The problem is the difference between governments (i.e. elected officials) and civil servants (i.e. the unelected administrators). The administrators would probably love to have open source - some short term cost and pain in switching but longer term they get more freedom and can do more with their budgets. Government's only care about the short term cost - the higher this is, the less likely it is to happen no matter what the long term benefits may be. No government wants to be the one to pour public funds into a black hole with a hugely expensive IT infrastructure switch, put the opposition into power on the back of this and then see them claim all your lovely efficiency gains as their own. For a government, the status quo is usually the safe bet, and most governments are already deeply entrenched in the commercial model.
If you can call the product of a pumped-full-of-chemicals, non-species-appropriately fed, mentally crazy chicken, still an “egg”.
Have you ever tasted the egg from a chicken that lives and eats, like it’s supposed to? After that, a industrial cooked egg tastes like a piece of nasty jelly, void of any taste.
And with the healthiness it’s even worse.
You get what you pay for...
Wait, I'm completely lost now through too many nested levels of analogy. The free range chicken is Unix, right? (hence the "free" as in range), but you don't pay for that, so you get nothing because you paid nothing? Can someone explain this to me with cars?
A bigger issue for government is that no one department seems to have any clue what any other department is doing, so they prefer to stick with the big, well known brands because they can be reasonably sure that nobody else is likely to be using something different, and if they are then they will be the one to blame for the interoperability failure for being free thinking mavericks. Not to mention that big coporate brands spend a lot of time/money schmoozing the decision makers.
Won't the drones be controlled by real people as opposed to being AI-controlled? If accuracy is an issue, I guess they could always round up a bunch of the best Counter Strike players to control them. The tea bagging might be a bit hard to explain at the press conference afterwards, mind.
You know, as much as it would suck to be ruled over by a totalitarian government with their own private police force, if we could have Daleks, I might forgive them.
Note it could also be more cheaply defeated by, for instance, walking into a shopping centre - good luck covering all the exits once you've lost sight of the suspect and they sneak out in a bunch of other people. We'll literally be paying police to play "Where's Wally" - in this case the answer is, "he's the one looking at the camera feed". I wonder what the flight time is on one of those things anyway, I guess you wouldn't have to hide for too long before it returned to base.
And that's without even considering inexpensive missile alternatives - I used to be pretty keen with a home-made catapult when I was younger. I can see this becoming a fun past-time for our troubled youth. Still, if it keeps them out of trouble...
Last I heard, antisocial motoring was rather annoying, but not actually a crime.
Isn't some antisocial behaviour a crime? E.g. disturbing the peace with loud noise at night, which can just as easily be a motorcycle as a PA system.
True, but then the quote is still wrong to say antisocial motoring when it should say criminal behaviour, otherwise it makes it sound like they're going to be tasering motorists who cut you up at the lights. Which, admittedly, might not be so bad, so long as they wait until they're not driving a heavy piece of machinery before they administer it;)
The democratic process only really works when your choices aren't limited to $SOME_CORRUPT_IDIOTS or $SOME_OTHER_CORRUPT_IDIOTS. It seems in the UK we get to choose between greedy nest featherers or the draconion securitariat, neither of which particularly seem to have an agenda of protecting our rights (although both spend a fair amount of time accusing the other of eroding our rights).
It seems like it would be a ridiculous idea. When your armed drone can be defeated with a butterfly net, all you'll accomplish is giving criminals easy access to weapons at the public's expense.
Of course that doesn't stop the police from being violent, but when they are it tends to be national news for weeks after. See the death of Ian Tomlinson and the controversial "ketteling" technique used at the demonstrations in the summer for good examples.
While I mostly agree with your summary of the likelihood of seeing armed drones, I have to say when it comes to police violence, when it's found out it is national news for weeks after, but how many incidents never get discovered or reported? They even tried to cover up Ian Tomlinson's death for the first couple of days and it's only the advent of camera phones and the video evidence they captured that revealed their lies. How many times has something like this happened in the past and not been discovered - as recently as five years earlier even the truth behind Tomlinson's death would probably have never been revealed, this is a rare case of the surveillance environment coming back to bite the police. No wonder they are so against the public using cameras around them.
