But the Disabilities Act does not require anyone except government agencies and a few other select public service entities to have assessable web sites.
But this "Act" would seem to make it illegal to make a site that is all flash, or accessible to Opera only, etc.
RTFL (Read the Farking Legislation). It is not to do with specific *browsers* (ie doesn't matter if you exclude Opera, or NS, or IE), but whether using those browsers together with assistive technology (which most OS and Browser publishers are increasingly supporting without recourse to third party tools) it is possible to use sites that provide services to the public (or to employees, which is a different section of the Act).
Further, Macromedia have also gone a long way to provide accessibility support in recent versions of Flash, so it's now not the total waste of space for disabled users that it used to be.
It seems that it is in the webmaster's best interest to allow the widest audience to use the site,
Indeed, there is a strong commercial argument to providing accessibility support simply on revenue,
even without the reputational issues involved.
but I don't see how it is any government business how a private company codes its website. Frankly, its no one's business if I want to code my own site to be inaccessible to anyone I want.
You also think it's your right to stick up 'No blacks or Irish' signs on your business?
Even Microsoft won't let you update Windows automatically without IE, which is their right.
However, even Microsoft have increasingly provided accesibility support in Windows and IE.
This is a theatre chain, they should have the right to design their website as they see fit.
This is a cinema chain. They provide services to the public, and must not do so in a way that unlawfully discriminates against sections of society.
Going online to view movie listings falls far short of the what any government should regulate.
Providing services to the public. Same as any of the Civil Rights legisation passed here, the US and other places. And given that many such operators give discounts for online booking, are you really proposing charging someone more because they have a disability?
Should we pass a law that requires all websites (blogs, family home pages, theatres, slashdot, etc) to have every bit of text, including the html source, as audio, to make the site accessible to blind people?
*cough*schoolboy fallacy*cough*. Although if you're coding to W3c standards, you will *already be* largely accessible.
In the early days of the web, there was a webcam that was pointed at an
LED sign. To which you could send your own messages, laugh while your coffee and TSP reports get cold, and marvel at the 'wonders of that modern Internet thingie'.
I also seem to remember some guy who claimed to have a speech synthesiser hooked up to an Amiga in his apartment, and you could talk to his cat.
Ah, here's some contemporary info about it, although the original talk to cat gateway is no longer running and even the Wayback Machine has nothing for the server.
Whether or not it actually spoke to his cat is probably debatable, but it certainly kept a log of messages sent.
Not really. It has a data front-end that can be plugged into a backend database, but nothing as self-contained as Access. This is about the only valid complaint about a "lacking" office app in the OSS world. For the small office there's nothing like Access.
You will however note that Access only comes with certain Office versions... Even enterprises don't license it for everyone, but on a case-by-case basis.
Tony: Absolutely! Zero downtime..guaranteed in our Service Level Agreement
So, either Tony is screwed when the engineers find out, or we can add Rackspace to Cockroaches and Twinkies as the only things that will survive a nuclear war.
Not sure you understand what is meant by an SLA... And haven't read the Rackspace info.
Essentially it means that if you don't get the level of service in the agreement, they will compensate you. This doesn't mean that the company will disappear into a puff of logic, or hand over a split new Ferrari if they have a second of downtime, but that there is an agreed schedule of payments they will make if they fail to deliver.
This makes it a simple business decision: "Is the risk schedule of payments plus loss of goodwill/face if we fail to deliver the SLA worth more than the extra business we'll gain by offering it (or rather, the incremental business over a lower SLA)?" If so, you offer the SLA.
In Rackspace's case, they've hit 99.999% of planned uptime[1] for 30 months straight (and only had a couple of planned downtimes for maintenance in that time), so were able to make an informed decision that the risk to them for offering a 100% SLA wasn't large enough to counter the business benefit of offering it, so that's what they're offering. If the engineers weren't part of that decision (assessing the risk at least) then I'd be amazed.
[1] iirc, this is network uptime - if you screw your own box, it's your own problem.
