I knew it! Those NASA bastards exploited the analog hole.
There's billions of dollars at stake here. The moon-landing shot established MTV's brand. How much more valuable would MTV be if their trademark hadn't been co-opted and leaked by NASA decades earlier?
Then maybe instead of "pilots experienced in the area," it should have said "pilots who have seen wreckage."
No, because as any Slashdotter knows, "area" is a two-dimensional measure. So if they flew over the wreckage, they were experienced in the area. They just weren't experienced in the volume.
the compulsory licensing for digital distribution does *not* cover public performance in a place of business
Yeah, I was wondering about that even as I wrote it... is it a public performance if it's only for employees, though? My chiropractor's office would clearly be a public performance, since patients come through there in the normal course of business, just like restaurant patrons. But what about, I dunno, the employee lounge of a gym? And do the rules differ for streaming radio vs. terrestrial radio, or do ASCAP/BMI not draw a distinction?
My thought was that if we're being told "the station you listen to at work is..." then the radio station wants us to listen at work. Of course, the radio station and the songwriters might disagree on that point. I took a whole semester on licensing rules, but I've blocked out the trauma.
about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners
I wonder how many of those are "the whole office"? I know a few offices I've been to where Pandora replaced the workplace radio. There must be a reason we were daily reminded that "The station you listen to all day, every day at work is WRQX". Those listeners belong to Pandora at the moment, but I don't think anyone's going to be paying for the privilege.
Google is the only mail service that I know of who still just won't accept my emails.
I had a similarexperience; I run my own mail server, send no bulk mail whatsoever, and both Postini and GMail independently decided I was a spammer. No DNSBLs had me listed, ReturnPath was happy, etc. Meanwhile, I was blocked from sending mail to my lawyer, my financial advisor, my chiropractor, etc., all of whom turned out to be downstream from Google. Despite Google's claims that the customer is in full control of filtering, none of them were able to get at my e-mail without getting their sysadmins involved - which often required discovering that they had sysadmins at all.
Worse, Postini's spam filtering takes its own output as input. Once it's scored a message of yours as spam, future messages will be more likely to score as spam - which of course makes any subsequent messages even more likely to score as spam. Brilliant. At one point, my spam score from a triple-signed (SPF/DK/DKIM) server was 98 out of a possible 100.
Google's philosophy of "we don't do it unless we can automate it" works horribly when it comes to customer service. There's no feedback loop, no whitelisting, no channels, no nothing. It's SPEWS all over again, or perhaps the Kafka International Airport.
But Google has no reason to worry about false positives; the more messages they call spam, the more spam they can say they blocked. Perverse incentives.
Apple, also, don't innovate much... Apple is good at spotting good ideas, implementing them well, and selling a polished final product
I know what you mean, but the ability to do that consistently well isinnovation, every bit as much as wavelet compression or microkernels or whatever technical innovations you were thinking of when you wrote that.
Sure, you can say that all they're doing is combining other people's innovations. Great. My Commodore 64 ran software consisting of byte values 0-255, just like Linux does; the rest is all refinement, combination and Moore's law.
I've used handhelds every day since the original Palm Pilot came out; then I tried a few Pocket PCs and PPC phones. All of them could do things that the iPhone didn't do, including a few like cut-and-paste that fall into the "unconscionably absent" category.
But my iPhone does more than any of them. Not "can do more" (it can't); it does more. My Palm Pilot could be my universal note-taking device, and I tried over and over to make it one - but it wasn't, because Graffiti is slow, and so's whipping out a stylus. My Clie could have been my main music player, but it wasn't, because memory sticks are overpriced, playback was unreliable, and that stylus again. My iPaq could have been my main camera and voice recorder, but it wasn't. And so on.
The iPhone is the first device I've owned that truly had the potential to be that "universal pocket appliance" I've wanted for a decade. The 3GS really nails it, but even the slower, clunkier 3G was far more (yes) usable than any of the other palmtops. The combination of always-on Internet, a real web browser, slim form factor, App Store, sync and true touch screen with finger-oriented UI pushed it over the tipping point.
None of those technologies are particularly novel (though I wasn't expecting to like the touch screen nearly as much as I do), and I didn't know that this is what I've been waiting for. In theory, someone could have introduced such a device any time in the past ten years. But nobody did - and it's taken two years for anything remotely similar to come to market, so clearly nobody had it in the pipeline, either.