I don't understand your hint. I don't know how things work in your area, but round here when cops kill or frame someone it is hushed up by cops and all the evidence is 'lost'. If there is enough of a fuss made, an investigation is held by cops and the results are heavily censored as they are 'not in the public interest'.
So yeah, if a cop tasers an innocent minor and gets found out, that cop will get suspended on full pay for a few years while an investigation chugs along, then when the fuss has died down and the not guilty verdict brought in he will be reinstated and get the promotions he missed out on while suspended.
Worst case, they'll give him the opportunity to resign on full pension and land a lucrative book deal, but yeah, they reserve that for the truly corrupt and incompetent.
I know this part of TFS was about a slightly different story, but: "[...] modified military aircraft drones will carry out surveillance on everyone from British protesters and antisocial motorists to fly-tippers" sums up the state of the UK perfectly, our Glorious Government will spend millions on police drones that carry out surveillance on everyone from protesters to motorists to people throwing away rubbish, so everyone except criminals then?
It's the same old pattern, if it costs a fortune and can be used to keep the guy on the street under control, the budget is endless whether the excuse is terrorism/crime (new strict laws, insane airport security, full body scanners, ID cards, numerous measures to spy on everything we do) or our own "safety" (miles and miles of speed cameras, even on roads where you're lucky to be doing half the speed limit most of the time), and yet nobody seems to feel any safer.
Apple would be no more forced to apply by the same rules as Microsoft, than you are forced to spent the rest of your days in prison, just because someone else was sentenced that for their crime.
Or rather, because someone else was sentenced for the same crime you've committed.
Explain how Apple has engaged in anti-competitive behavior with its tiny OS market share and still-small smartphone market share. (Especially in the EU. Its market share in Europe is even smaller than in the US)
Maybe it's not engaged in anti-competitive behaviour with its tiny smartphone market share, but aren't these apps also available on the iPod? There they have a much higher market share (90% of the hard drive MP3 player market, and 70% of the entire market). Surely locking down competitor apps on the iPod would fall within the anti-competitive behaviour laws? I wonder, if they were forced to open this up on the iPod, would they still keep it locked down on the iPhone - that would be interesting to see (of course, it's all moot until we see if they actually don't allow Opera on iPhones).
Just to add to this, the reason we were told this is because our reaction was pretty much the same as yours, i.e. does this stand for something or did they really just call their search platform the equivalent of SUPER-AWESOME-SEARCH!!!!;)
Actually I believe (well this is what I told when we worked with them just after the MS acquisition) that it's a "backronym" based on the name of the company who originally developed the platform, Fast Search & Transfer ASA (I know it doesn't make sense, even as a backronym which tend to make little sense to start with, but they're Norwegian so maybe it's a lost in translation thing).
Not sure if that's a serious question, but it's a search engine that can index across multiple data formats (so where I worked we used it to index a bunch of associated sites' data that had no single delivery format, so sometimes we'd be indexing a PDF or Word document, other times we'd have to follow a link to some content in an iframe, etc. as well as plugging into a disparate bunch of local databases which were slowly being migrated/converged). It also has some UI features implemented out of the box, but it's all a little messy and to use it properly you end up writing a ton of your own code on top of their code to make it behave the way it should.
All true, but transferring a few albums before you head off out with your iPod isn't anywhere near so painful as transferring a few movies, or even transferring one movie to the device every time you want to watch it. In a world where people expect immediate results, that's going to feel painfully slow.
iPod touch is very succesfull product, and iPad is order of magnitude more capable than the touch is.
The mistake people are doing is staring at the hardware-specs, and proclaiming the iPad as "nothing but oversized iPod touch", when the key thing is the software. You can do things on the Ipad that would simply not be possible on the iPod touch.
