Your cost calculations are incorrect. If I need to give a classmate a 1 meg or less text or doc file, I'm not going to want to use a 70 meg USB drive. I'd never get it back. A floppy is cheaper because it's small enough that I don't care if I get it back or not. I could use email, but with spam and virus blocking (as well as small free inboxes) causing nearly all attachments ever sent through e-mail to not work, that's not a good option. I guess I could put it up on a webserver somewhere, but isn't a floppy just easier? The floppy isn't going anywhere. Also, a floppy is less expensive because I already have about eleven billion trillion used ones.
Because Captcha systems suck. They are either: 1. so hard that real users are blocked from using the website 2. so easy that a computer program can be written to pass them, or 3. so inconvenient that users can't be bothered to try.
If I come across a post on RandomJoe's weblog, while I may have something valid and interesting to say that RandomJoe and his readers would benefit from, if I have to fill out a form for a new account, perform email verification and pass a captcha, I'm just going to keep my comments to myself. Entering the discussion for most users won't be worth the time.
The solution is probably one of trusted servers; the website in question could choose what open ID producers to trust, and what not to trust.
No, that was my error. Thanks for the correction. When everything is read to you you tend not to notice the difference between similar words; I am so used to the robotic computer voice that I speed it up to over 450 words per minute, and unless the error is staggeringly awful a proofread at that speed isn't going to find it. Don't even talk to me about there/their/they're, here/hear, and even affect/effect. I'm perfectly aware what to use when, but if I slip while writing I'll never catch it on the proofread. No, grammar checkers don't help. They're all worthless.
Your entry closed before I got to it. As someone who is completely blind, I'm going with way too hard. Are you the person responsible for this code? Can I come over and stab you in the face? No, seriously, I've gotten this all resolved through bugging pater about it, but still. If you're going to allow acceptions to your system, every robotic spammer and troll in the universe can claim blindness. Wouldn't it be smarter to create a text based system and stop creating accounts for any person or thing who claims not to be able to see the image?
See slashdotters, if people just added public email addresses in their profiles, I wouldn't be tossing off topic garbage in this thread. Go do it now if you haven't already. You can even protect it with a sane captcha solution. No, hold on...this is slashdot. Nothing that happens around here is ever sane.
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you ca'n't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad.
You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
I call bullshit! If you can't afford a car or a taxi, you shouldn't be blowing $2 a drink at some god damn bar, now should you? If I thought it would do any good, I would be first in line to bring back prohibition. Unfortunately, history shows that the human race is full of dumb shits who will insist on slowly poisoning themselves no matter what. The best we can do is ensure you don't kill anyone else while you're doing yourself in. I have been long of the opinion that the only solution to repeat drunk drivers is to lock them up for life or kill them. Even if they have no license, they will borrow a car and drive anyway. What a drunk driver has done, in most cases, is even more serious than what a rapest has done. A rapest rapes. A drunk driver kills. Why are drunk drivers treated lighter than rapests?
No, this isn't a troll. This whole issue just makes me flaming mad. The fact that this was obviously posted as some sort of "W00T OPEN SOURCE/LINUX IS TEH R0X!" just makes me sick. The fact that nobody else has a problem with it is even worse.
First off, bolting onto other browsers is *always* a good thing for accessibility. If I am bolted on to firefox or Internet Explorer, when a security fix comes out, I get it as soon as the devs of the mainstream product release the patch. The fact that it is a mainstream product means this will be relatively soon. If an exploit is found for Joe's Accessible Web Browser 2.3.9, I am at risk until Joe gets around to fixing his code. This will probably be a lot longer than when firefox does so.
Second off, if a website deviates from a standard, it means the standard doesn't work. In the current market, companies can't afford a standard. Just think how long any improvement would have taken in the early years of the internet if Microsoft and Netscape had had to agree on every new feature and how it would work before it got added? We'd still be in political meetings today. How do you think a website like launchcast should code the website in order to both satisfy the drm, have all the features they have now, and work as quickly? I don't think it can be done while strictly following the w3. If a user doesn't follow standards for his website (IE nested tables or something), it means either that the standard is flawed in being overly complicated, or in not providing an obvious way for the user to do what he or she wants. I'm blind, as you guessed, and acutely aware of standards. However, I have found that for every spare time hobby website I do, I have to disregard the standards entirely. Why? It takes me something like eighty times as long to create a standards compliant page, some in understanding, but mostly in *typing*! I find it outragious that a user is expected to memorize, think about, and specify doctype at the top of every single html file he or she creates. Once that's done, then you get the fun of meta-tags. If you want to create an rss link, then you get the fun of a bunch of other xml thingies for autodiscovery. We're not even going to get into how non-intuitive the slashes in tags like br are for the standard user. Ever tried to explain this to someone you were teaching html? You eventually end up giving them a bunch of things in a text file to copy-paste (like meta tags and doctype), and answering "because that's the way someone or other decided to do it." to almost all other questions. It seems to me that recent versions of html add nothing in usability and much in complexity.
I have discovered that what the open source community means by "it isn't standard" is usually one of the following: 1. It's not done *my way*, and I don't like the other way. 2. They didn't do it the way I decided to do it. 3. It uses DRM or is otherwise proprietary, and they won't let me play. 4. It does something I didn't allow for because I never thought of it or didn't feel like it. I'm not going to fix it now because not doing that is part of the standard. 5. It has trivial errors that could be easily and transparently worked around by my software, but I'm not going to because I like punishing users in hopes that they'll learn.
I realize minimal standards are required to ensure a lack of anarchy and allow for universal access, but most "standards" seem utterly arbitrary. Is it true that we can't nest tables (I've spent enough time on this, I refuse to go look it up)? Why on earth not? Was that slash in the br tag really required for anything, or is it just that programmers like xml better? Could a renderer really not hack it without knowing the doctype, or is it that that would take some extra coding smarts that nobody really wants to create? Will the world come to an end if people don't bother with meta tags? Maybe I'm just a dumb shit for having to ask, but I'm reading and posting on slashdot, and I've honestly spent time thinking about this stuff. How far does that put me above most average users? If I can't get it, how can we expect everyone else writing websites for minimum wage to figure it all out?
You left out the all important super tracker tracker. We obviously need a super tracker tracker to track the super trackers that are tracking the trackers. Are you keeping track of all this?
Then why are the firefox accessibility hooks improperly implemented, if and when they are implemented at all? Netscape (I've tested version 7, and I feel safe in saying the same for this latest version knowing AOL) and opera are no better. I've never tried safari/khtml so can't speak to them directly, but I haven't heard anything good. The only screen reading/magnifier/alternative interface solutions on the market, either free or gpl or commercial, are all built on Internet Explorer. When asking about this, the universal answer is that it's because firefox/mozilla code just doesn't allow for this sort of thing. If you are serious in avoiding products that do not offer access to all, your only option in a browser is Internet Explorer. Hell, they even have flash and java working now.
Fortunately, you are not serious. You're just pushing bullshit to further your own agenda and opinions. The web will *never* be completely accessible to all, and I think anyone who will stop and think about it for 10 seconds will have to agree. The best we can do is make it work for most of the people most of the time. Right now, that means centering development around Internet Explorer and Windows. Most people can choose to use Internet Explorer on the websites that don't work with firefox (at a library if you don't own Windows). However, many of us cannot choose to use firefox on a website that doesn't work with Internet Explorer.
Why did I have to go click that? Damn it! Remember when web animations didn't have soundtracks? The web was a better place. I'm going to go stuff cotton in my ears and cry....the tricks that he does... Probably have to gag myself, too.
This is the worst interview ever. I'm in a high school journalism course, and we can do better interviews than this. I am gobsmacked that the interviewer chose to ask something like three closed-ended questions (questions that can be answered with "yes", "no", or "maybe"). The only time these sorts of questions should be asked is when you honestly need the info or you're short on space or something. I'm also amaized that the interviewer didn't read the past work of the person he was interviewing. I realize it's a lot of stuff, but when you're constructing questions, surely you can google the website in question with related keywords to see if the person you're interviewing has already given a perfectly good and freely available answer to your question. If they have, come up with a better question. A good example of this was the Bram interview earlier today. Info is available on Bram's bit-torrent thoughts all over creation, so picking a new topic made it much easier to come up with interesting questions. Also, shouldn't the interviewer introduce the person? When is it your job to write your own introduction!!! I have never before heard of SecurityFocus. I hope never to hear from or about it again. This is not journalism; this is crap.
Sure, but dogs also crap, eat, misbehave, require large amounts of attention, only last a few years, etc. I will never get a dog, thanks. A cane is much more impersonal; I'd rather trust my life to my skills with a cane than to the whims of an animal. I'm sure there are perfectly good reasons to have and use a guide dog. I just don't understand them.
Re:we're almost able to replace their eyes!
on
Robots to Help the Blind
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I read these artificial vision stories with a sense of dread. I've been completely blind for my entire life. If I could suddenly see, assuming the level of data input didn't drive me completely mad, I'd have to learn to do absolutely everything over again: I'd have to learn to read, learn colors, learn to navigate around my environment, to orient myself to visual rather than audible clues, to recognize faces and objects by vision rather than sound, etc, etc, etc. I'm betting this would take me at least 10 years, probably more. I'm not in the least interested in being a basket case for that long.
Mod the above up! As a high school student, I can say that that's about all most powerpoint stuff is good for: sleeping. Powerpoint is, most of the time, used to say little, but make it flashy and take up all kinds of space. One can say "over 80% of American homes have computers." No charts are required for this concept. Thank you. I'll go away now.
Huh, sure. What ever. Computers have cracked these images. OCR is good enough that if it can't read it, neither can you. Being blind, I've run OCR over some of these and, once I get the settings right, I can generally get the text out of it. Then again, maybe OCR like in Kurzwiel isn't generally available.
I believe web devs have absolutely know right what so ever to ever try and figure out what browser I'm running (give a menu; I'll choose the browser. If I want to view your IE content without IE that's my own problem, thank you), so I usually change my user-agent and screw JavaScript etc. One would think these seo sites would detect by IP address or something, but they don't. I'm amused when surfing as Yahoo! slurp or googlebot or msnbot how many sites just look at the user-agent, and change the page accordingly, even though this is expressly against the rules. If someone codes a plugin where I can push a button and report these sites to someone, I would be happy to do it.
Oh, sure. So then How am I to give out my info? Please phone me and then I'll subscribe to your feed and then you can insert a new item in your feed for me and then I'll get it in ten minutes or so? Unless I'm not running my rss reader and you send so many messages that your item to me falls off of your feed. Oh, and assuming I'm not some creep and read all the other mmessages that you sent to everyone else that I got while I was checking your feed for messages to me. Oh, but if you change your ISP and your feed address changes I have to subscribe to your new feed if I ever want to hearr from you again. Also, forget giving out my online address on resume/business card/what ever, because if I don't subscribe to you you're screwed and can never send me any messages ever.
Virus checkers are doing this already. So are some isps. It just hammers on whom ever the spammmer put in the headers. I would think IBM would be smarter than to try this? Oh, first post.
Dude. In the audio games world, that voice acting is fairly good. I can show you lots worse, if you like. Audio Game companies don't have the money it would take to get experts; look at the sales figures in the wired article. As for your other problem, GMA Games lead programmer and all around developer is completely blind himself. Blind people read books, listen to radio, etc, etc, etc. We're soaking in visual references those of us born blind can have no understanding of; we tend to have strong associations between colors and other things (white=clean/medical/walls/roof/blank/nothing wred=blood/hot/angry/blushing/fire black=evil/dark/strong blue=cold/sad/bruised if you want a couple off the top of my head) that usually work just as well. If SOD went out of its way not to use things like that it would feel a lot more jarring to me; something would be missing.
Slashdot Mirror
Where can I purchase a dalek? Please respond asap, this is really urgent.
May I point you towards the word dord (link through wikiverse, wikipedia servers are slow to the point of unusable on my network)? Just because it's published doesn't make it correct.
Dude. It's called fasttrack; where ya been?
Your cost calculations are incorrect. If I need to give a classmate a 1 meg or less text or doc file, I'm not going to want to use a 70 meg USB drive. I'd never get it back. A floppy is cheaper because it's small enough that I don't care if I get it back or not. I could use email, but with spam and virus blocking (as well as small free inboxes) causing nearly all attachments ever sent through e-mail to not work, that's not a good option. I guess I could put it up on a webserver somewhere, but isn't a floppy just easier? The floppy isn't going anywhere. Also, a floppy is less expensive because I already have about eleven billion trillion used ones.
Because Captcha systems suck. They are either:
1. so hard that real users are blocked from using the website
2. so easy that a computer program can be written to pass them, or
3. so inconvenient that users can't be bothered to try.
If I come across a post on RandomJoe's weblog, while I may have something valid and interesting to say that RandomJoe and his readers would benefit from, if I have to fill out a form for a new account, perform email verification and pass a captcha, I'm just going to keep my comments to myself. Entering the discussion for most users won't be worth the time.
The solution is probably one of trusted servers; the website in question could choose what open ID producers to trust, and what not to trust.
No, that was my error. Thanks for the correction. When everything is read to you you tend not to notice the difference between similar words; I am so used to the robotic computer voice that I speed it up to over 450 words per minute, and unless the error is staggeringly awful a proofread at that speed isn't going to find it. Don't even talk to me about there/their/they're, here/hear, and even affect/effect. I'm perfectly aware what to use when, but if I slip while writing I'll never catch it on the proofread. No, grammar checkers don't help. They're all worthless.
They died? Oh no! You mean no more updates to some of my favourite websites?
Your entry closed before I got to it. As someone who is completely blind, I'm going with way too hard. Are you the person responsible for this code? Can I come over and stab you in the face? No, seriously, I've gotten this all resolved through bugging pater about it, but still. If you're going to allow acceptions to your system, every robotic spammer and troll in the universe can claim blindness. Wouldn't it be smarter to create a text based system and stop creating accounts for any person or thing who claims not to be able to see the image?
See slashdotters, if people just added public email addresses in their profiles, I wouldn't be tossing off topic garbage in this thread. Go do it now if you haven't already. You can even protect it with a sane captcha solution. No, hold on...this is slashdot. Nothing that happens around here is ever sane.
I call bullshit! If you can't afford a car or a taxi, you shouldn't be blowing $2 a drink at some god damn bar, now should you? If I thought it would do any good, I would be first in line to bring back prohibition. Unfortunately, history shows that the human race is full of dumb shits who will insist on slowly poisoning themselves no matter what. The best we can do is ensure you don't kill anyone else while you're doing yourself in. I have been long of the opinion that the only solution to repeat drunk drivers is to lock them up for life or kill them. Even if they have no license, they will borrow a car and drive anyway. What a drunk driver has done, in most cases, is even more serious than what a rapest has done. A rapest rapes. A drunk driver kills. Why are drunk drivers treated lighter than rapests?
No, this isn't a troll. This whole issue just makes me flaming mad. The fact that this was obviously posted as some sort of "W00T OPEN SOURCE/LINUX IS TEH R0X!" just makes me sick. The fact that nobody else has a problem with it is even worse.
First off, bolting onto other browsers is *always* a good thing for accessibility. If I am bolted on to firefox or Internet Explorer, when a security fix comes out, I get it as soon as the devs of the mainstream product release the patch. The fact that it is a mainstream product means this will be relatively soon. If an exploit is found for Joe's Accessible Web Browser 2.3.9, I am at risk until Joe gets around to fixing his code. This will probably be a lot longer than when firefox does so.
Second off, if a website deviates from a standard, it means the standard doesn't work. In the current market, companies can't afford a standard. Just think how long any improvement would have taken in the early years of the internet if Microsoft and Netscape had had to agree on every new feature and how it would work before it got added? We'd still be in political meetings today. How do you think a website like launchcast should code the website in order to both satisfy the drm, have all the features they have now, and work as quickly? I don't think it can be done while strictly following the w3. If a user doesn't follow standards for his website (IE nested tables or something), it means either that the standard is flawed in being overly complicated, or in not providing an obvious way for the user to do what he or she wants. I'm blind, as you guessed, and acutely aware of standards. However, I have found that for every spare time hobby website I do, I have to disregard the standards entirely. Why? It takes me something like eighty times as long to create a standards compliant page, some in understanding, but mostly in *typing*! I find it outragious that a user is expected to memorize, think about, and specify doctype at the top of every single html file he or she creates. Once that's done, then you get the fun of meta-tags. If you want to create an rss link, then you get the fun of a bunch of other xml thingies for autodiscovery. We're not even going to get into how non-intuitive the slashes in tags like br are for the standard user. Ever tried to explain this to someone you were teaching html? You eventually end up giving them a bunch of things in a text file to copy-paste (like meta tags and doctype), and answering "because that's the way someone or other decided to do it." to almost all other questions. It seems to me that recent versions of html add nothing in usability and much in complexity.
I have discovered that what the open source community means by "it isn't standard" is usually one of the following:
1. It's not done *my way*, and I don't like the other way.
2. They didn't do it the way I decided to do it.
3. It uses DRM or is otherwise proprietary, and they won't let me play.
4. It does something I didn't allow for because I never thought of it or didn't feel like it. I'm not going to fix it now because not doing that is part of the standard.
5. It has trivial errors that could be easily and transparently worked around by my software, but I'm not going to because I like punishing users in hopes that they'll learn.
I realize minimal standards are required to ensure a lack of anarchy and allow for universal access, but most "standards" seem utterly arbitrary. Is it true that we can't nest tables (I've spent enough time on this, I refuse to go look it up)? Why on earth not? Was that slash in the br tag really required for anything, or is it just that programmers like xml better? Could a renderer really not hack it without knowing the doctype, or is it that that would take some extra coding smarts that nobody really wants to create? Will the world come to an end if people don't bother with meta tags? Maybe I'm just a dumb shit for having to ask, but I'm reading and posting on slashdot, and I've honestly spent time thinking about this stuff. How far does that put me above most average users? If I can't get it, how can we expect everyone else writing websites for minimum wage to figure it all out?
You left out the all important super tracker tracker. We obviously need a super tracker tracker to track the super trackers that are tracking the trackers. Are you keeping track of all this?
Why did I have to go click that? Damn it! Remember when web animations didn't have soundtracks? The web was a better place. I'm going to go stuff cotton in my ears and cry. ...the tricks that he does... Probably have to gag myself, too.
Bzzzt! Wrong! You left out the words "your teeth". "You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent". The audio probably lives somewhere in this directory, but my file naming conventions are crap and I'm too lazy to root it out. Go find it yourself. Hey, it's free karma if you can find a more direct link.
This is the worst interview ever. I'm in a high school journalism course, and we can do better interviews than this. I am gobsmacked that the interviewer chose to ask something like three closed-ended questions (questions that can be answered with "yes", "no", or "maybe"). The only time these sorts of questions should be asked is when you honestly need the info or you're short on space or something. I'm also amaized that the interviewer didn't read the past work of the person he was interviewing. I realize it's a lot of stuff, but when you're constructing questions, surely you can google the website in question with related keywords to see if the person you're interviewing has already given a perfectly good and freely available answer to your question. If they have, come up with a better question. A good example of this was the Bram interview earlier today. Info is available on Bram's bit-torrent thoughts all over creation, so picking a new topic made it much easier to come up with interesting questions. Also, shouldn't the interviewer introduce the person? When is it your job to write your own introduction!!! I have never before heard of SecurityFocus. I hope never to hear from or about it again. This is not journalism; this is crap.
A year? Where do you get that figure? Just asking; it sounds pretty quick.
Sure, but dogs also crap, eat, misbehave, require large amounts of attention, only last a few years, etc. I will never get a dog, thanks. A cane is much more impersonal; I'd rather trust my life to my skills with a cane than to the whims of an animal. I'm sure there are perfectly good reasons to have and use a guide dog. I just don't understand them.
I read these artificial vision stories with a sense of dread. I've been completely blind for my entire life. If I could suddenly see, assuming the level of data input didn't drive me completely mad, I'd have to learn to do absolutely everything over again: I'd have to learn to read, learn colors, learn to navigate around my environment, to orient myself to visual rather than audible clues, to recognize faces and objects by vision rather than sound, etc, etc, etc. I'm betting this would take me at least 10 years, probably more. I'm not in the least interested in being a basket case for that long.
Mod the above up! As a high school student, I can say that that's about all most powerpoint stuff is good for: sleeping. Powerpoint is, most of the time, used to say little, but make it flashy and take up all kinds of space. One can say "over 80% of American homes have computers." No charts are required for this concept. Thank you. I'll go away now.
I spend all this time looking for crack, and nasa just *finds* it in their tanks? Where do they get their contractors, man?
Huh, sure. What ever. Computers have cracked these images. OCR is good enough that if it can't read it, neither can you. Being blind, I've run OCR over some of these and, once I get the settings right, I can generally get the text out of it. Then again, maybe OCR like in Kurzwiel isn't generally available.
I believe web devs have absolutely know right what so ever to ever try and figure out what browser I'm running (give a menu; I'll choose the browser. If I want to view your IE content without IE that's my own problem, thank you), so I usually change my user-agent and screw JavaScript etc. One would think these seo sites would detect by IP address or something, but they don't. I'm amused when surfing as Yahoo! slurp or googlebot or msnbot how many sites just look at the user-agent, and change the page accordingly, even though this is expressly against the rules. If someone codes a plugin where I can push a button and report these sites to someone, I would be happy to do it.
Oh, sure. So then How am I to give out my info? Please phone me and then I'll subscribe to your feed and then you can insert a new item in your feed for me and then I'll get it in ten minutes or so? Unless I'm not running my rss reader and you send so many messages that your item to me falls off of your feed. Oh, and assuming I'm not some creep and read all the other mmessages that you sent to everyone else that I got while I was checking your feed for messages to me. Oh, but if you change your ISP and your feed address changes I have to subscribe to your new feed if I ever want to hearr from you again. Also, forget giving out my online address on resume/business card/what ever, because if I don't subscribe to you you're screwed and can never send me any messages ever.
Virus checkers are doing this already. So are some isps. It just hammers on whom ever the spammmer put in the headers. I would think IBM would be smarter than to try this? Oh, first post.
Dude. In the audio games world, that voice acting is fairly good. I can show you lots worse, if you like. Audio Game companies don't have the money it would take to get experts; look at the sales figures in the wired article. As for your other problem, GMA Games lead programmer and all around developer is completely blind himself. Blind people read books, listen to radio, etc, etc, etc. We're soaking in visual references those of us born blind can have no understanding of; we tend to have strong associations between colors and other things (white=clean/medical/walls/roof/blank/nothing wred=blood/hot/angry/blushing/fire black=evil/dark/strong blue=cold/sad/bruised if you want a couple off the top of my head) that usually work just as well. If SOD went out of its way not to use things like that it would feel a lot more jarring to me; something would be missing.