According to the accessibility czar here, JAWS is largely a chunk of Visual BASIC which wedges itself into Windows' screen display routines, about as elegant as Sidekick using TSR keyboard interrupts to coexist with DOS. Its authors are praying Microsoft will buy them out and rewrite the code into the OS for them. If Windows was open enough as an architecture to make writing a general purpose screen reader easy, JAWS would handle non-Microsoft apps just as well as MS apps, and it pretty clearly doesn't.
I've run it successfully on Windows XP, OS X Tiger, and Debian Sarge. Under Windows you can even choose which speech engine to use; the one bundled with FireVOX or the one already installed on your PC.
UK and Australia have a much smaller sense of humor about non-accessible websites. Here, the only organizations with a legal obligation are state and federal ones (I know, I design websites for one).
To stay accessible, you need to ditch table-based HTML filled with JavaScript widgets and unnecessary Flash navigation. Consequently you need to explore CSS, and guess what hamstrings adoption of CSS's more advanced features?
The other issue is the crap-awful screen reader market. JAWS ignores code designed to separate out screen readers from visual browsers, Apple's technology works only with Safari, and none of these companies have been sued for not doing their job either.
"Homicide: Life on the Streets" style direction
on
GDC - Ron Moore Keynote
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not joking here for a change. The show takes itself seriously, unlike most Glen Larson franchises, and it does nothing to try to be a cute family show.
Proven actors, unproven actors, deliberate reflections of our own society and its issues, and really good action sequences.
This is what Enterprise should have been in some respects, a show without tethers to expectations.
One thing I will concede to PHP is that you tend to be more likely to have XSLT engines installed on a PHP based system, whereas I had to cajole my sysadmin into getting the C-based transformation libraries installed and then locally install the dependent Perl libraries to use it on top of that. In the end the Perl/XSLT solution I created works, but it wasn't fun to install.
Pick a subject you learned yourself hastily, then find a publisher known for editors unfamiliar enough with your subject to accept it as gospel because the manuscript is long and *looks* intelligent.
Look up Amazon reviews of Mortier's books on 3D design applications and you'll see almost the same reviews as above.
Chapter 12's permission vis-a-vis reverse engineering for compatibility purposes refers to copy protection and issues pertaining to copyright, not generic protocols:
Scroll down to "(f) Reverse Engineering." This section has to do with permitting one vendor to reverse engineer protected/encrypted content.
The notion of reverse engineering a driver for a pipeline which does not encrypt or otherwise disguise its content is theoretically outside the aegis of the DMCA.
Apple used (or misused, depending on your perspective) the DMCA against the OSx86 website because it infringed on protection measures Apple specifically set in place to prevent OSX from installing on whiteboxes. Real told its board members that they might be DMCAed over Fairplay because it unlocks copy protection on iTMS purchases.
If the submitter did not discover any authentication methods or trust related protocols in his reverse engineering, and his driver does not have code which specifically spoofs a platform or other form of identification, it sounds to this non-lawyer like a non-issue.
There may be other legal issues at hand, but AFAIK the DMCA is chiefly concerned with those who circumvent deliberate measures to protect copyright, and simply refusing to publicly document a protocol isn't the same thing.
Now, if the driver somehow replicates code that the vendor had to *license* from Microsoft, Microsoft may have an issue with you. Again, check with a competent IP attorney.
Conclusion conveniently omits Dell comparisons.
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
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· Score: 1
The most important part of this review was the consistency with which the Dell laptop came within a 5% margin of benchmark results of the MacBook Pro, and the reviewer makes no mention of it in her conclusions.
I realize that legally running Tiger on a Dell isn't a viable purchase option, but from a review standpoint on a hardware nerd's website, the most obvious question is going unasked: what intrinsic difference is proportional to the price difference between the platforms, besides an integrated camera and a magnetic power connector?
If Apple's getting price breaks from having Intel fab their boards and supply more of the controller chips themselves, when are we going to see it in the price tag?