With the caveat that "now" and "good" are relative and only apply to the browser 4 years ago, not today. This very minute, Internet Explorer is to the browser market as Yugos are to the sports car market.
Oh agreed, but that's because once MS had beaten NS into the ground as a commercial force, there was no need to continue to improve IE.
Much as Moz based browsers (and Konq/Safari) are technically miles ahead technically and in terms of standards support, they pose little commercial threat to MS, who can therefore stop spending shareholder money on competing with them.
On an unrelated point, does anyone else think that this is a monumentally stupid point for MS to take a long break in OS releases to Longhorn? You could compare it to the Apple OS7.5->OSX hiatus - when Apple started the process, they were competing with Win3.1. By the time Apple came back with a *real* successor, they were faced with Win2k - *2* generations ahead.
From the little I've seen of Longhorn, it may be marginally better than where OSX is now, but won't be even an also-ran compared with OSX by the time it actually ships.
Why yes. Which is why the UK is in the process of rolling out Chip and PIN (the trial was last summer). Over the next 18 months, every credit card - and probably most debit cards - in the UK will be replaced, along with upgrades to near enough every ATM and PoS device.
The major enforcement of this is the shifting of liability from the card schemes (MC, VISA and AMEX mostly) to anyone that doesn't comply. By 2006, finding anyone relying on magstripe will be less easy than currently finding someone relying on paper carbons.
IIRC, the verification takes place on the card. The ATM passes the PIN entered to the card, which simply responds pass|fail. No keys pass between reader and card, and the real PIN is held on-card with a sensible level of encryption.
Well, that's one way of looking at it. The other way is to look at taxation as a proportion of income (or to make the point even stronger, disposable income).
If you're able to pay your taxes (direct and indirect) with 10 minutes' work, would you consider it an equivalent and fair burden compared to someone who has to work for months to pay their burden?
A fair and transparent form of personal taxation would be to have a standardised %age of disposable income, although no doubt with good tax advice, it would be easy to show that one doesn't have any disposable income worth taxing.
Besides, Oliver Wendell Holmes was right - taxes are the price you pay for a civilised society. They are not an evil in themselves.
Even Temperament: why guitar tuning isn't possible
on
The Self-Tuning Guitar
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· Score: 1
There's a fun problem with tuning instruments: you can indeed tune them perfectly, provided you only ever stay in one key.
Simple intervals - 4th, 5th and octave are based on simple proportions of frequencies. Unfortunately, as you keep going up the simple proportions, you get out of line with where you started from.
Example: a simple circle of 5ths:
c - g - d - a - e - b - f# - c# - g# - d# - a# - f - c
This should take you exactly 7 octaves up, so with a frequency of exactly 2**7 that of the original C. But sadly, it doesn't. As you go further up, you get a bit out, and it's actually painfully out of tune.
Trouble is, a relatively common way to tune guitars without electronics is to do so by harmonics, counting beats. But this means that not only is your top E not 2 octaves above your bottom E, all your frets are subtley wrong and you'll have some problems around your G/B strings because it's not a simple 4th interval.
Violin players have it easy - they only have 4 strings at equal intervals, covering under 2 octaves, plus as they don't have any frets, really class violinists will unconsciously micro-adjust their notes mid stream.
What is much easier to do for fixed instruments like keyboards and fretted string instruments is tune one octave perfectly (say white notes starting at middle C), then tune each C on the instrument to N octaves up/down from the original C, then each D, and so on. Result, as long as you stay on the white keys (so C major/A minor/other white key modes), you're fine. But if you modulate to say G Major - a normal direction - you'll be in pain as your F# will be way out, so a simple dominant chord of D will be nasty.
This was well understood by about 1600, and came to a head with the rise of organ playing, and a number of compromises were worked out, where all the little differences are adjusted so that you can play in any key, and it'll be near enough OK. A side result of this is that different keys have different sounds as the adjustments fall differently.
As a demonstration of this variation of key colour, J S Bach wrote a set of preludes and fugues - 2 sets of 24, covering every major and every minor key, called the Well Tempered Klavier (or just the '48').
