At the same time there are brilliant Space Opera style Sci Fi authors out there. David Brin (Uplift), Yain Banks (Culture), Peter F Hamilton (Night's Down). All of them are capable of taking a topic and developing it into a whole universe for years.
But Lucas is not going to hire them. First it will decrease HIS credit and HIS ego. Second they will be able to draw on the Star Wars audience which he jelously guards as his prime revenue source.
Um, how about because first, these authors wouldn't touch the Star Wars universe with a ten-foot pole, and second, because these authors are doing quite well with their own ideas and audience.
Except for the ``paying people'' part, United Devices does just that.
The downside of distributed computing is figuring out how to split a given problem into pieces that can be processed separately. Not all problems can be split up, and for those that can be split, figuring out the best way to do so isn't always trivial.
Re:You should rewrite as little code as possible
on
Exegesis 4 Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
On the other hand, Joel's
in favor of refactoring, which is certainly an option with Perl 6.
The book was apparently called The Golden Compass in the States because Pullman changed the title after submitting the manuscript to his U.S. publishers (Scholastic). See the FAQ on this fan site.
The situation has also been explained in various interviews Pullman has given, available through a Google search.
(The Harry Potter books, however, were indeed changed because American kids are considered too dumb to be able to absorb words from another English-speaking culture, though -- see interview with Arthur Levine (the U.S. editor) and the ``Word Gallery'' for a list of the changes.)
If you read the NAFTA, it doesn't say your degree has to be in the field. That's an interpretation you'll only find in the official handbook used by the Immigration folk.
Also, good luck proving to a guy at the border that you're qualified to do the job without a degree in a field they recognize. They're not impressed by resumes, letters of reference or anything else.
The first answer is always no, and once you get that answer, the chances of getting a yes are very, very slim.
Bill Jones is not a U.S. Congressman. He's not even a member of the California Assembly or Senate. He's the California Secretary of State, an elected official.
In other words, calling him ``Rep. Bill Jones'' is wrong.
Yes, but your degree had better be in computer science, or mathematics, or something that sounds mighty techy to the average guy, or the folks at the border are going to tell you to get screwed on ice, no matter how much experience you have and how enthusiastic your potential employer is.
To this end, if memory serves it was Jerry Pournelle, suggested to MS that they include an option in
office that didn't involve a black-on-white display, so there is a little checkbox that lets you have a
blue background and white text hidden away in the prefs
My understanding was that the white on blue text in Word was a ``compatibility option'' so people who were forced to stop using WordPerfect could feel slightly more at home.
ObOnTopic: I generally use black text on a light yellow background. That's closer to ink on paper without being quite so glarey.
My partner was happy for years with her monochrome NeXT. Somehow the addition of color makes everything a lot more dodgy.
I have a Kensington TurboMouse working under Debian's XFree4 (not
sure if that's the same as the ExpertMouse or not -- the TurboMouse is
a Mac trackball).
Caveats: My system is a Mac clone, using ADB for the keyboard and
trackball/mouse.
I have (only) three mouse buttons working, and I run
xmodmap when I start X to swap two of them around -- my
~/.Xmodmap file contains pointer = 1 3 2; the
equivalent command line would be xmodmap -e 'pointer = 1 3
2'.
The last time I saw an eye doctor in San Jose, he told me about the
PRIO test, which calculates a
prescription specifically for use when working with a computer -- if
you already wear glasses, you wear the PRIO glasses instead; if you
have contacts, you wear the PRIO glasses with your contacts.
The idea is that the computer glasses allow you to focus on the
screen without having to strain your eyes -- according to PRIO,
when you look at a computer screen, your eyes tend to focus
beyond the screen, resulting in eyestrain as your eyes
constantly try to focus closer in. That seems to fit with what I
remember my doctor saying about the glasses encouraging
underfocusing.
Alas, I never followed up on these, but there's a fair bit of stuff
out there on the Web (look for ``PRIO''). Two articles on the Motion
Picture Editors' Guild website might also be of interest:
You might want to try some or all of the other suggestions people
have made here first (replacing overhead fluorescent lighting with
indirect lighting, increasing your system's refresh rate, lowering the
resolution of your monitor so you have larger characters, adjusting
the brightness and contrast, etc.), but if you're still having
problems, you might want to look into these glasses. If you have a
health plan that includes eyecare, these glasses might be covered, and
you also might be able to get coverage under the new OSHA ergonomics
regulations.
