By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: January 20, 2008
Sunday, 20 January 2008
- That’s One Way to Look at It ★
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Mike Barton at PC World doesn’t like the MacBook Air, which, apparently, somehow proves that Apple should license Mac OS X so that he can run it on a $600 ThinkPad. I’m sure Apple will get right on that. He’s also convinced that a future Air update will include a replaceable battery; I’m sure that will arrive right after the iPhone-with-replaceable-battery.
- Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence ★
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Dennis Lim on the sound design for No Country for Old Men, which has almost no musical score whatsoever:
What is unusual about “No Country for Old Men” is not simply the level of audio detail but that it is a critical part of the storytelling. Skip Lievsay, the sound editor who has worked with the Coen brothers since their first feature, “Blood Simple” (1984), called “No Country” “quite a remarkable experiment” from a sonic standpoint. “Suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music,” he said. “The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what’s going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone.”
- Inquisitor Update Marks Affiliate Links in Search Results ★
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David Watanabe:
In response to user feedback, Inquisitor 3.0 (v52) now explicitly tags product/affiliate links in search results and, furthermore, now includes an user preference to disable these links all together.
- About That $20 Upgrade ★
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The Macalope on why Apple has to charge for the iPod Touch upgrade, but not for the iPhone or Apple TV ones.
- DTrace Opt-Out on Mac OS X ★
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Adam Leventhal, after getting seemingly inexplicable results from DTrace (Leopard’s new super-low-level debugging tool) while iTunes is running, discovered that Apple’s DTrace implementation allows apps to opt-out of it:
Wow. So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don’t permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I’m sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow.
My guess is that this has more to do with making it harder to use DTrace to examine/reverse-engineer secretive code like FairPlay and DVD playback. Same thing goes for GDB.