Re:Toyota Truck Trashing (attempted)
on
Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
That would have been this report. They drove into things in it, parked it in the sea and let the tide come in over it, they set it on fire, they put it on the top of a tall building being demolished and dropped a caravan on it. And it still started.
Re:Why the NYT thinks this is noteworthy...
on
Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
I had one guy comment to me here on/. that there was an Audi which you couldn't open the hood to change the fluids! A little flip panel was the only access for this.
That'll be the A2.
Not really the first car you'd think of if you're hotrodding. It's a mini-MPV with an astounding level of fuel economy (in part due to the aluminium construction). Boosting the performance at the expense of fuel economy seems like an exercise in missing the point of the model...
Incidentally, a friend of mine has one, and the EMU once went into safe mode and wouldn't let him go above 50 MpH or so.
Re:Hacking Bluetooth enabled cars
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
While that would be cool in principle, there's no need to stream iPod via Bluetooth (assuming there were a Bluetooth iPod add-on), there's really no need as you can either use an iTrip to broadcast via FM (technically illegal in the UK, but eBay is your friend;-) ), or as your Prius has a tape player, one of those simple stereo out->cassette doodads will give you an even better sound.
Choice hotels wouldn't even have to mark-up the price of the rooms to cover the marginal cost of WiFi. If I, as a road-warrior, have a choice between a hotel with WiFi and a hotel without, I'm going to choose WiFi.
Actually, given that most hotel guests don't pay the rack rate, but one of a range of discounted rates that depend very, very heavily on occupancy (Hmm, sorry AmEx Travel, we don't have any of the $115 rooms left, but we do have one at $120), having more bookings really does allow hotels to obtain a price premium.
Note also that this is very selective highlights of a supposedly leaked copy of the conclusions, which happen to agree exactly with the Sun's position to date.
Slight caveat - Psyco is x86 only. Which is OK if you're not needing a globally redistributable end result. Testing with Plone suggests that by Pysco compiling a few of the more expensive components, you get a 10% speedup.
The other consumer hype was that you could have different format photos - particularly panoramas.
Of course, this was total bollox as all it did was chop off the top and bottom of the shot and blow up the centre strip, with all the associated grain blown up as well.
If you think it's annoying over IM, just think how much worse it would be if she phoned you...
Seriously though, what a lot of people are missing - or not spelling out - is that IM is great for (relatively) non-interrupting communication: the things that would be *really* tiresome if you had to be totally interrupted from whatever else you're trying to do to pay attention to.
The "What's for dinner" conversation is a great example, as is pretty much any question starting with "When..?"
Slashdot Mirror
Au contraire. The Act explicitly covers Access to Goods and Services, and successful cases brought under Part III concern a range of non-governmental bodies.
In fact, studying the actual text of the Act, we see specifically listed examples of providers to whom the legislation applies, including:
RTFL (Read the Farking Legislation). It is not to do with specific *browsers* (ie doesn't matter if you exclude Opera, or NS, or IE), but whether using those browsers together with assistive technology (which most OS and Browser publishers are increasingly supporting without recourse to third party tools) it is possible to use sites that provide services to the public (or to employees, which is a different section of the Act).
Further, Macromedia have also gone a long way to provide accessibility support in recent versions of Flash, so it's now not the total waste of space for disabled users that it used to be.
Indeed, there is a strong commercial argument to providing accessibility support simply on revenue, even without the reputational issues involved.
You also think it's your right to stick up 'No blacks or Irish' signs on your business?
However, even Microsoft have increasingly provided accesibility support in Windows and IE.
This is a cinema chain. They provide services to the public, and must not do so in a way that unlawfully discriminates against sections of society.
Providing services to the public. Same as any of the Civil Rights legisation passed here, the US and other places. And given that many such operators give discounts for online booking, are you really proposing charging someone more because they have a disability?
*cough*schoolboy fallacy*cough*. Although if you're coding to W3c standards, you will *already be* largely accessible.
