Some people may ask: why are you not using your own Dirac codec? I am fully committed to the development and success of Dirac, but for now those efforts are focused on high-end broadcast applications. This autumn, we intend to show the world what can be achieved with these technologies.
I hate voicemail with a passion too. I hate being put through to voicemail. I will ring back if you are not available to answer the phone now. I don't want to leave a message, and I don't want to pay for a wasted call.
I want an option that simply prevents my call being answered if there is no one there to answer it (rather than diverting to voicemail).
Of course British Telecom have realised they can make a mint out of voicemail and now with their 1571 voicemail service on virtually everyone's home telephone by default you just can't get away from it. I frequently get someone's voicemail just because they didn't get to the phone fast enough in the requisite number of rings.
Well, I think you've got face-to-face conversations and phone calls the wrong way around. How many times have you been talking to someone face-to-face when their phone has rung and they've interrupted the conversation to answer it? Seriously annoys me when that happens.
I heard a story about someone who was interrupted so many times while trying to talk to his boss that he eventually gave up and phoned (from the next cubicle) instead. He finally got his uninterrupted conversation.
One of the worst things is that OPC, one of the most common protocols for moving data around in SCADA systems, is based on Microsoft's DCOM. This makes it extremely difficult to connect any non-Windows system at all.
The next version of OPC will be based on XML and web services, but this is still some considerable way into the future.
You don't have to read the article very carefully to realise that this is exactly the misunderstanding the author is trying to fight.
Code != Project
If you don't get this then you'll never have the necessary understanding to engage with advocates of the BSD license in any meaningful way. You can't argue meaningfully against something that you don't understand.
And this is precisely why it has a great deal to do with linguistics.
Forget legalistic arguments. The problem that I see with your position is that you are making ignorance the 'unforgivable sin'. ('Unforgivable' in the sense that once committed you can't ever correct it.)
Well, inclusion in the Wayback Machine is optional, albeit opt-out rather than opt-in. So presumably the argument is not over whether a site owner should have control over whether his content is archived in the Wayback Machine.
But if you couldn't remove content retrospectively, then exclusion would be optional only for site owners who happen to know about the Wayback Machine and its robots.txt policy. That specifically is the thing that I would find unjustifiable.
wayback refuses to show any ARCHIVED pages where the domain CURRENTLY has a robots.txt.
In true Raymond Chen style, think about what the world would be like if this wasn't true: If it wasn't true, then a site owner would have no way to remove his content from the Wayback Machine retrospectively. That raises far more problems that the ability of a new owner to remove a previous owner's content.
I've read your reply a couple of times and I think I'm missing something.
As far as I'm concerned, 'type' and 'protocol' are both related to what a packet is. I'm aware that you can disguise one type of information in the protocol for another type, but I'm assuming for the sake of this argument that everyone plays fair and no one misrepresents what information they are sending/receiving.
So why is this distinction that you are drawing between 'type' and 'protocol' important? (Or is it only important in the case I don't care about where some people mess with protocols to try to game the system?)
I'm also not convinced that latency and bandwidth need necessarily be traded off against each other. Why shouldn't someone who wants a high QoS have both high bandwidth and low latency - provided they are willing to pay? The ideal situation for me would be one where every consumer can choose what QoS to have and pay accordingly. (But none of this is anything to do with net neutrality.)
There's no mystery here. The test is usually done by BT, who are notoriously conservative over what they say your line is capable of. The huge benefit to them is that by setting their standards so low they find there are very few lines so slow that they would consider them to be faulty...
If you're getting 8 Mbps on a line BT says is capable only of 2 Mbps then be grateful I say.
(Also, be careful to distinguish modem sync speed, which is the 2 Mbps that BT are talking about and the 8 Mbps that you actually get - distinguish them from the actual throughput, which cannot be higher than your sync speed and is frequently much less due to bottle-necks elsewhere on t'internet.)
many ISP's do limit the whole bandwidth, but this application would have to detect that only a certain type of trafic is limited
Sorry to jump on you (you were just the first to say it), but please can we be clear:
Net neutrality is not about giving all types of traffic the same priority. You can have a neutral net in which VOIP packets have a very high priority, HTTP packets a slightly lower priority, and bit torrent packets are bottom of the pile.