Needless to say, you should take anything that PRIO says with a
grain of salt -- while their product may do wonders, they have a
vested interest in people believing that it works. Your eye doctor
may, too, especially if he or she is selling the glasses, too, and not
just examining your eyes (at the very least, there's the cost of the
test; if you decide to get PRIO glasses, you're talking about new
lenses and frames, and fashionable frames tend to be very expensive).
Do some research -- see what people on the 'Net have to say, and if
you know people with these glasses, be sure to talk to them about
their experiences!
Out of curiousity, I tried deleting my Personal Toolbar folder,
quitting Communicator, and restarting. And, yes, a new Personal
Toolbar folder appeared, filled with links to various LinuxPPC related
things.
It turns out that those items are compiled into the binary -- do strings/usr/lib/netscape/netscape-communicator | less, and
look for the names of some of the things you're seeing. You'll also
find the magic Netscape bookmarks. This stuff is all in the form of
JavaScript code -- for example,
Edit the binary. If you have write access to the file, you can
just edit the code in the binary.
Edit your ~/.netscape/preferences.js file. Why not try
adding some of the relevent code to your preferences.js
file? One good one to try to keep the Personal Toolbar from
reappearing might be
config("personal_toolbar.CreateNewToolbar", false);.
Haven't tried the 6.0 flavor yet, but the 4.7x bunch just absolutely will not
let you take the preformated sections out of your bookmark file.
Really? I'm running Communicator 4.73 (latest version for PPC
Linux), and I have no Netscape- or AOL-related crap in my
bookmarks.html. Unless you're counting the ``Personal
Toolbar Folder'', which contains the links that appear in my toolbar,
or the ``New Bookmarks'' folder, where new bookmarks go. If I wanted,
I could select any folder to store new bookmarks, to store
toolbar bookmarks, or to appear as the bookmarks menu. I'd be
surprised if that had changed.
bookmarks.html is just a text file. If you don't like the
stuff that's in it, and you can't delete things from within the
bookmark editor, just quit Netscape, make a backup copy of
bookmarks.html, and hack on it in a text editor. When you're
happy with it, restart Netscape and see how it works -- you may need
to reset some or all of the ``special'' folders. The worst that can
happen is that you'll break something and have to go back to your
original (and try deleting unwanted stuff again).
If you implement a boot password, it's permanant. You can change the password, but you cannot
power up the machine without it.
...
But never lose your power on password!!
Presumably their password protection scheme has gotten better in
the last few years, or is more sophisticated on higher-end notebooks. A few years ago, I had a ThinkPad 500 (cute little machine,
nice keyboard). I used it for a while, then put it away and
completely forgot my power on password. Oops. Luckily, it turned out
that you could key in possible passwords, and the machine would only
choke when you typed a key out of sequence. So I started with A and
kept going 'til the machine didn't die, then I typed the good letter
followed by A 'til the next letter the machine didn't die on, and so
on until I had enough letters to remember the password. Phew. But
not really that secure.
The question with universal accessibility is how much is that
tiny percentage of your audience worth to you if you have limited time
and/or resources? Personally I go *way* out of my way making our
site's pages accessible in just about any browser, but it's a ton of
extra work both in terms of testing and design for less than 3% of my
total audience. There are a lot of places, however, where that isn't a
priority (take a look at/. in Netscape 2 if you want an
example).
A better way to look at the issue is to say, ``Hmm, do I want
people who use Lynx, or use Netscape with Java, Javascript, and images
turned off, or are running Linux on a system where there are no
plugins, or..., to see my site?''
If you're a big company that's only interested in the mainstream
audience (who probably run Windows 95 or 98 with Internet Explorer and
tons of fancy plugins), then, no, you probably don't care. After all,
those people probably don't have any money, anyway. But if you've got
a message you want a wider audience to hear, then you'll benefit from
accessible site design.
The fact is that accessibility isn't really that hard. It just
seems hard when your main goal is to duplicate the appearance of your
corporate brochures on a Web browser. Building an accessible site
boils down to little more than following good web design practice --
adding close tags where applicable, using contextual tags
(<em>, <strong>, <cite>),
including alt text for images, and all the other things
mentioned in other messages.