You keep repeating this claim, but aside from having a larger screen real estate (which is hardware rather than software anyway), can you tell us just exactly what you can do with the iPad that you can't do on an iPod that justifies the claim "order of magnitude more capable"? As far as I can see, there's very little difference beyond the hardware. WikiAnswers claims the difference is that you can "browse the web and read ebooks" - I haven't used an iPod but I assumed you could already do those things, my GF can certainly do both on her iPhone and I read that the iPad uses the same OS and will likely run all the same apps.
It's also a massive strawman to say the iPod was successful and to extrapolate from that that because the iPad is a more "capable" version of the iPod that it will also be successful. Their key purpose is largely different. The iPod is a portable music player primarily and is priced much cheaper than the iPad. Making a bigger, more expensive version of it doesn't guarantee success as you lose all of the advantages of the small form factor, nobody's going to be at the gymn jogging with their iPad, or carrying it on the bus. That doesn't mean it won't be successful within its own market, I just think that market will be a very niche one, you can't even begin to compare it to the iPod in terms of potential customers.
It's no surprise that the people who complain about the iPad are people who haven't used one. The ones that have used one, seem to have an opposite opinion. And that's because you can complain about the specs even if you just saw them listed on a piece of paper, but in order to have an opinion regarding the software and actual use of the device, you have to actually USE the device, as opposed to stare at a bunch of specs in a website.
You may be right here, I can't say having not used one but I can say two things. Firstly there are as many people singing the praises of the iPad as there are people complaining, and the vast majority of both sections haven't had a chance to use one, the way you word it you make it sound like everyone's a non-believer until the second they put their hands on the device and go through a conversion of faith. Secondly, call me cynical but I'll wait until there are more of these in the wild before I listen to opinion - I have no way of knowing if the devices have been sent to reviewers more likely to give favourable reviews, or if other incentives have been offered to ensure favourable reviews, and for that reason I'll wait until I see the opinions of real end-users rather than trusting to these very early overviews (and the fact is, nobody's yet had a chance to spend any time living with the device, it's only after using it for a few weeks that you'll get a real view of what it's like).
If it's a lot more than an oversized iPod Touch, then it's also a lot less, because you lose functionality as well as gain by the form factor switch.
Up to 20% of the population suffer some form of disability, and it's likely a significant higher proportion of site visitors suffer a disability (internet usage being higher in this group). If companies spend more than 20% of their time implementing accessibility then they're doing it wrong, it's not that difficult, but at the same time if they can afford to offer zero support to one in five of their potential customers then they're probably not going to stay in business too long.
At the risk of sounding hippie, it seems to me that the free software movement should be about inclusion and enabling access to all. I was under the impression that the free software way was about the betterment of mankind by providing everyone tools they can use without restriction, and it turns out all along it's actually just about satisfying your own needs and screw everyone else?
These tools help a massive number of people to be productive and contribute to society instead of doing nothing and being a drain on society, the pretty minimal costs associated with accessibility tools is far outweighed by the benefit currently delivered. Maybe GP would prefer to get his software a little cheaper but have a huge tax rise to pay for a big chunk of the population to be out of work needlessly, but to me that thinking is flawed.
On top of that, the disabled sector has huge buying power, around £50b annually which they are more inclined to spend on products which benefit them (for instance, they make up the largest sector of online spending because of the direct accessibility benefits it offers). The success of the internet and ecommerce, which benefits all of us regardless of ability, is in no small part thanks to the contributions of the "tiny minority" GP advocates ignoring.
Then of course there are huge usability benefits that everyone can enjoy which are driven by accessibility. Being able to resize a font that some designer decided would look cool rendered microscopically is the first one that springs to mind, then there are audio books, originally invented to give blind users access to books but now widely used by people who are perhaps driving or working out or just prefer to relax and listen to their favourite book after a long day. There are many other examples. The reasoning behind a feature may be to allow access to users that would otherwise be shut out, but that doesn't mean those same features can't make all of our lives just a little bit easier.