This being back in 94 or so when I saw it. Blimey, have I been online that long?
I also seem to remember some guy who claimed to have a speech synthesiser hooked up to an Amiga in his apartment, and you could talk to his cat.
Ah, here's some contemporary info about it, although the original talk to cat gateway is no longer running and even the Wayback Machine has nothing for the server.
Whether or not it actually spoke to his cat is probably debatable, but it certainly kept a log of messages sent.
Hmm - sounds like a b3ta challenge to me...
You will however note that Access only comes with certain Office versions... Even enterprises don't license it for everyone, but on a case-by-case basis.
Something like a Tranquil Smooth Server perhaps? Mini-ITX based, with Smoothwall Corporate pre-installed.
Pictures
Not sure you understand what is meant by an SLA... And haven't read the Rackspace info.
Essentially it means that if you don't get the level of service in the agreement, they will compensate you. This doesn't mean that the company will disappear into a puff of logic, or hand over a split new Ferrari if they have a second of downtime, but that there is an agreed schedule of payments they will make if they fail to deliver.
This makes it a simple business decision: "Is the risk schedule of payments plus loss of goodwill/face if we fail to deliver the SLA worth more than the extra business we'll gain by offering it (or rather, the incremental business over a lower SLA)?" If so, you offer the SLA.
In Rackspace's case, they've hit 99.999% of planned uptime[1] for 30 months straight (and only had a couple of planned downtimes for maintenance in that time), so were able to make an informed decision that the risk to them for offering a 100% SLA wasn't large enough to counter the business benefit of offering it, so that's what they're offering. If the engineers weren't part of that decision (assessing the risk at least) then I'd be amazed.
[1] iirc, this is network uptime - if you screw your own box, it's your own problem.
Well have you ever seen them in the same room together?
In soviet russia, SCO licences buy YOU
(Sorry, couldn't help it)
Oh agreed, but that's because once MS had beaten NS into the ground as a commercial force, there was no need to continue to improve IE.
Much as Moz based browsers (and Konq/Safari) are technically miles ahead technically and in terms of standards support, they pose little commercial threat to MS, who can therefore stop spending shareholder money on competing with them.
On an unrelated point, does anyone else think that this is a monumentally stupid point for MS to take a long break in OS releases to Longhorn? You could compare it to the Apple OS7.5->OSX hiatus - when Apple started the process, they were competing with Win3.1. By the time Apple came back with a *real* successor, they were faced with Win2k - *2* generations ahead.
From the little I've seen of Longhorn, it may be marginally better than where OSX is now, but won't be even an also-ran compared with OSX by the time it actually ships.
Why yes. Which is why the UK is in the process of rolling out Chip and PIN (the trial was last summer). Over the next 18 months, every credit card - and probably most debit cards - in the UK will be replaced, along with upgrades to near enough every ATM and PoS device.
The major enforcement of this is the shifting of liability from the card schemes (MC, VISA and AMEX mostly) to anyone that doesn't comply. By 2006, finding anyone relying on magstripe will be less easy than currently finding someone relying on paper carbons.
IIRC, the verification takes place on the card. The ATM passes the PIN entered to the card, which simply responds pass|fail. No keys pass between reader and card, and the real PIN is held on-card with a sensible level of encryption.
It's a far cry from the Fresno Drop of 1958.
OT: Given that:
I'm fairly gobsmacked that we're re-inventing the wheel here.
Well, that's one way of looking at it. The other way is to look at taxation as a proportion of income (or to make the point even stronger, disposable income).
If you're able to pay your taxes (direct and indirect) with 10 minutes' work, would you consider it an equivalent and fair burden compared to someone who has to work for months to pay their burden?
A fair and transparent form of personal taxation would be to have a standardised %age of disposable income, although no doubt with good tax advice, it would be easy to show that one doesn't have any disposable income worth taxing.
Besides, Oliver Wendell Holmes was right - taxes are the price you pay for a civilised society. They are not an evil in themselves.