But achieving that level of accessibility does mean giving up
control. You can't guarantee that a Web page will look the same on
every machine (every machine that has the necessary plugins to view it
at all, of course). You can't know for sure that the fonts you have
on your machine will be available on a user's machine. You can't be
sure they'll have the same color depth, screen size, or sound card.
And giving up that control is hard, especially when your Web site is
being designed by people who were trained for print media, where that
kind of control is implicit, and under supervision by executives who
don't understand the Internet's history or culture, and see it as
nothing more than an extension of television to people's desktops.
You say that the audience for accessibility is less than 3% -- ask
yourself this: How many people arrive at non-accessible Web sites, get
frustrated, and leave, never to return? Are those people worth your
time? What about their friends, relatives, and colleagues?
Under NAFTA, all you need is a job offer in the US, a diploma
from a University, and some simple paperwork is completed at the
border (or airport, whatever). The same holds true for Americans
coming to Canada, by the way.
That's what you think. The NAFTA only says bachelor's degree, but
the Immigration Canada manual specifies that the degree must be in a
``related field,'' where deciding what is and what is not related is
left up to the immigration officer reviewing a particular case.
It may require more work, but two modes (i.e.,
flash/non-flash, text-only/graphical) may just be the easiest way to
go -- so long as the content is identical in both modes. I imagine a
site with fewer toys is easier to make accessible.
A nice way to manage multiple versions of the same site is to use
server-side tools such as UserLand Frontier (which I
used to use to manage my static site), PHP, Zope, or any of the many others out
there -- these three are the ones I've tried. With a bit of
scripting, you can get a good idea of what tricks you can use with a
particular client, and tailor the page you serve to that client.
Building static sites with the same capabilities is harder -- as
far as I can tell, there are very few tools for building nice sites
offline and then uploading them to a remote server. (As I said, I
used to use Frontier (which is (1) expensive, and (2) Mac/Windows
only), and am currently frustrating myself by trying to bend Zope to
my will (made hard by the lack of basic documentation) -- suggestions
for alternatives are very welcome!)
Indeed. I got a perfect example of this when HP technical
support refused to tell me how to get the BIOS to recognise the
suspend partition on my HP laptop. [...] The tech support guy quite
happily told me that he ran Red Hat at home, but wasn't allowed to
tell me anything because I wasn't running Windows...
Weird. Back in 1995, when I first had an opportunity to try Linux,
I wanted to install on a 66 MHz 80486 HP Vectra XM, a pretty nice machine
with built-in video and networking. Unfortunately, the manual didn't
tell you what kind of video chipset the system had. So I called HP,
used my HP-UX system ID, and was put through to an engineer who looked
the information up in a book for me.
That's probably the key, though -- the HP-UX support people are
almost certainly not the same as the people who do support for their
PCs and laptops. And, now that I think about it, I may have had to dance around the questions from the receptionist, as well.
Zope and Frontier are similar tools, giving you both very powerful
behind-the-scenes scripting and database access and customizable
easy-to-use frontends.
Frontier started as a scripting environment for the Macintosh, evolved
into a great tool for designing complex static Web sites, and is now a
full-blown HTTP server with very powerful database features. It's
very XML-enabled (UserLand is active in the XML developer community,
and is a co-author of SOAP).
Manila gives you Web-based
editing capabilities. See the EditThisPage Top 100 for
some examples of what people are doing with Manila.
There are three main downsides to Frontier from my perspective that
may not be an issue for your company:
It's expensive. US$899 per
copy (basically per machine), with volume discounts for five or more
licenses.
At the moment, it only runs on Windows (2000 and NT, of course,
but also 95 and 98) and Macintosh. There is supposed to be a port to
Linux underway, but the last time I heard anything, that port was
going to be using WINE, and so would be x86-only.
It's proprietary. As a commercial product, the source is closed.
It has a powerful scripting language called UserTalk that can allow
you to do amazing things, but I don't know how easy it would be to
write extensions.
Zope is a lot like Frontier, but free. It's written in Python, making
it easier to write extensions, and is open source. It should run on
any platform that can host a Python interpreter (Unix, Windows, Mac,
for sure, but also BeOS and some others). The big downside to Zope is
that it has virtually no useful ``getting started'' documentation
right now (although an O'Reilly book is forthcoming). As a result, I
suspect you'd have to do a fair amount of handholding to get people
started.
