The .asia regional internet domain has officially opened for business. This should be interesting.. Especially intriguing and massively significant (and curiously mentioned only as a minor side-note in the article) is the separate initiative being tested by ICANN to allow for domain names in non-latin scripts/character sets, ie, domain names written directly in Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Khmer, etc. script rather than some phonetically romanized version of those. This change will make the internet infinitely more accessible to the masses who don’t speak/read/write English.
It will be very interesting to see what effects this addition of native language support, once complete, will have on the following and other areas:
IT and networking infrastructure — For example, the practical problem of an American or German network administrator troubleshooting a connectivity or DNS problem to a Taiwanese website with a URL like http://愉快的馬農場.中華民國 or a Korean website with a URL like http://행복한 말 농장.한국).
Business — This will potentially & likely lead to massive internet connectivity adoption rates among previously unreached people groups — lower-class and/or less educated people who only know a local language, but already have the connectivity infrastructure available to them. This could well turn out to be the shot-in-the-arm that the IT and Networking industries have been needing to help them revive from the slowing economy and the dot-com bust, which, although a relatively long time ago, left the industries badly shaken.
Politics — Control of the internet in many ways is currently still effectively in the hands of the US government, as it is after all basically a US DoD (DARPA; at the time known as ARPA) invention; the ARPANET was the direct predecessor to the internet. This change will vastly complicate that level of control.
Those of you who read this (there are at least one or two of you, right?), probably know that I like music and sound mixing (sound engineering).. Here are a few very funny links from a church sound engineering mailing list I’m on. If you’re interested, the website is http://www.churchsoundcheck.com/.
Everything you were taught about science & physics apparently becomes invalid the moment you step into a church. These are hysterical. Number 6 is the best, in my opinion.
Here’s a world record definitely NOT worth breaking! The deciBel is a ratio measurement for sound pressure change (change in volume). For you fellow nerds, Wikipedia has a more in-depth write-up, with formulas and everything! You’re happy now, aren’t you??
In layman’s terms, since the decibel (dB) scale is not straight, but logarithmic, an addition of 6dB (for example, increasing the volume from 80dB to 86dB) is roughly a doubling in perceived volume!! Generally speaking, most people consider ~80dB to be a comfortable listening volume during a concert. You would experience 100dB+ at a very loud rock concert. Unless you’re already deaf, sustained unprotected exposure to that kind of volume will cause hearing loss (hearing loss is irreversible!) and ringing in your ears, called tinnitus. The louder the sound, the less exposure time your ears can handle before you experience permanent damage.
This is fascinating. I ran across this on blogger.com (run by Google). Their story behind it is interesting enough that I’ll just re-post their entire write-up..
Blogger Play: Watch the blogs go by
Today we’re pleased to launch Blogger Play, a neat little toy we’ve cooked up to show you photos and blog posts as you’ve never seen them before.
Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn’t stop watching.
Over the years we’ve kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs. The fame of the scroller spread within Google, until one day we were asked, “so, when are you launching this?”
“Um…,” we replied. But we knew a good idea when we heard one. We got our UI people to come up with buttons and fadey effects and we got our engineers to make the whole thing fast and robust. A bit of work later, and now we can share it with all of you:
Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.
A caveat: we use many techniques, including Google’s SafeSearch technology, to keep the images clean. Nevertheless, on rare occasions an image that you may find vulgar or obscene will slip through our algorithmic filters. Google does not pre-screen the images that appear in Blogger Play, nor is it responsible for their content. To report a terms of service violation, you may fill out this contact form.
Looks like they have a few kinks to work out before this technology is truly mature. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating, and well, a bit scary, from a Biblical standpoint.
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