Because there are multiple valid definitions, the minute you select one you bias the engine unless you choose a lowest common denominator. In which case, you will end up with 99% useless "matches" and, buried in that list, 1% of useful matches.
An unbiased search engine is completely useless. In short, an unbiased search engine would either list results randomly or according to useless biases such as alphabetical listings.
Any useful search engine will have an algorithm for ranking page relevance. Because search engine placement is so important to business, there will always be people out there who attempt to optimize (and in some cases, abuse) their pages to boost search engine ranking.
The most useful search engine is the one whose biases match your own biases.
What is the point in talking about how everything can be valued in dollars if it's not possible to perform the valuation?
Even if for some things you cannot assign a specific measurement, you can still appreciate relative measurements. With respect to valuing things, relative measurements are much more generally important than specific measurements.
You claimed that "Everything can be assigned a dollar value. EVERYTHING", but now you're telling me that although things can be valued in dollars, it's not always possible to determine what this value is. So of what use is it to talk about qualitative valuations?
The most important principle is that we value some things more than others, and that we can provide a greater than/less than calculus for things. With respect to the topic at hand, this means that paying that I am willing to pay the $200 of a windows license even though I have no use for windows, while the author of the original article is not. It is thus not a matter of principle as to whether you seek the refund, but a matter of valuations.
If you can't fix a quantity, or necessarily even bound it, how is it useful?
I did not say you could not bound it. In fact, I am very specifically saying that you can bound it. In fact, I bounded the value of my life to myself.
Currency is not a system for measuring the value of things, it's a system for facilitating exchange
You are confusing currency with pricing. Prices, like meters, yards, liters, kelvin, etc. is a unit of measure. Currency is independent of price. It is an abstract concept that represents a value independent of the things being valued. Thus, three (or more)-way exchanges can be enabled without requiring the presence of all three players.
Given that fact, how is it possible to establish a dollar value on your life? Can we use some sort of a market to determine it?
I never claimed there was a meaningful market value to everything. There is a market value--but not a meaningful one--to everything. The only things that general have meaningful market values are commodities.
So, clearly, it is not correct to say that "Everything can be assigned a dollar value", since many things have many dollar values.
If everything has at least one dollar value, then "everything can be assigned a dollar value" is a true statement.
There are many things which I wouldn't exchange for any amount of money, or anything else, either. For example, my children's lives. How then can I assign a dollar value to these things? Since I'm not interested in exchanging them, there is no way a system for facilitating exchange can have any bearing on them.
This is sentimental nonsense. Just because the value is very, very high does not imply a value does not exist. Would you sacrifice your children to save the freedom of our country? To support the continued existence of the human race? The entire universe? At some point, you would agree, that yes, you would sacrifice your children. And that is beginning of the calculus for assigning a dollar value. Of course, the dollar value is really, really big and probably practically incalculable. But you can still bound it and use it to determine actions.
Eh? Your valuation of the lives of the rest of the world is greater than your valuation of your own life? Gosh, that sounds like *principle* at work, in contrast to purely cold-blooded value calculation. Or can you also assign a dollar value to your principles? How would you go about estimating *that*, I wonder?
I do not know whether or not you would call it principle, but, yes, you can assign a dollar value to a principle just as I noted in the part your are responding to.
Here is your problem:
"Gosh, that sounds like *principle* at work, in contrast to purely cold-blooded value calculation."
You seem to think there is something inherently negative about something havin
This is true for items that do not carry sentimental value.
Totally false. Emotions and sentimentality have value.
work in a UPS Store. A customer comes in and wants to ship some photographs. How much should the customer insure that package for? The photographs could very well be irreplaceable. More often than not, they are. The person may very well be willing to play $50,000 for those photographs (if they were in such a position). Does that mean that UPS should be obligated to pay $50,000 if the person insures them for that much?
You are confusing replacement costs of an item with the value placed on them by an individual. They are very different concepts. If that person is willing to pay $50,000 for those photographs, then they are worth $50,000 to them! End of story.
To tell the truth, UPS should not care about replacement costs. It should have a schedule of insurance values for various values and let the sender determine how much the package is worth to them.
My only guess is that UPS is concerned with fraud. When fraud comes into play, market value, best demonstrated by replacement value, provides a company like UPS with an objective metric for the item's value to most people. As a general rule, market value works most of the time. Unfortunately, it fails in situations where one person's subjective value of an item differs dramatically from the market value.
The important point, however, is not that some things cannot be assigned a dollar value (as you tried to argue). It is simply that people assign different values to different things.
This principle, by the way, is a critical reason why capitalism works and communism does not. Communism fails to recognize that people place different values on things and instead attempts to assign a single, global value on an item, service, or whatever for all. Capitalism, however, leverages the disparity in valuations to create wealth. Whenever you and I engage in a capitalist transaction, we both end up richer as a result of the transaction because we are giving up things we value less for things we value more.
The one (you must be able to assign a number) does not follow from the other (everything can be valued in dollars). You also need something to help measure that value.