WebObjects is a pretty high-end solution for building Web
applications. It's been around for a while, and has a pretty good
reputation, but it's definitely not for amateurs. It's now actually
cheaper than Frontier (US$699 per copy). It runs on Mac OS X Server,
Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and HP-UX 11.
(The development tools run on Mac OS X Server and Windows NT and
2000.) Programmable using Java, Objective C, or WebScript.
WebObjects is definitely more oriented toward centralized control, and
doesn't (by default) provide support for individual webmasters to run
their own sites within its aegis.
If all you want is a pretty interface, then maybe all you need is a
basic GUI client. If you want power, though, you should look into MH, which allows you to do
anything you could possibly want directly from a terminal window, or
within one of several front ends (including a fine GUI client). You
can even chain together commands to do complicated things (or write
shell or Perl scripts that do), search, sort, and filter messages,
have custom commands for writing to or replying to mail from mailing
lists, and so forth. The big downside with MH is that each message is
its own file, and each folder is a directory, which can mean some
wasted disk space. On the other hand, having every message be its own
file means that you can manipulate each message separately with shell
or Perl scripts.
The main front ends for MH (outside of the various shell commands)
are mh-e,
an Emacs interface, and exmh,
a TCL/Tk GUI client (previously mentioned by Tet). (xmh
included with the X Window System, is severely outdated.) Several
graphical clients can also be used as front ends for MH (although that
support mostly consists of being able to read from or write messages
to MH-style folders). (The links in this paragraph are to sections of
the on-line version of O'Reilly's MH & xmh: Email for Users
& Programmers, now called MH & nmh: Email for Users
& Programmers. How many other e-mail tools have an O'Reilly
book dedicated to them?)
Emacs itself gives you several additional mail reading
alternatives, including mh-e (of course), VM, rmail, MEW, and
gnus, which is primarily a
newsreader, but can also be used to read mail. (Especially good for
very high-traffic lists, as it will do threading and scoring just like
it does for newsgroups.)
Both exmh and mh-e (with mailcrypt)
support PGP and GPG encryption, signing, and decryption.
If you don't just trust me and devote your life to MH, your best
bet is to do a search on freshmeat and try all the mail
clients that sound interesting. That's lots easier if you're
using a Debian system or one with RPMs that will allow you to install
packages, play with them, and then easily remove them and all their
assorted fluff. As always, be sure to make a backup of your mail
spool before you start messing around with it!
My first e-mail experiences were with VAXen and IBM mainframes. I
started using MH with my first Unix account, and I've never found
anything more powerful or flexible. I've tried lots of
graphical clients, including Novell GroupWise 4, Eudora, Outlook,
Communicator, Outlook Express, and NeXT's Mail.app, and found them all
frustrating in one way or another.
My current setup uses nmh
as the base system; exmh as my main reader; and
mh-e for replying to mail. I use fetchmail to download
my mail, and mailagent (from CPAN) to filter it, catching most spam
and automatically filing real messages into the appropriate MH
folders.
(To be perfectly fair, Outlook was the prettiest client I ever
used, but it was still too complicated to set up and too limiting.
Not to mention the nightmare that is Exchange.)
Please. I never said it wouldn't pass. I have every expectation that it will pass. I wasn't even surprised when I first heard about it. Britain has been on the road to totalitarianism for years, regardless of the party currently ``running'' the country. (Who would have guessed that ``New Labor'' would have more success passing freedom-eroding legislation than the Tories?)
All the same, the Bill is not yet a Law, and it's important to get the facts straight and not simply take a misleading article in a less than trustworthy publication (IMHO) for the truth.
And while you're slagging Britain, don't forget to take a few shots at the United States, with the highest rate of imprisonment per capita, the highest rate of executions, and some of the most ridiculous laws on the books. Fascism was rather popular in the States before Pearl Harbor, and it was certainly looked upon more kindly than communism in the post-War years.
And if you think there's no class system in the States, you're not paying much attention.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill hasn't passed yet.
What happened is that the House of Commons discussed and accepted the amendments to the bill made by the House of Lords. No vote to accept or reject overall passage of the bill was made.