I'd say being a net.kook probably *increases* your credibility in the anti-spam community! That said, this guy's main page at www.iadl.org lists Paul Vixie and Steve Sobol as "counterfeit anti-spammers".
Now, I'm not always a fan of Vixie, and MAPS turned into a disaster, but calling him a phony seems about as net.kooky as you can get. I've met Steve Sobol, and even been the target of his displeasure; he always struck me as a scrupulous, all-around good guy as well.
So I'm not sure IADL's subterfuge, but not sure it's a reliable accounting of facts, either.
The thing I find disturbing is that so much of that baseline seems to be missing for some folks.
But if that's problematic, doesn't it imply that you don't have a reasonable understanding of human behavior? And shouldn't human behavior itself be part of the baseline - way before power grids and fuel production?
We know for a fact that traditional paper and ink lasts over 500 years when cared for.
Yes, but how different are today's inks and papers from those of the 1500s? Do we know with certainty that none of the differences will affect how the printing ages? More importantly: Do we know that with more certainty than we know how the newer stuff ages?
So if you are thinking of paying the extra money and upgrading your phone, first pay the 115 bucks and cancel your account. Then apply for a new account
I was thinking the same thing. But as I understand it, you can't create a new AT&T account until 60 days after you cancel your old one - and there are credit checks involved, so you can't just open the new account for your nonexistent "roommate". You'd have to port your number somewhere else for 60 days (and, unless you unlock the phone, switch phones as well).
I've also read (unsourced) that there will be a price drop on July 12; there was speculation that it was AT&T making sure they'd signed up all the new accounts they could (with sufficient stocking levels) before dropping the price for existing accounts.
But I don't know that I believe that. July 12 is the one-year anniversary of the 3G, and I think long-time AT&T customers are getting the full discount after 12 months. So it could be that someone misinterpreted that, and assumed that *everyone* gets the discount on July 12.
their current early termination fee is 175 dollars minus 5 dollars per month
If nothing else, that says it's foolish to spend $200 more on the contract-free, unsubsidized version (unless you live in an area where T-Mobile really is good enough). If you buy the "early upgrade" 32GB phone for $499, you could cancel immediately and still pay $25 less to AT that deal gets better as you wait longer, but it never gets worse.
It works by scaling back the size of some images and stripping out certain content types
Hmm... I seem to remember AOL trying something very much like this. It made browsing significantly faster, but people hated the lower-quality recompressed images. It also turned up oodles of caching-related bugs at web sites. And, in the end, it didn't scale well unless you kept a copy of the entire Internet on your cache server.
It'll be interesting to see how much that's changed now that RAM is cheaper, and even "slow" bandwidth is faster than dialup of the time.
The ask if we can take a photo with "that machine in the background, because it looks more credible as a expensive scientific instrument...". It was the printer.
Metoo!
We had many millions of dollars of minicomputers, but there was one piece of gear that absolutely had to be front and center, framed by the windows in the data center doors.
It was the X.25 handler, and it had blinking red transmit/receive LEDs for every telecom line.
I would hope that all desktop OS's are used by enthusiasts. People who run Ubuntu should do so because that's what they like. People who run Mac OS X should do so because that's what they like. People who run Windows should do so because that's what they like. If people are running an OS for some other reason, then we have problems...
Really? Which brand of paper clip do you use, and what made you decide to become an enthusiast for that brand?
Certainly, there are some people who ARE enthusiastic about a given paper clip (I'm an Acco Owl man myself), but most people use whatever brand they had in the store. It's the default. And guess what? An awful lot of computer users use Windows by default too; it's not because they've seriously considered the merits of OS X or Linux and decided to become Windows enthusiasts.
not just a colossally dumb idea, but a massive scam carried out by one of the craftiest con artists of our time... It must have been obvious to them at the time that it was a shit deal, but the short term payoff was so powerfully compelling that they went ahead anyway.
