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Amazingly, I just recently recorded a song about flying lawnmowers as part of the album-a-day project . I never thought it would be topical on slashdot...

Man, I fucken hate when electronics have badly attached jacks. That is the most common way that my stuff dies, and it's so easy to get it right: just mount the jack to the chassis instead of the PCB.

You might find my technique for fixing my own cheap player (w/ pictures) amusing.

What strange timing -- I just saw a talk this morning from Hales at CMU about his work on formalizing the Kepler conjecture ("theorem") in HOL Light.

I can understand not wanting to trust a big piece of C code that purports to check a huge number of cases of a proof doing numerical analysis. It took 6 years of 4 people trying to verify his computer proof of the Kepler conjecture--before they gave up. If a program is that hard to believe, then it does indeed deserve lesser status than a handwritten proof that can be checked by mathematicians in shorter time.

On the other hand, there are other computer tools that we really should trust, and that are revolutionizing mathematics. The idea is simple: write your proofs in such detail that they can be mechanically checked by a simple (easy to verify) procedure. This is much better than paper proofs, because the potential for human error is minimized. (I don't think anyone will argue that published proofs have often been wrong, and the proofs have not been caught by the peer reviewers!) Since it's really, really bad to believe wrong proofs, there's a very real benefit that is offset by the sometimes tedious work necessary in formalization.

That's what Tom Hales is doing with flyspeck, and I think it is the future of mathematics. (In fact, I have recently become addicted to mechanizing my own proofs in Twelf--it's not only immensely satisfying, but it helps me sleep better at night and makes for stronger papers.)

Damn, I put my novel up online for free but hardly anyone buys it! Maybe you have to have a famous web site, too...

When you used to sign up as an artist on mp3.com, there's a page with checkboxes, and it says something like, "Careful! It's important that you know what you're agreeing to here!" It is actually fairly obvious what they're doing, and I for one signed up for it because I prefer my music to be heard more than I prefer it to be sold.

Latex is actually an excellent way to get high quality PDFs with proper typesetting (spacing, hyphenation, ligatures) and fancy stuff like drop caps, even if you never enter math mode once. I used it for the novel I wrote for this year's Nanowrimo, and I'd definitely recommend it!

If you're interested in making NES music (the Game Boy is more powerful, actually, but I personally feel more nostalgia for the NES), check out MCK:

http://www.geocities.co.jp/Playtown-Denei/9628/mak edata_e.html

You can even use my MIDI converter MIDIMML so that you aren't stuck typing numbers into a text-based sequencer.

Also, my Tom 7 Entertainment System project has a bunch of original NES-ish songs for you.

It's true that Apple does stuff, but to throw on an extra album or extra hundred albums can't really be that expensive. Most of the things you mention are independent of how much music they host (and advertising gets easier when they have more albums ;)).

> If it's so easy, go build yourself an ITMS and charge less!

Actually, I just distribute all my music on the internet for free.

Well, his article is crap, too, so that's why I didn't read it. ;)

It may be true for writing, but it's definitely not true for music: for several years I've been having a great time downloading self-published music from mp3.com. Believe me, there's no sewage filter here, but that doesn't mean I'm not able to find stuff that I like fairly easily. It's great that these are real people, doing it for the love of it, and that you can have discussions and collaborations with them. Really refreshing. (It also feels a lot better than buying from the RIAA!) Of course, making my own music is a good way to have music that I like, and that some other people might by chance like, too. Seriously, if it meant the end of commercial radio and professional "artists," hell, sign me up.

This whole thing reminds me eerily of the academic publishing industry's claim that we as researchers need them in order to survive. (So sign over those copyrights!) Of course, with the internet we no longer need journals and conference proceedings to get access to papers, and with the recent academic scandals involving forged results, it's not clear that the peer review system is working particularly well, either.