Network neutrality is about giving all traffic of the same type the same priority regardless of its source. In other words, in a neutral net ISPs would not make deals with certain content providers to prioritise their traffic.
It is really important that everyone understands this. Some of the organisations who are against net neutrality are using the argument that it is only sensible to prioritise protocols such as VOIP (prioritisation by type, which most people would agree with), when what they really want is to extract money out of the content providers by prioritising traffic by source.
Why is prioritisation by source such a bad thing? Because it turns the 'old internet' on its head. Whereas at present anyone can be a content provider, in the brave new world of a non-neutral net only large organisations can afford to pay the ISPs to deliver their content at an acceptable speed.
I'd love to see a web server spawn a separate process for every page access.
One thread/process per client is an incredibly inefficient way of managing connections on a server, even on Windows. The only thing in its favour is that you don't have to think about the code that you are writing because the connection context is embedded in the thread context, which is handled for you by the OS.
I don't know about writing servers on UNIX, but I do know that you can write a far more efficient server using Windows' overlapped I/O. No threads in sight and all I/O is asynchronous. If that isn't efficient enough for you then you can read up on Microsoft's I/O completion ports. Even if you want to utilise multiple processors, Microsoft's recommendation now is to limit the number of (active) threads to the number of processor cores.
Exactly. Why can't I install a personal program in ~/Applications?
I'm not sure if your question was rhetorical, but in case you were genuinely asking, yes, you can install a personal program in ~/Applications. In fact almost any OS X application will run perfectly well from whatever folder you put it in. The only real reason for putting most applications in/Applications is that it makes them easily accessible to all users of the machine. If you are the only user, then go ahead and put everything in ~/Applications if you want to.
This I think is related to the reason for having a single/Applications folder, and not separate folders for Apple-supplied software, os-version-specific stuff, etc.
People who use OS X (this may not apply to you) mostly want things to Just Work. If I want to load a disk cleaner I don't want to have to try to remember who supplied it or whether it is specific to my OS version or another. I want to find it in the first place I look, which means there must be only one place to look.
(Yeah, yeah, you could set up symlinks or whatever, but I think you have a solution in search of a problem. Keep it simple.)
Good link. This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. You are quite right that accessibility and standards-adherence are not the same thing, but there is no doubt that standards-adherence (in terms of overall approach, not just markup validation) goes a long way towards accessibility.
I think you rather overstate the case though that designing for accessibility over-restricts the kind of interface that you use, or even that it requires a greater familiarity with the tools and languages. Simply by respecting the semantic nature of the design medium you are using goes a very long way towards accessibility.
Here is where you fail to understand the problem.
First, creating content is not negligible in cost.
But the cost is the same whether you are making it accessible or not.
Second, creating an interface to deliver the content is not Negligable in cost.
But the cost is the same whether you are making it accessible or not.
Third, Actually delivering the content to the masses isn't negligible in cost either.
But the cost is the same whether you are making it accessible or not.
In case you haven't picked up the theme yet, my original point was about the incremental cost of making content accessible - that it is very small compared to for example, driverless cars or retrofitting lifts and ramps to historic buildings.
if you are using HTML only, the whole captcha debate is meaningless for you. HTML is designed for PUBLISHING information, captcha applies to web based applications that HTML is only a SMALL part of.
That's a false distinction. HTML is an example of an inherently accessible medium (when used properly) but anything stored on a computer as text is inherently accessible. It is only the short-sightedness of some developers that makes it inaccessible.
I don't if it should be a concern. Do we lament that the blind and h-o-s cannot drive?
I think that's a pretty outrageous attitude.
Think about it. What is the cost of making a car that a blind person could drive? Prohibitive, I suspect. Given the current state of technology it may not be quite possible even (though we could pay for human chauffeurs if we were really determined).
What's the cost of making a printed newspaper accessible to a blind person? Quite high I suspect. The technology to read shapes on a page and convert them to something the blind person can read or listen to is not straighforward.
What's the cost of a system that allows a blind person to access text stored electronically on a computer? Pretty-much negligible.
The thing is, the web should be a superb medium for making its content accessible to practically everyone. The information is already in a form that computers can manipulate easily.
If you use HTML as it was designed to be used, there is no additional cost in making it accessible.