Not really. The idea of AOL and Time Warner combining forces seemed like a huge win for both sides. Yes, it was obvious that dialup itself had no future. But like any other company that's knowingly facing disruptive innovation, we were (overly) confident that we'd find a third business model. Remember, we had already gone from a model that billed consumers by the hour and *paid* companies for their online presence to a model that *charged* those companies for what was now considered "advertising"; meanwhile, all of our initial competition was gone except for the ones that we bought. Anything else seemed easy.
By 2000, we were already forming (ill-fated) DSL partnerships with telcos, and Time Warner of course had Road Runner. AOL was still the largest ISP by far, and dialup wasn't dying that slowly, so there was plenty of time to transition. (Hell, they still have some 6 million subscribers today, for no reason I can think of.)
AOL was good at online services, but no good at content; Time Warner was the converse (remember Pathfinder?). Bringing them together seemed as obvious as peanut butter and chocolate. The failure of the merger was a corporate culture and power clash, plain and simple.
Now, I'm talking about the *idea*. I don't remember the deal terms, and you seem to be touching on both points; the deal itself could well have been a lousy one for Time Warner. But the idea? Coulda been great.
The reason the Internet protocols won out over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, et al is because if you were signed up with AOL and I was signed up with Prodigy we couldn't send each other email. The Internet was a standard that everyone could sign up to without having to pay licensing fees to someone else.
Nope; I think the GP has it exactly right. AOL had Internet e-mail by 1991, as well as X.400 gateways (for MCI, I think?), SprintMail/Telemail, a fax gateway, a U.S. postal mail gateway, and some others. Licensing wasn't an issue at all; development time was the only bottleneck, since AOL's proprietary mail system didn't map well onto most of the interoperable standards.
AOL got USENET and FTP in 1994, but only through a server-side gateway. Native Web browsing (using the client-integrated BookLink browser) came along a year or two later, and it was anything but a sure win; browsing over slow dialup links was painful, especially as IMG tags became widespread. Our proprietary P3 protocol made things even worse, with overhead that duplicated functions in TCP, and an architecture that made lightweight back-and-forth roundtrips (as in HTTP/1.0) horribly slow. We ran the first large-scale caching proxies, and the infamous.JPG-to-.ART graphics recompression servers, and only then was dialup web browsing tolerable.
Meanwhile, the smartest minds at Johnson-Grace came up with a truly elegant solution: a format called ARTDOC. It contained all the information you'd see in a web page today - video, audio, graphics, text - and a "choreography" that would render each part at the desired timing. It was designed to let you pre-author media for specific modem speeds, and it was sent in a single stream so the client could progressively render it at any baud rate. Everything was compressed to within an inch of its life. It was gorgeous, and it offered capabilities that even today would require Flash or something similar, yet it ran on the slow PCs and servers of the day. HTML couldn't come close.
If the web's popularity had been delayed by a year or two, we'd probably all be running ARTDOC browsers.
Anyone who thinks ADD is flat-out "not a syndrome" - as opposed to an over-diagnosed but existent syndrome - has clearly never stood halfway between the dishwasher and the trash can, holding a yogurt cup and spoon, unable to dispose of the one because he keeps getting distracted by what to do with the other.
which leads me to believe we've got some hairs in our ear just for super high frequencies, but they don't end up sounding specific
Yep - something like that. (This is all from memory, so it's probably wrong-but-close.)
The flyback transformer in a CRT is something like 15-16KHz. Most teenagers can hear that; in adulthood, we all lose the top end of our hearing range. Men lose it earlier than women, and people who've been exposed to loud OR continuous noise lose it earlier still. I can hear a CRT too, and I can hear when the background color changes from light to dark (e.g. a night scene cuts to a day scene.) As a child, I couldn't go into shoe stores until they'd turned off the alarm, because they all had ultrasonic alarms.
We have "hair cells" in our ears that vibrate sympathetically with the sounds we're hearing. We can't regrow them, though science is trying; once they're gone, they're gone. Different hair cells are tuned to different frequencies, and the ones for higher frequencies are more delicate and tend to break over time. And they work in groups; we have "critical bands", where a group of hair cells might be responsible for hearing 5000 - 5500Hz. If they're busy hearing one sound there, they can't hear another. This leads to our ability to compress MP3s by removing the sounds we wouldn't hear anyway; they're not masked just by volume, but by other closely-pitched sounds.