There's a bug in coreplayer.c that will bite people with PowerPC or Alpha machines. Just because char is signed on x86 doesn't mean it's signed everywhere. fgetc() returns an int, so ch should be an int.
Slashdot Mirror
At the same time there are brilliant Space Opera style Sci Fi authors out there. David Brin (Uplift), Yain Banks (Culture), Peter F Hamilton (Night's Down). All of them are capable of taking a topic and developing it into a whole universe for years.
But Lucas is not going to hire them. First it will decrease HIS credit and HIS ego. Second they will be able to draw on the Star Wars audience which he jelously guards as his prime revenue source.
Um, how about because first, these authors wouldn't touch the Star Wars universe with a ten-foot pole, and second, because these authors are doing quite well with their own ideas and audience.
Except for the ``paying people'' part, United Devices does just that.
The downside of distributed computing is figuring out how to split a given problem into pieces that can be processed separately. Not all problems can be split up, and for those that can be split, figuring out the best way to do so isn't always trivial.
On the other hand, Joel's in favor of refactoring, which is certainly an option with Perl 6.
The book was apparently called The Golden Compass in the States because Pullman changed the title after submitting the manuscript to his U.S. publishers (Scholastic). See the FAQ on this fan site.
The situation has also been explained in various interviews Pullman has given, available through a Google search.
(The Harry Potter books, however, were indeed changed because American kids are considered too dumb to be able to absorb words from another English-speaking culture, though -- see interview with Arthur Levine (the U.S. editor) and the ``Word Gallery'' for a list of the changes.)
If you read the NAFTA, it doesn't say your degree has to be in the field. That's an interpretation you'll only find in the official handbook used by the Immigration folk.
Also, good luck proving to a guy at the border that you're qualified to do the job without a degree in a field they recognize. They're not impressed by resumes, letters of reference or anything else.
The first answer is always no, and once you get that answer, the chances of getting a yes are very, very slim.
Bill Jones is not a U.S. Congressman. He's not even a member of the California Assembly or Senate. He's the California Secretary of State, an elected official.
In other words, calling him ``Rep. Bill Jones'' is wrong.
Yes, but your degree had better be in computer science, or mathematics, or something that sounds mighty techy to the average guy, or the folks at the border are going to tell you to get screwed on ice, no matter how much experience you have and how enthusiastic your potential employer is.
To this end, if memory serves it was Jerry Pournelle, suggested to MS that they include an option in office that didn't involve a black-on-white display, so there is a little checkbox that lets you have a blue background and white text hidden away in the prefs
My understanding was that the white on blue text in Word was a ``compatibility option'' so people who were forced to stop using WordPerfect could feel slightly more at home.
ObOnTopic: I generally use black text on a light yellow background. That's closer to ink on paper without being quite so glarey.
My partner was happy for years with her monochrome NeXT. Somehow the addition of color makes everything a lot more dodgy.
I have a Kensington TurboMouse working under Debian's XFree4 (not sure if that's the same as the ExpertMouse or not -- the TurboMouse is a Mac trackball).
Caveats: My system is a Mac clone, using ADB for the keyboard and trackball/mouse.
I have (only) three mouse buttons working, and I run xmodmap when I start X to swap two of them around -- my ~/.Xmodmap file contains pointer = 1 3 2; the equivalent command line would be xmodmap -e 'pointer = 1 3 2'.
The last time I saw an eye doctor in San Jose, he told me about the PRIO test, which calculates a prescription specifically for use when working with a computer -- if you already wear glasses, you wear the PRIO glasses instead; if you have contacts, you wear the PRIO glasses with your contacts.
The idea is that the computer glasses allow you to focus on the screen without having to strain your eyes -- according to PRIO, when you look at a computer screen, your eyes tend to focus beyond the screen, resulting in eyestrain as your eyes constantly try to focus closer in. That seems to fit with what I remember my doctor saying about the glasses encouraging underfocusing.
Alas, I never followed up on these, but there's a fair bit of stuff out there on the Web (look for ``PRIO''). Two articles on the Motion Picture Editors' Guild website might also be of interest:
You might want to try some or all of the other suggestions people have made here first (replacing overhead fluorescent lighting with indirect lighting, increasing your system's refresh rate, lowering the resolution of your monitor so you have larger characters, adjusting the brightness and contrast, etc.), but if you're still having problems, you might want to look into these glasses. If you have a health plan that includes eyecare, these glasses might be covered, and you also might be able to get coverage under the new OSHA ergonomics regulations.
