One of the things I would love to see happen is to have the Open Source Community swarm the software support for the blind and just replace everything the venders are trying to do, all under the GPL. It would put them out of buisness so they could stop rapeing the disabled for what little money they do have, and urge actual inovation in the field of voice interfaces.
Right now nobody is forcing them to compete, because nobody cares about the blind unless they are blind themselves or they have family who is visualy disabled. Open source could really help us out, but nobody cares.
Thats just a "in a perfect world" wish list item; Many of us would be happy if it sounded decent. The problem is without eye sight our hearing goes up, so we are more then sensitive then the average person to how things sound. We hear details normal cant, because sighted people have not learned to stretch the boundaries of there other senses, like there ability to hear. We do it on average 50% better then anybody who is not disabled.
Jaws support would be great, if your application runs on the windows platform. Firefox could really make some steps in that direction. The problem is that Jaws itself can be expensive, and many of us simply lack the funds to buy copies.
Brail terminal support would be great as well. The problem with this is that a 80 character brail terminal costs almost eleven thousand ($11,000) dollars each. Do not belive me? Google "braile terminal 80 cell" or "Braillant 80-cell $10995*". No matter how much support you have for a brail terminal in your application, its not going to help the 90% of blind users who cant afford to pay that much for the hardware.
That is why better voice activated systems, dictation, voice enabled IDEs, and more fluid voice synth and recognition are the thing we need the most. We cant afford the hardware or expensive commercial software, and even if we bought the software we would still not be free as we would be limited to the few applications that support it. But todays computer systems are fast and cheap, and could run such systems easily if they existed.
For the few who can get the hardware, I would love to have a touch typing style application available that trained the user in both or either of the 2 different systems of braille by sending the keys to be typed to the brail terminal, reading in that sentence from the keyboard as input, and if the user messed up spoke what they did wrong. If not say "Success!" or something and go to the next level. Only 10% of the blind population even knowns the first, simpler form of braille because tools to help them learn it outside of somebody sitting down and helping them does not exist. And thats expensive even when you can find the very rare person that can teach you.
Yes, no flaming intended but python sucks and technically its not even a real computer language, because it uses non terminals (whitespace) to function. Its really more of a data execution format then a programming language, and a bad and unusable one at that. I know the python fanboys will read this and go off on me, but the fact is its just unusable given the current state of tech available to the blind for free.
My languages of choice are mostly C based. I use php, perl, C, C++, shell, and even lisp the most. Lately I have been playing around with C# using mono.
I find linux very easy to use; I just wish we had more intuitive file editing and programming interfaces. Emacs-speak is only good for so much, and its a monster to learn eve without the docs being out of date.
I'm what the state calls "Visually Disabled". Some people would rather just say I'm retarded, or even "useless". All are terms I often hear, despite the fact that I was born normal with better then 20/20 eyesight.
Like it or not there is a large rift between the needs of the disabled and the people willing to take the extra time to address it. Disabled people, no matter the affliction, all have the same problem today: Only the people who need the extra interface flexibility are the ones interested in doing anything about it. And 99% of the time, they still cant because what they need is required to be able to build that very same system. Its a recursive dependency.
We need a better focus on software based voice systems. Speech recognition, and yes better generation, it all needs to be there and sound good and be fast doing it. And yes, sounding good matters. I always laugh when I hear (google for festival, flite, blind linux) people talk about "eye candy" or "improved frame rates". They dont matter, and its just useless junk to me and others who lack the visual functions to care about how crisp the screen looks; What I and every other visually disabled person wants is "Ear Candy", the type of synthed voice that sounds like she or he really exists, so we dont get fed up with listening to that horrible robot voice all day and go crazy.
One thing that most people dont understand as well is that most of us who are disabled in any way at all are dirt poor. It could be from medical bills, the lack of the ability to even work because of our disability, the fact that to most we are seen as less then human so people dont want to hire us for work we can do, or any number of other reasons. The fact is, most of us do not have much money and have a lot of free time on our hands. We could be open sources greatest contributors if the OOS community cared enough to do the things we cant to help us make the tools we need. Once our hungry minds have the option, you have no idea how much we will use it.
