I defer to your knowledge of the issue. Clearly many of the "rules" would have to be rewritten if these devices actually work and are usable, but then again, they can write the rules all they want, it's the interpretation by the belligerents that's the most important. We seem to care more about how the US Army FM defines "torture," as opposed to waiting on if the ICJ decides to prosecute us for their definition of it, because the latter is basically irrelevant to powerful countries, particularly ones with overall good reputations that have laws on the books requiring them to use military force to invade the Hague if any of their guys were arrested for a war crime (not naming names here).
I am a professional, but a lot of the people I work with have gone stone deaf working the way we do, so maybe I have everything backwards, but here's what I was taught (from the mouth of Tom Holman himself.
Hearing damage is like radiation: it's cumulative over your entire life.
I'm not sure anyone has done any conclusive studies on earbuds versus headphones, but both are equally effective in causing damage if you listen at a bad level.
Your eardrum is sensitive, but relatively robust compared to the Organ of Corti, which lives in your chochlea and actually tranducts the sound into the nerve; it gets damaged at the high end of your listening response and the damage travels down the spectrum as it accumulates. You won't generally notice cumulative hearing loss at first because it occurs at the top end of the spectrum, away from speech.
Your response to sound level is logarithmic, and also relative. If you're in a loud car, or driving with the window down, you may be applying 90-100 dB SPL to your ears from all the energy from wind and engine, but it will seem quiet compared to a loud stereo which you crank to 11 to put it over the din, thus you can trick yourself into listening to things much louder than you could otherwise tolerate.
Your acoustic reflex protects you from loud sounds by involuntarily contracting muscle in your middle ear to pull your eardrum tight, thus reducing your eardrums displacement and the amount of energy it passes to the inner ear. The muscle in your ear has tone like any other muscle, however, and will being to release your eardrum after 2-3 hours of continuous loud noise. It does this gradually, however, and you won't notice the effect, but your eardrum will register the strain and pass it along to your cochlea.
Sudden dynamic (loudness) changes can be more damaging than dynamic changes that you acclimate yourself into. If you listen to your music at a comfortable level and turn it up over 10 minutes or so your acoustic reflex will protect your eardrum from immediate stress.
The way you describe it, military cloaks of invisibility would seem to be plainly illegal under the Hague Conventions, supposing that killing an enemy while you are invisible translates as a "treacherous act," by Article 23. Also if you engaged in combat under a Cloak you would be necessarily trading in your protections under GC1 and 3.
For people who are concerned about "storing things on other people's servers," I have no doubt that within a year or two, once all us beta-testers have had our go at it, Google will be selling a "Docs Appliance" in an orange 19" box that you can buy, rack up and ethernet into your system, tie into your Goog Search Box and away you go. Hook up an LTO and set it up in the web admin and you will have a very serious operation.
I think the Appliance-in-a-box model is a good way to go, particularly if it does the one job well, and you can get stuff in and out of it in universal formats. Note that Windows "Sharepoint" is the same sort of niche, but you buy the hardware (and support, and upgrades, and client software, and upgrades...), and that Apple's Leopard server will have a wiki/WebDAV server preinstalled with a Writely-style editing system built in. Everybody's pulling the same way, they just differ in their business models; Google sells turnkey solutions, MS builds on their platform and charges extra, Apple builds on their platform and includes it 'for free' with their base server as a sales draw to their platform.
I don't know if I'm more offended by the knowing "Mac OS is Unix!" "Windows is doomed by legacy code!" thread of the article, or the iTunes ad along the side for the new Jars of Clay album, but still:p
As I said, interstellar space. Neither Voyager is expected to pass within a light-year of any star within our current ability to predict. If we detected a space probe in our Oort cloud, for example, we in our current state would have a lot of trouble recovering it.
if we had never had USB, DRM, ALC encoded audio, I think we'd be in pretty poor shape to figure out what was on that USB key
Yeah, but we do. On the other hand, if you crack open a USB key, you can pretty easily see which pins carry the supply rails onto the chip, and from their thickness deduce how much power the thing will be looking for. Once you get the USB host up and running, it's just a matter of reverse engineering the protocol, and since it's not encrypted or obfuscated, this can be done with relatively minimal effort (the aliens have gotta be at least as smart as the Samba guys, just as an example). I'm not saying it'd be easy, but if we lived in a world with no USB, and had been using, idunno, SCSI for peripheral interconnect all this time, USB would be no trick.