Needless to say, you should take anything that PRIO says with a grain of salt -- while their product may do wonders, they have a vested interest in people believing that it works. Your eye doctor may, too, especially if he or she is selling the glasses, too, and not just examining your eyes (at the very least, there's the cost of the test; if you decide to get PRIO glasses, you're talking about new lenses and frames, and fashionable frames tend to be very expensive). Do some research -- see what people on the 'Net have to say, and if you know people with these glasses, be sure to talk to them about their experiences!
Out of curiousity, I tried deleting my Personal Toolbar folder, quitting Communicator, and restarting. And, yes, a new Personal Toolbar folder appeared, filled with links to various LinuxPPC related things.
It turns out that those items are compiled into the binary -- do /usr/lib/netscape/netscape-communicator | less, and
look for the names of some of the things you're seeing. You'll also
find the magic Netscape bookmarks. This stuff is all in the form of
JavaScript code -- for example,
strings
That leads me to two suggestions:
Haven't tried the 6.0 flavor yet, but the 4.7x bunch just absolutely will not let you take the preformated sections out of your bookmark file.
Really? I'm running Communicator 4.73 (latest version for PPC Linux), and I have no Netscape- or AOL-related crap in my bookmarks.html. Unless you're counting the ``Personal Toolbar Folder'', which contains the links that appear in my toolbar, or the ``New Bookmarks'' folder, where new bookmarks go. If I wanted, I could select any folder to store new bookmarks, to store toolbar bookmarks, or to appear as the bookmarks menu. I'd be surprised if that had changed.
bookmarks.html is just a text file. If you don't like the stuff that's in it, and you can't delete things from within the bookmark editor, just quit Netscape, make a backup copy of bookmarks.html, and hack on it in a text editor. When you're happy with it, restart Netscape and see how it works -- you may need to reset some or all of the ``special'' folders. The worst that can happen is that you'll break something and have to go back to your original (and try deleting unwanted stuff again).
If you're looking for a quick "HOWTO" to getting LyX installed, there is one for RPM-based distros here..
For Debian, of course, just type apt-get update && apt-get install lyx.
IBM Thinkpads have one nice feature in them.
If you implement a boot password, it's permanant. You can change the password, but you cannot power up the machine without it.
But never lose your power on password!!
Presumably their password protection scheme has gotten better in the last few years, or is more sophisticated on higher-end notebooks. A few years ago, I had a ThinkPad 500 (cute little machine, nice keyboard). I used it for a while, then put it away and completely forgot my power on password. Oops. Luckily, it turned out that you could key in possible passwords, and the machine would only choke when you typed a key out of sequence. So I started with A and kept going 'til the machine didn't die, then I typed the good letter followed by A 'til the next letter the machine didn't die on, and so on until I had enough letters to remember the password. Phew. But not really that secure.
The question with universal accessibility is how much is that tiny percentage of your audience worth to you if you have limited time and/or resources? Personally I go *way* out of my way making our site's pages accessible in just about any browser, but it's a ton of extra work both in terms of testing and design for less than 3% of my total audience. There are a lot of places, however, where that isn't a priority (take a look at /. in Netscape 2 if you want an
example).
A better way to look at the issue is to say, ``Hmm, do I want people who use Lynx, or use Netscape with Java, Javascript, and images turned off, or are running Linux on a system where there are no plugins, or ..., to see my site?''
If you're a big company that's only interested in the mainstream audience (who probably run Windows 95 or 98 with Internet Explorer and tons of fancy plugins), then, no, you probably don't care. After all, those people probably don't have any money, anyway. But if you've got a message you want a wider audience to hear, then you'll benefit from accessible site design.
The fact is that accessibility isn't really that hard. It just seems hard when your main goal is to duplicate the appearance of your corporate brochures on a Web browser. Building an accessible site boils down to little more than following good web design practice -- adding close tags where applicable, using contextual tags (<em>, <strong>, <cite>), including alt text for images, and all the other things mentioned in other messages.