There's a fun problem with tuning instruments: you can indeed tune them perfectly, provided you only ever stay in one key.
Simple intervals - 4th, 5th and octave are based on simple proportions of frequencies. Unfortunately, as you keep going up the simple proportions, you get out of line with where you started from.
Example: a simple circle of 5ths:
This should take you exactly 7 octaves up, so with a frequency of exactly 2**7 that of the original C. But sadly, it doesn't. As you go further up, you get a bit out, and it's actually painfully out of tune.
Trouble is, a relatively common way to tune guitars without electronics is to do so by harmonics, counting beats. But this means that not only is your top E not 2 octaves above your bottom E, all your frets are subtley wrong and you'll have some problems around your G/B strings because it's not a simple 4th interval.
Violin players have it easy - they only have 4 strings at equal intervals, covering under 2 octaves, plus as they don't have any frets, really class violinists will unconsciously micro-adjust their notes mid stream.
What is much easier to do for fixed instruments like keyboards and fretted string instruments is tune one octave perfectly (say white notes starting at middle C), then tune each C on the instrument to N octaves up/down from the original C, then each D, and so on. Result, as long as you stay on the white keys (so C major/A minor/other white key modes), you're fine. But if you modulate to say G Major - a normal direction - you'll be in pain as your F# will be way out, so a simple dominant chord of D will be nasty.
This was well understood by about 1600, and came to a head with the rise of organ playing, and a number of compromises were worked out, where all the little differences are adjusted so that you can play in any key, and it'll be near enough OK. A side result of this is that different keys have different sounds as the adjustments fall differently.
As a demonstration of this variation of key colour, J S Bach wrote a set of preludes and fugues - 2 sets of 24, covering every major and every minor key, called the Well Tempered Klavier (or just the '48').
More than you need to know at A beginner's guide to temperament.
That would have been this report. They drove into things in it, parked it in the sea and let the tide come in over it, they set it on fire, they put it on the top of a tall building being demolished and dropped a caravan on it. And it still started.
That'll be the A2. Not really the first car you'd think of if you're hotrodding. It's a mini-MPV with an astounding level of fuel economy (in part due to the aluminium construction). Boosting the performance at the expense of fuel economy seems like an exercise in missing the point of the model...
Incidentally, a friend of mine has one, and the EMU once went into safe mode and wouldn't let him go above 50 MpH or so.
While that would be cool in principle, there's no need to stream iPod via Bluetooth (assuming there were a Bluetooth iPod add-on), there's really no need as you can either use an iTrip to broadcast via FM (technically illegal in the UK, but eBay is your friend ;-) ), or as your Prius has a tape player, one of those simple stereo out->cassette doodads will give you an even better sound.
Actually, given that most hotel guests don't pay the rack rate, but one of a range of discounted rates that depend very, very heavily on occupancy (Hmm, sorry AmEx Travel, we don't have any of the $115 rooms left, but we do have one at $120), having more bookings really does allow hotels to obtain a price premium.
Sure. And you just know that they're going to have Genuine People Personalities and sold as Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With.
Note also that this is very selective highlights of a supposedly leaked copy of the conclusions, which happen to agree exactly with the Sun's position to date.
Slight caveat - Psyco is x86 only. Which is OK if you're not needing a globally redistributable end result. Testing with Plone suggests that by Pysco compiling a few of the more expensive components, you get a 10% speedup.
Interestingly, you don't have to use the native object database - there are connectors to most sensible third party databases, including PostgreSQL.
The other consumer hype was that you could have different format photos - particularly panoramas.
Of course, this was total bollox as all it did was chop off the top and bottom of the shot and blow up the centre strip, with all the associated grain blown up as well.
If you think it's annoying over IM, just think how much worse it would be if she phoned you...
Seriously though, what a lot of people are missing - or not spelling out - is that IM is great for (relatively) non-interrupting communication: the things that would be *really* tiresome if you had to be totally interrupted from whatever else you're trying to do to pay attention to.
The "What's for dinner" conversation is a great example, as is pretty much any question starting with "When..?"