I'm not saying you're wrong, overall, but I think all such "messages to posterity" are mostly statements about how their Makers view and fetishize the world, and what they hold dearest. The makers of the Voyager Record, for example, decided that the hyperfine transition of hydrogen is so basic to knowledge, that a culture that could recover the probe would naturally understand it. Note that the hyperfine transition of hydrogen is itself an less-than-hundred-year-old concept, and might not even be physical, if more fundamental theories of physics are discovered. If Voyager had been launched in 1920, maybe the Plank time would have been used instead of the H-interval. And if Voyager had been launched in 1260, maybe the Golden Record would have been nothing but Greek, since this was the language of the Book.
The reason was for preservaton because a 78 RPM records is apparently extrememly easy to play even without much technology
This was the theory behind the Voyager Golden Record, which one side of is nothing but audio. It is of course easy to play a record without much technology, because they were invented in the late 19th century and people back then, by our standards, "didn't have much technology," so maybe it's all a wash.
If we'd put the music of the Voyager Golden Record on a USB key in iTunes Fairplay ALC, I have little doubt that aliens with the capacity to recover a space probe from interstellar space could have decoded it (they have to be at least as smart as DVD Jon). Hell, it might have made it interesting for them.
Our society may ultimately be remembered only for the work of those individuals.
If the last hundred or so years are any indication, the only music that becomes culturally significant is the music that can be authoritatively notated on paper. The recordings themselves are like gold on Inca temples: they're beautiful, far to beautiful to avoid being being stolen or otherwise being permanently locked away once the culture that honored them disappears. Paper is too boring to steal.
Don't worry, all the videos are in the "asp.asx" format that my computer neither recognizes nor plays. Maybe we can defeat the terrorists by giving them all Macs;)
What difference does it make what kind of music the owner buys, particularly if the margins are so thin on the songs? Apple makes all its profits on the devices themselves- you're paying money for portable listening, the content you put on it has always been of negligible interest to Apple, as long as you were listening to it on their hardware.
The crossed purposes of the recording industry (pushing the hot new acts on the teenies) and hardware manufacturers (easy copying/sharing of content in particular) are well attested. What's good for Warner-Elektra-Atlantic is absolutely not what's good for Apple.
The WMP by nature decrypts the file, in order to play it. Now, right after WMP decrypts it...it is a file in memory just like any other file/code, and I don't know of any rules or laws out there that say what you can or cannot do to any bit of data in memory...especially if it is in a decoded, freely readable format. Are you 'forced' to play it through the speakers?
I don't know how it works, but it may only decrypt the audio block-by-block or frame-by-frame, meaning that any de-DRMing process you do would have to happen in real time, just like plugging a DAT recorder into your computer's S/PDIF out. The fact that it's real time is enough of a dis-incentive to keep people from stripping the DRM from files, just as it is technically possible to burn a CD from the iTUnes music store and rip it, to remove DRM. Too many steps and too inconvenient to cost the copyright holders enough money to bother protecting against it. For now.
For video, of course, they see this as a problem, so there is HDCP and protected data channels and revokable certificates on your TV set in case you try crack it open and turn it "rogue".
I wonder...why is that, exactly? Why is Vista such a massive project?
Possible answer: Vista has to generally remain bug-for-bug compatible with every piece of software written for the overall Microsoft platform since MS-DOS 2.0. Apple and Linus both are willing to break developer's applications if the loss of backwards compatibility is worth the gain in speed/size/abstraction/whatever.
It might also be that Microsoft decided in 2000 that the Longhorn project was going to be the biggest engineering project in human history, and damned if it wasn't going to be proven wrong. When you are working on a project that is the biggest/most expensive/most ambitious of its kind, that in itself is a license to spend even more time/money/people, particularly in a corporate environment.
John Foster Dulles, the Sec of State, had worked for a law firm that regularly defended United Fruit, and sat on its board of directors, IIRC. An overview of the whole sordid affair can be found in David Halberstam's The Fifties. The bit about compensating United Fruit for their assessed value of the land is completely true and particularly funny, but the Dulleses weren't laughing
It should be stated, of course, that United Fruit was completely incapable of ordering a war through its intermediaries in the US government, but Arbenz, by initiating a land redistribution plan, was pushing every anti-commie button the US government had at the time, particularly with McCarthy accusing the State Department of having 57 "Card-Carrying Communists" in its senior ranks. Had Dole owned the land and not United Fruit, the outcome would have probably been the same, despite Dulles having worked for their competitor.