But achieving that level of accessibility does mean giving up control. You can't guarantee that a Web page will look the same on every machine (every machine that has the necessary plugins to view it at all, of course). You can't know for sure that the fonts you have on your machine will be available on a user's machine. You can't be sure they'll have the same color depth, screen size, or sound card. And giving up that control is hard, especially when your Web site is being designed by people who were trained for print media, where that kind of control is implicit, and under supervision by executives who don't understand the Internet's history or culture, and see it as nothing more than an extension of television to people's desktops.
You say that the audience for accessibility is less than 3% -- ask yourself this: How many people arrive at non-accessible Web sites, get frustrated, and leave, never to return? Are those people worth your time? What about their friends, relatives, and colleagues?
FWIW, there is an early draft of a forthcoming Zope book from O'Reilly...
Yes, I know. Unfortunately, all the stuff I need to know falls into the ``XXX FIXME! XXX'' category at this time. I keep checking, though....
Under NAFTA, all you need is a job offer in the US, a diploma from a University, and some simple paperwork is completed at the border (or airport, whatever). The same holds true for Americans coming to Canada, by the way.
That's what you think. The NAFTA only says bachelor's degree, but the Immigration Canada manual specifies that the degree must be in a ``related field,'' where deciding what is and what is not related is left up to the immigration officer reviewing a particular case.
And so continues the "special" relationship...
As rocky as ever....
It may require more work, but two modes (i.e., flash/non-flash, text-only/graphical) may just be the easiest way to go -- so long as the content is identical in both modes. I imagine a site with fewer toys is easier to make accessible.
A nice way to manage multiple versions of the same site is to use server-side tools such as UserLand Frontier (which I used to use to manage my static site), PHP, Zope, or any of the many others out there -- these three are the ones I've tried. With a bit of scripting, you can get a good idea of what tricks you can use with a particular client, and tailor the page you serve to that client.
Building static sites with the same capabilities is harder -- as far as I can tell, there are very few tools for building nice sites offline and then uploading them to a remote server. (As I said, I used to use Frontier (which is (1) expensive, and (2) Mac/Windows only), and am currently frustrating myself by trying to bend Zope to my will (made hard by the lack of basic documentation) -- suggestions for alternatives are very welcome!)
Indeed. I got a perfect example of this when HP technical support refused to tell me how to get the BIOS to recognise the suspend partition on my HP laptop. [...] The tech support guy quite happily told me that he ran Red Hat at home, but wasn't allowed to tell me anything because I wasn't running Windows...
Weird. Back in 1995, when I first had an opportunity to try Linux, I wanted to install on a 66 MHz 80486 HP Vectra XM, a pretty nice machine with built-in video and networking. Unfortunately, the manual didn't tell you what kind of video chipset the system had. So I called HP, used my HP-UX system ID, and was put through to an engineer who looked the information up in a book for me.
That's probably the key, though -- the HP-UX support people are almost certainly not the same as the people who do support for their PCs and laptops. And, now that I think about it, I may have had to dance around the questions from the receptionist, as well.
Three options I can think of are
Zope and Frontier are similar tools, giving you both very powerful behind-the-scenes scripting and database access and customizable easy-to-use frontends.
Frontier started as a scripting environment for the Macintosh, evolved into a great tool for designing complex static Web sites, and is now a full-blown HTTP server with very powerful database features. It's very XML-enabled (UserLand is active in the XML developer community, and is a co-author of SOAP). Manila gives you Web-based editing capabilities. See the EditThisPage Top 100 for some examples of what people are doing with Manila.
There are three main downsides to Frontier from my perspective that may not be an issue for your company:
Zope is a lot like Frontier, but free. It's written in Python, making it easier to write extensions, and is open source. It should run on any platform that can host a Python interpreter (Unix, Windows, Mac, for sure, but also BeOS and some others). The big downside to Zope is that it has virtually no useful ``getting started'' documentation right now (although an O'Reilly book is forthcoming). As a result, I suspect you'd have to do a fair amount of handholding to get people started.
WebObjects is a pretty high-end solution for building Web applications. It's been around for a while, and has a pretty good reputation, but it's definitely not for amateurs. It's now actually cheaper than Frontier (US$699 per copy). It runs on Mac OS X Server, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and HP-UX 11. (The development tools run on Mac OS X Server and Windows NT and 2000.) Programmable using Java, Objective C, or WebScript. WebObjects is definitely more oriented toward centralized control, and doesn't (by default) provide support for individual webmasters to run their own sites within its aegis.
