Jake's Latest News
Internet Explorer vs. Mozilla Firefox: Google Zeitgeist - Thursday 15th July 2004
I’ve now been using Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer for several months and highly recommend it to everyone. It blocks popups, is extremely quick, and better for security (less likely to get hacked, virii etc.). I’ve installed Firefox on most of my friends’ and family’s computers but have been watching Google’s Zeitgeist frequently to see when it starts making a big impact on their graph of browsers used to access Google. Today, Google have posted a new monthly Zeitgeist which includes the browser graph I was looking for - for June 2004, Internet explorer using has dropped with “Netscape 5.x+ (incl. Mozilla)” claiming an increase. Unfortunately, the graph that shows this is very small and does not give a high level of accuracy, and nor does it explain what percentgage of the “Netscape 5.x+ (incl. Mozilla)” are Mozilla Firefox and the other browsers, but this is a very significant finding all the same. My prediction is that this new trend will increase over the coming months, particularly with a 1.0 release of Firefox scheduled in a couple of months time. By this time next year, Mozilla Firefox use will have increased to around 30%, and PC vendors will begin to bundle it with new machines.
Fahrenheit 9/11 - good, but nothing new - Tuesday 13th July 2004
So I watched Michael Moore’s new film before my brother by downloading it (see my previous post if you’ve come here to download it from Google). Apologies for my poor spelling - it should be fahrenheit rather than fahrenheight (but similar poor spelling may explain why soem of you just got here from Google).
Anyway, the film was good - very good - but to me at least it was nothing new. I know all the issues Michael talks about from various books and websites I’ve read before. But the important thing about this film is that it puts all that information into an enjoyable format for the mainstream to digest - something which can’t currently be achieved on such a massive using alternative websites and books. So hopefully, the film will make a difference in the upcoming US elections.
But as much as I love Michael Moore’s stuff - I’ve read most his books and watched most of his films/documentaries - there are some areas where I think he needs a bit of self-reflection and thought. To begin with, he’s too American - I would suggest a more cosmopolitan approach, calling himself a world-citizen rather than an American. He talks about pride in America etc. but I think it would be better to talk about pride in humanity or the world. My second criticism is that he often skips important facts in order to score points. For example in Farheneit 9/11 he talks about the countries in the ‘coalition of the willing’ in order to make a joke: that the US is basically alone, with only small irrelevant countries joining it. Although he never explicitly states so, those watching the film are lead to believe that they’re given a full list of countries in this coalition… but never is the UK and other large coalition countries mentioned in that list. I find that inexcusable - he could have made his point just as well by adding at the end “oh yeah, well the UK etc. are also in the coalition”. Makes me wonder about some of the other points he’s made in the past and their accuracy. Omitting something relevant can be just as bad as lying.
Oh, and just to point out that the bittorrent file I linked to in my last post works great but do be warned that its a camcorder-in-a-cinema version of the film. Quite watchable though.
Fahrenheight 9/11 - Saturday 10th July 2004
Michael Moore’s new film ‘Fahrenheight 9/11′ came out in the UK today. My brother Joe is watching it at the cinema tomorrow, but I’ve decided to download it for free - apparently Michael Moore has even said he wants people to do this. I’m using BitTorrent to download the file using the Azureus client. Whenever I’d tried downloading in this way before I gave up because download speeds were so poor. For about half an hour this time I was downloading at no more than around 5kB/s, but then I followed the advice here
and I’m now getting a download speed of around 40kB/s - much more reasonable! Basically, I had to setup port forwarding on my Linksys router on ports 6881-6889. Works a treat… maybe I’ll be watching the film before my brother!
Using the Disability Discriminatin Act (UK) to force companies to provide e-books - Saturday 3rd July 2004
I sent an email to Lawrence Lessig today:
“Hi Lawrence,
I thought you may be interested in an idea I had to force companies - using new UK legislation - to provide e-books, or more specifically, audio versions of their books, perhaps by releasing plain text versions which can be transformed into MP3s etc. using text-to-voice software.
The Disability Discrimination Act in the UK ensures that disabled people can have access to products and services provided by businesses. In October of this year (2004) there will be a change in the act so that:
“you [businesses] may have to make reasonable adjustments to any physical barriers that may prevent disabled people using your service. Or you may have to provide your service by a reasonable alternative means, like bringing goods to the disabled person or helping them find items.”
According to this act it would follow that a business should make reasonable effort to ensure that blind people can also ‘read’ all of their books, rather than just selected versions which are made into audio books. The fact that a physical book cannot be read by a blind person is a barrier to them.
Whilst it may be considered unreasonable for a publisher to have a person dictate an unabridged copy of every book they publish, and release them all as tapes or CDs, is it so unreasonable for publishers to provide a text-to-speech version of every book which they publish? I would expect not. Because of this, from October, surely a lawsuit could make it illegal for publishers not to provide such copies of their books? Better still, perhaps it could be argued that the books are best provided as plain text with the reader encoding the plain text into audio themselves. This would then, for example, also allow a blind person to convert the plain text into braille using a braille machine. Or a partially sighted person could enlarge the text and read it on a computer screen.
Do you think I have a possible case here? If I wanted to pursue this, what do you recommend I should do?
Anticipating a response.
Regards,
Jake Gordon”
As you’ll see from my last post, my gran’s eye sight is currently deteriorating. There are plenty of audio books which are available to her, but I do not consider that to be enough. What about the books which aren’t released as ebooks? In particular, ‘alternative’ books which I myself read at least. My understanding of the updated act is that publishers will have to provide all their books for the blind and other disabled people as long as doing so is not unreasonable. Using text-to-speech technology, I do not consider it to be unreasonable. By all means, the publishers can charge for their text-to-speech books (although they’d be preferable without annoying DRM), but there should be no reason why they do not make them available.
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