Standards/Consortia: Accessibility, UNIX, and GPS
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Accessibility, Jitsi, IRC, Element-Desktop
The Wikipedia page on Accessibility says the following – Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology. Now IRC or Internet Relay Chat has been accessible for a long time. I know of even blind people who have been able to navigate IRC quite effortlessly as there has been a lot of work done to make sure all the joints ‘speak to each other’ so people with one or more disabilities still can use, and contribute without an issue. It does help that IRC and many clients have been there since the 1970s so most of them have had more than enough time to get all the bugs fixed and both text-to-speech and speech-to-text work brilliantly on IRC. Newer software like Jitsi or for that matter Telegram is lacking those features. A few days ago, discovered on Telegram I was shared that Samsung Voice input is also able to do the same. The Samsung Voice Input works wonder as it translates voice to text, I have not yet tried the text-to-speech but perhaps somebody can and they can share whatever the results can be one way or the other. I have tried element-desktop both on the desktop as well as mobile phone and it has been disappointing, to say the least. On the desktop, it is unruly and freezes once in a while, and is buggy. The mobile version is a little better but that’s not saying a lot. I prefer the desktop version as I can use the full-size keyboard. The bug I reported has been there since its Riot days. I had put up a bug report even then.
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Transcending POSIX: The End of an Era?
POSIX has become the standard for operating systems abstractions and interfaces over the decades. Two drivers for the design of the abstractions are the hardware constraints and the use cases of the time. Today, the speed balance between I/O and compute is shifting in favor of I/O, which is partly why coprocessors and special-purpose accelerators are becoming more mainstream. Therefore, we argue that the POSIX era is over, and future designs need to transcend POSIX and re-think the abstractions and interfaces at a higher level. We also argue that the operating system interface has to change to support these higher level abstractions.
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Pentagon warns of GPS interference from Ligado broadband network
The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report released Friday warned some Iridium Communications mobile satellite services "used by the U.S. Department of Defense and others will experience harmful interference under certain conditions and warned some high-precision devices sold before about 2012 "can be vulnerable to significant harmful interference."
The Defense Department said the study is consistent with its view that "Ligado's system will interfere with critical GPS receivers and that it is impractical to mitigate the impact of that interference" and noted the study found FCC's proposed mitigation and replacement measures "are impractical, cost prohibitive, and possibly ineffective."