If I recall, NPR said that Fox News Channel was in charge of the pooled cameras that night. While I despise that channel except for comedic purposes, that is likely why they used FNC footage.
This is less about spectrun and more about rules by which you agreed to live by. In our resident halls, you are not allowed to have a pet (except fish). This is the exact same thing. It is merely a rule you must follow when living in University-provided housing when you agreed to live by such rules. They can ask you not to run a business from your room. They can ask you not to do scientific research on Slashdot kiddies to find out why they're so stupid in your room. They can ask you not to have wireless access points in your room.
The university I attend and work for has this exact same policy. The issue is not FCC regulation, but you being a student at the university and having to live under their rules that you agreed to live under when enrolling as a student. Stop whining and just use their wireless network. There are far too few 802.11* channels for students, faculty, and staff to have their own rogue WAPs in the same vicinity as official university ones.
What? I'm a visually impaired user and depend on key combonations for the most part. While it is true that there are less key combos in OS X, they aren't horrible. In fact, a lot of them just need enabled. Keyboard access is an option. With the work being done on Universal Access, I've seen a little bit of improvement in the key combo access as well. The printer and scanner bit is good advice, but I'm currently looking for a new printer and any of the ones I've been interested in tout OS X support. It doesn't appear to be that big of a problem for new stuff. I'm not sure what you're talking about with the VPN bit. OS X supports L2TP over IPsec and PPTP out of the box. The Cisco VPN Client is also available for OS X. Search for it at VersionTracker.
Your network should just work. OS X out of the box is set to use DHCP. It is easy to configure the networking parameters if necessary, and it supports network profiles so you can have different settings for home, work, and at the lanparty or whatever. Through Samba, it supports Windows file sharing. There is a "Network" pane in Finder that lets you browse your network similar to Network Neighborhood. You can also mount NFS, SMB, FTP, and other wacky filesystems. It is as easy as going to Go->Connect to Server... in Finder (or Cmd-K). Is your printer USB? Does it work with CUPS? If OS X doesn't directly support your printer, slam it into one of your Windows machines and use networked printing. OS X can do it via CUPS' IPP, LPD, etc. I would suggest grabbing a Microsoft Intellmouse Optical with scroll wheel, though. I can't stand the Apple mouse. You might want to throw iTunes on all your Windows machines and take advantage of Rendezvous, so you can play all your music on all your machines. I would also suggest getting Microsoft Office 2004 for OS X if you do any work that involves word processing, slideshows, spreadsheeting and charting, etc. It is a very slick package and I like it much better than Office for Windows. Oddly enough, the features in the OS X version are slightly different. Some third-party software you might consider getting (check for it on VersionTracker.com): * OSXvnc - So you can connect to your Mac remotely. Might not be as important on a laptop. * Quicksilver: A really nice application launcher that lets you just hit Cmd-Space and start typing the name of any app, contact, photo, etc on your system to open it. * SSHKeychain: Never enter a SSH passphrase again * Remote Desktop Connection (http://www.microsoft.com/mac): Good for connecting to your XP machines from your Mac. * Roxio Toast Titanium: Decent CD/DVD burning software * If you like multiple desktops, get Desktop Manager * Chicken of the VNC: A VNC client * Camino: If you don't like Safari for some reason, this is Mozilla with a pretty Aqua UI
I went from being an Apple hater from the pre-OS X days to now loving my Apple PowerMac G5. Recently, I even got sucked in enough to buy an iPod, Apple Cinema Display, etc. I hope you enjoy your purchase.
It comes from the Family Guy Y2K episode. There is a guy in a chicken suit handing out coupons, and the chicken tells Peter about Y2K. Peter replies with "What are you selling? Chicken or sex jelly?"