"Sensitive mercury switches inside the tablet allow you to clear the screen just by shaking it, while the core interface has been simplified down to two edge-positioned dials, using technologies licensed from Synaptics and Ohio Arts."
"...Chairman Steve Case confidently stated that this was as much a coup as their getting AOL CDs put around the necks of the Winter Olympic medalists, and he wanted to know if you were done with that sandwich."
My brother worked with her. I wish you were trolling, but you aren't. She invested in boondoggle after boondoggle without doing any homework, picked her toes at board meetings, cursed us with the term "Web 2.0," and in general establishes herself as the tech world's Paris Hilton: a vacuous faux-blonde trading off her father's name without actually achieving anything. Faith Popcorn with less substance.
Except it's called Bonjour now for trademark reasons, and has been for nearly a year.
I'll agree with your point, though. There are two extremes: borrow a common word and risk infringing a trademark, or pretend you're as capable as the people who invented "Kodak," "Exxon" and "Xerox" and extrude a random 3 syllable name.
News flash: that works for branding *companies,* not products. Note also that those names max out at two syllables and five letters, and have virtually no ambiguity as to how they ought to be pronounced.
Coders are by and large not any better than the general populace at creating verbal aesthetics. It's a cruel irony that this has to happen to a Gnome (it's not an acronym, mmmkay?) release which prides itself on visual aesthetics.
While I had diddled with PDP mainframes in junior high, the ZX81 was my first computer. I went to the TV repair shop and found a giant B/W TV which had a useless tuner and made a deal with the owner: he'd take $10 for it and he'd never see me again.
Damn, it was something to have that kind of control in my own room. Not surprisingly the 16K and 64K expansion packs weren't far off. I already knew BASIC-Plus, so it was a great opportunity to learn my first assembler as soon as I realized I could use it to do things impossible in ZX-BASIC (such as hi-res graphics or generating MIDI-esque frequency music on a nearby transistor radio). I subscribed to SYNC and never got the promised transfer subscription to other magazines when it folded, giving me a reason to hate Ziff-Davis decades before it was fashionable.
I moved on to Ataris and eventually I gave the ZX81 away to a friend's kids, but it's still a warm memory.
I stand corrected on the issue of familiarity with the principle of vectorization.
I remain unimpressed with landscape simulations as a demonstration of processing power. Hair and cloth simulations are much, much harder to pull off realtime in single-processor systems, and a demonstration of how Cell processors manage strand-based hair and draping cloth AND pass that data back to a POWER chip managing the animation of the base figure wearing that hair/clothes would be an instant sale to me of a cohesive, distributed system. Those are the effects in CGI which even console game developers won't touch, and they've got locked down systems with full video card APIs.
It's a hell of a paradigm shift for programmers to go from writing code that targets one CPU to code that deliberately splinters tasks across a bank of specialized processors.
It's fun to bash the Cell as a general purpose CPU when no one has actually suggested it's designed for that.
All of the above being true, it remains to be seen what gains IBM's POWER/Cell system actually offers above present architectures -- RISC was the next big thing, too, until Intel internalized part of it into the x86 architecture.
Flyover landscape graphics demos are a shopworn rabbit pulled out of a threadbare hat: convert fractals into craggy vertical displacements with extremely primitive lighting/mapping. Show me an architecture that can *realtime* render Incredibles-caliber cloth/hair simulations and I'll get a hard-on while ATI and nVidia executives slit their wrists.
Slashdot Mirror
Bueller...Bueller...Bueller?
Oh, it was slashdotted.
According to the accessibility czar here, JAWS is largely a chunk of Visual BASIC which wedges itself into Windows' screen display routines, about as elegant as Sidekick using TSR keyboard interrupts to coexist with DOS. Its authors are praying Microsoft will buy them out and rewrite the code into the OS for them. If Windows was open enough as an architecture to make writing a general purpose screen reader easy, JAWS would handle non-Microsoft apps just as well as MS apps, and it pretty clearly doesn't.