Come on people, this is not rocket science! Here we have a golden opportunity to make, for practically no additional cost, something that can be accessed by everyone. It's not like designing a driverless car, or backfitting access ramps and lifts to historic buildings. Why on earth wouldn't we do this?
Our eyes are more suited to reading narrow columns of text...
I try... to place as many elements as I can (toolbars, etc.) in a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal one.... I do what I can to create a narrow, high space for text.
Would I be right in thinking that you tend to work with maximised windows?
I suspect that a great deal of the argument about wide-screen monitors (even if not in this particular case) comes down to those who prefer working with maximised windows, so that the aspect ratio of the window is fixed by the screen, and those who loathe maximised windows and like to keep multiple windows open side-by-side.
There was a similar argument recently when the BBC redesigned their News web site. Half the visitors said "Hurray, the big empty space occupying half of my browser window is now a smaller empty space". The other half screamed "Now I have to make the browser window nearly the full width of the screen, obscuring the other windows I have open."
Selling machines with built-in displays and non-upgradable machines with limited storage is great for Apple's bottomline: it forces people to upgrade when non-replaceable parts break and non-upgradable machines are too slow to handle modern tasks.
But it is also well-known that Apple owners tend to upgrade their machines less often than Windows owners; the facts don't really support your argument.
One could argue that Steve Jobs refuses to offer a 'normal headless box' precisely because a machine that you can tinker endlessly with is not what most Apple customers are after.
But risks add up. One phone operating for a few minutes might put the navigation off by a part of a degree. Not desirable, but not likely immediately to cause an accident. Lots of phones operating for most of the flight would be a much more serious matter.
If you'd read some of the other threads in this discussion, you'd see a reply from a pilot - i.e. someone who actually knows what he is talking about (unusual on/. I know) - who says that he can hear on his VHF radio whenever someone in the passenger compartment is using a cell phone. One of the navigation instruments operates on the next frequency along.
If you've ever done any sound PA work, you'll know just how disruptive cell phones (even in silent mode) can be to radio mics.
Yes, it is perfectly possible for a cell phone in a plane at 3000m and probably much higher to contact a ground station and make a call.
The problem for airlines is that in order to do this, the cell phone has to be operating on full power.
When the cell phone is operating on full power, it is highly likely to interfere with the plane's navigation systems.
By installing a mini base station in the passenger compartment of the plane, cell phones on the plane will lock onto the base station on the plane and operate at minimal power. This makes it far less likely to interfere with the plane's navigational system.
An additional problem with using a cell phone on a plane to talk directly to a ground station is that the phone keeps switching ground stations as local conditions vary and the plane moves between cells. This switching is much more rapid than it would be for a person moving at normal speeds on the ground and this causes problems with the phone network. By using a base station on the plane this problem is completely avoided.
When I had a run-in with my old ISP a few years ago, the issue was that a) they did not advertise anywhere that they weren't accepting mail from blacklisted peers, and b) mail from blacklisted peers was simply discarded. There was no 'administration interface' to '"release" the mail and/or mark it as safe.' There was in fact no way for the recipient (i.e. me) to ever know that a mail addressed to them that had not been delivered had even been sent.
That said, the approach of ORDB does seem to be the right way to stop administrators from using it. If you don't force the issue by stopping all mail, then random non-spam emails will continue to be blocked indefinitely. Short-term pain for long-term gain...
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
I hate voicemail with a passion too. I hate being put through to voicemail. I will ring back if you are not available to answer the phone now. I don't want to leave a message, and I don't want to pay for a wasted call.
I want an option that simply prevents my call being answered if there is no one there to answer it (rather than diverting to voicemail).
Of course British Telecom have realised they can make a mint out of voicemail and now with their 1571 voicemail service on virtually everyone's home telephone by default you just can't get away from it. I frequently get someone's voicemail just because they didn't get to the phone fast enough in the requisite number of rings.
Well, I think you've got face-to-face conversations and phone calls the wrong way around. How many times have you been talking to someone face-to-face when their phone has rung and they've interrupted the conversation to answer it? Seriously annoys me when that happens.
I heard a story about someone who was interrupted so many times while trying to talk to his boss that he eventually gave up and phoned (from the next cubicle) instead. He finally got his uninterrupted conversation.
One of the worst things is that OPC, one of the most common protocols for moving data around in SCADA systems, is based on Microsoft's DCOM. This makes it extremely difficult to connect any non-Windows system at all.