Funny. Do you trash it because it is Microsoft? Would you say the same thing is this was Apple and not Microsoft making the announcement? I have had several Microsoft mice over the years, and I'm currently using one on my Apple PowerMac G5. They are great mice. They seem to last forever. cThe iPod mini is $249 for 4 GB. The iPod is $299 for 20 GB. The only reason to get the mini is for the look. Many people caught onto Apple products becaue of their appearance and design. So, what is the problem with Microsoft targetting a mouse to the same audience that buys things that are both visually stimulating and also functional? Would you prefer the world to be full of boxy beige computer cases and accessories?
Uhh... I am using Panther right now. I am using epic with a colorized script, lynx with colors, colored bash prompts, etc all perfectly fine in Terminal.app. Are you sure "Use ANSI Color" isn't unchecked in the Terminal Inspector? Now when it comes to IBM PC-ish fonts, that is a different story.
Software has bugs. Deal with it.
on
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It never ceases to amuse me to see the continual bashing of Microsoft on Slashdot. Yes, Microsoft has some major security issues to work out. However, they are making a fairly good faith effort to do this now. Service Pack 2 was a decent attempt. Yes, there were bugs introduced by Service Pack 2. But even Linux has bugs every once and a while after a new release. If you really must discredit Microsoft, at least do it on fair ground and acknowledge that the operating system(s) you hold dear also have some bugs. And please, do not call them Micro$oft, M$ and other lame variants. It is Microsoft Windows, not Micro$haft Windblowz. If you can't even have the common decency to refer to somethign by the proper name, then nobody worth listening to is evey going to take you seriously. If you want your community to be seen in a decent light, then you must behave decently.
This is a useful tool for those of us who have a slew of machines on a single network segment and don't want to have an expensive KVM or 47 monitors. The ability to put your consoles over the same wire you put your normal network traffic over is great. It is like those cable companies that also provide phone service over your cable line, sort of... IRIX isn't the only operating system that does crashdumps. I've found them to be an invaluable tool for debugging FreeBSD. It has supported them for quite a long time. The ability to gdb your kernel and the vm after you reboot and see exactly where things went wrong is great. I still don't understand why Linux lacks this.
If you use FreeBSD and find this interesting, you should take a look at rwatson's ethercons patches. Basically, it is this but supports bidirectional communication. That means you can run a getty on it and login over ethernet console. Rather slick.
I think somebody is missing the big picture, here. The Internet is not taking TV viewers away. TV viewers are being forced away by the continual drivel being produced by TV content providers. How many Law & Orders do we need? Oh look, now we have 2 CSIs! Oh, can we have some more generic cop/laywer shows, please?! Oh, here's a lawyer show that takes place 100 years in the future! Okay, you don't want to watch the cop/lawyer show? How about this nice helping of fake "reality TV"!! WOO!!! About the only things I watch on TV anymore are West Wing and The Daily Show. West Wing because it is different from anything else being shown on TV right now, and The Daily Show because it applies comedy to this progressively dumbed down society to show you how dumb it really is.
Yes, I am aware that the accessability market is very small. That is also why prices are so high. Yes, I have been to these conferences, and I've seen how hard they try to push their product on you. It is quite entertaining. The Blaise guy was so trying to sell me a Type 'n Speak that he was coming off as an asshole. I'm not expecting the OS to work any better than it does. It would be nice if it did, but I also understand it would kill competition and lock those users who needed it into using a single product. In essence, we'd all be Microsofted. I am, however, glad to see Apple doing something on their platform since there is no real solution available anymore. Maybe by adding/enhancing their APIs, some other company will cmme along and make one better than the one built into the OS. Only time will tell...
In Panther, that first sets your display to grayscale and then inverts the colors. So, you lose all color and everything is inverted. What I'd really like to see is a feature where it only inverts "white-likeA" and "black-like" colors so I can still have a normally colored display with high contrast text. Or alternatively, add a "High Contrast" mode to Aqua. I know they really don't want to stray from their Holy Aqua Interface, but come on... there are people who *need* something different in order to use it properly.
I have no bias. I own two Windows machines, one FreeBSD machine, and one Apple machine. I will blatantly tell you when something Apple does sucks, because I didn't really even like Apple until this last year when I actually gave OS X a try. My opinion has nothing to do with how many people use each OS, but is rather how I evaluate their included accessability *utilities*. Now to take you to task on your bit about more people using Windows. This is *exactly* why more people say that Microsoft has better accessability features than Apple, because more people are looking at the Microsoft solutions. On top of this, when people are praising "accessability features", they are not praising the software (Screen Reader, Magnifier) bundled with Windows. They are praising the APIs provided by the operating system for use by these utilities. The Microsoft-included utilities suck. There are other, third-party, applications that use these same APIs (and others) and do a much better job than what Microsoft Windows provides. Apple does not lag behind Windows. If anything, Apple is ahead of Windows. I do not mean this in the sense that Apple is ahead of Windows when it comes to open APIs, but rather Apple is ahead of Windows with the *utilities* it provides. The Apple speech and magnification software included inside OS X (Universal Access) is very good considerring it wasn't designed to be a full-fledged screenreader/magnifier. I do believe that Microsoft is ahead when it comes to having open APIs for software to use, but I'm not really fully qualified to make this claim since I do not do Universal Access programming.
You sound very similar to me. I also change color schemes to be white on black. Unfortunately, you can't do this on MacOS X (unless you use the Accessability option, which turns your display to greyscale). As a result, I've found myself using the OS X screen magnification features. They are very nice and I've learned to use them seamlessly. I do everything else you mentioned that you do, as well. I did set out to use gnopernicus once, but never really got around to finishing it. I seem to recall it wanting to use Festival for the speech output part, which seemed somewhat ugly to me. I also didn't much care for the GNOME screen magnification stuff I could find and get working.
A very good question. I said I was "legally blind", not "physically blind." Legally blind means your vision is worse than 20/200. My vision is far worse than that. I can't even see the big E on the eye chart, and only have been able to once or twice throughout my entire life. So, I can see but not very well. My eye doctor has a very unscientific method to determine if my vision has changed since I can't use the eyechart. Counting fingers at X feet.
No, you don't need special versions of all your applications. The screen readers use APIs and trickery in Windows to peel the text out of menus, dialogs, etc. It then reads it. So, as long as applications use the standard Windows methods for putting stuff on the screen, they will be *fairly* compatible with speech software. However, when software starts to get fancy, uses graphics for text, etc, then you start to get problems. You also get problems when data is formatted oddly on the screen, such as in tables. The Windows screenreader is very limited in nature, only really able to read dialog boxes. I don't remember if it can even read menus. The MacOS X stuff can read almost anything under the mouse pointer, and I look forward to see what enhancements come to OS X with this new screen reader. Hope this answers your question to some degree.
Sadly, this is a byproduct of a free market. Less demand means higher prices. There aren't many people buying screenreaders, since there aren't that many blind people compared to other people. However, most blind people can get assistance from organizations and the government for buying this sort of thing.
I am a legally blind FreeBSD (and former Linux) user. What is the problem? Yes, it takes some adaption, but that is no reason not to do it. If all else fails, you SSH to the machine from Windows using a screen reader.
As a legally blind person and a person who has used various screen reader programs, I assure you that the Microsoft solution integrated into Windows just blows. It lacks features that any retail screenreader would have. The Microsoft one just blindly reads dialog boxes and stuff with no intelligence, no ability to really convey to the user how data is laid out, etc. The "screen reader" that is in Windows 2000 and up is about on par with what has been in MacOS for a long time. I agree with this article that any decent screen reading software costs hundreds of dollars. In my opinion, the Microsoft solution isn't useful for much more than installing Windows and getting your screenreader installed. Oh, and MacOS X's screen magnification stuff kicks the ass off of the Magnifier integrated in Windows 2000 and up.
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If I recall, NPR said that Fox News Channel was in charge of the pooled cameras that night. While I despise that channel except for comedic purposes, that is likely why they used FNC footage.
ULE has been set aside for 5.3-RELEASE. It is back to SCHED_4BSD for now.
This is less about spectrun and more about rules by which you agreed to live by. In our resident halls, you are not allowed to have a pet (except fish). This is the exact same thing. It is merely a rule you must follow when living in University-provided housing when you agreed to live by such rules. They can ask you not to run a business from your room. They can ask you not to do scientific research on Slashdot kiddies to find out why they're so stupid in your room. They can ask you not to have wireless access points in your room.
The university I attend and work for has this exact same policy. The issue is not FCC regulation, but you being a student at the university and having to live under their rules that you agreed to live under when enrolling as a student. Stop whining and just use their wireless network. There are far too few 802.11* channels for students, faculty, and staff to have their own rogue WAPs in the same vicinity as official university ones.
What? I'm a visually impaired user and depend on key combonations for the most part. While it is true that there are less key combos in OS X, they aren't horrible. In fact, a lot of them just need enabled. Keyboard access is an option. With the work being done on Universal Access, I've seen a little bit of improvement in the key combo access as well.
The printer and scanner bit is good advice, but I'm currently looking for a new printer and any of the ones I've been interested in tout OS X support. It doesn't appear to be that big of a problem for new stuff.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with the VPN bit. OS X supports L2TP over IPsec and PPTP out of the box. The Cisco VPN Client is also available for OS X. Search for it at VersionTracker.
Your network should just work. OS X out of the box is set to use DHCP. It is easy to configure the networking parameters if necessary, and it supports network profiles so you can have different settings for home, work, and at the lanparty or whatever. Through Samba, it supports Windows file sharing. There is a "Network" pane in Finder that lets you browse your network similar to Network Neighborhood. You can also mount NFS, SMB, FTP, and other wacky filesystems. It is as easy as going to Go->Connect to Server... in Finder (or Cmd-K).
Is your printer USB? Does it work with CUPS? If OS X doesn't directly support your printer, slam it into one of your Windows machines and use networked printing. OS X can do it via CUPS' IPP, LPD, etc.
I would suggest grabbing a Microsoft Intellmouse Optical with scroll wheel, though. I can't stand the Apple mouse.
You might want to throw iTunes on all your Windows machines and take advantage of Rendezvous, so you can play all your music on all your machines.
I would also suggest getting Microsoft Office 2004 for OS X if you do any work that involves word processing, slideshows, spreadsheeting and charting, etc. It is a very slick package and I like it much better than Office for Windows. Oddly enough, the features in the OS X version are slightly different.
Some third-party software you might consider getting (check for it on VersionTracker.com):
* OSXvnc - So you can connect to your Mac remotely. Might not be as important on a laptop.
* Quicksilver: A really nice application launcher that lets you just hit Cmd-Space and start typing the name of any app, contact, photo, etc on your system to open it.
* SSHKeychain: Never enter a SSH passphrase again
* Remote Desktop Connection (http://www.microsoft.com/mac): Good for connecting to your XP machines from your Mac.
* Roxio Toast Titanium: Decent CD/DVD burning software
* If you like multiple desktops, get Desktop Manager
* Chicken of the VNC: A VNC client
* Camino: If you don't like Safari for some reason, this is Mozilla with a pretty Aqua UI
I went from being an Apple hater from the pre-OS X days to now loving my Apple PowerMac G5. Recently, I even got sucked in enough to buy an iPod, Apple Cinema Display, etc. I hope you enjoy your purchase.
It comes from the Family Guy Y2K episode. There is a guy in a chicken suit handing out coupons, and the chicken tells Peter about Y2K. Peter replies with "What are you selling? Chicken or sex jelly?"
Funny. Do you trash it because it is Microsoft? Would you say the same thing is this was Apple and not Microsoft making the announcement? I have had several Microsoft mice over the years, and I'm currently using one on my Apple PowerMac G5. They are great mice. They seem to last forever.
cThe iPod mini is $249 for 4 GB. The iPod is $299 for 20 GB. The only reason to get the mini is for the look. Many people caught onto Apple products becaue of their appearance and design. So, what is the problem with Microsoft targetting a mouse to the same audience that buys things that are both visually stimulating and also functional?
Would you prefer the world to be full of boxy beige computer cases and accessories?
Uhh... I am using Panther right now. I am using epic with a colorized script, lynx with colors, colored bash prompts, etc all perfectly fine in Terminal.app. Are you sure "Use ANSI Color" isn't unchecked in the Terminal Inspector?
Now when it comes to IBM PC-ish fonts, that is a different story.
We call this being illiterate. Good work!
It never ceases to amuse me to see the continual bashing of Microsoft on Slashdot. Yes, Microsoft has some major security issues to work out. However, they are making a fairly good faith effort to do this now. Service Pack 2 was a decent attempt. Yes, there were bugs introduced by Service Pack 2. But even Linux has bugs every once and a while after a new release.
If you really must discredit Microsoft, at least do it on fair ground and acknowledge that the operating system(s) you hold dear also have some bugs. And please, do not call them Micro$oft, M$ and other lame variants. It is Microsoft Windows, not Micro$haft Windblowz. If you can't even have the common decency to refer to somethign by the proper name, then nobody worth listening to is evey going to take you seriously.
If you want your community to be seen in a decent light, then you must behave decently.
This is a useful tool for those of us who have a slew of machines on a single network segment and don't want to have an expensive KVM or 47 monitors. The ability to put your consoles over the same wire you put your normal network traffic over is great. It is like those cable companies that also provide phone service over your cable line, sort of...
IRIX isn't the only operating system that does crashdumps. I've found them to be an invaluable tool for debugging FreeBSD. It has supported them for quite a long time. The ability to gdb your kernel and the vm after you reboot and see exactly where things went wrong is great. I still don't understand why Linux lacks this.
If you use FreeBSD and find this interesting, you should take a look at rwatson's ethercons patches. Basically, it is this but supports bidirectional communication. That means you can run a getty on it and login over ethernet console. Rather slick.
Isn't the miniseries more based off the radio version? The radio was the original, then came the book.
I think somebody is missing the big picture, here. The Internet is not taking TV viewers away. TV viewers are being forced away by the continual drivel being produced by TV content providers. How many Law & Orders do we need? Oh look, now we have 2 CSIs! Oh, can we have some more generic cop/laywer shows, please?! Oh, here's a lawyer show that takes place 100 years in the future! Okay, you don't want to watch the cop/lawyer show? How about this nice helping of fake "reality TV"!! WOO!!! About the only things I watch on TV anymore are West Wing and The Daily Show. West Wing because it is different from anything else being shown on TV right now, and The Daily Show because it applies comedy to this progressively dumbed down society to show you how dumb it really is.
Yes, I am aware that the accessability market is very small. That is also why prices are so high. Yes, I have been to these conferences, and I've seen how hard they try to push their product on you. It is quite entertaining. The Blaise guy was so trying to sell me a Type 'n Speak that he was coming off as an asshole.
I'm not expecting the OS to work any better than it does. It would be nice if it did, but I also understand it would kill competition and lock those users who needed it into using a single product. In essence, we'd all be Microsofted.
I am, however, glad to see Apple doing something on their platform since there is no real solution available anymore. Maybe by adding/enhancing their APIs, some other company will cmme along and make one better than the one built into the OS. Only time will tell...
In Panther, that first sets your display to grayscale and then inverts the colors. So, you lose all color and everything is inverted. What I'd really like to see is a feature where it only inverts "white-likeA" and "black-like" colors so I can still have a normally colored display with high contrast text. Or alternatively, add a "High Contrast" mode to Aqua. I know they really don't want to stray from their Holy Aqua Interface, but come on... there are people who *need* something different in order to use it properly.
I have no bias. I own two Windows machines, one FreeBSD machine, and one Apple machine. I will blatantly tell you when something Apple does sucks, because I didn't really even like Apple until this last year when I actually gave OS X a try. My opinion has nothing to do with how many people use each OS, but is rather how I evaluate their included accessability *utilities*. Now to take you to task on your bit about more people using Windows. This is *exactly* why more people say that Microsoft has better accessability features than Apple, because more people are looking at the Microsoft solutions. On top of this, when people are praising "accessability features", they are not praising the software (Screen Reader, Magnifier) bundled with Windows. They are praising the APIs provided by the operating system for use by these utilities. The Microsoft-included utilities suck. There are other, third-party, applications that use these same APIs (and others) and do a much better job than what Microsoft
Windows provides. Apple does not lag behind Windows. If anything, Apple is ahead of Windows. I do not mean this in the sense that Apple is ahead of Windows when it comes to open APIs, but rather Apple is ahead of Windows with the *utilities* it provides. The Apple speech and magnification software included inside OS X (Universal Access) is very good considerring it wasn't designed to be a full-fledged screenreader/magnifier. I do believe that Microsoft is ahead when it comes to having open APIs for software to use, but I'm not really fully qualified to make this claim since I do not do Universal Access programming.
You sound very similar to me. I also change color schemes to be white on black. Unfortunately, you can't do this on MacOS X (unless you use the Accessability option, which turns your display to greyscale). As a result, I've found myself using the OS X screen magnification features. They are very nice and I've learned to use them seamlessly. I do everything else you mentioned that you do, as well. I did set out to use gnopernicus once, but never really got around to finishing it. I seem to recall it wanting to use Festival for the speech output part, which seemed somewhat ugly to me. I also didn't much care for the GNOME screen magnification stuff I could find and get working.
A very good question. I said I was "legally blind", not "physically blind." Legally blind means your vision is worse than 20/200. My vision is far worse than that. I can't even see the big E on the eye chart, and only have been able to once or twice throughout my entire life. So, I can see but not very well. My eye doctor has a very unscientific method to determine if my vision has changed since I can't use the eyechart. Counting fingers at X feet.
No, you don't need special versions of all your applications. The screen readers use APIs and trickery in Windows to peel the text out of menus, dialogs, etc. It then reads it. So, as long as applications use the standard Windows methods for putting stuff on the screen, they will be *fairly* compatible with speech software. However, when software starts to get fancy, uses graphics for text, etc, then you start to get problems. You also get problems when data is formatted oddly on the screen, such as in tables. The Windows screenreader is very limited in nature, only really able to read dialog boxes. I don't remember if it can even read menus. The MacOS X stuff can read almost anything under the mouse pointer, and I look forward to see what enhancements come to OS X with this new screen reader. Hope this answers your question to some degree.
Sadly, this is a byproduct of a free market. Less demand means higher prices. There aren't many people buying screenreaders, since there aren't that many blind people compared to other people. However, most blind people can get assistance from organizations and the government for buying this sort of thing.
I am a legally blind FreeBSD (and former Linux) user. What is the problem? Yes, it takes some adaption, but that is no reason not to do it. If all else fails, you SSH to the machine from Windows using a screen reader.
As a legally blind person and a person who has used various screen reader programs, I assure you that the Microsoft solution integrated into Windows just blows. It lacks features that any retail screenreader would have. The Microsoft one just blindly reads dialog boxes and stuff with no intelligence, no ability to really convey to the user how data is laid out, etc. The "screen reader" that is in Windows 2000 and up is about on par with what has been in MacOS for a long time. I agree with this article that any decent screen reading software costs hundreds of dollars. In my opinion, the Microsoft solution isn't useful for much more than installing Windows and getting your screenreader installed. Oh, and MacOS X's screen magnification stuff kicks the ass off of the Magnifier integrated in Windows 2000 and up.