You want FOSS accessibility for browsers? FireVOX extension.
https://webspace.utexas.edu/chencl1/clc-4-tts/
I've run it successfully on Windows XP, OS X Tiger, and Debian Sarge. Under Windows you can even choose which speech engine to use; the one bundled with FireVOX or the one already installed on your PC.
UK and Australia have a much smaller sense of humor about non-accessible websites. Here, the only organizations with a legal obligation are state and federal ones (I know, I design websites for one).
To stay accessible, you need to ditch table-based HTML filled with JavaScript widgets and unnecessary Flash navigation. Consequently you need to explore CSS, and guess what hamstrings adoption of CSS's more advanced features?
The other issue is the crap-awful screen reader market. JAWS ignores code designed to separate out screen readers from visual browsers, Apple's technology works only with Safari, and none of these companies have been sued for not doing their job either.
Not joking here for a change. The show takes itself seriously, unlike most Glen Larson franchises, and it does nothing to try to be a cute family show.
Proven actors, unproven actors, deliberate reflections of our own society and its issues, and really good action sequences.
This is what Enterprise should have been in some respects, a show without tethers to expectations.
Oh, and Katee Sackhoff smuggling hollowtips.
One thing I will concede to PHP is that you tend to be more likely to have XSLT engines installed on a PHP based system, whereas I had to cajole my sysadmin into getting the C-based transformation libraries installed and then locally install the dependent Perl libraries to use it on top of that. In the end the Perl/XSLT solution I created works, but it wasn't fun to install.
"Through reuse of the popular Faraday Flashlight mechanism, as long as you keep surfing porn, the battery remains charged."
'"We decided on SCAMP because it was easier to pronounce than 699LCSTB," McBride was later quoted as saying.'
"As soon as we were able to confirm that 'ekiga' is not Japanese for Happy Fun Tentacle Rape Time, it was a go."
Pick a subject you learned yourself hastily, then find a publisher known for editors unfamiliar enough with your subject to accept it as gospel because the manuscript is long and *looks* intelligent.
Look up Amazon reviews of Mortier's books on 3D design applications and you'll see almost the same reviews as above.
Chapter 12's permission vis-a-vis reverse engineering for compatibility purposes refers to copy protection and issues pertaining to copyright, not generic protocols:
0 1
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap12.html#12
Scroll down to "(f) Reverse Engineering." This section has to do with permitting one vendor to reverse engineer protected/encrypted content.
The notion of reverse engineering a driver for a pipeline which does not encrypt or otherwise disguise its content is theoretically outside the aegis of the DMCA.
Apple used (or misused, depending on your perspective) the DMCA against the OSx86 website because it infringed on protection measures Apple specifically set in place to prevent OSX from installing on whiteboxes. Real told its board members that they might be DMCAed over Fairplay because it unlocks copy protection on iTMS purchases.
If the submitter did not discover any authentication methods or trust related protocols in his reverse engineering, and his driver does not have code which specifically spoofs a platform or other form of identification, it sounds to this non-lawyer like a non-issue.
There may be other legal issues at hand, but AFAIK the DMCA is chiefly concerned with those who circumvent deliberate measures to protect copyright, and simply refusing to publicly document a protocol isn't the same thing.
Now, if the driver somehow replicates code that the vendor had to *license* from Microsoft, Microsoft may have an issue with you. Again, check with a competent IP attorney.
The most important part of this review was the consistency with which the Dell laptop came within a 5% margin of benchmark results of the MacBook Pro, and the reviewer makes no mention of it in her conclusions.
I realize that legally running Tiger on a Dell isn't a viable purchase option, but from a review standpoint on a hardware nerd's website, the most obvious question is going unasked: what intrinsic difference is proportional to the price difference between the platforms, besides an integrated camera and a magnetic power connector?
If Apple's getting price breaks from having Intel fab their boards and supply more of the controller chips themselves, when are we going to see it in the price tag?