I hope that gives you some ideas.
If all you want is a pretty interface, then maybe all you need is a basic GUI client. If you want power, though, you should look into MH, which allows you to do anything you could possibly want directly from a terminal window, or within one of several front ends (including a fine GUI client). You can even chain together commands to do complicated things (or write shell or Perl scripts that do), search, sort, and filter messages, have custom commands for writing to or replying to mail from mailing lists, and so forth. The big downside with MH is that each message is its own file, and each folder is a directory, which can mean some wasted disk space. On the other hand, having every message be its own file means that you can manipulate each message separately with shell or Perl scripts.
The main front ends for MH (outside of the various shell commands) are mh-e , an Emacs interface, and exmh , a TCL/Tk GUI client (previously mentioned by Tet). (xmh included with the X Window System, is severely outdated.) Several graphical clients can also be used as front ends for MH (although that support mostly consists of being able to read from or write messages to MH-style folders). (The links in this paragraph are to sections of the on-line version of O'Reilly's MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, now called MH & nmh: Email for Users & Programmers. How many other e-mail tools have an O'Reilly book dedicated to them?)
Emacs itself gives you several additional mail reading alternatives, including mh-e (of course), VM, rmail, MEW, and gnus, which is primarily a newsreader, but can also be used to read mail. (Especially good for very high-traffic lists, as it will do threading and scoring just like it does for newsgroups.)
Both exmh and mh-e (with mailcrypt) support PGP and GPG encryption, signing, and decryption.
If you don't just trust me and devote your life to MH, your best bet is to do a search on freshmeat and try all the mail clients that sound interesting. That's lots easier if you're using a Debian system or one with RPMs that will allow you to install packages, play with them, and then easily remove them and all their assorted fluff. As always, be sure to make a backup of your mail spool before you start messing around with it!
My first e-mail experiences were with VAXen and IBM mainframes. I started using MH with my first Unix account, and I've never found anything more powerful or flexible. I've tried lots of graphical clients, including Novell GroupWise 4, Eudora, Outlook, Communicator, Outlook Express, and NeXT's Mail.app, and found them all frustrating in one way or another.
My current setup uses nmh as the base system; exmh as my main reader; and mh-e for replying to mail. I use fetchmail to download my mail, and mailagent (from CPAN) to filter it, catching most spam and automatically filing real messages into the appropriate MH folders.
(To be perfectly fair, Outlook was the prettiest client I ever used, but it was still too complicated to set up and too limiting. Not to mention the nightmare that is Exchange.)
Please. I never said it wouldn't pass. I have every expectation that it will pass. I wasn't even surprised when I first heard about it. Britain has been on the road to totalitarianism for years, regardless of the party currently ``running'' the country. (Who would have guessed that ``New Labor'' would have more success passing freedom-eroding legislation than the Tories?)
All the same, the Bill is not yet a Law, and it's important to get the facts straight and not simply take a misleading article in a less than trustworthy publication (IMHO) for the truth.
And while you're slagging Britain, don't forget to take a few shots at the United States, with the highest rate of imprisonment per capita, the highest rate of executions, and some of the most ridiculous laws on the books. Fascism was rather popular in the States before Pearl Harbor, and it was certainly looked upon more kindly than communism in the post-War years.
And if you think there's no class system in the States, you're not paying much attention.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill hasn't passed yet.
What happened is that the House of Commons discussed and accepted the amendments to the bill made by the House of Lords. No vote to accept or reject overall passage of the bill was made.
You can read the discussions for yourself.
For up-to-date tracking of the bill's progress, see the Home Office's RIP page.
BTW, REBOOT IS NOT ANIME. It was made by Mainframe, who are based ion Burnaby, BC (just outside Vancouver).
Mainframe is in Vancouver proper. I have a friend who works there. I live in Burnaby.
There's a bug in coreplayer.c that will bite people with PowerPC or Alpha machines. Just because char is signed on x86 doesn't mean it's signed everywhere. fgetc() returns an int, so ch should be an int.
Here's a patch: