Friday Apple Fun

It's the weekend, and it's Friday the 13th (depending on when you read this), so have some fun making your Mac windows unusable and buying copyrighted (and copy-protected!) silence from iTunes Music Store. Read on for details. Crazy Window Effects ZackSchil writes "Open a terminal window and type on the prompt: killall Dock. Don't press return. Position a large window behind the terminal window, then shift-click on the large window's minimize button (so it goes slowly). While still holding shift, quickly hit the return key to execute the command and kill the Dock (it comes back right away). As soon as the dock's process is killed, the window will cease minimizing, leaving you with a working, draggable, active window halfway through the warping animation! While the system is at a loss how to translate mouse clicks to the window, you can still move bits that haven't changed location too much. After having some fun, just press Command-M to get the window all the way into the Dock and click to get it out again."

I had a similar experience with iChat the other day: I somehow caught a chat so the window was transparent. And more fun: open System Preferences, click on Network, and before it loads, move the window; when Network opens, the whole window moves back to where it was when you first clicked on it (this isn't new, but it annoys me).

Paying for (Copy-Protected) Silence wayneh writes "As the Apple Turns turned out a great story about several silent tracks available via the iTunes Music Store. They are all subject to the same digital copy protection as tracks with actual sound and at least one has a thirty second preview. Interestingly, a number of them are listed as explicit and have alternate clean versions available as well. Next time you need a few minutes of quiet time, consider purchasing it from Apple."

Comments

As funny as that is

[Anonymous Coward]

It ought to be plainly obvious why those silent tracks are there.

If you think it's dumb, you really should be laughing at the artists who think low enough of their fans to put silent tracks on their records.

That's the beauty of the 9.99/album dealy thingy.

If an album has a bunch of bs silence, and you're one of those people that has to buy the whole album (not a bad thing, I'm the same way), you aren't paying 99 cents per silent track.

Albums like Tool's AEnima have 4 or 5 BS tracks that nobody could possibly consider music, or need (not want, need). That albums comes out to less than $10 (and far less than an hour) when you buy the tracks individually.

silence

[venicebeach]

A great musician once said:

"Silence is also music."

Yep...

[Gothic_Walrus]

Nothing quite like buying worthless MP3s. The only thing that compares?

How about making your computer malfunction on purpose?

Just some more proof that yes, we ARE all crazy.

Re:I don't have a sound card!

[molafson]

hey those silent tracks are so cool...to play them dosen't even require a sound card!

But then how would you know they were silent?

+1 Insightful

[MasterMnd]

If it's Friday the 13th when your reading this, then it's Friday the 13th.
Wow!

Trying to block out noisy neighbours...

[zpok]

As with all conceptial weird ideas, the idea itself is nice, but I can't imagine myself cranking up the stereo to have a good listen...

Re:Silence

[psxndc]

what kind of a world would we be in if silence becomes patented?

A screwed up one because you don't patent creative works, you copyright them. ;-p

psxndc

Re:So whats better? AAC, WMA, MP3 or OGG?

[Webmonger]

FLAC.

Re:So whats better? AAC, WMA, MP3 or OGG?

[hawaiian717]

MIDI. It uses instructions rather than sampled sounds and is thus very small. A silent recording in MIDI format will sound exactly the same as a silent recording in AAC format.

Art Insanity

[SuperBanana]

4'33"[azstarnet.com], otherwise as the Silent Sonata, was written by composer John Cage. A pianist would enter onto the stage and sit at a piano for a timed interval of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. During this period, the normally insignificant ambient noise of the audience and environment became the music itself. Of most interest, while there were no written notes for the piece, the performance produces a different sound each and every time.

...and secretly everyone thought "What the fuck was that? I just PAID for that?", but were too embarrassed to admit they got duped, so in a hurry, they thought up some shit about getting to listen to the audience. Which we do at every performance anyway, usually when some fucktard thinks it's really necessary to go "WOOOOO!" as everyone else shuts up. If you want to toss instruments out to the audience and say "hey, play something and then pass it on!", not only would you truly have an audience-based musical performance, you'd get some acting to boot, as any doctors in the place went insane just thinking about how unsanitary the whole thing was.

...and this is why the "art" world has gone insane. I could take a bathroom sink from the dump, and put it in an art gallery. Then sit back and watch as people talked about how existential it was, how it conveyed the notion of the drudgery of every day life, blah blah(see, I can make up shit that sounds just like an art critic, on the spot). And yes, I've actually seen this in an art gallery. It's bullshit. It's "I'm too lazy or untalented to come up with something", not "vision" or "talent". Same thing goes for the morons who throw(literally) paint at a canvas. They deserve to be working in some diner bussing tables, not sipping wine and eating cheese explaining their "inner rage" or some bullshit like that.

To call 4:33 of silence a "sonata", to call John Cage a "composer", is an insult to musicians and composers everywhere. It's called a -scam-, folks.

As for the silence bits- they're there because a lot of albums have silent tracks that last for a short bit to space tracks out. It's the sign of a mastering company that doesn't know what the shit they're doing, because you can accomplish the same thing with the CD's TOC(table of contents).