Pitch perception is indeed a different function from simple "I hear a sound". It's strongly affected by harmonics, which is why a steel drum always sounds out of tune, and pianos are "stretch tuned" so that an octave on the keyboard is slightly more than an octave in pitch (the frequency is just more than double). Google "Shepard tones" and "even-tempered scale" for more fun stuff there.
Because we rely on harmonics for pitch, it's harder to hear the pitch of a sine wave (no harmonics) than that of a more complex wave. This is why you might hate electronic "here's an A" tones; they're just sine waves. A more complex wave - say, a square wave - can be broken down into a series of sine waves, one at each harmonic, which sum up to a square wave.
Well, when you hear a super-high-pitched sound, like the TV, you're not hearing any harmonics. The first harmonic is already up at 30KHz, which is well beyond any human's hearing. So you can't tell what the true pitch is; you just know it's high.
There, now I know my tuition money was well-spent.
Microsoft developer Jensen Harris wrote a great series of posts in 2006 on the thinking behind the ribbon.
It wasn't a management-requested "make everything new again", nor was it a fit-and-finish trick to make Office look different from Windows. According to Harris, it was done because:
1. The top 10 requested features in Office were already in Office - but nobody could find them. 2. Office usage doesn't follow the 80/20 rule. You and I use only a tiny portion of Office - but it's a different tiny portion.
Expanding on #2: In Word 2003, the most-used command (Paste) is only 11% of the total command usage. Second place (Save) gets only 5%. And it goes down from there; the top 5 commands together get 32%. The usage difference between #100 (Accept Change) and #400 (Reset Picture) is about the same as the difference between #1 and #11 (Change Font Size).
Essentially, Office was now big enough - and needed to be big enough - that menus and toolbars didn't scale. That's why they've kept trying new UI metaphors: task panes, adaptive menus, etc. But they all made it feel more bloated and confusing, and took up too much real estate.
So the ribbon is their hail-Mary pass; they're trying to reinvent the basic UI to make it more discoverable. I think it works. I'm no Microsoft fan, and I've used every version of Office that ever was, but I've grown to like the ribbon enough that I use Office 2007 via Fusion when I could have OOo for free. The real test: when I haven't used a feature for months, I can usually find it in the ribbon without Googling for it.
Have you ever tried the "I don't think I have to talk to you" route with an actual cop? Because I did, a few weeks ago. It's not easy. (And I was the one who called them in the first place - street altercation.)
See, unless you're going into full-on "I have the right to remain silent; I want my lawyer" mode, they have the right to keep questioning you. Which they do, because it's in their interest to find out as much information as possible as quickly as possible - and to get you to incriminate yourself if you have in fact committed a crime. They're on a call; they're not about to sit back, offer you a beer, and say "Hey, that's cool, man. I'll skip the incident report."
Look at the conversation with Officer Abed again: She was engaging HIM in a political argument. To keep him talking. I had the same thing happen to me; all three responders did it at some point. (And with the other guy too, I'm sure.) I like to think I'm pretty sharp in a conversation, but after the tenth go-round, I walked down the garden path a few steps before I'd realized it. I was calm, since I was the one who'd called them; if they showed up bsaed on the word of some guy with a gun who'd just threatened to kick my ass, I think the adrenaline might have won over the Don't Talk principle.
On the other hand, if you DO start self-Mirandizing the minute the cops show up to your local upscale shopping center - well, that takes a lot more balls than I'd have. "I understand, you're just here buying a bike lock, right?" "I have the right to remain silent." "OK, I'm not saying you did anything wrong - but you're here, right? I'm just writing a report; you agree that you're standing here talking to us?" "I have the right to remain silent. I want my lawyer now."
Either way: STFU doesn't work well if they're trying to cajole you to not STFU.
I'm not an expert either, unless living through it is expertise: I had bronchitis for six months. Six really long, chest-wall-bruising months. Kinda screwed up my voice lessons, too.
Luckily, the guy who wrote the seminal 50-page paper on cough is only 45 minutes from me. (So he's an expert. I can't find the specific paper,but his name's Richard Irwin.)
Among his surprising findings: About 30% of chronic cough cases result from acid reflux. It irritates the esophagus, which makes you cough, which tenses your diaphragm, which pushes up more acid, which irritates the esophagus... So the best cough medicine is often Prilosec. Even if the original cause is a cold virus, the cough-acid-cough cycle can continue after the virus is gone.
