I never claimed Macs were anything special, the parent simply claimed that it would be impossible to bypass Spotlight with your own service. This was never an OS X versus Windows debate.
So what exactly can I do extra on a Mac?
Apparently I can comprehend English more clearly with it.
If the data passes to canada, it will probably pass over a transatlantic cable the either lands in the United States or, failing that, is operated by an American corporation.
Apple's API lets you USE their search feature programatically, not replace it.
You could replace it a couple of different ways:
The kernel publishes all file system changes to clients that subscribe, all they have to do is open a file system descriptor on/dev/fsevents. From there you have to write your own framework for indexing the content on files as they are created or modified, which would be a pain, but you volunteered! You would have to write your own app to front-end the thing, but you could change the behavior of the "Find..." menu command in the File menu of the Finder, or at least add your own "Find with Google..." option to the file menu (with the public API). You might not be able to override the behavior of the Find box in finder windows with the public API, but you could do it with an NSInputManager class loaded dynamically. A more conforming idea would be to write a standalone app that fronts your search service and adversities itself as a SystemService so it would be available from a global menu.
If you didn't mind Apple's indexing service (which is quite serviceable) but wanted to write your front end, you can write your own GUI to do customized searches. I've done this and it's very easy.
If you develop a file format that Apple's content indexer can't recognize, you can write a callback function (which you ship with your application) that the content indexer can use to extract key-value pairs of content that the underlying spotlight database will store and search. (This I understand is a particular omission of Vista's find-by-content system.)
After going through this I do wonder why anybody would go to the trouble, but I suppose Google wrote their search app because they didn't have to worry about overriding the Windows service, because the Windows service didn't exist. I wonder how many small Windows devs wish they could've dented M$ a little when the Redmond guys destroyed their market by copying their little app's features and incorporating it into the OS. Google simply can, and though Apple has destroyed it's share of little shareware apps, they aren't 95% of the PC market, thus those little devs can be accused of wasting their time in the first place;D.
Let's see the Mac OS publish open APIs for their entire OS.
Well they do have an API that lets you run programs on their OS, so I guess they do. Their OS isn't "open source," though their kernel is and a bunch of the underlying services are.
Gerrymandering is the "lucky rabbit's foot" of politics.
You should play the game, you'd see you were wrong.
The funnest level is the one where you take one district away from the other party to yours. You just give all of his loyal supporters to his neighboring party-mate, who's happy to have them, and you push the border of the safe seat for your team a few miles your direction, putting your supporters in his district, and walla!
The most ironic level is the "reform" level, where you draw borders without regard for party and just try to get the districts right. It's easy, but its impossible for you to ever get your map approved, because nobody in the legislature will vote for it, because their seats get too risky, but you can't ever make the map suit them, because you can't see the demographic data. Hilarious!
One hundred out of a run of ten million is probably not "a fairly large headache".
Unless ten of them have weblogs. One nastygram blog posting about "iPhone scratches are teh suxx0r" has a way of getting repeated, ad nauesum, for years;).
Also, ask yourself, what have we done in the last minute, compared to the two before that? Our rate of advancement seems to have slowed considerably. Just look at what sort of things were predicted for us in the 50s and 60s that we're still no closer to seeing. Even Arthur C Clarke though we would have moonbases in 1999.
Well, if you watched something like a Captain Video short, which nominally depicted 500 years into the future, people would travel around in their flying cars, but when they wanted to talk to someone on the other side of town, they generally had to land the flying car, get out, go into their hover-house, and turn on a very large radio-transmitter looking device.
Most predicitons of the FUTURE in the case of fiction are driven by the dramatic needs of the story. No scientist will comment on the viability of a matter transporter, but it sure kept the average Star Trek episode budget down. Arthur C. Clarke had moonbases on the moon in 1999 because he wanted his readers to feel like they could relate in human terms with the characters and still put the TMA-1 far enough away from Earth so that it's "recent discovery" is believable in context. In the case of 2001, Clark wanted to make the point that society and governments still had not changed, and that the events still were occurring in the same historical epoch as the readers.
When the people doing the predicting are the government, or Bell Labs, it's still storytelling, and the better you like the story, the more likely you'll part with your grant money.
If they wanna make a share of the subscribers monthly bill, like the cut they get from AT&T, then yes, they need to make a deal with the people doing the billing. Further they need a little cooperation to support visual voicemail.
oh please let it be so... that would show just how ridiculous it is...
Wholly agree. Another implication in the article is that someone could hit you with a court order, and the moment you were served, if your machine was on, turning it off (or even killing a process or doing something that caused a pageout) could be destruction of evidence.
As the TFA explains, the judge means that the RAM would become a legal document, and that any information put on it would have to be retained for later examination, and that if this ruling were extended to things like SOX, a SOX-complying company would have to keep transaction logs or images of their RAM so that the state of the RAM at any point in the past could be accounted. EEep.
OK... but no one really expected to run third-party apps on the iPod in the first place.
And they still don't. Maybe a big part of consumer electronics is managing expectations and not over-promising, by positioning your product in a known niche with high demand and not getting side-tracked by your engineers who seem to want to put a JVM in EVERYTHING, if only because they can. "Do one job and do it well" isn't just for Unix.
The iPhone is essentially a handheld computer and is going up against other handheld computers, like the Treo and the Blackberry.
The Tivo is essentially a living-room computer and is going up against other living-room computers, like the Windows MCE and the Apple Front Row. \sarcasm{ This is clearly why Windows MCE is in everyone's living room, and why I tell my friends to "Be sure to MCE the Sopranos tonight!" I can't tell you how often I've found it useful to have Word on my TV, so that I can be typing a document for work while I'm having a good time with friends watching TV!}
Sometimes we have to step back and realize that a general-purpose computer is not an end in itself. Further, the concept of the 'killer app' is a construct of business schools that were in a dither to try to explain why software companies were making mad money in the 1980s and 90s. It is an extremely recent phenomenon in business thought, and may not have much explanatory power outside of software in the 1980s.
or you sincerely believe most folks that install stuff know what they are doing?
That is the responsibility they undertake, yes. They may or may not understand all the ins and outs, but it's their responsibility.
so then it is better that people don't know what's in for them when installing it, right?
Based on the blog posting, they STILL don't know what's "in for them," since the vulnerabilities are still undisclosed. They remain in Maynor's to do list, for sale to the highest bidder for all we know.
If you're a linux or MS supporter, don't waste your breath defending this guy. He wasted a year of everybody's time on that Airport vulnerability that didn't exist.
Also add, if you right-click on any element in a WebKit view with the debug on, you will get the extremely good element inspector for the element you're on.
What I mean is, the World Of Warcraft is a true multiplatform, OpenGL game. The EA stuff will probably be Windows.exe files tailored to run under OS X.
Mac OS X cannot run.exe files. If you want your program to run on OS X, without requiring the end user buying Parallels or Wine, you will be packaging your executable in a.app directory like the rest of us.
They can't be TOO windows-ish, as very few video cards on Macs support DirectX 9 or whatever games are now, and Macs don't ship with any Windows libraries. But since EA has written for so many different platforms as it is (Windows, Xbox 1 and 2, PS1,2,3, all manner of Nintendos) their games are probably written meta enough that they can be adapted without too much difficulty.
Hello, I'm a film sound designer and I LIVE for when the occasional sound article comes up on slashdot.
The parent poster is completely right, hearing damage is a function of Sound Pressure Level and time, and sound pressure level is a measurement of energy in the air, and not a measure of your perception. Something people don't recognize along these lines, is that a lot of people do terrible damage to themselves by simply driving with the car window down on the freeway, as (in our modern aerodynamic cars) the turbulent airflow can pummel your ears with LF, though it doesn't bother you because it's below 20 Hz. And the wind noise makes you turn up the radio louder.
With regard to graphic EQ, the things were invented, partly, to help engineers correct the acoustic characteristics of rooms -- if your room has a mode at 400 Hz, turn down 400 Hz, if it has some high ringiness due to some resonance, turn down the high end. A 30 band graphic EQ is ideal for this sort of work because some rooms have a bunch of little peaks and troughs on an RTA and you'd need a ton of parametric EQs to do the same goofiness. A 5 band graphic EQ is just for show, you need at least 10 before you can do anything particularly fun, and even then in a car I can't imagine where it'd get you. Maybe you could shape the music over the engine noise or something:P If you want the music to stay loud over engine noise, you're better off using the automatic level control, if your car has one (it's basically a compressor, the audio kind, not the data kind).
It should go without saying, if you want to hear the song the way the band mixed it, they listened to it with a flat EQ, and if you want to enjoy the nuances of a piece of music, don't listen to it in a car. Also, the standard practice in music mixing since forever is to record the song as loud as possible without distorting on the medium. Compression (the audio kind) is a style thing, and bands have been using since the beginning of rock and roll, and particularly with CDs, the music is physically incapable of getting any louder on the medium. You kids have just been cranking up your damn volume knobs.
If you take a look at two of the greatest ever scientist, Faraday and Maxwell, you'll see that they were evangelical Christians who played in active role in teaching the Bible in their local churches. [...]
Try telling them that Christianity and science don't mix.
Respectfully, Maxwell never claimed that one had to accept Jesus in order to know that magnetic monopoles do not exist. Where on the other hand, the subject of the post, the Creation Museum, states quite baldly that only through Faith can one know how the world was created.
When one says "Science and Religion cannot mix," we might give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and assume he means "Science cannot prove a matter of faith, nor can Faith prove a scientific one," unless he cuts himself off.
Freedom is the ability to speak directly to the GSM modem and any other piece of hardware in the device.
[...] Not sure... Is that possible with the Neo1973 Heck yeah
Banned from US carriers' GSM networks 5...4...3...2...
I am one of those people, and I have worked on both the high- and low-brow. The dumb movies usually attract the better people, because they pay better and are more stable -- a particular arthouse studio you would recognize that I worked for was always a little sketchy about paying on time and unpaid overtime, and many of the prestige marques, like Universal Focus, Fox Searchlight, etc. are happy to buy non-union and extremely low budget films that paid the technical people little to nothing, and then make hundreds of millions distributing them. You always hope you can land a huge movie that pays well AND is a work of art, but Clint only makes a movie once every couple years.
Do you really think that those people would HAVE a salaried job working in film production if the people who invest in the film (in order to make money) didn't put up the money, UP FRONT? If a production company can't get the cash flowing, NO ONE has a job in that company
I'm not sure that's exactly how it works. The studios are loss leaders for their conglomerates -- the studios manufacture media platforms to which the larger corporations attach their products and services. The money flows because large corporations need movies to be made to act as flagships for their media products, which they do wether they are pirated or not. Movie studios don't make money, by themselves; that's why they were all bought up in the 1960s and 70s.
If you were to start a company, today, which did nothing but shoot films and release them into theaters, you would go bankrupt in 5 years, piracy or no. Movies just aren't economic in and of themselves, they have to be integrated into DVDs, marketing, books, and all that stuff.
Basically, I think I'm saying that motion pictures are just big ads for the DVD, if they make money, that's awesome and helps the marketing down the chain, but as advertisements, they're driven by numbers of eyeballs viewing, and not by tickets sold. In my universe, if I'm right, you could invite people to see a movie for free and have the DVDs on sale at a table at the exit, and if the movie were good, you'd make a profit.
Independent films are a different beast. Those occasionally hit it big and become vehicles for DVD sales, but often the producer is happy to make double or triple his investment by preselling the distribution to Polish distributors, French cable, Blockbuster bargain bin DVD, and all the other little markets independent films show on -- Roger Corman and a dozen imitators have perfected this over the last two decades. If he gets US distribution and BO, it's gravy.