For me this is a big issue, working in web development, accessibility is so deeply intertwined with usability and search engine optimisation (white hat optimisation, that is, presenting relevant data in a format that is easily read by a machine benefits users with screen readers who access that information in the same way) that I can't even imagine not building it in at the root of a project now.
Well, it's not that straightforward - moral considerations aside there is a not inconsiderable (particularly if your disability means you aren't able to work) cost associated with a move to Windows from Linux which obviously doesn't exist when the situation is reversed, so to many people it would be more applicable.
That's pretty much exactly what I thought. In my particular sphere (web development) agile seems the most suitable methodology as there is a lot of ongoing development work which can be packaged into small deliverables and often a great deal of flexibility is required in managing multiple releases over various sites.
Agile is great for this, it's incredibly flexibile and means we don't have to make the critical decisions months in advance (something we just couldn't do in this environment even if we wanted to), and it also allows us to easily drop in contractors to help when extra resource is needed (scrum combined with small, frequent deployments gives them a much better chance to hit the ground running as they'll rarely have to pick up a task halfway through or without support) but my first thought was how exactly would this work on a project with a defined end-point where most of the critical decisions have to be made up front anyway? Somehow I just can't see agile working in game design, many of the benefits would just be wasted and it just doesn't seem suited to a longer project life cycle - sure it would be great for something like managing WoW, and there may be other exceptions but otherwise it just seems like entirely the wrong tool for the job.
You know, what you're describing as "virtual reality" is really just the interface. It's like calling your monitor a first person shooter. The actual virtual reality is the programmed world, and sure we were promised virtual reality immersive headgear which didn't really transpire (augmented reality is the new virtual reality, it seems), but the promise of an interactive world certainly came to pass in any number of online multiplayer games.
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The problem is the difference between governments (i.e. elected officials) and civil servants (i.e. the unelected administrators). The administrators would probably love to have open source - some short term cost and pain in switching but longer term they get more freedom and can do more with their budgets. Government's only care about the short term cost - the higher this is, the less likely it is to happen no matter what the long term benefits may be. No government wants to be the one to pour public funds into a black hole with a hugely expensive IT infrastructure switch, put the opposition into power on the back of this and then see them claim all your lovely efficiency gains as their own. For a government, the status quo is usually the safe bet, and most governments are already deeply entrenched in the commercial model.
If you can call the product of a pumped-full-of-chemicals, non-species-appropriately fed, mentally crazy chicken, still an “egg”.
Have you ever tasted the egg from a chicken that lives and eats, like it’s supposed to? After that, a industrial cooked egg tastes like a piece of nasty jelly, void of any taste. And with the healthiness it’s even worse.
You get what you pay for...
Wait, I'm completely lost now through too many nested levels of analogy. The free range chicken is Unix, right? (hence the "free" as in range), but you don't pay for that, so you get nothing because you paid nothing? Can someone explain this to me with cars?
A bigger issue for government is that no one department seems to have any clue what any other department is doing, so they prefer to stick with the big, well known brands because they can be reasonably sure that nobody else is likely to be using something different, and if they are then they will be the one to blame for the interoperability failure for being free thinking mavericks. Not to mention that big coporate brands spend a lot of time/money schmoozing the decision makers.
Won't the drones be controlled by real people as opposed to being AI-controlled? If accuracy is an issue, I guess they could always round up a bunch of the best Counter Strike players to control them. The tea bagging might be a bit hard to explain at the press conference afterwards, mind.
You know, as much as it would suck to be ruled over by a totalitarian government with their own private police force, if we could have Daleks, I might forgive them.
Note it could also be more cheaply defeated by, for instance, walking into a shopping centre - good luck covering all the exits once you've lost sight of the suspect and they sneak out in a bunch of other people. We'll literally be paying police to play "Where's Wally" - in this case the answer is, "he's the one looking at the camera feed". I wonder what the flight time is on one of those things anyway, I guess you wouldn't have to hide for too long before it returned to base.
