Because this one works *well* and does logins/passwords too. Also it works across a lot of browsers. There isn't a good alternative (yet).

Am I the only one who followed this link & found that you'd managed to get the spelling of his name wrong in the search query: this DE Knut guy is some bio/med research type. On the up side I guess I can say that I've heard of both of 'em now.

Yes the system maps the surrounding to sounds, i.e., it is a sonfication system. The big question is: how to effectively and meaningfully map a complex, dynamic visual scene (the immediate world around a person) to sounds such that it makes sense to the listener and communicates useful information? There is a good amount of research to show that, especially those who are blind from birth, have a very distinct and unique perception on the physical world; consequently a mapping that may work for a sighted person may not be any help to a visually impaired user. There have been a number of such systems developed in the past: some based on raster scanning, mapping snapshots of the current scene to a soundscape, and others that attempt to do qualitative analysis of scene images and express these with mappings developed in conjunction with visually impaired users. In all cases the issue is mapping images to sound in such a way as makes sense to a person who has never been able to see.

WTF was I thinking? On reflection this is in extremely bad taste & could be interpreted as racist. It was just a (bad) attempt at a joke. My apologies to anybody who was offended by the above posting.

Hay, I'm Indeen u unsensative klod!

I don't entirely agree with this. I take the view that what I do in a given situation (be it work overtime or whatever) is my choice in that particular situation and any manager that makes the mistake of thinking that I'll always react in the same way every time an issue arises will find out in time that this is not the case. I guess it helps that I don't really care what my co-workers/managers think of me, nor do I feel any pressure to behave like them.

If you have a job to do then do it. I don't think personality traits can be adopted at will to fit in: be yourself, and if you are a jerk, work from home.

To lose one 4G iPhone, Mr. Jobs, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.

ois@zig:~$ EMACS
-bash: EMACS: command not found
ois@zig:~$ echo $?
127
ois@zig:~$

Did he announce this using twitter?

Okay, apparently everybody hates this Wales guy. At last we agree on something here :o) Seriously the original issue was whether porn has any place on wikipedia. I don't believe it does (& I like porn at least as much as the next guy). Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, isn't it? Do you usually find (what most sane-ish people would deem to be) porn in an encyclopedia? I shouldn't have thought so & I'd have hoped not. It's not as if we are talking about banning porn entirely; the point is to remove it from wikipedia, just like anything else that doesn't serve its objectives of bringing useful information to people should be removed from wikipedia.

Do we have to keep pretending to be surprised every time evidence of this sort sort of a abuse is reported or published? Isn't it a fact of life that these companies are exploiting cheap labour & couldn't care less as long as we can all have cheap crap toys for half nothing? The tech industry, the textile industry, it's all built on exploitation. There's no other way we could be getting these products at the prices we do unless the labour costs were approximately 0. On top of which, these industries & their practices are as damaging to the environment as they are to the humans involved. We are all guilty here unless we demand something be done about it & that would mean stopping our mindless consumption of cheap junk.

Surely Python is the language to start with these days? It's straightforward, doesn't force any particular model, i.e., can use for procedural, OOP, functional style. Most importantly it's not a toy language.

Here in Ireland (NUI, Galway) C has been used as the first / introduction to programming language for a long time now. There was a brief & failed effort to use Java; I had the "pleasure" of trying to tutor some of the people who had started on Java -- they were a confused bunch. Of course there are plenty of people who fail to "get it" with C too.

There is at least one difference between uncooked flaky Linux distro releases versus Microsoft disasters like vista: the average unsuspecting user does not get the Linux junk pushed down their neck when they try to buy a new machine. Since Microsoft are the de facto pre-installed OS for the PC market it's understandable that they receive a lot of criticism for screwing up. On top of this they are a for profit company putting out a product. However any distro that messes up Debian's good name for reliability by introducing a load of untested flakeware also deserves a thrashing ;o)