(Another surprising finding: There's absolutely no evidence that guaifenesin helps clear the lungs. It makes your coughs productive, but it could just as easily have caused all that extra production; nobody's ever measured the actual effect on your lungs.)
The worst part was that if Prilosec doesn't help, and neither do codeine/dextromethorphan or (my favorite) Tessalon perles: there's nothing. There's no extra-special super-prescription remedy. They got nothin'. As the doctor said to me: If I give you some pills, it could clear up in 90 days. Otherwise, it could take up to three months.
Slashdot Mirror
That'd be keming, of course.
Yes, but Michael Jackson loaned them a replica sound stage.
There's billions of dollars at stake here. The moon-landing shot established MTV's brand. How much more valuable would MTV be if their trademark hadn't been co-opted and leaked by NASA decades earlier?
OK, but how many liquor stores said "I accept your interpretation of state Constitutional law, and so I will allow you to purchase this liquor"?
No, because as any Slashdotter knows, "area" is a two-dimensional measure. So if they flew over the wreckage, they were experienced in the area. They just weren't experienced in the volume.
Yeah, I was wondering about that even as I wrote it... is it a public performance if it's only for employees, though? My chiropractor's office would clearly be a public performance, since patients come through there in the normal course of business, just like restaurant patrons. But what about, I dunno, the employee lounge of a gym? And do the rules differ for streaming radio vs. terrestrial radio, or do ASCAP/BMI not draw a distinction?
My thought was that if we're being told "the station you listen to at work is..." then the radio station wants us to listen at work. Of course, the radio station and the songwriters might disagree on that point. I took a whole semester on licensing rules, but I've blocked out the trauma.
I wonder how many of those are "the whole office"? I know a few offices I've been to where Pandora replaced the workplace radio. There must be a reason we were daily reminded that "The station you listen to all day, every day at work is WRQX". Those listeners belong to Pandora at the moment, but I don't think anyone's going to be paying for the privilege.
I had a similar experience; I run my own mail server, send no bulk mail whatsoever, and both Postini and GMail independently decided I was a spammer. No DNSBLs had me listed, ReturnPath was happy, etc. Meanwhile, I was blocked from sending mail to my lawyer, my financial advisor, my chiropractor, etc., all of whom turned out to be downstream from Google. Despite Google's claims that the customer is in full control of filtering, none of them were able to get at my e-mail without getting their sysadmins involved - which often required discovering that they had sysadmins at all.
Worse, Postini's spam filtering takes its own output as input. Once it's scored a message of yours as spam, future messages will be more likely to score as spam - which of course makes any subsequent messages even more likely to score as spam. Brilliant. At one point, my spam score from a triple-signed (SPF/DK/DKIM) server was 98 out of a possible 100.
Google's philosophy of "we don't do it unless we can automate it" works horribly when it comes to customer service. There's no feedback loop, no whitelisting, no channels, no nothing. It's SPEWS all over again, or perhaps the Kafka International Airport.
But Google has no reason to worry about false positives; the more messages they call spam, the more spam they can say they blocked. Perverse incentives.
So you'd be OK with a tax that applied only to Zappos?
I know what you mean, but the ability to do that consistently well isinnovation, every bit as much as wavelet compression or microkernels or whatever technical innovations you were thinking of when you wrote that.
Sure, you can say that all they're doing is combining other people's innovations. Great. My Commodore 64 ran software consisting of byte values 0-255, just like Linux does; the rest is all refinement, combination and Moore's law.
I've used handhelds every day since the original Palm Pilot came out; then I tried a few Pocket PCs and PPC phones. All of them could do things that the iPhone didn't do, including a few like cut-and-paste that fall into the "unconscionably absent" category.
But my iPhone does more than any of them. Not "can do more" (it can't); it does more. My Palm Pilot could be my universal note-taking device, and I tried over and over to make it one - but it wasn't, because Graffiti is slow, and so's whipping out a stylus. My Clie could have been my main music player, but it wasn't, because memory sticks are overpriced, playback was unreliable, and that stylus again. My iPaq could have been my main camera and voice recorder, but it wasn't. And so on.