One wonders what action the US would've taken if the land had been owned by a French or Mexican fruit company...
If we're talking manual transmission, you're only wearing the clutch when you're in the transition state between engaged and disengaged- all the wear on your clutch happens when the clutch and flywheel aren't moving at the same speed. As long as you don't ride the clutch, and you are rolling at a speed that is sane for your gear/RPM, you won't hurt anything, and it does improve brake life.
Use the standard window frame, use glass (transparency) judiciously
Good good. If MS keeps making such a big deal about transparent UI tho, silly developers are gonna use it everywhere.
Use icons and graphics consistent with the Windows Vista style and quality
Good. If you follow this suggestion closely enough, maybe we can convince the users at home that your application comes from Microsoft, too.
Use task dialogs for new or frequently used dialog boxes and error messages
Good.
Use Aero Wizards
If you're replacing a 97 Wizard, you should use an Aero wizard. If you're writing a new app, please do not use a wizard. They're obnoxious, and send the message: "We didn't know how to organize your options in any sort of logical way, so here's a powerpoint that lets you fill in the blanks, masquearding as a UI."
Use Explorer-hosted, navigation-based user interfaces, provide a Back button
In short: Consider making programs that aren't web browsers behave like web browsers, since people use those alot. This is interesting, but at some point you have to explain the difference between the "Back" button and the "Undo" button, and you might just end up making your program into a wizard
Use the standard Windows Search (have a little iTunes style search box in your window's corner when appropriate)
A total dig on my part, and I apologize, but that's basically what they're saying. Apple makes the same recommendation, and give a very slick API for making it work. So good suggestion.
Use the Windows Vista tone in all UI text (use a professional writing style in you informative text)
From Microsofts mouth to ghod's ears.
Clean up the user interface
On their page they list all kinds of things you can do to make your program more ergonomic, but they put it at the end of the list, and phrase it in such a way as to suggest that it should be something you do at the end of development, as opposed to at the beginning, when you're designing your windows on a whiteboard. "Organize your command (sic) into a simple, predictable, and easy to find presentation" is something you do before you start writing code- it is not something you do while "cleaning up".
Use notifications judiciously
Or not at all. The list makes no suggestion about keeping your damn icons out of the systray.
Reserve development time for "fit and finish"!
Fit and Finish has quickly become my least favorite phrase. Sorry, just snarky, I agree with this point. But I would say "Hire a designer" as opposed to "reserve development time", mainly because it will allow collaboration with someone who always has their eyes on the UI and can give the developers continual feedback on how their code is totally rocking for the user... experience, or totally deviating from reality.
Slashdot Mirror
I defer to your knowledge of the issue. Clearly many of the "rules" would have to be rewritten if these devices actually work and are usable, but then again, they can write the rules all they want, it's the interpretation by the belligerents that's the most important. We seem to care more about how the US Army FM defines "torture," as opposed to waiting on if the ICJ decides to prosecute us for their definition of it, because the latter is basically irrelevant to powerful countries, particularly ones with overall good reputations that have laws on the books requiring them to use military force to invade the Hague if any of their guys were arrested for a war crime (not naming names here).
Thanks, mod parent up.
I am a professional, but a lot of the people I work with have gone stone deaf working the way we do, so maybe I have everything backwards, but here's what I was taught (from the mouth of Tom Holman himself.
The way you describe it, military cloaks of invisibility would seem to be plainly illegal under the Hague Conventions, supposing that killing an enemy while you are invisible translates as a "treacherous act," by Article 23. Also if you engaged in combat under a Cloak you would be necessarily trading in your protections under GC1 and 3.
Are you reading that HTML readme in Internet Explorer or Firefox? It might change the proposition of READMEs being safe universally. ;)
It can't and it doesn't. See Apple's Universal Binaries reader (a pdf). If you're a developer, it's time to recompile; fortunately Carbon isn't going anywhere.
For the record, they're called "Seti Eels" and though they may not make you scream "KHAAAAAAAN!!", they may make the person who finds you scream it.
Well, they sell x86 Intel microcomputers, which you can buy from several resellers pre-installed with Windows, so.. what were we talking about?
By this standard they're a marginal PC manufacturers, with a market share on the scale of the Sony Vaios.
Mod this interesting (I accidently hit 'redundant'. This AJAXY interface should at least have an undo, if it won't give me a submit button :P)
For people who are concerned about "storing things on other people's servers," I have no doubt that within a year or two, once all us beta-testers have had our go at it, Google will be selling a "Docs Appliance" in an orange 19" box that you can buy, rack up and ethernet into your system, tie into your Goog Search Box and away you go. Hook up an LTO and set it up in the web admin and you will have a very serious operation.
I think the Appliance-in-a-box model is a good way to go, particularly if it does the one job well, and you can get stuff in and out of it in universal formats. Note that Windows "Sharepoint" is the same sort of niche, but you buy the hardware (and support, and upgrades, and client software, and upgrades...), and that Apple's Leopard server will have a wiki/WebDAV server preinstalled with a Writely-style editing system built in. Everybody's pulling the same way, they just differ in their business models; Google sells turnkey solutions, MS builds on their platform and charges extra, Apple builds on their platform and includes it 'for free' with their base server as a sales draw to their platform.
That article is such a troll! True or not.
I don't know if I'm more offended by the knowing "Mac OS is Unix!" "Windows is doomed by legacy code!" thread of the article, or the iTunes ad along the side for the new Jars of Clay album, but still :p
That would make Ashton Kutcher first lady, so be careful what you ask for. It might make one hell of a Punk'd episode, though.
You bastard.
As I said, interstellar space. Neither Voyager is expected to pass within a light-year of any star within our current ability to predict. If we detected a space probe in our Oort cloud, for example, we in our current state would have a lot of trouble recovering it.
Yeah, but we do. On the other hand, if you crack open a USB key, you can pretty easily see which pins carry the supply rails onto the chip, and from their thickness deduce how much power the thing will be looking for. Once you get the USB host up and running, it's just a matter of reverse engineering the protocol, and since it's not encrypted or obfuscated, this can be done with relatively minimal effort (the aliens have gotta be at least as smart as the Samba guys, just as an example). I'm not saying it'd be easy, but if we lived in a world with no USB, and had been using, idunno, SCSI for peripheral interconnect all this time, USB would be no trick.
I'm not saying you're wrong, overall, but I think all such "messages to posterity" are mostly statements about how their Makers view and fetishize the world, and what they hold dearest. The makers of the Voyager Record, for example, decided that the hyperfine transition of hydrogen is so basic to knowledge, that a culture that could recover the probe would naturally understand it. Note that the hyperfine transition of hydrogen is itself an less-than-hundred-year-old concept, and might not even be physical, if more fundamental theories of physics are discovered. If Voyager had been launched in 1920, maybe the Plank time would have been used instead of the H-interval. And if Voyager had been launched in 1260, maybe the Golden Record would have been nothing but Greek, since this was the language of the Book.
This was the theory behind the Voyager Golden Record, which one side of is nothing but audio. It is of course easy to play a record without much technology, because they were invented in the late 19th century and people back then, by our standards, "didn't have much technology," so maybe it's all a wash.
If we'd put the music of the Voyager Golden Record on a USB key in iTunes Fairplay ALC, I have little doubt that aliens with the capacity to recover a space probe from interstellar space could have decoded it (they have to be at least as smart as DVD Jon). Hell, it might have made it interesting for them.
If the last hundred or so years are any indication, the only music that becomes culturally significant is the music that can be authoritatively notated on paper. The recordings themselves are like gold on Inca temples: they're beautiful, far to beautiful to avoid being being stolen or otherwise being permanently locked away once the culture that honored them disappears. Paper is too boring to steal.
Don't worry, all the videos are in the "asp.asx" format that my computer neither recognizes nor plays. Maybe we can defeat the terrorists by giving them all Macs ;)
What difference does it make what kind of music the owner buys, particularly if the margins are so thin on the songs? Apple makes all its profits on the devices themselves- you're paying money for portable listening, the content you put on it has always been of negligible interest to Apple, as long as you were listening to it on their hardware.
The crossed purposes of the recording industry (pushing the hot new acts on the teenies) and hardware manufacturers (easy copying/sharing of content in particular) are well attested. What's good for Warner-Elektra-Atlantic is absolutely not what's good for Apple.
I'd be honored to be the first among slashdotters to welcome our first Navajo code talker poster!
I don't know how it works, but it may only decrypt the audio block-by-block or frame-by-frame, meaning that any de-DRMing process you do would have to happen in real time, just like plugging a DAT recorder into your computer's S/PDIF out. The fact that it's real time is enough of a dis-incentive to keep people from stripping the DRM from files, just as it is technically possible to burn a CD from the iTUnes music store and rip it, to remove DRM. Too many steps and too inconvenient to cost the copyright holders enough money to bother protecting against it. For now.
For video, of course, they see this as a problem, so there is HDCP and protected data channels and revokable certificates on your TV set in case you try crack it open and turn it "rogue".
Possible answer: Vista has to generally remain bug-for-bug compatible with every piece of software written for the overall Microsoft platform since MS-DOS 2.0. Apple and Linus both are willing to break developer's applications if the loss of backwards compatibility is worth the gain in speed/size/abstraction/whatever.
It might also be that Microsoft decided in 2000 that the Longhorn project was going to be the biggest engineering project in human history, and damned if it wasn't going to be proven wrong. When you are working on a project that is the biggest/most expensive/most ambitious of its kind, that in itself is a license to spend even more time/money/people, particularly in a corporate environment.
John Foster Dulles, the Sec of State, had worked for a law firm that regularly defended United Fruit, and sat on its board of directors, IIRC. An overview of the whole sordid affair can be found in David Halberstam's The Fifties. The bit about compensating United Fruit for their assessed value of the land is completely true and particularly funny, but the Dulleses weren't laughing
It should be stated, of course, that United Fruit was completely incapable of ordering a war through its intermediaries in the US government, but Arbenz, by initiating a land redistribution plan, was pushing every anti-commie button the US government had at the time, particularly with McCarthy accusing the State Department of having 57 "Card-Carrying Communists" in its senior ranks. Had Dole owned the land and not United Fruit, the outcome would have probably been the same, despite Dulles having worked for their competitor.
One wonders what action the US would've taken if the land had been owned by a French or Mexican fruit company...
If we're talking manual transmission, you're only wearing the clutch when you're in the transition state between engaged and disengaged- all the wear on your clutch happens when the clutch and flywheel aren't moving at the same speed. As long as you don't ride the clutch, and you are rolling at a speed that is sane for your gear/RPM, you won't hurt anything, and it does improve brake life.
Sorry responded to the wrong response. Very drunk, many apologies :P
thanks for the link
My thoughts:
Use the Aero Theme and System Font (Segoe UI)
Good, but obvious.
Use common controls and common dialogs
ibid
Use the standard window frame, use glass (transparency) judiciously
Good good. If MS keeps making such a big deal about transparent UI tho, silly developers are gonna use it everywhere.
Use icons and graphics consistent with the Windows Vista style and quality
Good. If you follow this suggestion closely enough, maybe we can convince the users at home that your application comes from Microsoft, too.
Use task dialogs for new or frequently used dialog boxes and error messages
Good.
Use Aero Wizards
If you're replacing a 97 Wizard, you should use an Aero wizard. If you're writing a new app, please do not use a wizard. They're obnoxious, and send the message: "We didn't know how to organize your options in any sort of logical way, so here's a powerpoint that lets you fill in the blanks, masquearding as a UI."
Use Explorer-hosted, navigation-based user interfaces, provide a Back button
In short: Consider making programs that aren't web browsers behave like web browsers, since people use those alot. This is interesting, but at some point you have to explain the difference between the "Back" button and the "Undo" button, and you might just end up making your program into a wizard
Use the standard Windows Search (have a little iTunes style search box in your window's corner when appropriate)
A total dig on my part, and I apologize, but that's basically what they're saying. Apple makes the same recommendation, and give a very slick API for making it work. So good suggestion.
Use the Windows Vista tone in all UI text (use a professional writing style in you informative text)
From Microsofts mouth to ghod's ears.
Clean up the user interface
On their page they list all kinds of things you can do to make your program more ergonomic, but they put it at the end of the list, and phrase it in such a way as to suggest that it should be something you do at the end of development, as opposed to at the beginning, when you're designing your windows on a whiteboard. "Organize your command (sic) into a simple, predictable, and easy to find presentation" is something you do before you start writing code- it is not something you do while "cleaning up".
Use notifications judiciously
Or not at all. The list makes no suggestion about keeping your damn icons out of the systray.
Reserve development time for "fit and finish"!
Fit and Finish has quickly become my least favorite phrase. Sorry, just snarky, I agree with this point. But I would say "Hire a designer" as opposed to "reserve development time", mainly because it will allow collaboration with someone who always has their eyes on the UI and can give the developers continual feedback on how their code is totally rocking for the user ... experience, or totally deviating from reality.