And that's without even considering inexpensive missile alternatives - I used to be pretty keen with a home-made catapult when I was younger. I can see this becoming a fun past-time for our troubled youth. Still, if it keeps them out of trouble...
Last I heard, antisocial motoring was rather annoying, but not actually a crime.
Isn't some antisocial behaviour a crime? E.g. disturbing the peace with loud noise at night, which can just as easily be a motorcycle as a PA system.
True, but then the quote is still wrong to say antisocial motoring when it should say criminal behaviour, otherwise it makes it sound like they're going to be tasering motorists who cut you up at the lights. Which, admittedly, might not be so bad, so long as they wait until they're not driving a heavy piece of machinery before they administer it ;)
The democratic process only really works when your choices aren't limited to $SOME_CORRUPT_IDIOTS or $SOME_OTHER_CORRUPT_IDIOTS. It seems in the UK we get to choose between greedy nest featherers or the draconion securitariat, neither of which particularly seem to have an agenda of protecting our rights (although both spend a fair amount of time accusing the other of eroding our rights).
It seems like it would be a ridiculous idea. When your armed drone can be defeated with a butterfly net, all you'll accomplish is giving criminals easy access to weapons at the public's expense.
Of course that doesn't stop the police from being violent, but when they are it tends to be national news for weeks after. See the death of Ian Tomlinson and the controversial "ketteling" technique used at the demonstrations in the summer for good examples.
While I mostly agree with your summary of the likelihood of seeing armed drones, I have to say when it comes to police violence, when it's found out it is national news for weeks after, but how many incidents never get discovered or reported? They even tried to cover up Ian Tomlinson's death for the first couple of days and it's only the advent of camera phones and the video evidence they captured that revealed their lies. How many times has something like this happened in the past and not been discovered - as recently as five years earlier even the truth behind Tomlinson's death would probably have never been revealed, this is a rare case of the surveillance environment coming back to bite the police. No wonder they are so against the public using cameras around them.
I don't understand your hint. I don't know how things work in your area, but round here when cops kill or frame someone it is hushed up by cops and all the evidence is 'lost'. If there is enough of a fuss made, an investigation is held by cops and the results are heavily censored as they are 'not in the public interest'.
So yeah, if a cop tasers an innocent minor and gets found out, that cop will get suspended on full pay for a few years while an investigation chugs along, then when the fuss has died down and the not guilty verdict brought in he will be reinstated and get the promotions he missed out on while suspended.
Worst case, they'll give him the opportunity to resign on full pension and land a lucrative book deal, but yeah, they reserve that for the truly corrupt and incompetent.
I know this part of TFS was about a slightly different story, but: "[...] modified military aircraft drones will carry out surveillance on everyone from British protesters and antisocial motorists to fly-tippers" sums up the state of the UK perfectly, our Glorious Government will spend millions on police drones that carry out surveillance on everyone from protesters to motorists to people throwing away rubbish, so everyone except criminals then?
It's the same old pattern, if it costs a fortune and can be used to keep the guy on the street under control, the budget is endless whether the excuse is terrorism/crime (new strict laws, insane airport security, full body scanners, ID cards, numerous measures to spy on everything we do) or our own "safety" (miles and miles of speed cameras, even on roads where you're lucky to be doing half the speed limit most of the time), and yet nobody seems to feel any safer.
Difference is, apple does not have the same market-share on smartphone OSes as microsoft has on desktop OSes.
How's their market share on MP3 players?
Apple would be no more forced to apply by the same rules as Microsoft, than you are forced to spent the rest of your days in prison, just because someone else was sentenced that for their crime.
Or rather, because someone else was sentenced for the same crime you've committed.
Explain how Apple has engaged in anti-competitive behavior with its tiny OS market share and still-small smartphone market share. (Especially in the EU. Its market share in Europe is even smaller than in the US)
Maybe it's not engaged in anti-competitive behaviour with its tiny smartphone market share, but aren't these apps also available on the iPod? There they have a much higher market share (90% of the hard drive MP3 player market, and 70% of the entire market). Surely locking down competitor apps on the iPod would fall within the anti-competitive behaviour laws? I wonder, if they were forced to open this up on the iPod, would they still keep it locked down on the iPhone - that would be interesting to see (of course, it's all moot until we see if they actually don't allow Opera on iPhones).
