They're essentially talking about making a Squeezebox device that plays video, it's that simple. The problem -- at least, what I perceive is the priblem -- with the current generation of products out there (that have already been doing this for years now) is: vendor lock-in.
For example, D-Link's media players are little slim pizza boxes (nowhere near as small or light-weight as a Squeezebox, sadly) that would seem to be a great fit for a media viewer and relatively inexpensive -- until you find out that they only support modern Windows installations as the file server. (That I later learned you can effectively hack up an NFS server on *nix is in this case irrelevant; it's not supported and apparently doesn't work very well anyway).
Being one of those crazy nerds who actually has a 1.6TB RAID5 in a dual Opteron rack-mount box under the stairs (which isn't running Windows, it may shock you to learn) means I actually care about the quality of the software offering of the media server in question because it isn't going to be yet another TSR to crash Explorer on my Windows desktop; If the hardware vendor says, "You have to run Windows on that server to use our media player," or better yet, "You need to have an Intel VIIV processor in that server," I'll be glad to tell them where to stick their media player platform.
I mentioned SqueezeBox before and their perl-based "SlimServer" app. The implementation isn't airtight (the player still hangs occasionally on a very small number of mp3s for some reason I haven't divined yet), but they got my money because the server platform is written in Perl and because it's open-source, with all of the benefits that implies. Slim Devices also donates 10% of their net profit to the EFF to help protect our rights to fair use, which is more than any other vendor in the market is doing, to my knowledge. The hardware is also, incidentally, awesome compared to any competitor in the same ballpark -- but you can find out about that for yourself if you're interested.
When the folks at Slim Devices announce that they have a new device available that plays video as well as music I'll be the first in line to take the plunge; Until that day my Freevo-running EPIA-M will do just dandy, thanks.
Other vendors like D-Link and Intel are going to be left out in the cold (from this house, at least) until they can come close to making a similar offering across the board -- not just a lower price point nor being able to walk into a big-box store to go into debt over such a device on 18% interest store credit.
... There hasn't exactly been widespread adoption of PHP5 at commercial hosting interests, has there. I see PHP's greatest strength being its widespread adoption, not its OO model -- and it doesn't do a lot of good to develop using a technology that is effectively unavailable to host your application unless you want to set up your own co-located server to do it (e.g. even top-notch managed services like Rackspace still come with PHP4).
Perl is another alternative, and admittedly a pretty popular installation (I imagine anywhere that offers PHP hosting also offers Perl) -- but for someone like me who wants to do the occasional scripting the language is not exactly ideal -- nor is it especially easy to read someone else's code. I think Perl developers are incidentally the most "guilty" party of poorly commented code in FOSS projects, which doesn't help matters.
As a designer and occasional scripter I was interested in learning more PHP at one time, but now I feel as though it's a bit of a dead end, especially for "bigger" projects. Learning Python seems to be time better spent at this point; I can run a native interpreter as well as Java and.net based interpreters to handle more "enterprise-sized" projects; Python has a stronger OO foundation than PHP in existing versions, is designed to easily integrate with C modules, and reads easily. It's also shown itself to be equal to a broad spectrum of applications from commercial tax forms software (QuickTax) to web application frameworks (Zope) to HTPC frontends (Freevo) to P2P software (BitTorrent).
As for PHP, roll me over when version 5 is standard across the board and I'll consider taking another look at it.
I have a friend's elderly 3U server here -- The goods inside are probably about 5 years old (and it's all desktop-class hardware, not server hardware -- he was just sick of having boxes kicking around the floor and bought a small half-height rack and a couple 3U boxes and consolidated his footprint).
Long story short, I've been running Gentoo on it since it showed up at the house some time ago. Now, there was some drive weirdness -- I think the boot drive was actually hdd with another drive present but unused on hdc, and the CDROM was on hdb with hda empty (??) but the point is, Gentoo installed and ran just dandy.
For work reasons I now need to install Windows 2000 on the box and I've now rebooted half a dozen times, reformatting drives all over the place and still haven't managed to get the damn thing to boot. Why? Well, it looks like the BIOS is toast because it keeps reporting different sizes for hda (I've changed the cables to where they should be) every time I boot, and -- not surprisingly -- the drive is just totally useless to boot from. Windows won't install unless it can write an MBR to the drive, it seems.
So -- even though I know the hardware isn't working quite right, at least Linux could work with (or, more to the point, around) the problem whereas Windows just pulls up a blank. Nothing I can do about it, either -- I've tried all the configurations that were worth trying. Next, it's time to try using a separate PATA controller card and spend another hour or so to see if Windows likes that any better...
I'll take you up on that bet. The WINE team patching their vulnerability before Microsoft patches theirs is highly unlikely considering Microsoft already released the patch yesterday, as covered right here on Slashdot.
Unless the WINE developers have a time machine and are holding out on the rest of us. Incidentally, that would explain why WINE only runs software designed to run on OSes aged 8 yrs. and older.
I always thought it was none of the above. The pronunciation "SIN-nee" seems to make the most sense in this case (e.g. cinema->xinema) but what do I know -- it is definitely a conundrum with this particular package, and will likely go unsolved until the original inventor of the name shows up and adds their two cents.
Going by "common" pronunciations is useless with English. If that were the case, the word "ghoti" wouldn't be pronounceable in English as "fish".
Thankfully I find mplayer to be the better package--and no mysteries as to how to pronounce it, either.
Let me sort this out. Say that one of the brightest minds of our time is blind -- but they can't access the content of scientific publications because braille is going to take months to produce (if it ever materialises at all, and chances are it won't). I'm sure most people wouldn't have too hard a time thinking about some luminaires (past and present) with severe disabilities; most people in the know are aware that properly designed HTML is just about the most accessible content there is because of its incredibly rich structural markup capability.
Now, is the delivery format really the problem here, or is it simply a case of dollars and sense? Is the concept of charging for access to content -- whatever the delivery vehicle -- completely foreign to the content publishers?
Sometimes I read this kind of thing and wonder if I'm in the wrong career.
The ability for someone who is blind to effectively be able to use a screen reader does not equate to accessibility -- although this view is understandably a common misconception; it relates to only one class of disability and only the most severe form at that. A screen reader is unlikely to be used by users with low vision (in fact, Jaws and Window-Eyes are unlikely to be used by anyone who doesn't absolutely need given how much the software costs); Opera's ability to scale up both text and images is superior to that of Firefox in production release (and this presumably isn't changing in the new version, although by now someone may have released a plug-in module that achieves the same effect via CSS or something); this makes pages easier not only to read (for those with low vision) but also easier to interact with (for users with limited motor ability). My understanding is that Firefox (current production releases) doesn't expose to MSAA either, nor does any other browser -- so that point about Opera is moot for now, which brings me to my next point:
Firefox 1.5 is still not a production release and I -- along with most other users -- will not be installing it until it is, nor will we be testing with it for accessibility-related purposes since it is almost assured that most users with disabilities won't have already jumped on beta software, either.
Accessible DHTML of course isn't news -- it's all about how you design it -- but I agree that Firefox's new implementation (thanks to the thousands of lines of code donated to Mozilla by IBM, who -- not surprisingly -- seem to understand and explain web accessibility better than most) is very exciting and will hopefully raise the bar and give users with special needs a reason to switch from MSIE to something better. That said, building a better browser is only part of the problem with accessibility; the content itself has to be designed accessible as well.
As far as Section 508 is concerned, for example, you can't just code DHTML however you'd like and expect the browser to do the work to make it accessible for you; even if it is perfectly accessible in Firefox (but not in, say, MSIE) users should have the right to choose whatever software they like. In the end, the ramifications for accessibility here are potentially every bit as bad as Flash and MSIE -- "You want accessible Flash? Use MSIE. You want accessible DHTML? Use Firefox."
Thank you for the link, though. I am interested to read more about it after having heard the announcement some months ago about IBM donating accessibility code to Mozilla. I'll certainly be doing more reading up on the subject and looking forward to the results. Now if only IBM/Sun could do the same thing for OOo.
Speaking as someone working in the AT industry ...
on
Open Source Accessibility
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· Score: 2, Insightful
... and also someone who loves open source, I have come to the same conclusion myself -- that Open Source has a way to go before it can stand shoulder to shoulder with its proprietary counterparts. The fact is, open source is already at a disadvantage when it comes to accessibility -- because so many of the accessibility features out there are being pushed by the vendor (making them effectively proprietary).
Consider Flash. It is, as some of you may be surprised to know, accessible -- but only when used with a Microsoft toolchain. That's right; for users with special needs to use Flash, it has to be being rendered through Macromedia's plugin (obviously), in MSIE, to one of a very limited group of screen readers only available for Windows (JAWS, WindowEyes, one or two others) and all on, you might have guessed by now, Windows platforms only. Even the Macintosh -- which is natively considerably more accessible than Windows (or any other OS, essentially) doesn't support accessible flash.
We've all heard the rumours of Microsoft releasing its "Flash Killer" application; maybe it will be natively more accessible than Flash, but then where will that leave open source and operating systems besides Windows? Does anyone think Microsoft cares about the greater good enough to want to make the spec -- much less the product -- available for any other operating system?
Now consider Adobe Acrobat. Version 7 is chock full of accessibility features that revolve around the new tagged document structure. How many apps currently generate tagged documents? Not many. Again, Adobe has partnered with Microsoft so that just about every Office product will generate tagged PDF. There are one or two other desktop publishing packages that do it. OpenOffice managed to squeak tagged PDF 2.0 into their product (and good on them for doing it) but the support is minimalistic; it is an attempt at addressing the problem but is shy of the mark as far as users with special needs go.
Never mind that OpenDocument is anyway readable on free operating systems; users with disabilities generally wouldn't touch Linux with a ten-foot pole because the screen reader software available for it is also somewhat lacking where it counts; consider JAWS by Freedom Scientific, where they employ dozens of employees to do nothing more all day long than write key mappings and shortcut-features to applications. Guess which browser is better supported in JAWS -- MSIE, or Firefox? Guess how good the custom support for OpenOffice.org is in JAWS? You would be correct to guess it is non-existent. These people have invested thousands (and in many cases, over the USD $10,000 mark) in technologies to allow them to use computers to do their jobs or just live; it's unfair enough to have something continue to be inaccessible to them, but considerably worse (and understandably frustrating) to have something be accessible then have it taken away for the benefit of others.
The only potential saving grace in the browser market is the release of Opera for free; since it has better innate accessibility features than either Firefox or MSIE (which has virtually none) there may be some mass migration to these systems. HTML is inherently one of the most accessible forms of markup available today because of its strong, structural meaning and the fact that it is one of the very few languages that are completely open, appropriate for most uses, and heavily wide-spread.
Several opens-source projects have already made accessibility an important part of their web projects; for example, Plone and especially Atutor are star examples of how you can build a great application and still have it accessible to users with disabilities by design.
I would like to congratulate all authors and participants on those projects and others who work at making open source software accessible to everyone, not just the enabled majority. I would like to encourage everyone else to do some re
Well, can't say I'm sad to hear it -- I emailed the folks at Xara Ltd. almost a year ago to ask if they intended to port their product to Linux to help ease my transition in that regard (having bought versions of their software since 1.0). Their move to open source is a bit of a shock (I would have been happy with a Linux binary ported using Wine), but it's all good -- better than I could have hoped for. Hopefully some collaboration/cross-semination will occur between the Xara folks and the Inkscape guys, who are also making leaps and bounds and deserve mention here for their amazing progress and excellent work.
Congrats to Xara for your bold new direction, if anyone from the company is reading. Rest assured that I'll keep slinging my business your way -- especially considering how you responded very well to my (and presumably other) inquiries. You've also just secured more years of business out of me, assuming porting to other platforms will now become significantly easier. Cheers.
To my knowledge there was, overtly, a Myst 5 in the works already when Myst 4 hit the shelves -- so unless Myst 5 is just waiting to be published right now, the story (as its extents were most recently planned, anyway) is not quite finished.
As the end of Revelations played out, it became abundantly clear that some big changes and revelations were happening to some of the series' characters (of which I will say no more for fear of spoiling it for someone) and it seems kind of sad to close the book on the series (if you'll forgive the expression) before the final chapter is written.
I openly confess I'm a big fan of the series and especially loved the second (Riven) and third (Exile) installments; I've never known a game so sensually immersive before that I could put my headphones on and "be somewhere else" for a few hours after a tough day at work. I don't mind adding my voice to the lament for Cyan studios; their work and vision will be sorely missed.
I are looking into running eGroupware where I work, but there is no actual Outlook connector (or connectors for any other desktop clients, like Ximian) built for it. The only mention of such a thing dates back from 2004, saying "The next version will have a connector to integrate with Outlook!" and, almost a year later, such a thing has yet to be delivered.
No doubt about it, the Shuffle displaces less volume. I can't close my fist around my wife's Shuffle, however; The YP-T6 has a shorter and chubbier profile which, in some circumstances, is a better fit. The weight, incidentally, is higher chiefly because the chassis is made of aluminium, not plastic, like the Shuffle.
... but a lot of people like me, value space more than gimmicky fetures
I admittedly laughed pretty hard when I read this. Tell me about all those extra things you managed to roll up into your life with that extra 0.7 square inches at your disposal? As much as an extra (somewhat used) pink eraser?
The built in mic isn't going to record the next award-winning DDD album or anything, no -- as I stated already, it's good enough to record dictation notes and the line in can handle a quick dub from tape or a record or something if you don't want to haul your gear around to plug it into your computer to tease a song or two out of your older media for listening later.
As for FM tuners -- maybe it's been a while since you've been to the gym? Most broadcast whatever's playing (television, workout tapes, whatever) on FM channels so people can tune in privately without disturbing everyone else, much like a drive-in movie.
FM tuners are useful to have with you on days when you are exposed to inclement weather as well (such as when on the water, for example), as they can detect lightning strikes reliably in time for you to seek shelter (and, of course, provide up to date weather forecasts as well).
And then, of course, some people also like to listen to the news from time to time, especially the local colour if one finds onesself travelling abroad. FM reception is just dandy, actually, including indoors in my basement -- thanks for asking.
Another one of those "gimmicky" features you neglected to mention is a removable, standard AAA battery. Have fun paying to have yours replaced in a year.
If you can live without a screen or a user-replaceable battery, then great -- stick with your Shuffle. I couldn't, or I would have bought two instead of just one for my wife and something else for myself. I don't keep an "i-Tunes" postage stamp collection of my favourite songs, nor are they all MP3s as plenty of bands release their songs online using the open OGG format; I sort my music by album and prefer to listen to it that way, and change the songs frequently based on whatever is new or "new again" to me, or to what suits my mood at the time.
Having a graphic equaliser isn't an especially big deal if you have a good set of headphones and use them properly (I leave my EQ on "Normal"). Tell me you aren't using those miserable buds that came with your iPod? Invest in a pair of Shure E3c's and some triple-flanged earcups, or a set of Etymotics and form a good seal in your ear, and you'll have a much more enjoyable listening experience, especially in the lower register.
First, mp3s generally require higher bitrates and therefore larger files to avoid somewhat ugly sound artifacts (such as flanging) whereas OGG files degrade more gracefully toward FM-like sound. In both portable media devices and large music collections this wasted space adds up pretty quickly.
Second, OGG encoders produce considerably more reliable-quality encodes than MP3 encoders. Yes, diversity is good, but those "legacy" format mp3s you've got might sound good or terrible at 128kbps depending on what was used to encode them (all other factors, of course, being equal).
Third, the licencing issues around mp3. While the patent is now probably effectively unenforceable because of the format's (chiefly illegal) proliferation in software, it is patented, which is why OGG exists at all. The Slashdot crowd may not like patents (I'm not particularly fond of them either) but A) the Fraunhofer Institute did come up with it first, and B) the format has proven to be immensely valuable, as you have pointed out. At least OGG isn't part of that problem.
Yes, I have -- one or two of my Star Control II (Precursors Mixes) oggs cause a lockup where I have to actually pop the battery out to reset the device. A little disheartening. I tried to download the latest Samsung firmware from their site just yesterday... and when I ran it, the downloaded firmware appeared to be considerably older than what was already on the device.:(
Plenty of the iRiver and Samsung offerings support it. My 1GB samsung YP-T6 is (slightly) smaller than a Shuffle, has a screen and more than 2 play modes, an FM tuner, a mic and line in with direct encoding capability (128kbps, but good enough for dictating notes etc.) and plays MP3, WMA, and OGG just fine. It also connects to Windows and Linux as a regular mass-storage device and so doesn't require iTunes or any of its open-source alternatives.
It's a pity OGG support isn't more wide-spread, and worse still that lots of people bitch about wanting mp3s, completely oblivious to the closed-source brick wall the "next generation" of mp3 formats is going to present. I naturally will be smug with my OGG-playing YP-T6 and EPIA running Linux/Freevo as a set-top multimedia player.
There's no reason it shouldn't. Frankly, there are a lot of reasons for changing the Slashdot display code to make use of CSS2:
Improved server customisation appearance capability (CSS Zen Garden is proof enough of that even without the slashdot code)
Lower bandwidth consumption: CSS can be cached; tables and other HTML elements cannot
Improved user customisability: It is relatively easy to copy a style sheet form a site and customise it to your own needs. I should note, however, that I find Firefox's built in "user style sheet" capability pathetically slow and prefer to have my style sheet preferences substituted using a content proxy (like Privoxy, which is what I use).
Improved readability/usability in different user agents such as text-based readers (e.g. Lynx/eLinks)
And of course, massively improved accessibility (WAI/Section 508) if it's done right -- users would be able to define their own font choices, font sizes, colour preferences, and so on, and (additionally) accessible style sheet options could be provided as a profile-based option.
Disclosure: I'm a web designer with enterprise application development experience who is presently employed with a company whose business it is to provide Section 508 accessibility auditing, remediation, and development services. I would almost certainly be willing and able to provide a gratis complete audit (as well as design recommendations) to the Slash source to improve its accessibility and usability for everyone.
... And an excellent book it was. If you haven't read it -- even if you aren't a Banks fanboy -- I'd recommend it. No Culture experience required (because it's not a Culture novel).
That said, I'm a little surprised Alastair Reynolds' "Century Rain" didn't get nominated, as it was also an excellent novel and, perhaps, especially relevant to the/. crowd. I've been meaning to write a review forever (since nobody else has) but I'm lazy, so I just write comments about it hoping someone else will.
For all those non-math students who wanted to know all about that piece of software, you couldn't ask for much more than "I prefer an application that works like the drawing tool in a word processor."
Your article inspired me to write my own inspired review of drawing software:
Dia -- May be an abbreviation of "Diagram" (?)
Inkscape -- I prefer Xara X.
jFig -- I don't like figs (or prunes).
I understand this article is probably geared toward poor mathematics students, but come on. If you're going to go through the bother of "researching" and listing products students probably can't afford anyway you may as well say something useful -- or at least remotely objective -- about each piece of software.
Better still, don't bother listing commercial software at all and stick to the open source propaganda if Slashdot is where you're posting this stuff (I have a hard time seeing why you did, by the bye, to be blunt about it).
Who the hell though it would be a good idea to write an entire page of text in header tags? I couldn't bear to read it, even when I scaled the font size down.
For the price of it I may as well have bought a copy of Windows XP (and I'm in Ottawa, so it's not like I'd be paying for transportation or accomodation). Hope it was a success anyway...
Wow, thanks for taking the time out to reply. I appreciate that you probably took the time not only to reply to my thread but potentially hundreds of others too (assuming anyone had anything to say besides "Looks good but I don't draw, so...".
Definitely anything you can do to keep the workspace clean is very much appreciated -- Moving things like font dialogs (or basic font features, at least) to smaller, docked (or even better, context-sensitive) positions is a great idea.
I don't want to suggest any more until I get a chance to really sit down and experiment a bit. Is there somewhere good to get in touch with Inkscape's developers to participate in community discussions about such things? I'm definitely interested in doing some testing and providing some usability feedback from "the field" if you guys are receptive to suggestions.
Thanks again for responding, and keep up the great work.
I still use Xara X2 for all of my drawing needs (I do web work, primarily, although it works excellent for making everything from roughs to faked screenshots) although I've been eyeing Inkscape with increasing interest as it improves. It has now far surpassed it's parent fork project, Sodipodi, in terms of capability and appearance.
One of the main reasons I found Inkscape in the first place was because it was a branch of Sodipodi for what I felt were "the right reasons" -- Frankly, Sodipodi's interface is dialog hell. However, I still feel that Inkscape has too many dialogs that "hang around" on the screen. Why have a big dialog that takes 1/7th of the screen to handle color selection when it could be done more effectively with a temporary window that is half the size?
I also couldn't stand the fact that Inkscape didn't have named colours (e.g. colours that you can define, use, then change later and affect the entire drawing) although maybe that's changed now. I also know all of the previous versions I have looked at in the past literally take 10-15 seconds to open a file dialog window (no hyperbole here. Seriously); while my interest in Inkscape has been primarily to get me using a package that looks and works the same on Linux (so I can finally make the switch on the desktop -- Neither Xara X / Xara X2 run on CrossOver Office, unfortunately) I can't help but notice it will save me money from upgrading Xara X every couple of years, too. As a little aside -- I even went so far as to contact Xara Corp. and ask if they had any plans to release a Linux version of their software or even contribute assistance to getting Xara X to run on Wine/CXO. Their response was "No, we're too busy, and anyway people who use Linux seem to expect everything to be free." Well, that put me in my place...
Anyway, thanks to the original poster for pointing this new release out; it's worth taking another look to see what these guys have been up to. The new features look great; I hope stability and improved GUI design are some of the "unsung heroes" of this and future releases.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, D-Link's media players are little slim pizza boxes (nowhere near as small or light-weight as a Squeezebox, sadly) that would seem to be a great fit for a media viewer and relatively inexpensive -- until you find out that they only support modern Windows installations as the file server. (That I later learned you can effectively hack up an NFS server on *nix is in this case irrelevant; it's not supported and apparently doesn't work very well anyway).
Being one of those crazy nerds who actually has a 1.6TB RAID5 in a dual Opteron rack-mount box under the stairs (which isn't running Windows, it may shock you to learn) means I actually care about the quality of the software offering of the media server in question because it isn't going to be yet another TSR to crash Explorer on my Windows desktop; If the hardware vendor says, "You have to run Windows on that server to use our media player," or better yet, "You need to have an Intel VIIV processor in that server," I'll be glad to tell them where to stick their media player platform.
I mentioned SqueezeBox before and their perl-based "SlimServer" app. The implementation isn't airtight (the player still hangs occasionally on a very small number of mp3s for some reason I haven't divined yet), but they got my money because the server platform is written in Perl and because it's open-source, with all of the benefits that implies. Slim Devices also donates 10% of their net profit to the EFF to help protect our rights to fair use, which is more than any other vendor in the market is doing, to my knowledge. The hardware is also, incidentally, awesome compared to any competitor in the same ballpark -- but you can find out about that for yourself if you're interested.
When the folks at Slim Devices announce that they have a new device available that plays video as well as music I'll be the first in line to take the plunge; Until that day my Freevo-running EPIA-M will do just dandy, thanks.
Other vendors like D-Link and Intel are going to be left out in the cold (from this house, at least) until they can come close to making a similar offering across the board -- not just a lower price point nor being able to walk into a big-box store to go into debt over such a device on 18% interest store credit.
Perl is another alternative, and admittedly a pretty popular installation (I imagine anywhere that offers PHP hosting also offers Perl) -- but for someone like me who wants to do the occasional scripting the language is not exactly ideal -- nor is it especially easy to read someone else's code. I think Perl developers are incidentally the most "guilty" party of poorly commented code in FOSS projects, which doesn't help matters.
As a designer and occasional scripter I was interested in learning more PHP at one time, but now I feel as though it's a bit of a dead end, especially for "bigger" projects. Learning Python seems to be time better spent at this point; I can run a native interpreter as well as Java and .net based interpreters to handle more "enterprise-sized" projects; Python has a stronger OO foundation than PHP in existing versions, is designed to easily integrate with C modules, and reads easily. It's also shown itself to be equal to a broad spectrum of applications from commercial tax forms software (QuickTax) to web application frameworks (Zope) to HTPC frontends (Freevo) to P2P software (BitTorrent).
As for PHP, roll me over when version 5 is standard across the board and I'll consider taking another look at it.
Long story short, I've been running Gentoo on it since it showed up at the house some time ago. Now, there was some drive weirdness -- I think the boot drive was actually hdd with another drive present but unused on hdc, and the CDROM was on hdb with hda empty (??) but the point is, Gentoo installed and ran just dandy.
For work reasons I now need to install Windows 2000 on the box and I've now rebooted half a dozen times, reformatting drives all over the place and still haven't managed to get the damn thing to boot. Why? Well, it looks like the BIOS is toast because it keeps reporting different sizes for hda (I've changed the cables to where they should be) every time I boot, and -- not surprisingly -- the drive is just totally useless to boot from. Windows won't install unless it can write an MBR to the drive, it seems.
So -- even though I know the hardware isn't working quite right, at least Linux could work with (or, more to the point, around) the problem whereas Windows just pulls up a blank. Nothing I can do about it, either -- I've tried all the configurations that were worth trying. Next, it's time to try using a separate PATA controller card and spend another hour or so to see if Windows likes that any better ...
Unless the WINE developers have a time machine and are holding out on the rest of us. Incidentally, that would explain why WINE only runs software designed to run on OSes aged 8 yrs. and older.
Well, pay up. What'd I win?
Going by "common" pronunciations is useless with English. If that were the case, the word "ghoti" wouldn't be pronounceable in English as "fish".
Thankfully I find mplayer to be the better package--and no mysteries as to how to pronounce it, either.
Now, is the delivery format really the problem here, or is it simply a case of dollars and sense? Is the concept of charging for access to content -- whatever the delivery vehicle -- completely foreign to the content publishers?
Sometimes I read this kind of thing and wonder if I'm in the wrong career.
If I may, a couple points:
Accessible DHTML of course isn't news -- it's all about how you design it -- but I agree that Firefox's new implementation (thanks to the thousands of lines of code donated to Mozilla by IBM, who -- not surprisingly -- seem to understand and explain web accessibility better than most) is very exciting and will hopefully raise the bar and give users with special needs a reason to switch from MSIE to something better. That said, building a better browser is only part of the problem with accessibility; the content itself has to be designed accessible as well.
As far as Section 508 is concerned, for example, you can't just code DHTML however you'd like and expect the browser to do the work to make it accessible for you; even if it is perfectly accessible in Firefox (but not in, say, MSIE) users should have the right to choose whatever software they like. In the end, the ramifications for accessibility here are potentially every bit as bad as Flash and MSIE -- "You want accessible Flash? Use MSIE. You want accessible DHTML? Use Firefox."
Thank you for the link, though. I am interested to read more about it after having heard the announcement some months ago about IBM donating accessibility code to Mozilla. I'll certainly be doing more reading up on the subject and looking forward to the results. Now if only IBM/Sun could do the same thing for OOo.
... and also someone who loves open source, I have come to the same conclusion myself -- that Open Source has a way to go before it can stand shoulder to shoulder with its proprietary counterparts. The fact is, open source is already at a disadvantage when it comes to accessibility -- because so many of the accessibility features out there are being pushed by the vendor (making them effectively proprietary).
Consider Flash. It is, as some of you may be surprised to know, accessible -- but only when used with a Microsoft toolchain. That's right; for users with special needs to use Flash, it has to be being rendered through Macromedia's plugin (obviously), in MSIE, to one of a very limited group of screen readers only available for Windows (JAWS, WindowEyes, one or two others) and all on, you might have guessed by now, Windows platforms only. Even the Macintosh -- which is natively considerably more accessible than Windows (or any other OS, essentially) doesn't support accessible flash.
We've all heard the rumours of Microsoft releasing its "Flash Killer" application; maybe it will be natively more accessible than Flash, but then where will that leave open source and operating systems besides Windows? Does anyone think Microsoft cares about the greater good enough to want to make the spec -- much less the product -- available for any other operating system?
Now consider Adobe Acrobat. Version 7 is chock full of accessibility features that revolve around the new tagged document structure. How many apps currently generate tagged documents? Not many. Again, Adobe has partnered with Microsoft so that just about every Office product will generate tagged PDF. There are one or two other desktop publishing packages that do it. OpenOffice managed to squeak tagged PDF 2.0 into their product (and good on them for doing it) but the support is minimalistic; it is an attempt at addressing the problem but is shy of the mark as far as users with special needs go.
Never mind that OpenDocument is anyway readable on free operating systems; users with disabilities generally wouldn't touch Linux with a ten-foot pole because the screen reader software available for it is also somewhat lacking where it counts; consider JAWS by Freedom Scientific, where they employ dozens of employees to do nothing more all day long than write key mappings and shortcut-features to applications. Guess which browser is better supported in JAWS -- MSIE, or Firefox? Guess how good the custom support for OpenOffice.org is in JAWS? You would be correct to guess it is non-existent. These people have invested thousands (and in many cases, over the USD $10,000 mark) in technologies to allow them to use computers to do their jobs or just live; it's unfair enough to have something continue to be inaccessible to them, but considerably worse (and understandably frustrating) to have something be accessible then have it taken away for the benefit of others.
The only potential saving grace in the browser market is the release of Opera for free; since it has better innate accessibility features than either Firefox or MSIE (which has virtually none) there may be some mass migration to these systems. HTML is inherently one of the most accessible forms of markup available today because of its strong, structural meaning and the fact that it is one of the very few languages that are completely open, appropriate for most uses, and heavily wide-spread.
Several opens-source projects have already made accessibility an important part of their web projects; for example, Plone and especially Atutor are star examples of how you can build a great application and still have it accessible to users with disabilities by design.
I would like to congratulate all authors and participants on those projects and others who work at making open source software accessible to everyone, not just the enabled majority. I would like to encourage everyone else to do some re
Could someone pass this message along to the Squirrelmail team?
Congrats to Xara for your bold new direction, if anyone from the company is reading. Rest assured that I'll keep slinging my business your way -- especially considering how you responded very well to my (and presumably other) inquiries. You've also just secured more years of business out of me, assuming porting to other platforms will now become significantly easier. Cheers.
As the end of Revelations played out, it became abundantly clear that some big changes and revelations were happening to some of the series' characters (of which I will say no more for fear of spoiling it for someone) and it seems kind of sad to close the book on the series (if you'll forgive the expression) before the final chapter is written.
I openly confess I'm a big fan of the series and especially loved the second (Riven) and third (Exile) installments; I've never known a game so sensually immersive before that I could put my headphones on and "be somewhere else" for a few hours after a tough day at work. I don't mind adding my voice to the lament for Cyan studios; their work and vision will be sorely missed.
I are looking into running eGroupware where I work, but there is no actual Outlook connector (or connectors for any other desktop clients, like Ximian) built for it. The only mention of such a thing dates back from 2004, saying "The next version will have a connector to integrate with Outlook!" and, almost a year later, such a thing has yet to be delivered.
No doubt about it, the Shuffle displaces less volume. I can't close my fist around my wife's Shuffle, however; The YP-T6 has a shorter and chubbier profile which, in some circumstances, is a better fit. The weight, incidentally, is higher chiefly because the chassis is made of aluminium, not plastic, like the Shuffle.
I admittedly laughed pretty hard when I read this. Tell me about all those extra things you managed to roll up into your life with that extra 0.7 square inches at your disposal? As much as an extra (somewhat used) pink eraser?
The built in mic isn't going to record the next award-winning DDD album or anything, no -- as I stated already, it's good enough to record dictation notes and the line in can handle a quick dub from tape or a record or something if you don't want to haul your gear around to plug it into your computer to tease a song or two out of your older media for listening later.
As for FM tuners -- maybe it's been a while since you've been to the gym? Most broadcast whatever's playing (television, workout tapes, whatever) on FM channels so people can tune in privately without disturbing everyone else, much like a drive-in movie.
FM tuners are useful to have with you on days when you are exposed to inclement weather as well (such as when on the water, for example), as they can detect lightning strikes reliably in time for you to seek shelter (and, of course, provide up to date weather forecasts as well).
And then, of course, some people also like to listen to the news from time to time, especially the local colour if one finds onesself travelling abroad. FM reception is just dandy, actually, including indoors in my basement -- thanks for asking.
Another one of those "gimmicky" features you neglected to mention is a removable, standard AAA battery. Have fun paying to have yours replaced in a year.
If you can live without a screen or a user-replaceable battery, then great -- stick with your Shuffle. I couldn't, or I would have bought two instead of just one for my wife and something else for myself. I don't keep an "i-Tunes" postage stamp collection of my favourite songs, nor are they all MP3s as plenty of bands release their songs online using the open OGG format; I sort my music by album and prefer to listen to it that way, and change the songs frequently based on whatever is new or "new again" to me, or to what suits my mood at the time.
Having a graphic equaliser isn't an especially big deal if you have a good set of headphones and use them properly (I leave my EQ on "Normal"). Tell me you aren't using those miserable buds that came with your iPod? Invest in a pair of Shure E3c's and some triple-flanged earcups, or a set of Etymotics and form a good seal in your ear, and you'll have a much more enjoyable listening experience, especially in the lower register.
First, mp3s generally require higher bitrates and therefore larger files to avoid somewhat ugly sound artifacts (such as flanging) whereas OGG files degrade more gracefully toward FM-like sound. In both portable media devices and large music collections this wasted space adds up pretty quickly.