"The company is actually incorporated dba Me, Inc, an abbreviation of Me, Inc. Asset Management Portfolio Fund, thereafter referred to as MEIncAMPF."
"Sensitive mercury switches inside the tablet allow you to clear the screen just by shaking it, while the core interface has been simplified down to two edge-positioned dials, using technologies licensed from Synaptics and Ohio Arts."
"...unnamed executives at Apple admitted that the sourcecode to Xnu had to be pulled after threats from the Church of Scientology."
"...Chairman Steve Case confidently stated that this was as much a coup as their getting AOL CDs put around the necks of the Winter Olympic medalists, and he wanted to know if you were done with that sandwich."
Christ, the last time I saw someone with that expression people were debating whether to remove her feeding tube.
My brother worked with her. I wish you were trolling, but you aren't. She invested in boondoggle after boondoggle without doing any homework, picked her toes at board meetings, cursed us with the term "Web 2.0," and in general establishes herself as the tech world's Paris Hilton: a vacuous faux-blonde trading off her father's name without actually achieving anything. Faith Popcorn with less substance.
Mod me down if you care to.
Except it's called Bonjour now for trademark reasons, and has been for nearly a year.
I'll agree with your point, though. There are two extremes: borrow a common word and risk infringing a trademark, or pretend you're as capable as the people who invented "Kodak," "Exxon" and "Xerox" and extrude a random 3 syllable name.
News flash: that works for branding *companies,* not products. Note also that those names max out at two syllables and five letters, and have virtually no ambiguity as to how they ought to be pronounced.
Coders are by and large not any better than the general populace at creating verbal aesthetics. It's a cruel irony that this has to happen to a Gnome (it's not an acronym, mmmkay?) release which prides itself on visual aesthetics.
I stood outside my door this morning in Flagstaff, which is 6200 feet above the Arizona desert.
Which in turn look a lot like Apple recycling their iPod scrollwheel and Synaptics double-finger gestures.
While I had diddled with PDP mainframes in junior high, the ZX81 was my first computer. I went to the TV repair shop and found a giant B/W TV which had a useless tuner and made a deal with the owner: he'd take $10 for it and he'd never see me again.
Damn, it was something to have that kind of control in my own room. Not surprisingly the 16K and 64K expansion packs weren't far off. I already knew BASIC-Plus, so it was a great opportunity to learn my first assembler as soon as I realized I could use it to do things impossible in ZX-BASIC (such as hi-res graphics or generating MIDI-esque frequency music on a nearby transistor radio). I subscribed to SYNC and never got the promised transfer subscription to other magazines when it folded, giving me a reason to hate Ziff-Davis decades before it was fashionable.
I moved on to Ataris and eventually I gave the ZX81 away to a friend's kids, but it's still a warm memory.
I stand corrected on the issue of familiarity with the principle of vectorization.
I remain unimpressed with landscape simulations as a demonstration of processing power. Hair and cloth simulations are much, much harder to pull off realtime in single-processor systems, and a demonstration of how Cell processors manage strand-based hair and draping cloth AND pass that data back to a POWER chip managing the animation of the base figure wearing that hair/clothes would be an instant sale to me of a cohesive, distributed system. Those are the effects in CGI which even console game developers won't touch, and they've got locked down systems with full video card APIs.
But do you run Linux?
It's a hell of a paradigm shift for programmers to go from writing code that targets one CPU to code that deliberately splinters tasks across a bank of specialized processors.
It's fun to bash the Cell as a general purpose CPU when no one has actually suggested it's designed for that.
All of the above being true, it remains to be seen what gains IBM's POWER/Cell system actually offers above present architectures -- RISC was the next big thing, too, until Intel internalized part of it into the x86 architecture.
Flyover landscape graphics demos are a shopworn rabbit pulled out of a threadbare hat: convert fractals into craggy vertical displacements with extremely primitive lighting/mapping. Show me an architecture that can *realtime* render Incredibles-caliber cloth/hair simulations and I'll get a hard-on while ATI and nVidia executives slit their wrists.