The next version of OPC will be based on XML and web services, but this is still some considerable way into the future.
Why was this modded +5 Insightful?
You don't have to read the article very carefully to realise that this is exactly the misunderstanding the author is trying to fight.
Code != Project
If you don't get this then you'll never have the necessary understanding to engage with advocates of the BSD license in any meaningful way. You can't argue meaningfully against something that you don't understand.
And this is precisely why it has a great deal to do with linguistics.
You might have a point, but it is nothing to do with what I just wrote.
Forget legalistic arguments. The problem that I see with your position is that you are making ignorance the 'unforgivable sin'. ('Unforgivable' in the sense that once committed you can't ever correct it.)
Well, inclusion in the Wayback Machine is optional, albeit opt-out rather than opt-in. So presumably the argument is not over whether a site owner should have control over whether his content is archived in the Wayback Machine.
But if you couldn't remove content retrospectively, then exclusion would be optional only for site owners who happen to know about the Wayback Machine and its robots.txt policy. That specifically is the thing that I would find unjustifiable.
I've read your reply a couple of times and I think I'm missing something.
As far as I'm concerned, 'type' and 'protocol' are both related to what a packet is. I'm aware that you can disguise one type of information in the protocol for another type, but I'm assuming for the sake of this argument that everyone plays fair and no one misrepresents what information they are sending/receiving.
So why is this distinction that you are drawing between 'type' and 'protocol' important? (Or is it only important in the case I don't care about where some people mess with protocols to try to game the system?)
I'm also not convinced that latency and bandwidth need necessarily be traded off against each other. Why shouldn't someone who wants a high QoS have both high bandwidth and low latency - provided they are willing to pay? The ideal situation for me would be one where every consumer can choose what QoS to have and pay accordingly. (But none of this is anything to do with net neutrality.)
There's no mystery here. The test is usually done by BT, who are notoriously conservative over what they say your line is capable of. The huge benefit to them is that by setting their standards so low they find there are very few lines so slow that they would consider them to be faulty...
If you're getting 8 Mbps on a line BT says is capable only of 2 Mbps then be grateful I say.
(Also, be careful to distinguish modem sync speed, which is the 2 Mbps that BT are talking about and the 8 Mbps that you actually get - distinguish them from the actual throughput, which cannot be higher than your sync speed and is frequently much less due to bottle-necks elsewhere on t'internet.)
Net neutrality is not about giving all types of traffic the same priority. You can have a neutral net in which VOIP packets have a very high priority, HTTP packets a slightly lower priority, and bit torrent packets are bottom of the pile.
Network neutrality is about giving all traffic of the same type the same priority regardless of its source. In other words, in a neutral net ISPs would not make deals with certain content providers to prioritise their traffic.
It is really important that everyone understands this. Some of the organisations who are against net neutrality are using the argument that it is only sensible to prioritise protocols such as VOIP (prioritisation by type, which most people would agree with), when what they really want is to extract money out of the content providers by prioritising traffic by source.
Why is prioritisation by source such a bad thing? Because it turns the 'old internet' on its head. Whereas at present anyone can be a content provider, in the brave new world of a non-neutral net only large organisations can afford to pay the ISPs to deliver their content at an acceptable speed.
I don't know about writing servers on UNIX, but I do know that you can write a far more efficient server using Windows' overlapped I/O. No threads in sight and all I/O is asynchronous. If that isn't efficient enough for you then you can read up on Microsoft's I/O completion ports. Even if you want to utilise multiple processors, Microsoft's recommendation now is to limit the number of (active) threads to the number of processor cores.
This I think is related to the reason for having a single
People who use OS X (this may not apply to you) mostly want things to Just Work. If I want to load a disk cleaner I don't want to have to try to remember who supplied it or whether it is specific to my OS version or another. I want to find it in the first place I look, which means there must be only one place to look.
(Yeah, yeah, you could set up symlinks or whatever, but I think you have a solution in search of a problem. Keep it simple.)
Good link. This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. You are quite right that accessibility and standards-adherence are not the same thing, but there is no doubt that standards-adherence (in terms of overall approach, not just markup validation) goes a long way towards accessibility.