I'm very lucky. I worked as a independent consulted for 5 years, taught myself as much as I could while I still had better eye sight then I do now in my "good" eye, and make sure to keep lights dim or off when I dont have to worry about a sightie needing more light to function so I dont get eye strain or migraines that could keep me from working due to my photo sensitivity. I made a living with Linux offering support, administration services, and my skills as a code monkey against all odds for 5 years, before my current job, because I did not give up. Many of my fellow disabled did not have the chance to use even that much sight, or did not get the time I did at a young age to learn things the "normal" way before my accident. That gave me a slight advantage, as now I know both worlds.
Most of us dont have that. But then again most people dont understand, they cant. So everybody reading this, pick a day out of the week and go to bed the night before wearing a blindfold. Wake up with it still on and go through just one day without your ability to see. At all. Then maybe you will get a hint of what it is like for us, OOS's most eager and unwelcome members. And I say only a hint as that is all you will get; Because the first time you fall down, bump into something and break soemthing, want to cook a meal or need to take a piss, the first thing your going to do is take that blindfold off. Just remember that many do not have that option.
Trust me, MSR has better things to do then 0wn your boxen.
Besides, you should know how to audit your init scripts and copy your boot sector to a file you can check the md5 of at boot. If you dont know how, its your fault. They may have researched it thinking of a possible attack on there product, and thus there main source of income. Any company has that right, it be Apple, Sun, or yes even Microsoft.
I live in a city with slightly less then 30k people in it, and I'm in Washington state. Yes kids, this is the same home state of MS. The population is about 29,686 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walla_Walla%2C_Washin gton )
As Einstein once said, Reality is Relative. As another great writer once said, We are all the third person.
1. More *nix problems have been fixed then with windows this year. Windows still has the large amount of bugs it has last year, while linux and other open source softwarte projects has much less then even before.
2. Windows is even more insecure then *nix now then ever before by virtue of these *nix bugs being reported, fixed, and the software further secured.
3. Windows bugs are not reported like linux bugs. They are more public thus there will be more to add to this list, as it would be impossable for them to add internal Microsoft bugs to this list in full.
4. People in the linux camp can not *add* security problems to Microsoft internal code, while Microsoft People have the motive (job security and company loyalty), Ability (They would not be working for Microsoft if they did not know at least basic programming), and Freedom (As per the GPL) to sabotage Open Source Software projects. And it would not be illegal to do so, since there are no restrictions against it in the GPL that would make it a crime for Microsoft-freindly and Anti-Linux parties to do such evil deeds.
And yet its only a recap, written for people who do not keep updated on tech or actual real life data on what file sharing is and is not, people who do not have a clue on what is really going on.
The gpl is a contract of sorts, and is based on IP law. It may use that law in a way that it may not have been intended, but its still a use of the law. So violation of the GPL - like tainting your kernel - are technically illegal.
IANOL, but that is how the law reads to me when I look it up.
Names like 'Neptune' and 'Jupiter' are based on names based in religion for these times, not 'pop-culture icons' as you so claim. People *worshipped* the namesakes of the planets as gods not mortal celebrity, and the planets themselves served at some point as symbolic representations of the deities they represented.
To say they are 'pop culture icons' is to deny the very history you are referencing, and may be construed by some as insulting or even bigoted against the pagan religions of that time.
And no, This was not a flame or a troll. I'm just doing my best to educate others and give my - cheap at.02 cents - input to correct what I see as the wrong way of looking at things. No offence intended.
Just because I have the hardware does not mean that my Linux or BSD based (Yes mac users, that means you as well) operating system supports it. Any even if it is *available*, that does not mean that my custom gentoo-sources based kernel has the support even compiled in.
Then again since this would no doubt be proprietary tech it would be impossible for me it add that required support without tainting my kernel... and is that not technialy illegal?
That would be a very evil thing to do, and would be illegal under animal abuse laws. Although I could never see that as funny myself, I hope you are joking.
Will it come with automatic updates over the internet? The ability to detect new rootkits? The ability to let users run code they know is safe but still trips the alarm? Not slow the computer to the speed of the chip itself?
