhausting that convenient, truly portable assistive technology can be just what makes a housebound, unemployed blind person able to instead get a professional job that contributes to the tax base.
A similar, but safe, solution, detailed below: RV antifreeze, NOT standard automotive antifreeze and certainly not windshield washer fluid, is safe for potable water systems. It's similar to automotive antifreeze, but uses "food grade" propylene glycol. Prevents pipe bursting down to -50F. Seems standard to still turn off water and drain what you can, then pour in the RV antifreeze everwhere water remains, like the toilet tank and bowl, and sink traps.
The Ansari family did indeed generously donate a great deal of money to the X Prize foundation, so much so that the prize name changed from the "X Prize" to the "Ansari X Prize." In no way would I want to take away from their generosity. However, it's unfair to the many other people who donated gobs of money, years before the Ansari family's donation, to make the Ansaris out to be the sole investors. (Look at the donor list, linked above, and you'll see that many others were donating serious wads of cash as well.) The X Prize foundation was founded in 1994, and had announced $5 million in prize money in 1998. The Ansari donation (and subsequent name change) occurred in 2004.
MS bashing aside, it kills me that something as vague as AJAX is touted as a specific technology with a birth date. The only thing with a birthdate is the term. Wikipedia says it's when Jesse James Garrett first coined the term, in an article dated 2/18/2005.
The BitTorrent feed seems fine; maybe it's just the traditional download mirrors? I downloaded install-amd64-minimal-2005.0.iso last night and it boots fine.
Yes, that's the trick that some seem to be missing here when they talk about computing hash values faster than you suggest. You gotta read the whole file to compute a hash UNLESS you've only changed the last part of the file, in which case you could take the cumulative result and work from that point. If someone can show that the SHA-1 shortcuts the researchers found allow you to change data specifically at the end of the file, please correct me. Until then I'll assume that any assertions to the contrary are merely wild speculation.
Here are some real numbers for computing various hash values using Crypto++ 5.2.1. Even on a 1.6 GHz Opteron, SHA-1 hashes are computed at a rate of 100 MB/sec. Even a truckload of Opterons won't finish the job any time soon.
The cornstarch/water mixture is an example of a STF (Shear Thickening Fluid), which has a non-Newtonian flow. A recent Slashdot post nicely explains how hitting water at high speed differs from hitting a STF at high speed.
I will concede that the grammar Nazis carry things to an extreme. As much as it annoys me, I can understand text with common grammar issues (wrong verb tense, plural vs. singular) and common typographical errors. Beyond that, and I have to work harder to understand the text.
As errors approach infinity, the probability approaches zero that a "community" understands what is being said or written. Thus, this is not some sort of natural evolution of language. Language, particularly as described by definition 1a above, naturally evolves towards commonly understood phrases and word combinations. Uncommon or inconsistent spelling, usage or ordering of words will always get in the way of the understanding of the "community".
The funny thing is that, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, changing the font size using Ctrl+Mousewheel, and then changing back to the original size fixes the problem--until you refresh. It is particularly strange that the only site where I have Firefox rendering issues is /. though....
Hahaha! I was just in the process of typing a response to the topic when I saw your post.
;-).
As a partner-in-crime on your endeavor, the details are exactly what I recalled (though you remembered more since the idea was yours and I was primarily the provider of the circular saw
Read the question the person asked again. They're looking for long term storage, not a backup. The redundancy of RAID provides some assurance that your data will be around for the long term.
This isn't as much a tragedy as a near tragedy.
Back in the olden 386 days (about 12 years ago), I was doing a for-fee computer upgrade. Can't remember what the upgrade was, but I was getting paid $75, which at that point in life was well worth the effort involved. Whatever the upgrade was, it involved removing lots of power connectors and the like and then reconnecting them. You know how pretty much every 3.5" floppy connector is keyed? Well, this lovely machine didn't have that option.
Maybe I should mention at this point that my "customer" (also my boss at the time) was a lawyer, and a quite computer savvy one at that. She had all her finances on the machine. Turbo Tax records for multiple years, Quicken data, Checkfree eletronic payments... numerous personal documents in Word. I didn't make a backup of the hard drive before proceeding. I mean, I had nothing that could hold the drive's contents (it was a ~60MB MFM drive, one of those full-height 5.25" beasts), though I had plenty of floppies....
So, I simply plugged in all the plugs, figuring that they should be keyed, so polarity won't be a problem, right? Wrong. I got a "pop" and wisp of smoke from the floppy drive as soon as I hit the power switch. I immediately powered down. After assessing the situation, I disconnected the floppy drive, figuring I simply killed the floppy (bad enough, but could be worse). Wrong. The hard drive was unresponsive. At this point I started _really_ feeling the gut churn.
A combination of smarts and luck (and $$$) saved me. A friend and I noticed the drive still spun up, so it was mechanically okay. We theorized that the MFM controller was okay based on the error message we saw on boot. If I could find an identical drive, we may be able to swap out the circuit board with the dead drive. I scoured the local used computer stores and managed to find one that had the exact same drive, used, for $179 + tax. I bought that, and paid I forget how much for a new 3.5" floppy, and returned home. Nervously, my friend and I took out the Torx screwdrivers and removed the drive's circuit board. Swapping the boards did work, the computer booted back up, I got paid my $75 (net loss >$100), and forever have a great computer story to tell everyone to remind them how you can never be too careful with power connector polarity.
Fortunately, the drop in computer hardware costs has made similar tragedies much more bearable. Just last week, I had a screwdriver slip while prying the heat sink tab and killed a brand new motherboard. That 12-year-old stomach ache hit me for quite a while before I reminded myself that while this could've been very bad, it was only a $60 mobo. All the same, it's never fun to accidentally break things.