The iPhone is the first device I've owned that truly had the potential to be that "universal pocket appliance" I've wanted for a decade. The 3GS really nails it, but even the slower, clunkier 3G was far more (yes) usable than any of the other palmtops. The combination of always-on Internet, a real web browser, slim form factor, App Store, sync and true touch screen with finger-oriented UI pushed it over the tipping point.
None of those technologies are particularly novel (though I wasn't expecting to like the touch screen nearly as much as I do), and I didn't know that this is what I've been waiting for. In theory, someone could have introduced such a device any time in the past ten years. But nobody did - and it's taken two years for anything remotely similar to come to market, so clearly nobody had it in the pipeline, either.
If that's not innovation, I don't know what is.
And what semester of pre-law are you in?
I'd say being a net.kook probably *increases* your credibility in the anti-spam community! That said, this guy's main page at www.iadl.org lists Paul Vixie and Steve Sobol as "counterfeit anti-spammers".
Now, I'm not always a fan of Vixie, and MAPS turned into a disaster, but calling him a phony seems about as net.kooky as you can get. I've met Steve Sobol, and even been the target of his displeasure; he always struck me as a scrupulous, all-around good guy as well.
So I'm not sure IADL's subterfuge, but not sure it's a reliable accounting of facts, either.
But if that's problematic, doesn't it imply that you don't have a reasonable understanding of human behavior? And shouldn't human behavior itself be part of the baseline - way before power grids and fuel production?
Yes, but how different are today's inks and papers from those of the 1500s? Do we know with certainty that none of the differences will affect how the printing ages? More importantly: Do we know that with more certainty than we know how the newer stuff ages?
I was thinking the same thing. But as I understand it, you can't create a new AT&T account until 60 days after you cancel your old one - and there are credit checks involved, so you can't just open the new account for your nonexistent "roommate". You'd have to port your number somewhere else for 60 days (and, unless you unlock the phone, switch phones as well).
I've also read (unsourced) that there will be a price drop on July 12; there was speculation that it was AT&T making sure they'd signed up all the new accounts they could (with sufficient stocking levels) before dropping the price for existing accounts.
But I don't know that I believe that. July 12 is the one-year anniversary of the 3G, and I think long-time AT&T customers are getting the full discount after 12 months. So it could be that someone misinterpreted that, and assumed that *everyone* gets the discount on July 12.
If nothing else, that says it's foolish to spend $200 more on the contract-free, unsubsidized version (unless you live in an area where T-Mobile really is good enough). If you buy the "early upgrade" 32GB phone for $499, you could cancel immediately and still pay $25 less to AT that deal gets better as you wait longer, but it never gets worse.
Hmm... I seem to remember AOL trying something very much like this. It made browsing significantly faster, but people hated the lower-quality recompressed images. It also turned up oodles of caching-related bugs at web sites. And, in the end, it didn't scale well unless you kept a copy of the entire Internet on your cache server.
It'll be interesting to see how much that's changed now that RAM is cheaper, and even "slow" bandwidth is faster than dialup of the time.
Metoo!
We had many millions of dollars of minicomputers, but there was one piece of gear that absolutely had to be front and center, framed by the windows in the data center doors.
It was the X.25 handler, and it had blinking red transmit/receive LEDs for every telecom line.
Really? Which brand of paper clip do you use, and what made you decide to become an enthusiast for that brand?
Certainly, there are some people who ARE enthusiastic about a given paper clip (I'm an Acco Owl man myself), but most people use whatever brand they had in the store. It's the default. And guess what? An awful lot of computer users use Windows by default too; it's not because they've seriously considered the merits of OS X or Linux and decided to become Windows enthusiasts.
Not really. The idea of AOL and Time Warner combining forces seemed like a huge win for both sides. Yes, it was obvious that dialup itself had no future. But like any other company that's knowingly facing disruptive innovation, we were (overly) confident that we'd find a third business model. Remember, we had already gone from a model that billed consumers by the hour and *paid* companies for their online presence to a model that *charged* those companies for what was now considered "advertising"; meanwhile, all of our initial competition was gone except for the ones that we bought. Anything else seemed easy.