Second, OGG encoders produce considerably more reliable-quality encodes than MP3 encoders. Yes, diversity is good, but those "legacy" format mp3s you've got might sound good or terrible at 128kbps depending on what was used to encode them (all other factors, of course, being equal).
Third, the licencing issues around mp3. While the patent is now probably effectively unenforceable because of the format's (chiefly illegal) proliferation in software, it is patented, which is why OGG exists at all. The Slashdot crowd may not like patents (I'm not particularly fond of them either) but A) the Fraunhofer Institute did come up with it first, and B) the format has proven to be immensely valuable, as you have pointed out. At least OGG isn't part of that problem.
Yes, I have -- one or two of my Star Control II (Precursors Mixes) oggs cause a lockup where I have to actually pop the battery out to reset the device. A little disheartening. I tried to download the latest Samsung firmware from their site just yesterday ... and when I ran it, the downloaded firmware appeared to be considerably older than what was already on the device. :(
It's a pity OGG support isn't more wide-spread, and worse still that lots of people bitch about wanting mp3s, completely oblivious to the closed-source brick wall the "next generation" of mp3 formats is going to present. I naturally will be smug with my OGG-playing YP-T6 and EPIA running Linux/Freevo as a set-top multimedia player.
Disclosure: I'm a web designer with enterprise application development experience who is presently employed with a company whose business it is to provide Section 508 accessibility auditing, remediation, and development services. I would almost certainly be willing and able to provide a gratis complete audit (as well as design recommendations) to the Slash source to improve its accessibility and usability for everyone.
Having read the book in its entirety, I think it's pretty clear that reading about Dwellers as an appendix would be utterly inappropriate.
That said, I'm a little surprised Alastair Reynolds' "Century Rain" didn't get nominated, as it was also an excellent novel and, perhaps, especially relevant to the /. crowd. I've been meaning to write a review forever (since nobody else has) but I'm lazy, so I just write comments about it hoping someone else will.
Your article inspired me to write my own inspired review of drawing software:
Dia -- May be an abbreviation of "Diagram" (?)
Inkscape -- I prefer Xara X.
jFig -- I don't like figs (or prunes).
I understand this article is probably geared toward poor mathematics students, but come on. If you're going to go through the bother of "researching" and listing products students probably can't afford anyway you may as well say something useful -- or at least remotely objective -- about each piece of software.
Better still, don't bother listing commercial software at all and stick to the open source propaganda if Slashdot is where you're posting this stuff (I have a hard time seeing why you did, by the bye, to be blunt about it).
There's no shortage of other crippled features in the free version either, such as a maximum of 4x for burning CDs.
Who the hell though it would be a good idea to write an entire page of text in header tags? I couldn't bear to read it, even when I scaled the font size down.
For the price of it I may as well have bought a copy of Windows XP (and I'm in Ottawa, so it's not like I'd be paying for transportation or accomodation). Hope it was a success anyway...
Definitely anything you can do to keep the workspace clean is very much appreciated -- Moving things like font dialogs (or basic font features, at least) to smaller, docked (or even better, context-sensitive) positions is a great idea.
I don't want to suggest any more until I get a chance to really sit down and experiment a bit. Is there somewhere good to get in touch with Inkscape's developers to participate in community discussions about such things? I'm definitely interested in doing some testing and providing some usability feedback from "the field" if you guys are receptive to suggestions.
Thanks again for responding, and keep up the great work.
One of the main reasons I found Inkscape in the first place was because it was a branch of Sodipodi for what I felt were "the right reasons" -- Frankly, Sodipodi's interface is dialog hell. However, I still feel that Inkscape has too many dialogs that "hang around" on the screen. Why have a big dialog that takes 1/7th of the screen to handle color selection when it could be done more effectively with a temporary window that is half the size?
I also couldn't stand the fact that Inkscape didn't have named colours (e.g. colours that you can define, use, then change later and affect the entire drawing) although maybe that's changed now. I also know all of the previous versions I have looked at in the past literally take 10-15 seconds to open a file dialog window (no hyperbole here. Seriously); while my interest in Inkscape has been primarily to get me using a package that looks and works the same on Linux (so I can finally make the switch on the desktop -- Neither Xara X / Xara X2 run on CrossOver Office, unfortunately) I can't help but notice it will save me money from upgrading Xara X every couple of years, too. As a little aside -- I even went so far as to contact Xara Corp. and ask if they had any plans to release a Linux version of their software or even contribute assistance to getting Xara X to run on Wine/CXO. Their response was "No, we're too busy, and anyway people who use Linux seem to expect everything to be free." Well, that put me in my place...
Anyway, thanks to the original poster for pointing this new release out; it's worth taking another look to see what these guys have been up to. The new features look great; I hope stability and improved GUI design are some of the "unsung heroes" of this and future releases.