I would say that the market for accessibility-specific Web consultancies is rather small and will have a short lifespan. I can say this with some confidence as I am an authority on accessibility, with a published book to prove it, and I hardly get any business.
Are you sure that you hardly get any work because there is no market, or courld it possibly be because... say, oh I don't know...
...you're a dick?
(PS - This is intended as a humorous remark, not a personal attack. Although some personal introspection might not hurt the situation.)
Honestly, I'm not surprised -at all- that he was as terse as he was. If anything, I'm surprised he was as polite as he was. Consider how many people posted asking him why he killed his wife, how he got away with killing his wife, if he and his wife ever did any sexual roleplaying with Trek characters...
Quite honestly, I think he probably read about the first dozen or so questions and then got to the point where he just got fed up with us asking stupid, insensitive, and downright hurtful questions. I'm amazed that some of you had the gall to call him a murderer, a pervert, and an egomaniac all in the same breath.
Hey boss,
Shatner (and probably most of us) never saw those questions.
Taco read him the selected questions, and most of us sane people read at +2 or +3 threshold, unless we're moderating.
Nice flame on the trolls, though. What's funny is that those types of questions were probably posed by social misfits in their 30s and 40s, as opposed to the usually juvenile hijinx coming from the teen crowd.
Regarding my question (#10, from my Geek in Training (uid 12075) account)...
While it's cool that Slashdot posed my question to William "Bill" "Captain Kirk" "TJ Hooker" Shatner (he's actually 71, not 61, my bad); I don't know whether to take his comment at face value and realize he is giving an off-the-cuff response, or be disappointed because he (apparently) didn't give it much thought. The "My life is my statement" seems at first profound, yet not necessarily deep.
To be honest, I had this secret wish that someone who was so good at poking fun at himself in his old age would have some deep, contemplative responses for questions about his life's journey. Perhaps I am just naive in confusing talent and humor with insight and intellectualism.
Oh well, I'm glad he took the time to reply. I stand by my probing questions, but must only answer them in my own imagination, from Bill's point of view.
If its not our business why post it on his web site?
He gives out a little bit of general info to provide background for the other things he posts. That doesn't necessarily obligate him to run every aspect of his life in the public forum. His respect for the privacy of his family is commendable.
Not that I care realy, it just struck me as odd.
If it strikes you enough to think about it and post a comment to slashdot, you must care. At least a little bit.
From Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: "This is a site populated by militant movie buffs. Sad, pathetic little bastards living in their parents basement, downloading scripts and what they think is inside information about movies and actors they claim to dispise, yet can't stop discussing."
The link is an interesting read. However I was struck by two things. First he claims he is turning 30. Second he says his child is 13. 30 - 13 = 17. IMHO thats a wee bit young to be a dad. Then again him and his kid could sit around playing PS2 games and snarfing cheetos.
Not that I feel a strange compulsion to validate your attempt at a point, but I believe he says, "My wife, Anne, and I have been married since 1999" on his website.
It could very well be that he married a woman who already had a child. Even if he did father a child at 17, I think Wil Wheaton is a stand-up guy enough to be able to handle it like a man.
Ron, if you're reading this: please, please, please, try to be more careful in the way you describe these things in your work. I really believe that there's way too much journalism that conveys strong innapropriate bias in subtle ways. I'm not sure if you mean to, but try to be aware of it, even if not all of your colleagues are.
I don't talk to reporters anymore, never. I have had a very select few occaisions to talk "on the record" about something I am interested in, and my sound bites were taken complely out of context and spun toward the bias of the "journalist's angle."
If I'm ever in a situation to actually grant an interview on something again, I'm going to have to demand pre-publication review and clarification editorial rights. As far as I know, this just doesn't happen.
I'm not out to get a fluff piece done, swooning over me, but I'm sure as hell going to make certain that MY point gets across by my own words, not someone ELSE'S point.
Was was reading this yesterday, it's actually interesting. It wasn't six bets, it was one bet on six consecutive races (called a Pick 6, apparently). The ticket cost over a grand just to purchase.
Apparently, the winning ticket including the first 4 race winners, followed by picking every horse in the field for the 5th and 6th races. This was suspicious because the betting management company allows the bets to be submitted during simulcasting through the end of the 4th race to prevent system congestion, according to the article.
The theory is that the employee submitted a fixed bet at the end of the 4th race. The ticketholder himself, apparently unrelated to the employee who is under investigation for fraud, claims that he is innocent, and is telling the company to put up some evidence or give him his 3 mils.
I dunno about you, but I do detect a strong odor of fish. On the other hand, if the lottery hit for this guy and he is legit, more power to him.
No, we just have several thousand remote users on 56k frame relay circuits who run their windows desktops and 4-10 different applications (depending on job functions) off of a Citrix farm.
Hope that answers your question.:) Also, yes RAM is your friend for multiple sessions!
And yet while running enterprise class systems I can't find a system with too little power.
Well I have a citrix farm full of quad Xeons and 4 gigabytes of RAM, and we'd still love some more power, thanks.:)
Maybe you don't want 3.06 GHz for what you're working on, but our "Enterprise Class Systems" (Win2k application servers) can use all the CPU we can throw at them. Everyone has different needs, and for a lot of folks, faster processors are a good thing.
(I've seen this troll a few times over the last four or five AMD/Intel product announcements. And it's still getting modded up.)
SCSI in mass production anywhere near how much IDE stuff gets made will drop the price to the point where it would be affordable to sell it to the home market. Or so the theory goes.
As I sit here in the datacenter, surrounded by (and overwhelmed by the noise of) twelve hundred rackmount servers, each containing between 3 and 15 SCSI Ultra3 (and up) hard drives, 10 to 15 thousand RPMs... and realize that corporations have been buying these things for years...
I am STILL trying to understand why we pay $500 for a 36 GB 15k SCSI drive (40 gig 7200RPM IDE, $77) and over $800 for a 72 GB 10k SCSI drive (80 gig 7200 RPM IDE, $105).
Yes, the IDE drives are more mass-produced, have shorter warranties, and are slower. But the "make more and they'll go down in price" thing just doesn't seem to make sense. And I've been doing this for a few years; long enough to tell you that when you deal with thousands of drives, a couple a dozen per year are still going to fail within the first 6 months. The data density is well below par, even if the drive reliability is comparable. (Thank God for RAID.)
Crossover office is a version of wine [winehq.com] tweaked to run microsoft office better. Xandros does not include office, you still have to buy it yourself.
Maybe I'm dense, but when our (admittedly large and Microsoft-heavy) corporation buys ~2 GHz IBM desktops with Win2k Pro and Office2k Pro for $600 apiece, and looks to refresh the hardware/OS every 3 years, why in the world would $99 plus the cost of office be a good deal for an OS?
Not to mention testing, replication of images, training, more training, support training, additional support during the conversion, development costs to convert fat-client apps to new OS or to web-based alternatives, cost of converting hundreds of national field offices off WinNT and Win2k (either by traveling internal staff, or a vendor who knows the new OS)...
Wow, I have made it 4 and a half years...
on
Slashdot Turns 5
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I can't believe that after all these years of reading Slashdot, hanging here with my uber-low UID number. And I've made it all this time, managing to resist the temptation to post... Four and a half years without a single troll, flame, or even so much as a "me too!"
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that you hardly get any work because there is no market, or courld it possibly be because... say, oh I don't know...
(PS - This is intended as a humorous remark, not a personal attack. Although some personal introspection might not hurt the situation.)
Honestly, I'm not surprised -at all- that he was as terse as he was. If anything, I'm surprised he was as polite as he was. Consider how many people posted asking him why he killed his wife, how he got away with killing his wife, if he and his wife ever did any sexual roleplaying with Trek characters...
Quite honestly, I think he probably read about the first dozen or so questions and then got to the point where he just got fed up with us asking stupid, insensitive, and downright hurtful questions. I'm amazed that some of you had the gall to call him a murderer, a pervert, and an egomaniac all in the same breath.
Hey boss,
Shatner (and probably most of us) never saw those questions.
Taco read him the selected questions, and most of us sane people read at +2 or +3 threshold, unless we're moderating.
Nice flame on the trolls, though. What's funny is that those types of questions were probably posed by social misfits in their 30s and 40s, as opposed to the usually juvenile hijinx coming from the teen crowd.
Regarding my question (#10, from my Geek in Training (uid 12075) account)...
While it's cool that Slashdot posed my question to William "Bill" "Captain Kirk" "TJ Hooker" Shatner (he's actually 71, not 61, my bad); I don't know whether to take his comment at face value and realize he is giving an off-the-cuff response, or be disappointed because he (apparently) didn't give it much thought. The "My life is my statement" seems at first profound, yet not necessarily deep.
To be honest, I had this secret wish that someone who was so good at poking fun at himself in his old age would have some deep, contemplative responses for questions about his life's journey. Perhaps I am just naive in confusing talent and humor with insight and intellectualism.
Oh well, I'm glad he took the time to reply. I stand by my probing questions, but must only answer them in my own imagination, from Bill's point of view.
If its not our business why post it on his web site?
He gives out a little bit of general info to provide background for the other things he posts. That doesn't necessarily obligate him to run every aspect of his life in the public forum. His respect for the privacy of his family is commendable.
Not that I care realy, it just struck me as odd.
If it strikes you enough to think about it and post a comment to slashdot, you must care. At least a little bit.
From Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: "This is a site populated by militant movie buffs. Sad, pathetic little bastards living in their parents basement, downloading scripts and what they think is inside information about movies and actors they claim to dispise, yet can't stop discussing."
The link is an interesting read. However I was struck by two things. First he claims he is turning 30. Second he says his child is 13. 30 - 13 = 17. IMHO thats a wee bit young to be a dad. Then again him and his kid could sit around playing PS2 games and snarfing cheetos.
Not that I feel a strange compulsion to validate your attempt at a point, but I believe he says, "My wife, Anne, and I have been married since 1999" on his website.
It could very well be that he married a woman who already had a child. Even if he did father a child at 17, I think Wil Wheaton is a stand-up guy enough to be able to handle it like a man.
Not that it's any of our business.
Is the Reman some sort of clone, Borg Hybrid, Picard love child, or what?
Ron, if you're reading this: please, please, please, try to be more careful in the way you describe these things in your work. I really believe that there's way too much journalism that conveys strong innapropriate bias in subtle ways. I'm not sure if you mean to, but try to be aware of it, even if not all of your colleagues are.
I don't talk to reporters anymore, never. I have had a very select few occaisions to talk "on the record" about something I am interested in, and my sound bites were taken complely out of context and spun toward the bias of the "journalist's angle."
If I'm ever in a situation to actually grant an interview on something again, I'm going to have to demand pre-publication review and clarification editorial rights. As far as I know, this just doesn't happen.
I'm not out to get a fluff piece done, swooning over me, but I'm sure as hell going to make certain that MY point gets across by my own words, not someone ELSE'S point.
If anyone would like to air their feelings on the subject, please call me at 212-416-4974...
:)
So what IS the sound of a telephone being slashdotted?
As a normal everyday guy from Canada,
:)
Sorry for the confusion, that should be "as you are a normal, everyday guy from Canada..."
And DISPARITY.
I spent a while proofreading and was still way late on the submission
resulted in a series of six bets
Was was reading this yesterday, it's actually interesting. It wasn't six bets, it was one bet on six consecutive races (called a Pick 6, apparently). The ticket cost over a grand just to purchase.
Apparently, the winning ticket including the first 4 race winners, followed by picking every horse in the field for the 5th and 6th races. This was suspicious because the betting management company allows the bets to be submitted during simulcasting through the end of the 4th race to prevent system congestion, according to the article.
The theory is that the employee submitted a fixed bet at the end of the 4th race. The ticketholder himself, apparently unrelated to the employee who is under investigation for fraud, claims that he is innocent, and is telling the company to put up some evidence or give him his 3 mils.
I dunno about you, but I do detect a strong odor of fish. On the other hand, if the lottery hit for this guy and he is legit, more power to him.
No, we just have several thousand remote users on 56k frame relay circuits who run their windows desktops and 4-10 different applications (depending on job functions) off of a Citrix farm.
:) Also, yes RAM is your friend for multiple sessions!
Hope that answers your question.
And yet while running enterprise class systems I can't find a system with too little power.
:)
Well I have a citrix farm full of quad Xeons and 4 gigabytes of RAM, and we'd still love some more power, thanks.
Maybe you don't want 3.06 GHz for what you're working on, but our "Enterprise Class Systems" (Win2k application servers) can use all the CPU we can throw at them. Everyone has different needs, and for a lot of folks, faster processors are a good thing.
(I've seen this troll a few times over the last four or five AMD/Intel product announcements. And it's still getting modded up.)
Yahoo has the news about the new P4 who will run at nothing less than 3.06mhz...
:)
Wow! That's super fast...
FOR 1975!!!
I don't know about you, but if Intel is selling 3.06mhz CPUs for a few hundred quid, I'm buying AMD.
SCSI in mass production anywhere near how much IDE stuff gets made will drop the price to the point where it would be affordable to sell it to the home market. Or so the theory goes.
As I sit here in the datacenter, surrounded by (and overwhelmed by the noise of) twelve hundred rackmount servers, each containing between 3 and 15 SCSI Ultra3 (and up) hard drives, 10 to 15 thousand RPMs... and realize that corporations have been buying these things for years...
I am STILL trying to understand why we pay $500 for a 36 GB 15k SCSI drive (40 gig 7200RPM IDE, $77) and over $800 for a 72 GB 10k SCSI drive (80 gig 7200 RPM IDE, $105).
Yes, the IDE drives are more mass-produced, have shorter warranties, and are slower. But the "make more and they'll go down in price" thing just doesn't seem to make sense. And I've been doing this for a few years; long enough to tell you that when you deal with thousands of drives, a couple a dozen per year are still going to fail within the first 6 months. The data density is well below par, even if the drive reliability is comparable. (Thank God for RAID.)
Crossover office is a version of wine [winehq.com] tweaked to run microsoft office better. Xandros does not include office, you still have to buy it yourself.
Maybe I'm dense, but when our (admittedly large and Microsoft-heavy) corporation buys ~2 GHz IBM desktops with Win2k Pro and Office2k Pro for $600 apiece, and looks to refresh the hardware/OS every 3 years, why in the world would $99 plus the cost of office be a good deal for an OS?
Not to mention testing, replication of images, training, more training, support training, additional support during the conversion, development costs to convert fat-client apps to new OS or to web-based alternatives, cost of converting hundreds of national field offices off WinNT and Win2k (either by traveling internal staff, or a vendor who knows the new OS)...
And geez, If I want a $100 OS at home, I'll drop the $90 for XP Home Edition, thanks.
I can't believe that after all these years of reading Slashdot, hanging here with my uber-low UID number. And I've made it all this time, managing to resist the temptation to post... Four and a half years without a single troll, flame, or even so much as a "me too!"
Wait a minute...
DOH!!