This sounds like a really bad idea from a bunch of people who are supposed to be really smart.
The few that your personal Xbox360 is a unit that is known to "work fine" is not the issue here, and the fact that your use of it seems to say it cools well enough does not disprove the fact that other people are having trouble with there own units due to design flaws.
I'm going to give up modding the parent +1 insightful in order to post this here, so please do so for me if you can.
The Parent is correct; If you get something hot enough on today's carpeting or by a wall a fire *will* start. And most gamers/computer people I know have stacks of paper - gaming catalogs, cheat code listings, whatever - by there gaming systems anyway so that only increases the danger.
The fact is Microsoft made a really bad mistake out of either gross incompetence or extreme criminal negligence, and instead of being something as benign to the real word as a BSOD that simply needs a reboot to fix, the over heating of the Xbox360 can and will burn your house down if it gets out of hand. Hell it could not just be your house, it could be your city block or your entire town because you do not even need to be an owner of a XBox360 to have a over heated unit start the fire that will end up destroying everythng you own or burn your family alive. Any of the great fires of Boston or Chicago are the perfect example of this.
I am personally glad he is asking for a full recall of every single unit based on these facts, they are unsafe and all should be destroyed, with the company that made them taking the loss for bad design. And I would feel this way even if I owned the company that built them, or if it was Apple or Sun or any of a million other companies. Its not about Microsoft bashing, its about safety and a company needing to take responsibility for a crappy product that was badly made enough to be dangerous to peoples lives and property.
It means that if a AA battery was made out of the stuff, you would need 2 of them in a row to get 2/3 the power of one normal dry fuel cell AA battery. Not very efficient, and current technology means that this is not cheap.
It also means that even the worst laptop battery outlasts this tech by several miles.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the things I would love to see happen is to have the Open Source Community swarm the software support for the blind and just replace everything the venders are trying to do, all under the GPL. It would put them out of buisness so they could stop rapeing the disabled for what little money they do have, and urge actual inovation in the field of voice interfaces.
Right now nobody is forcing them to compete, because nobody cares about the blind unless they are blind themselves or they have family who is visualy disabled. Open source could really help us out, but nobody cares.
Look into Emacs-Speak. But I warn you, its a monster to learn and as the artical said, the docs are not friendly.
Thats just a "in a perfect world" wish list item; Many of us would be happy if it sounded decent. The problem is without eye sight our hearing goes up, so we are more then sensitive then the average person to how things sound. We hear details normal cant, because sighted people have not learned to stretch the boundaries of there other senses, like there ability to hear. We do it on average 50% better then anybody who is not disabled.
Jaws support would be great, if your application runs on the windows platform. Firefox could really make some steps in that direction. The problem is that Jaws itself can be expensive, and many of us simply lack the funds to buy copies.
Brail terminal support would be great as well. The problem with this is that a 80 character brail terminal costs almost eleven thousand ($11,000) dollars each. Do not belive me? Google "braile terminal 80 cell" or "Braillant 80-cell $10995*". No matter how much support you have for a brail terminal in your application, its not going to help the 90% of blind users who cant afford to pay that much for the hardware.
That is why better voice activated systems, dictation, voice enabled IDEs, and more fluid voice synth and recognition are the thing we need the most. We cant afford the hardware or expensive commercial software, and even if we bought the software we would still not be free as we would be limited to the few applications that support it. But todays computer systems are fast and cheap, and could run such systems easily if they existed.
For the few who can get the hardware, I would love to have a touch typing style application available that trained the user in both or either of the 2 different systems of braille by sending the keys to be typed to the brail terminal, reading in that sentence from the keyboard as input, and if the user messed up spoke what they did wrong. If not say "Success!" or something and go to the next level. Only 10% of the blind population even knowns the first, simpler form of braille because tools to help them learn it outside of somebody sitting down and helping them does not exist. And thats expensive even when you can find the very rare person that can teach you.
Yes, no flaming intended but python sucks and technically its not even a real computer language, because it uses non terminals (whitespace) to function. Its really more of a data execution format then a programming language, and a bad and unusable one at that. I know the python fanboys will read this and go off on me, but the fact is its just unusable given the current state of tech available to the blind for free.
My languages of choice are mostly C based. I use php, perl, C, C++, shell, and even lisp the most. Lately I have been playing around with C# using mono.
I find linux very easy to use; I just wish we had more intuitive file editing and programming interfaces. Emacs-speak is only good for so much, and its a monster to learn eve without the docs being out of date.
I'm blind. Check out my response at the link below.
0 680&cid=14951238
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18
I'm what the state calls "Visually Disabled". Some people would rather just say I'm retarded, or even "useless". All are terms I often hear, despite the fact that I was born normal with better then 20/20 eyesight.
Like it or not there is a large rift between the needs of the disabled and the people willing to take the extra time to address it. Disabled people, no matter the affliction, all have the same problem today: Only the people who need the extra interface flexibility are the ones interested in doing anything about it. And 99% of the time, they still cant because what they need is required to be able to build that very same system. Its a recursive dependency.
We need a better focus on software based voice systems. Speech recognition, and yes better generation, it all needs to be there and sound good and be fast doing it. And yes, sounding good matters. I always laugh when I hear (google for festival, flite, blind linux) people talk about "eye candy" or "improved frame rates". They dont matter, and its just useless junk to me and others who lack the visual functions to care about how crisp the screen looks; What I and every other visually disabled person wants is "Ear Candy", the type of synthed voice that sounds like she or he really exists, so we dont get fed up with listening to that horrible robot voice all day and go crazy.
One thing that most people dont understand as well is that most of us who are disabled in any way at all are dirt poor. It could be from medical bills, the lack of the ability to even work because of our disability, the fact that to most we are seen as less then human so people dont want to hire us for work we can do, or any number of other reasons. The fact is, most of us do not have much money and have a lot of free time on our hands. We could be open sources greatest contributors if the OOS community cared enough to do the things we cant to help us make the tools we need. Once our hungry minds have the option, you have no idea how much we will use it.
I'm very lucky. I worked as a independent consulted for 5 years, taught myself as much as I could while I still had better eye sight then I do now in my "good" eye, and make sure to keep lights dim or off when I dont have to worry about a sightie needing more light to function so I dont get eye strain or migraines that could keep me from working due to my photo sensitivity. I made a living with Linux offering support, administration services, and my skills as a code monkey against all odds for 5 years, before my current job, because I did not give up. Many of my fellow disabled did not have the chance to use even that much sight, or did not get the time I did at a young age to learn things the "normal" way before my accident. That gave me a slight advantage, as now I know both worlds.
Most of us dont have that. But then again most people dont understand, they cant. So everybody reading this, pick a day out of the week and go to bed the night before wearing a blindfold. Wake up with it still on and go through just one day without your ability to see. At all. Then maybe you will get a hint of what it is like for us, OOS's most eager and unwelcome members. And I say only a hint as that is all you will get; Because the first time you fall down, bump into something and break soemthing, want to cook a meal or need to take a piss, the first thing your going to do is take that blindfold off. Just remember that many do not have that option.
Trust me, MSR has better things to do then 0wn your boxen.
Besides, you should know how to audit your init scripts and copy your boot sector to a file you can check the md5 of at boot. If you dont know how, its your fault. They may have researched it thinking of a possible attack on there product, and thus there main source of income. Any company has that right, it be Apple, Sun, or yes even Microsoft.
I live in a city with slightly less then 30k people in it, and I'm in Washington state. Yes kids, this is the same home state of MS. The population is about 29,686 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walla_Walla%2C_Washin gton )
As Einstein once said, Reality is Relative. As another great writer once said, We are all the third person.
1. More *nix problems have been fixed then with windows this year. Windows still has the large amount of bugs it has last year, while linux and other open source softwarte projects has much less then even before.
2. Windows is even more insecure then *nix now then ever before by virtue of these *nix bugs being reported, fixed, and the software further secured.
3. Windows bugs are not reported like linux bugs. They are more public thus there will be more to add to this list, as it would be impossable for them to add internal Microsoft bugs to this list in full.
4. People in the linux camp can not *add* security problems to Microsoft internal code, while Microsoft People have the motive (job security and company loyalty), Ability (They would not be working for Microsoft if they did not know at least basic programming), and Freedom (As per the GPL) to sabotage Open Source Software projects. And it would not be illegal to do so, since there are no restrictions against it in the GPL that would make it a crime for Microsoft-freindly and Anti-Linux parties to do such evil deeds.
For some people sex *is* a form of worship, and thus *is* church.
That is called Darwinism.
And yet its only a recap, written for people who do not keep updated on tech or actual real life data on what file sharing is and is not, people who do not have a clue on what is really going on.
So this article is perfect for the **AA.
So where are the packages going to get the electrical power required to run the adds, sounds, and animation?
emerge grip && echo -e "\a"
The gpl is a contract of sorts, and is based on IP law. It may use that law in a way that it may not have been intended, but its still a use of the law. So violation of the GPL - like tainting your kernel - are technically illegal.
IANOL, but that is how the law reads to me when I look it up.
AND they took down the "No gurls!" sign.
You may be too young, statisticly the average age of the men Buffy dates is 133 years or so.
Names like 'Neptune' and 'Jupiter' are based on names based in religion for these times, not 'pop-culture icons' as you so claim. People *worshipped* the namesakes of the planets as gods not mortal celebrity, and the planets themselves served at some point as symbolic representations of the deities they represented.
.02 cents - input to correct what I see as the wrong way of looking at things. No offence intended.
To say they are 'pop culture icons' is to deny the very history you are referencing, and may be construed by some as insulting or even bigoted against the pagan religions of that time.
And no, This was not a flame or a troll. I'm just doing my best to educate others and give my - cheap at
Just because I have the hardware does not mean that my Linux or BSD based (Yes mac users, that means you as well) operating system supports it. Any even if it is *available*, that does not mean that my custom gentoo-sources based kernel has the support even compiled in.
Then again since this would no doubt be proprietary tech it would be impossible for me it add that required support without tainting my kernel... and is that not technialy illegal?
That would be a very evil thing to do, and would be illegal under animal abuse laws. Although I could never see that as funny myself, I hope you are joking.
For example, cats whiskers are also highly sensitive to EM fields on top of wind changes and there great touch of touch.
Will it come with automatic updates over the internet? The ability to detect new rootkits? The ability to let users run code they know is safe but still trips the alarm? Not slow the computer to the speed of the chip itself?
This sounds like a really bad idea from a bunch of people who are supposed to be really smart.
The few that your personal Xbox360 is a unit that is known to "work fine" is not the issue here, and the fact that your use of it seems to say it cools well enough does not disprove the fact that other people are having trouble with there own units due to design flaws.
I'm going to give up modding the parent +1 insightful in order to post this here, so please do so for me if you can.
The Parent is correct; If you get something hot enough on today's carpeting or by a wall a fire *will* start. And most gamers/computer people I know have stacks of paper - gaming catalogs, cheat code listings, whatever - by there gaming systems anyway so that only increases the danger.
The fact is Microsoft made a really bad mistake out of either gross incompetence or extreme criminal negligence, and instead of being something as benign to the real word as a BSOD that simply needs a reboot to fix, the over heating of the Xbox360 can and will burn your house down if it gets out of hand. Hell it could not just be your house, it could be your city block or your entire town because you do not even need to be an owner of a XBox360 to have a over heated unit start the fire that will end up destroying everythng you own or burn your family alive. Any of the great fires of Boston or Chicago are the perfect example of this.
I am personally glad he is asking for a full recall of every single unit based on these facts, they are unsafe and all should be destroyed, with the company that made them taking the loss for bad design. And I would feel this way even if I owned the company that built them, or if it was Apple or Sun or any of a million other companies. Its not about Microsoft bashing, its about safety and a company needing to take responsibility for a crappy product that was badly made enough to be dangerous to peoples lives and property.
It means that if a AA battery was made out of the stuff, you would need 2 of them in a row to get 2/3 the power of one normal dry fuel cell AA battery. Not very efficient, and current technology means that this is not cheap.
It also means that even the worst laptop battery outlasts this tech by several miles.