By 2000, we were already forming (ill-fated) DSL partnerships with telcos, and Time Warner of course had Road Runner. AOL was still the largest ISP by far, and dialup wasn't dying that slowly, so there was plenty of time to transition. (Hell, they still have some 6 million subscribers today, for no reason I can think of.)
AOL was good at online services, but no good at content; Time Warner was the converse (remember Pathfinder?). Bringing them together seemed as obvious as peanut butter and chocolate. The failure of the merger was a corporate culture and power clash, plain and simple.
Now, I'm talking about the *idea*. I don't remember the deal terms, and you seem to be touching on both points; the deal itself could well have been a lousy one for Time Warner. But the idea? Coulda been great.
Nope; I think the GP has it exactly right. AOL had Internet e-mail by 1991, as well as X.400 gateways (for MCI, I think?), SprintMail/Telemail, a fax gateway, a U.S. postal mail gateway, and some others. Licensing wasn't an issue at all; development time was the only bottleneck, since AOL's proprietary mail system didn't map well onto most of the interoperable standards.
AOL got USENET and FTP in 1994, but only through a server-side gateway. Native Web browsing (using the client-integrated BookLink browser) came along a year or two later, and it was anything but a sure win; browsing over slow dialup links was painful, especially as IMG tags became widespread. Our proprietary P3 protocol made things even worse, with overhead that duplicated functions in TCP, and an architecture that made lightweight back-and-forth roundtrips (as in HTTP/1.0) horribly slow. We ran the first large-scale caching proxies, and the infamous .JPG-to-.ART graphics recompression servers, and only then was dialup web browsing tolerable.
Meanwhile, the smartest minds at Johnson-Grace came up with a truly elegant solution: a format called ARTDOC. It contained all the information you'd see in a web page today - video, audio, graphics, text - and a "choreography" that would render each part at the desired timing. It was designed to let you pre-author media for specific modem speeds, and it was sent in a single stream so the client could progressively render it at any baud rate. Everything was compressed to within an inch of its life. It was gorgeous, and it offered capabilities that even today would require Flash or something similar, yet it ran on the slow PCs and servers of the day. HTML couldn't come close.
If the web's popularity had been delayed by a year or two, we'd probably all be running ARTDOC browsers.
Anyone who thinks ADD is flat-out "not a syndrome" - as opposed to an over-diagnosed but existent syndrome - has clearly never stood halfway between the dishwasher and the trash can, holding a yogurt cup and spoon, unable to dispose of the one because he keeps getting distracted by what to do with the other.
It exists.
Yep - something like that. (This is all from memory, so it's probably wrong-but-close.)
The flyback transformer in a CRT is something like 15-16KHz. Most teenagers can hear that; in adulthood, we all lose the top end of our hearing range. Men lose it earlier than women, and people who've been exposed to loud OR continuous noise lose it earlier still. I can hear a CRT too, and I can hear when the background color changes from light to dark (e.g. a night scene cuts to a day scene.) As a child, I couldn't go into shoe stores until they'd turned off the alarm, because they all had ultrasonic alarms.
We have "hair cells" in our ears that vibrate sympathetically with the sounds we're hearing. We can't regrow them, though science is trying; once they're gone, they're gone. Different hair cells are tuned to different frequencies, and the ones for higher frequencies are more delicate and tend to break over time. And they work in groups; we have "critical bands", where a group of hair cells might be responsible for hearing 5000 - 5500Hz. If they're busy hearing one sound there, they can't hear another. This leads to our ability to compress MP3s by removing the sounds we wouldn't hear anyway; they're not masked just by volume, but by other closely-pitched sounds.
Pitch perception is indeed a different function from simple "I hear a sound". It's strongly affected by harmonics, which is why a steel drum always sounds out of tune, and pianos are "stretch tuned" so that an octave on the keyboard is slightly more than an octave in pitch (the frequency is just more than double). Google "Shepard tones" and "even-tempered scale" for more fun stuff there.
Because we rely on harmonics for pitch, it's harder to hear the pitch of a sine wave (no harmonics) than that of a more complex wave. This is why you might hate electronic "here's an A" tones; they're just sine waves. A more complex wave - say, a square wave - can be broken down into a series of sine waves, one at each harmonic, which sum up to a square wave.
