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24 November 2002 |
Irish Sites Fail Accessibility Tests Barry McMullin -- The Internet is actually increasing the social exclusion of disabled people because developers are building web sites that are impossible for people with disabilities to use. That's McMullin's conclusion, after studying 214 Irish sites. Only 6% of those sites met the minimum accessbility standard set by the Worldwide Web Consortium.
G! has only 7 hits for "Web Accessbility Tests"
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Adrian Weckler -- Two weeks ago, Weckler got a call from a public relations woman who was trying on underwear and asking her friend about it. Once he got a call from a venture capitalist he had just interviewed on the phone. "He was discussing the interview with a third person. He had obviously hit the redial button by accident." Weckler points out that since his name normally lands at the top of the phone books in many mobile phones, he inadvertently gets calls from phones that would bring out the voyeur in anybody.
G! finds 2550 hits
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TREK -- I have a fat USB storage key and am always worried about it getting lost or stolen. Thumbdrive Secure helps reduce the threat of stolen data. Its security features are based around an alphanumeric password. By default the password is fifteen zeroes. The need for a secure PIN means that the Thumbdrive Secure relies on a driver CD for every system you need to install it on. Installation is a matter of choosing either the Windows 2000 or Windows 98 drivers and letting the system do the rest. Every time you insert the Thumbdrive Secure on a system, a dialog pops up demanding the security code. This is also the only time you can change the code.
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Howard Rheingold -- The Well's public conferences are quite handy, especially when considering how lightweight their bandwidth demands are. Howard Rheingold talked about SmartMobs on the Well.
The FCC was set up to regulate the spectrum on behalf of its owners -- the citizens. It happened in the wake of the Titanic disaster, where "interference" was an issue. Radio waves don't physically interfere with each other -- they pass through each other. But the radios of the 1920s were "dumb" insofar as they lacked the ability to discriminate between signals from nearby broadcasters on the same frequencies. So the regime we now know emerged -- broadcasters are licensed to broadcast in a particular geographic area in a particular frequency band. For the most part, licenses to chunks of spectrum are auctioned, and the winner of the auction "owns" that piece of spectrum. We have seen in recent years that the owners of broadcast licenses have amassed considerable wealth, and that those owners have consolidated ownership in a smaller and smaller number of more and more wealthy entities. And of course, political power goes along with that wealth. These aren't widget-manufacturing industries. These are enterprises that influence what people perceive and believe to be happening in the world.
Recently, different new radio technologies have emerged. Cognitive radios are "smarter" in that they have the capability to discriminate among competing broadcasters. Software-defined radio makes it possible for devices to choose the frequency and modulation scheme that is most efficient for the circumstances. Ultra-wideband radio doesn't use one slice of spectrum, but sends out ultra-short pulses over all frequencies. It is possible now to think of "intelligent" broadcast and reception devices that use the spectrum in a way similar to the way routers use the Internet: devices can listen, and if a chunk of spectrum isn't being used by another device for an interval (millionths or billionths of seconds), the device can broadcast on that frequency; reception devices are smart enough to hop around and put the digital broadcasts together, roughly similar to the way packets assemble themselves as they find their way through the Internet. Again, let me caution that there are probably many people who read this who can point out gross technical generalizations and slight inaccuracies in this description. The point, however, is that spectrum no longer has to be regulated the way it used to be. Politically, however, those interests that benefitted from the traditional regime have the ear and pocketbooks of rulemakers, whether they are regulators or legislators. Yochai Benkler at Yale has proposed an "open spectrum" regime, and Lawrence Lessig has discussed a mixed regime, in which parts of the spectrum continue to be owned and sold the way they have been, but other parts are opened to be treated as a commons.
At the same time, the IIU mailing list considered "the dawn of the stupid network."
In recent history, the basis of telephone company value has been the sharing of scarce resources -- wires, switches, etc. - to create premium-priced services. Over the last few years, glass fibers have gotten clearer, lasers are faster and cheaper, and processors have become many orders of magnitude more capable and available. In other words, the scarcity assumption has disappeared, which poses a challenge to the telcos' "Intelligent Network" model. A new type of open, flexible communications infrastructure, the "Stupid Network," is poised to deliver increased user control, more innovation, and greater value.
[Well and Antoin O Lachtnain and Cory Doctorow]
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Dan Bricklin -- Tablets go back a long way. To understand why it doesn't seem like such an advance, you have to be familiar with the hardware and software of the early 1990's. The use of pens and tablets, and "light-pens" that you could point at the screen, goes very far back in the history of computers.
[Tomalak's Realm]
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BBC -- Record industry attempts to stop the swapping of pop music on online networks such as Kazaa will never work. So says a research paper prepared by computer scientists working for software giant Microsoft.
[BBC News and JD's New Media Musings]
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NYT -- Now watch what happens. At least 20 people will arrive on this page during the next 7 days, looking for an inside view of Britney. And all I've done is refer to a New York Times article on Britney's makeover in which executive edirot Howell Raines defends Britney on the front page. "It was about the fame machine, the economic engine that's behind it," Raines said. "Our readers are interested in reading a sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon like that."
[Mickey Kaus]
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Mickey Kaus -- As a keynote speaker at the Revenge of the Blog Conference, Mickey knows the core elements of quality blogging.
- Half-finished ideas are sort of the point. Put the idea out there, let people tell you if it's good or not.
- The shift away from more traditional, print technology press practices: Mickey probably couldn't write a "lead" or "billboard" paragraph if you asked him to.
- There was a very bad editor at the L.A. times who said: "Do it once, do it right, and do it long." This is a really dumb philosophy for a newspaper, and this is why the L.A. Times failed to break any scandals while this guy was editor. In blogging, you don't do it once, you do it repeatedly. You don't do it right, but through feedback you eventually get it right. You don't do it long.
[ Denise Howell and Mickey Kaus and Dave Winer]
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©2003 Bernie Goldbach, Tech Journo, Irish Examiner.
Weblog powered by Radio Userland running on IBM TransNote.
Some content from Nokia 9210i Communicator as mail-to-blog.
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