Just to add to this, the reason we were told this is because our reaction was pretty much the same as yours, i.e. does this stand for something or did they really just call their search platform the equivalent of SUPER-AWESOME-SEARCH!!!! ;)
Actually I believe (well this is what I told when we worked with them just after the MS acquisition) that it's a "backronym" based on the name of the company who originally developed the platform, Fast Search & Transfer ASA (I know it doesn't make sense, even as a backronym which tend to make little sense to start with, but they're Norwegian so maybe it's a lost in translation thing).
Not sure if that's a serious question, but it's a search engine that can index across multiple data formats (so where I worked we used it to index a bunch of associated sites' data that had no single delivery format, so sometimes we'd be indexing a PDF or Word document, other times we'd have to follow a link to some content in an iframe, etc. as well as plugging into a disparate bunch of local databases which were slowly being migrated/converged). It also has some UI features implemented out of the box, but it's all a little messy and to use it properly you end up writing a ton of your own code on top of their code to make it behave the way it should.
All true, but transferring a few albums before you head off out with your iPod isn't anywhere near so painful as transferring a few movies, or even transferring one movie to the device every time you want to watch it. In a world where people expect immediate results, that's going to feel painfully slow.
iPod touch is very succesfull product, and iPad is order of magnitude more capable than the touch is.
The mistake people are doing is staring at the hardware-specs, and proclaiming the iPad as "nothing but oversized iPod touch", when the key thing is the software. You can do things on the Ipad that would simply not be possible on the iPod touch.
You keep repeating this claim, but aside from having a larger screen real estate (which is hardware rather than software anyway), can you tell us just exactly what you can do with the iPad that you can't do on an iPod that justifies the claim "order of magnitude more capable"? As far as I can see, there's very little difference beyond the hardware. WikiAnswers claims the difference is that you can "browse the web and read ebooks" - I haven't used an iPod but I assumed you could already do those things, my GF can certainly do both on her iPhone and I read that the iPad uses the same OS and will likely run all the same apps.
It's also a massive strawman to say the iPod was successful and to extrapolate from that that because the iPad is a more "capable" version of the iPod that it will also be successful. Their key purpose is largely different. The iPod is a portable music player primarily and is priced much cheaper than the iPad. Making a bigger, more expensive version of it doesn't guarantee success as you lose all of the advantages of the small form factor, nobody's going to be at the gymn jogging with their iPad, or carrying it on the bus. That doesn't mean it won't be successful within its own market, I just think that market will be a very niche one, you can't even begin to compare it to the iPod in terms of potential customers.
It's no surprise that the people who complain about the iPad are people who haven't used one. The ones that have used one, seem to have an opposite opinion. And that's because you can complain about the specs even if you just saw them listed on a piece of paper, but in order to have an opinion regarding the software and actual use of the device, you have to actually USE the device, as opposed to stare at a bunch of specs in a website.
You may be right here, I can't say having not used one but I can say two things. Firstly there are as many people singing the praises of the iPad as there are people complaining, and the vast majority of both sections haven't had a chance to use one, the way you word it you make it sound like everyone's a non-believer until the second they put their hands on the device and go through a conversion of faith. Secondly, call me cynical but I'll wait until there are more of these in the wild before I listen to opinion - I have no way of knowing if the devices have been sent to reviewers more likely to give favourable reviews, or if other incentives have been offered to ensure favourable reviews, and for that reason I'll wait until I see the opinions of real end-users rather than trusting to these very early overviews (and the fact is, nobody's yet had a chance to spend any time living with the device, it's only after using it for a few weeks that you'll get a real view of what it's like).
If it's a lot more than an oversized iPod Touch, then it's also a lot less, because you lose functionality as well as gain by the form factor switch.