I think you rather overstate the case though that designing for accessibility over-restricts the kind of interface that you use, or even that it requires a greater familiarity with the tools and languages. Simply by respecting the semantic nature of the design medium you are using goes a very long way towards accessibility.
Perhaps you should find out what Web Standards are really about.
http://www.webstandards.org/about/mission/
Clearly it is not what you think.
In case you haven't picked up the theme yet, my original point was about the incremental cost of making content accessible - that it is very small compared to for example, driverless cars or retrofitting lifts and ramps to historic buildings. That's a false distinction. HTML is an example of an inherently accessible medium (when used properly) but anything stored on a computer as text is inherently accessible. It is only the short-sightedness of some developers that makes it inaccessible.
Think about it. What is the cost of making a car that a blind person could drive? Prohibitive, I suspect. Given the current state of technology it may not be quite possible even (though we could pay for human chauffeurs if we were really determined).
What's the cost of making a printed newspaper accessible to a blind person? Quite high I suspect. The technology to read shapes on a page and convert them to something the blind person can read or listen to is not straighforward.
What's the cost of a system that allows a blind person to access text stored electronically on a computer? Pretty-much negligible.
The thing is, the web should be a superb medium for making its content accessible to practically everyone. The information is already in a form that computers can manipulate easily.
If you use HTML as it was designed to be used, there is no additional cost in making it accessible.
Come on people, this is not rocket science! Here we have a golden opportunity to make, for practically no additional cost, something that can be accessed by everyone. It's not like designing a driverless car, or backfitting access ramps and lifts to historic buildings. Why on earth wouldn't we do this?
</rant>
I suspect that a great deal of the argument about wide-screen monitors (even if not in this particular case) comes down to those who prefer working with maximised windows, so that the aspect ratio of the window is fixed by the screen, and those who loathe maximised windows and like to keep multiple windows open side-by-side.
There was a similar argument recently when the BBC redesigned their News web site. Half the visitors said "Hurray, the big empty space occupying half of my browser window is now a smaller empty space". The other half screamed "Now I have to make the browser window nearly the full width of the screen, obscuring the other windows I have open."
One could argue that Steve Jobs refuses to offer a 'normal headless box' precisely because a machine that you can tinker endlessly with is not what most Apple customers are after.
But risks add up. One phone operating for a few minutes might put the navigation off by a part of a degree. Not desirable, but not likely immediately to cause an accident. Lots of phones operating for most of the flight would be a much more serious matter.
/. I know) - who says that he can hear on his VHF radio whenever someone in the passenger compartment is using a cell phone. One of the navigation instruments operates on the next frequency along.
If you'd read some of the other threads in this discussion, you'd see a reply from a pilot - i.e. someone who actually knows what he is talking about (unusual on
If you've ever done any sound PA work, you'll know just how disruptive cell phones (even in silent mode) can be to radio mics.
Yes, it is perfectly possible for a cell phone in a plane at 3000m and probably much higher to contact a ground station and make a call.
The problem for airlines is that in order to do this, the cell phone has to be operating on full power.
When the cell phone is operating on full power, it is highly likely to interfere with the plane's navigation systems.
By installing a mini base station in the passenger compartment of the plane, cell phones on the plane will lock onto the base station on the plane and operate at minimal power. This makes it far less likely to interfere with the plane's navigational system.
An additional problem with using a cell phone on a plane to talk directly to a ground station is that the phone keeps switching ground stations as local conditions vary and the plane moves between cells. This switching is much more rapid than it would be for a person moving at normal speeds on the ground and this causes problems with the phone network. By using a base station on the plane this problem is completely avoided.
There's a big difference between 120 mph on a train and 650 mph on an aeroplane.
When I had a run-in with my old ISP a few years ago, the issue was that a) they did not advertise anywhere that they weren't accepting mail from blacklisted peers, and b) mail from blacklisted peers was simply discarded. There was no 'administration interface' to '"release" the mail and/or mark it as safe.' There was in fact no way for the recipient (i.e. me) to ever know that a mail addressed to them that had not been delivered had even been sent.
That said, the approach of ORDB does seem to be the right way to stop administrators from using it. If you don't force the issue by stopping all mail, then random non-spam emails will continue to be blocked indefinitely. Short-term pain for long-term gain...
My list of 'unauthorized' software:
None of these are available from central IT support. Almost all of them are essential for my job.