Well, when you hear a super-high-pitched sound, like the TV, you're not hearing any harmonics. The first harmonic is already up at 30KHz, which is well beyond any human's hearing. So you can't tell what the true pitch is; you just know it's high.
There, now I know my tuition money was well-spent.
Microsoft developer Jensen Harris wrote a great series of posts in 2006 on the thinking behind the ribbon.
It wasn't a management-requested "make everything new again", nor was it a fit-and-finish trick to make Office look different from Windows. According to Harris, it was done because:
1. The top 10 requested features in Office were already in Office - but nobody could find them.
2. Office usage doesn't follow the 80/20 rule. You and I use only a tiny portion of Office - but it's a different tiny portion.
Expanding on #2: In Word 2003, the most-used command (Paste) is only 11% of the total command usage. Second place (Save) gets only 5%. And it goes down from there; the top 5 commands together get 32%. The usage difference between #100 (Accept Change) and #400 (Reset Picture) is about the same as the difference between #1 and #11 (Change Font Size).
Essentially, Office was now big enough - and needed to be big enough - that menus and toolbars didn't scale. That's why they've kept trying new UI metaphors: task panes, adaptive menus, etc. But they all made it feel more bloated and confusing, and took up too much real estate.
So the ribbon is their hail-Mary pass; they're trying to reinvent the basic UI to make it more discoverable. I think it works. I'm no Microsoft fan, and I've used every version of Office that ever was, but I've grown to like the ribbon enough that I use Office 2007 via Fusion when I could have OOo for free. The real test: when I haven't used a feature for months, I can usually find it in the ribbon without Googling for it.
WORKSFORME.
Have you ever tried the "I don't think I have to talk to you" route with an actual cop? Because I did, a few weeks ago. It's not easy. (And I was the one who called them in the first place - street altercation.)
See, unless you're going into full-on "I have the right to remain silent; I want my lawyer" mode, they have the right to keep questioning you. Which they do, because it's in their interest to find out as much information as possible as quickly as possible - and to get you to incriminate yourself if you have in fact committed a crime. They're on a call; they're not about to sit back, offer you a beer, and say "Hey, that's cool, man. I'll skip the incident report."
Look at the conversation with Officer Abed again: She was engaging HIM in a political argument. To keep him talking. I had the same thing happen to me; all three responders did it at some point. (And with the other guy too, I'm sure.) I like to think I'm pretty sharp in a conversation, but after the tenth go-round, I walked down the garden path a few steps before I'd realized it. I was calm, since I was the one who'd called them; if they showed up bsaed on the word of some guy with a gun who'd just threatened to kick my ass, I think the adrenaline might have won over the Don't Talk principle.
On the other hand, if you DO start self-Mirandizing the minute the cops show up to your local upscale shopping center - well, that takes a lot more balls than I'd have. "I understand, you're just here buying a bike lock, right?" "I have the right to remain silent." "OK, I'm not saying you did anything wrong - but you're here, right? I'm just writing a report; you agree that you're standing here talking to us?" "I have the right to remain silent. I want my lawyer now."
Either way: STFU doesn't work well if they're trying to cajole you to not STFU.
I'm not an expert either, unless living through it is expertise: I had bronchitis for six months. Six really long, chest-wall-bruising months. Kinda screwed up my voice lessons, too.
Luckily, the guy who wrote the seminal 50-page paper on cough is only 45 minutes from me. (So he's an expert. I can't find the specific paper,but his name's Richard Irwin.)
Among his surprising findings: About 30% of chronic cough cases result from acid reflux. It irritates the esophagus, which makes you cough, which tenses your diaphragm, which pushes up more acid, which irritates the esophagus... So the best cough medicine is often Prilosec. Even if the original cause is a cold virus, the cough-acid-cough cycle can continue after the virus is gone.
(Another surprising finding: There's absolutely no evidence that guaifenesin helps clear the lungs. It makes your coughs productive, but it could just as easily have caused all that extra production; nobody's ever measured the actual effect on your lungs.)
The worst part was that if Prilosec doesn't help, and neither do codeine/dextromethorphan or (my favorite) Tessalon perles: there's nothing. There's no extra-special super-prescription remedy. They got nothin'. As the doctor said to me: If I give you some pills, it could clear up in 90 days. Otherwise, it could take up to three months.