Admittedly, this is not a perfect solution, and others have suggested solutions to help. However, the following actually works quite well for me: I'm running IPCop, and have Squid enabled with a 2GB cache size. Not a huge cache, but big enough to pick up Windows Update stuff (and small enough to deliver maximal performance on a 128MB machine with RAM to spare).
When I install a new XP machine at home, all the updates are still in cache from my last install, so are downloaded at full wire speed.
I just installed my second XP machine, which is when I saw that all updates pulled from cache. (I think MS is wisely very cache-friendly on Windows Update.) I know, you have to have patched a machine already on your network, but it's nice because it doesn't require any specialized tools, and it doesn't require relying on an independent site like AutoPatcher that may go away (or charge) in the future.
Acclimatize is in the dictionary (or at least several I could find on quick notice):
There was an April Fools' Ask /. in March that also discussed "enhancing" HP Laserjet messages. Here's the pertinent thread.
You're kidding, right? Because dogs never chew anything.... ;-)
I've owned cats and dogs, and the chewing/scratching damage done by the cats is nothing compared to what one of my dogs has done. (And he's really not that bad.)
Just two days ago I caught him laying down by a power strip, beginning to chew on the attached power bricks. As others have said, I was careful to not scold him for chewing. I moved the power strip away from him and immediately ran to get two of his favorite chew toys and brought them to him, and praised him when he started chewing them.
He was bored and wanted to chew something. Telling him, "don't chew anything" ain't gonna cut it. However, telling him, "Chew this instead," is >99.99% effective. (Standard, obvious psychology stuff, but had to be said.)
My searching turned up news stories saying ~$3MM. The company's form 8-K from Feb. 2003 shows they took a one-time restructuring charge of $150MM. Is that where you got the number?
Here's my favorite. This style uses an "ear clip" to essentially dangle an earbud-sized earpiece in front of the ear opening. The wire runs behind the ear (as with the sony headphones mentioned above), and there's something about how the earpiece only rests on the ear that keeps any heat issues down. I like this headset enough that I got an adaptor at Radio Shack to use this headset on my computer.
Agreed. The cry seems to be, "Patch our machines quickly, but not too quickly." We can talk on and on about Microsoft writing unstable software and make some pretty good arguments. However, the real problem is that it's a complex system that's designed to look easy. It only stands to reason that a complex system will have more vulnerabilities. (Again, in no way trying to defend Microsoft.)
So, we cry when Microsoft "allows" machines to not get patched. But can I really yell at my mom about this? She & Dad were under the impression this was easy! So now they need to learn a bunch of stuff about the technology--bzz, wrong answer.
Then we can cry when Microsoft makes the scary proposition of auto-updating machines. The fact is, these are tough choices to make, and none of the possibilities are without problems.
I think the auto-update with an opt-out is the best way to go. MS, for all its faults, I think has a decent track record on patches. I've never had an issue, nor known anyone who's had a patch break their machine.
US electric clothes dryer outlets are 3-prong 220v. It's not three-phase. It's just both 110 hot lines + the neutral.
I'm using Roadside America to plot out quirky fun stops on a 1200 mile road trip I'm making this weekend.
;-) This means I want brief, silly things to look for along the way. Roadside America seems great for that, except I wish they had these plotted onto a map. Instead, I'm having to look at the list of cities with attractions, then try to see which cities I'll pass near/through on my trip.
I'm getting a "new" car that I'm flying to Boston to pick up, then driving back home to St. Louis, all without taking any vacation days from work.
In his interview, Joe Clark discussed this--if my memory serves correctly.
Somewhere in his [lengthy] responses he suggested that considering accessibility in user interface design will result in a solution that's better for all. (I at least bought his arguments. ;-)
This is an interesting insight, and it's sad to think of things being drawn along economic lines like this.
However, on the brighter side, there's another group of pessimists that have believed we'd have a technocracy, where techies rule the world (scary thought with plenty of jokes), and the non-technical ignorant masses left to collect minimum wage by flipping burgers. I've always considered this view to be too extreme. There are many fields that have technical aspects to them. Ever listen to the gibberish that car mechanics spout? They may not be nerds, and may not have college degrees, but I'd argue that they're extremely technical. Those same skills - especially troubleshooting and understanding how little details make a bigger thing work - are the exact skills that everyone needs, from programmers to network administrators.
I know a car mechanic who's picked up on the computer stuff to the point that he asks questions about trade-offs and disadvantages of PPPOE, DHCP and static IP addressing, and understands the difference between bandwidth and latency. I know many IT professionals that don't have that kind of knowledge. Of course, I know many IT professionals that became so because it was the cool career field, not because of an interest in computers.
In that sense, I think it's a very positive thing: the world now knows you don't need to be a wiry, pasty-faced, greasy dork to be good with computers. The thing that might be scary to those of us (you know who you are) who really just want to hide out in a glass room until we vest in our 401(k), this could be scary, and certainly should be taken as a wake-up call. Most of what we do with computers in the business world is inherently practical. We can draw all the cute diagrams and use the latest buzz words, but the core value we add is primarily through practical construction of some simple, maintainable systems. Fancy Visio diagrams don't change that.
As another aside, a couple years ago I was amazed to overhear conversation between two gentlemen behind me in line at Best Buy. They were the standard fare burly rednecks, with unkempt beards, in camoflage coveralls, but what they were discussing was rather different from the stereotype. With missing teeth and bad grammar, one was educating the other on why he should upgrade his video card, discussing details about how the amount of RAM as well as the RAMDAC spped and features such as T&L affect frame rate. And the other redneck dude gave all impressions of understanding the conversation.
In conclusion: the world is changing, computers aren't only in the hands of the "have"s, and in my opinion this isn't a completely horrible thing.
Thanks for listening. ;-)