Up to 20% of the population suffer some form of disability, and it's likely a significant higher proportion of site visitors suffer a disability (internet usage being higher in this group). If companies spend more than 20% of their time implementing accessibility then they're doing it wrong, it's not that difficult, but at the same time if they can afford to offer zero support to one in five of their potential customers then they're probably not going to stay in business too long.
At the risk of sounding hippie, it seems to me that the free software movement should be about inclusion and enabling access to all. I was under the impression that the free software way was about the betterment of mankind by providing everyone tools they can use without restriction, and it turns out all along it's actually just about satisfying your own needs and screw everyone else?
Like all good trolls, GP ignores frivolous things like "facts" in order to hide the huge flaws in their opinion.
For one thing the disability rate in most nations is pretty standardised at between 10-20% of the population. In the UK, 18.6%, or almost one in five people have a disability. Hardly a "tiny minority" by any means. 40% of the UK population will be aged 45+ this year, the largest number of people in work is in the 45-65 age group and 33% of people aged 50+ have a disability.
These tools help a massive number of people to be productive and contribute to society instead of doing nothing and being a drain on society, the pretty minimal costs associated with accessibility tools is far outweighed by the benefit currently delivered. Maybe GP would prefer to get his software a little cheaper but have a huge tax rise to pay for a big chunk of the population to be out of work needlessly, but to me that thinking is flawed.
On top of that, the disabled sector has huge buying power, around £50b annually which they are more inclined to spend on products which benefit them (for instance, they make up the largest sector of online spending because of the direct accessibility benefits it offers). The success of the internet and ecommerce, which benefits all of us regardless of ability, is in no small part thanks to the contributions of the "tiny minority" GP advocates ignoring.
Then of course there are huge usability benefits that everyone can enjoy which are driven by accessibility. Being able to resize a font that some designer decided would look cool rendered microscopically is the first one that springs to mind, then there are audio books, originally invented to give blind users access to books but now widely used by people who are perhaps driving or working out or just prefer to relax and listen to their favourite book after a long day. There are many other examples. The reasoning behind a feature may be to allow access to users that would otherwise be shut out, but that doesn't mean those same features can't make all of our lives just a little bit easier.
For me this is a big issue, working in web development, accessibility is so deeply intertwined with usability and search engine optimisation (white hat optimisation, that is, presenting relevant data in a format that is easily read by a machine benefits users with screen readers who access that information in the same way) that I can't even imagine not building it in at the root of a project now.
Well, it's not that straightforward - moral considerations aside there is a not inconsiderable (particularly if your disability means you aren't able to work) cost associated with a move to Windows from Linux which obviously doesn't exist when the situation is reversed, so to many people it would be more applicable.
That's pretty much exactly what I thought. In my particular sphere (web development) agile seems the most suitable methodology as there is a lot of ongoing development work which can be packaged into small deliverables and often a great deal of flexibility is required in managing multiple releases over various sites.
Agile is great for this, it's incredibly flexibile and means we don't have to make the critical decisions months in advance (something we just couldn't do in this environment even if we wanted to), and it also allows us to easily drop in contractors to help when extra resource is needed (scrum combined with small, frequent deployments gives them a much better chance to hit the ground running as they'll rarely have to pick up a task halfway through or without support) but my first thought was how exactly would this work on a project with a defined end-point where most of the critical decisions have to be made up front anyway? Somehow I just can't see agile working in game design, many of the benefits would just be wasted and it just doesn't seem suited to a longer project life cycle - sure it would be great for something like managing WoW, and there may be other exceptions but otherwise it just seems like entirely the wrong tool for the job.
You know, what you're describing as "virtual reality" is really just the interface. It's like calling your monitor a first person shooter. The actual virtual reality is the programmed world, and sure we were promised virtual reality immersive headgear which didn't really transpire (augmented reality is the new virtual reality, it seems), but the promise of an interactive world certainly came to pass in any number of online multiplayer games.