Speaking of companies like Pixar... that is most definitely NOT true. They make a lot of money in the theaters AND they make a lot of money in other distribution forms, as well. There are a lot of childrearing households with Toy Story DVDs that never come out of the disk changer
Are we calling Pixar a "band" in this analogy or a "label," because in my understanding, the cast and crew is a "band," and the company is a "label." Pixar makes fine $$$ off of all of its movies in DVD, but these don't always filter down to the talent in the same way as box office does (the sharing of DVD and internet revenue is the common cause of the WGA and SAG strikes that seem to happen every few years). To respond to the point of the other respondent, above-the-line people don't get points out of the total sales of a film, all of the retail channels are kept separate in terms of their profit participation, and often these artists will only get royalties, or even less, particularly on purely art films made for no budget in the independent realm.
I should say, however, that none of this is even remotely related to the broader point of "Is it moral or ethical to download movies," which I positively reject. I love seeing movies in the theater, and buying my favorites on DVD. I ask you though, humbly, don't go around thinking you're rewarding an artist when you run your MasterCard through the POS terminal at MediaPlay.
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I never claimed Macs were anything special, the parent simply claimed that it would be impossible to bypass Spotlight with your own service. This was never an OS X versus Windows debate.
If the data passes to canada, it will probably pass over a transatlantic cable the either lands in the United States or, failing that, is operated by an American corporation.
You could replace it a couple of different ways:
After going through this I do wonder why anybody would go to the trouble, but I suppose Google wrote their search app because they didn't have to worry about overriding the Windows service, because the Windows service didn't exist. I wonder how many small Windows devs wish they could've dented M$ a little when the Redmond guys destroyed their market by copying their little app's features and incorporating it into the OS. Google simply can, and though Apple has destroyed it's share of little shareware apps, they aren't 95% of the PC market, thus those little devs can be accused of wasting their time in the first place ;D.
Well they do have an API that lets you run programs on their OS, so I guess they do. Their OS isn't "open source," though their kernel is and a bunch of the underlying services are.
And FWIW, Mac OS X has an extensible public API for File Search.
He's just pissed-off he isn't gonna get an iPhone the first day.
To those of you who may be wondering: Put Sneakers on your netflix queue. You are not welcome here until you have viewed it.
You should play the game, you'd see you were wrong.
The funnest level is the one where you take one district away from the other party to yours. You just give all of his loyal supporters to his neighboring party-mate, who's happy to have them, and you push the border of the safe seat for your team a few miles your direction, putting your supporters in his district, and walla!
The most ironic level is the "reform" level, where you draw borders without regard for party and just try to get the districts right. It's easy, but its impossible for you to ever get your map approved, because nobody in the legislature will vote for it, because their seats get too risky, but you can't ever make the map suit them, because you can't see the demographic data. Hilarious!
Unless ten of them have weblogs. One nastygram blog posting about "iPhone scratches are teh suxx0r" has a way of getting repeated, ad nauesum, for years ;).
Ditto Palm.
Well, if you watched something like a Captain Video short, which nominally depicted 500 years into the future, people would travel around in their flying cars, but when they wanted to talk to someone on the other side of town, they generally had to land the flying car, get out, go into their hover-house, and turn on a very large radio-transmitter looking device.
Most predicitons of the FUTURE in the case of fiction are driven by the dramatic needs of the story. No scientist will comment on the viability of a matter transporter, but it sure kept the average Star Trek episode budget down. Arthur C. Clarke had moonbases on the moon in 1999 because he wanted his readers to feel like they could relate in human terms with the characters and still put the TMA-1 far enough away from Earth so that it's "recent discovery" is believable in context. In the case of 2001, Clark wanted to make the point that society and governments still had not changed, and that the events still were occurring in the same historical epoch as the readers.
When the people doing the predicting are the government, or Bell Labs, it's still storytelling, and the better you like the story, the more likely you'll part with your grant money.
If they wanna make a share of the subscribers monthly bill, like the cut they get from AT&T, then yes, they need to make a deal with the people doing the billing. Further they need a little cooperation to support visual voicemail.
Wholly agree. Another implication in the article is that someone could hit you with a court order, and the moment you were served, if your machine was on, turning it off (or even killing a process or doing something that caused a pageout) could be destruction of evidence.
As the TFA explains, the judge means that the RAM would become a legal document, and that any information put on it would have to be retained for later examination, and that if this ruling were extended to things like SOX, a SOX-complying company would have to keep transaction logs or images of their RAM so that the state of the RAM at any point in the past could be accounted. EEep.
And they still don't. Maybe a big part of consumer electronics is managing expectations and not over-promising, by positioning your product in a known niche with high demand and not getting side-tracked by your engineers who seem to want to put a JVM in EVERYTHING, if only because they can. "Do one job and do it well" isn't just for Unix.
The Tivo is essentially a living-room computer and is going up against other living-room computers, like the Windows MCE and the Apple Front Row. \sarcasm{ This is clearly why Windows MCE is in everyone's living room, and why I tell my friends to "Be sure to MCE the Sopranos tonight!" I can't tell you how often I've found it useful to have Word on my TV, so that I can be typing a document for work while I'm having a good time with friends watching TV!}
Sometimes we have to step back and realize that a general-purpose computer is not an end in itself. Further, the concept of the 'killer app' is a construct of business schools that were in a dither to try to explain why software companies were making mad money in the 1980s and 90s. It is an extremely recent phenomenon in business thought, and may not have much explanatory power outside of software in the 1980s.
That is the responsibility they undertake, yes. They may or may not understand all the ins and outs, but it's their responsibility.
Based on the blog posting, they STILL don't know what's "in for them," since the vulnerabilities are still undisclosed. They remain in Maynor's to do list, for sale to the highest bidder for all we know.
If you're a linux or MS supporter, don't waste your breath defending this guy. He wasted a year of everybody's time on that Airport vulnerability that didn't exist.
Also add, if you right-click on any element in a WebKit view with the debug on, you will get the extremely good element inspector for the element you're on.
Mac OS X cannot run .exe files. If you want your program to run on OS X, without requiring the end user buying Parallels or Wine, you will be packaging your executable in a .app directory like the rest of us.
They can't be TOO windows-ish, as very few video cards on Macs support DirectX 9 or whatever games are now, and Macs don't ship with any Windows libraries. But since EA has written for so many different platforms as it is (Windows, Xbox 1 and 2, PS1,2,3, all manner of Nintendos) their games are probably written meta enough that they can be adapted without too much difficulty.
Mod parent informative; the Debug menu on Safari is tres handy.
Hello, I'm a film sound designer and I LIVE for when the occasional sound article comes up on slashdot.
:P If you want the music to stay loud over engine noise, you're better off using the automatic level control, if your car has one (it's basically a compressor, the audio kind, not the data kind).
The parent poster is completely right, hearing damage is a function of Sound Pressure Level and time, and sound pressure level is a measurement of energy in the air, and not a measure of your perception. Something people don't recognize along these lines, is that a lot of people do terrible damage to themselves by simply driving with the car window down on the freeway, as (in our modern aerodynamic cars) the turbulent airflow can pummel your ears with LF, though it doesn't bother you because it's below 20 Hz. And the wind noise makes you turn up the radio louder.
With regard to graphic EQ, the things were invented, partly, to help engineers correct the acoustic characteristics of rooms -- if your room has a mode at 400 Hz, turn down 400 Hz, if it has some high ringiness due to some resonance, turn down the high end. A 30 band graphic EQ is ideal for this sort of work because some rooms have a bunch of little peaks and troughs on an RTA and you'd need a ton of parametric EQs to do the same goofiness. A 5 band graphic EQ is just for show, you need at least 10 before you can do anything particularly fun, and even then in a car I can't imagine where it'd get you. Maybe you could shape the music over the engine noise or something
It should go without saying, if you want to hear the song the way the band mixed it, they listened to it with a flat EQ, and if you want to enjoy the nuances of a piece of music, don't listen to it in a car. Also, the standard practice in music mixing since forever is to record the song as loud as possible without distorting on the medium. Compression (the audio kind) is a style thing, and bands have been using since the beginning of rock and roll, and particularly with CDs, the music is physically incapable of getting any louder on the medium. You kids have just been cranking up your damn volume knobs.
Respectfully, Maxwell never claimed that one had to accept Jesus in order to know that magnetic monopoles do not exist. Where on the other hand, the subject of the post, the Creation Museum, states quite baldly that only through Faith can one know how the world was created.
When one says "Science and Religion cannot mix," we might give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and assume he means "Science cannot prove a matter of faith, nor can Faith prove a scientific one," unless he cuts himself off.
Banned from US carriers' GSM networks 5...4...3...2...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_q
I thought that was the point I was trying to make, but I admit, I phrased it in the form of a snark and not a statement.
I am one of those people, and I have worked on both the high- and low-brow. The dumb movies usually attract the better people, because they pay better and are more stable -- a particular arthouse studio you would recognize that I worked for was always a little sketchy about paying on time and unpaid overtime, and many of the prestige marques, like Universal Focus, Fox Searchlight, etc. are happy to buy non-union and extremely low budget films that paid the technical people little to nothing, and then make hundreds of millions distributing them. You always hope you can land a huge movie that pays well AND is a work of art, but Clint only makes a movie once every couple years.
I'm not sure that's exactly how it works. The studios are loss leaders for their conglomerates -- the studios manufacture media platforms to which the larger corporations attach their products and services. The money flows because large corporations need movies to be made to act as flagships for their media products, which they do wether they are pirated or not. Movie studios don't make money, by themselves; that's why they were all bought up in the 1960s and 70s.
If you were to start a company, today, which did nothing but shoot films and release them into theaters, you would go bankrupt in 5 years, piracy or no. Movies just aren't economic in and of themselves, they have to be integrated into DVDs, marketing, books, and all that stuff.
Basically, I think I'm saying that motion pictures are just big ads for the DVD, if they make money, that's awesome and helps the marketing down the chain, but as advertisements, they're driven by numbers of eyeballs viewing, and not by tickets sold. In my universe, if I'm right, you could invite people to see a movie for free and have the DVDs on sale at a table at the exit, and if the movie were good, you'd make a profit.
Independent films are a different beast. Those occasionally hit it big and become vehicles for DVD sales, but often the producer is happy to make double or triple his investment by preselling the distribution to Polish distributors, French cable, Blockbuster bargain bin DVD, and all the other little markets independent films show on -- Roger Corman and a dozen imitators have perfected this over the last two decades. If he gets US distribution and BO, it's gravy.
Are we calling Pixar a "band" in this analogy or a "label," because in my understanding, the cast and crew is a "band," and the company is a "label." Pixar makes fine $$$ off of all of its movies in DVD, but these don't always filter down to the talent in the same way as box office does (the sharing of DVD and internet revenue is the common cause of the WGA and SAG strikes that seem to happen every few years). To respond to the point of the other respondent, above-the-line people don't get points out of the total sales of a film, all of the retail channels are kept separate in terms of their profit participation, and often these artists will only get royalties, or even less, particularly on purely art films made for no budget in the independent realm.
I should say, however, that none of this is even remotely related to the broader point of "Is it moral or ethical to download movies," which I positively reject. I love seeing movies in the theater, and buying my favorites on DVD. I ask you though, humbly, don't go around thinking you're rewarding an artist when you run your MasterCard through the POS terminal at MediaPlay.
It's like DRM, except for living things.