Yes, I can, in principle, devise a number that would be the value of my life to me in dollars. The reservation price is a very large number. In other words, I would pay any amount given the choice to live or not to live. In practice, however, that is never the choice. So the calculation of worth is dependent on calculating other contextual values, such as the cost to society, the cost to my family, etc., etc.
For example, assume I could manage to get hold of the entire GDP of all of the world's countries and that would keep me alive. In principle, I would do that because that is less than my reservation price. Unfortunately, taking all of the world's GDP has associated costs that make it not worth appropriating it for myself.
So, that very large number is somewhere greater than all of the world's GDP but less than my valuation of the lives of the rest of the world.
The fact that *I* do not have the mental capacity to calculate the exact value does not mean it does not have an exact value any more than our inability to calculate any number of scientific values suggests they do not exist.
Yes, it is. Somehow, however, I doubt you actually value them at $5 million. Claiming to value them at that much is not valuing them no more than my claiming to weigh 2000 lbs means I actually weigh 2000 lbs. The true value for you is how much you are willing to pay to acquire the thing.
What I referred to as absurd was the original poster claiming that it was some matter of principle. It is not at all absurd for you to search for and pay less for a TV without the unused feature if you value your time less than $100.
In short, it has nothing to do with principle. It has to do with value.
I cannot believe your response was modded up as insightful!
Everything can be assigned a dollar value. EVERYTHING. That is because everything has value and anything that has value can be measured and the dollar is one of many units for measuring value.
You are being absurd. We pay for aspects of things we buy all the time that we do not care about. That is the difference between custom-made products and mass-produced products. My TV has a PiP function I have never used in the 5 years I have had the TV. Should I try to force Sony to give me a refund for that functionality?
If you want a computer built to your exact specs, then go to a company that does that. Otherwise, accept the fact that it comes with PS2 ports and Windows.
If you added Sun because of this thread, you are a reactionary irrational retard. Sun Solaris is a System V OS and thus Sun is required purchasing licenses as part of doing business with Solaris. You also don't understand the concept of time (these events occurred before anything relating to the IBM nonsense) or corporate warrants.
You also do not understand that Sun is a vendor of Linux solutions that are an important part of delivering entry-level systems for Sun.
Wonder why? Maybe, just matbe, it's because it's not the language's job to do that.
No, that is not why. It is simply a relatively new philosophy in language design. And it seems to work a hell of a lot better since it lowers the learning curve and empowers people to successfully build software that previously could not.
Java doesn't even have a goto FFS, how broken is that?
Because something is not a best practice does not make it a "worst practice". Bind variables are actually very difficult things when you first encounter them--especially if accompanied with no explanation.
On the other hand, in simple SQL examples demonstrating join tables outside the context of any higher level programming language, the use of bind variables is completely inappropriate.
Though you may think I am not taking criticism well, I am simply pointing out that you and the previous poster are looking at the issue outside the proper context. Using bind variables in this chapter would have been WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. On every level.
Except the example chapter is about database architecture and not database programming. And it comes in the book before I have introduced the concept of bind variables (aka callable statements) or stored procedures. Thus, it is:
a) Not a best practice in database architecture, so inappropriate to call out as a best practice at that point
b) Too complex a concept to assume knowledge of at that point in the book
As a side note, I do call this out as a best practice in a later chapter and all subsequent chapters use callable statements in their examples.
It is a book on Java database best practices, not third-party persistence tools. Though Justen Stepka did contribute a good overview on alternate third party persistence tools, so the concept is not ignored.
Every language, not just Java, has best practices. In fact, every thing--from using scissors (don't run with them) to playing right field (play to your right when a right-handed batter is at the plate)--has best practices.
And best practices are always evolving. Many past best practices for Java are no longer best practices because Java has changed. Sometimes best practices help you get around a flaw in the underlying tool (like closing result sets and statements in JDBC code). Those best practices eventually become addressed by the tool itself and thus become outdated.
In short, there is nothing wrong with the fact that best practices change. Furthermore, I seriously doubt Sun's marketing department is in any way involved with the concept of best practices.
And finally, if people were really capable of following "best practices" why the hell did Java have to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator?
As I stated before, a best practice sometimes should be violated. Java cannot and should not enforce every best practice since sometimes you need to violate it. Java tries very hard to choose the right point in the continuum between best practice and "coding law".
Sometimes it may come down on the wrong side by treating some things as best practices that should be law or as treating as law something that should be a best practice. All in all, I think they did a great job even if not close to perfection.
Application sequencers are the correct approach. You use as the only supporting evidence behind your claim that "Application level sequence == BAD":
Ask Tom Kyte (of Oracle) his opinion about doing something like that
In that article, Tom talks about a specific kind of application-level sequencer. The sequence he talks about is, in fact, a bad sequencer. When implementing an application-level sequencer, you must take into account the following:
Generated IDs must be guaranteed to be unique.
The act of generating a new ID must not impact performance negatively.
The example I provide in the book meets both conditions. In fact, it gets around common deficiencies in database-specific sequence generation schemes.
Implementing a sequencer at the application level (one of the "best practices") is a much better idea if you're not clustering your application servers and other applications will not be performing INSERTs into the database.
Actually, with some slight transactional modifications, it can be used in a clustered environment as designed. It was, in fact, originally designed to support a clustered pre-EJB application. I made the transaction support for the sake of this book simpler to illustrate the point.
The key to this scheme is that each application gets its own sequence key, so multiple applications or cluster nodes are free to generate unique IDs without duplication by other nodes or applications.
Disclaimer: I am the author of the book being reviewed.
I have never quite figured out why some developers have a visceral negative reaction to the expression "best practices". In any field, a best practice is nothing more than a rule of thumb that guides your decision making. It is a heuristic.
Best practices cannot be fully incorporated into a language. Java does a good job of that, but new best practices grow from further use. As the reviewer noted, the chapters on newer technologies (e.g. JDO) were lighter in this book because programmers simply have not had as much experience in developing best practices with those technologies as with older ones (e.g. JDBC).
Furthermore, a best practice is not something you get sent to the electric chair for violating. When your decision violates a best practice, the "best practice" status simply indicates that you need to understand why it is a best practice and make sure you go to great lengths to justify its violation. On the other hand, you do not need to think a lot about sticking with a best practice.
By leveraging best practices, you simply gain a short-cut in decision-making. For those people who would say "short-cuts in decision making are bad", get real. Short cuts are necessary. You cannot analyze all possibilities resulting from every decision you make. Otherwise, you would never manage to flip a switch to turn on a light bulb.
I would love to know what backs up his assertion that Linux will surpass Apple. The article he references in BusinessWeek simply states that as a fact with nothing to back it up. It sounds like an example of one person says something and other people start parroting it as if it were science.
In my experience, Apple is picking up users right and left. People I would never have imagined as Apple users. I have not met one person who as adopted Linux as their desktop. I honestly do not see why anyone would.
On the price issue, people need to stop bitching about that. Apple always will be higher priced. That is the cost of innovation. They will also always be second, because you do not corner the market by being the most expensive.
If your record collection, no matter how large, is really a random sample, then you apparently really are a smack addict with far too much money
It is sufficiently random for the purposes at hand. In general, so is anyone else's record collection as long as the record collection is not selected on the basis of its artistry with respect to being an album.
Of course, you could argue that some genres are over-represented in my collection and those genres are more prone to abusing the album format. I do think you would have a hard time making that argument with any genre other than straight pop, however. And my collection is not straight pop.
I'd say at least 50% of them exhibit "MEANINGFUL uses of the album format".
And I would find that hard to believe. Even still, I find that an appalling number when artists are trying to argue that the album format is sacred. Remember, that is 50% of albums you actually like! Nevertheless, I doubt that # is truly 50%. I bet, at best, it is closer to 5-10%. You are just counting albums you really, really like as meaningful uses of the album format.
Also, I sincerely recommend that you acquire a copy of DSotM.
I really do not like Pink Floyd. However, IMHO, Pink Floyd is the only artist who has really, consistently tried to make use of the album as an artistic format, not just the song.
I actually do not have Dark Side of the Moon and I am not a Pink Floyd fan. I cannot comment on whether it should or should not be in the list. Nor is it relevant.
And I do have a quite good collection of albums and quite a varied collection of albums. It is 22GB, however many albums that translates to. While that is not humungous, it is certainly much larger than average.
Whether you think my examples are shitty or not is IRRELEVANT. What would be a good counter argument is some argument that tries to show a higher concentration of MEANINGFUL uses of the album format with respect to a decent random sample of albums.
I truly regret having posted my picks for albums that have properly leveraged the genre. As I noted in the post:
I am sure others exist, and I am sure people can bring up lists of their own favorites. My point is more that out of the hundreds and hundreds of CDs and LPs I own, I only consider 4 to be artistically harmed by pulling them apart. That's just sad.
It is very unfortunate everyone has decided to ignore that point and ignore the overall larger point of my post to attack my list. I hope moderaters will knock down anyone critiquing the list as off topic.
What Paul McCartney thinks about anything, whether he wrote it or not, has NO IMPACT on my appreciation for it.
NONE. I am making no claims on the overall thematic purpose of the album WHATSOEVER. I am making claims on what I FEEL about it.
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Because there are multiple valid definitions, the minute you select one you bias the engine unless you choose a lowest common denominator. In which case, you will end up with 99% useless "matches" and, buried in that list, 1% of useful matches.
Any useful search engine will have an algorithm for ranking page relevance. Because search engine placement is so important to business, there will always be people out there who attempt to optimize (and in some cases, abuse) their pages to boost search engine ranking.
The most useful search engine is the one whose biases match your own biases.
Even if for some things you cannot assign a specific measurement, you can still appreciate relative measurements. With respect to valuing things, relative measurements are much more generally important than specific measurements.
You claimed that "Everything can be assigned a dollar value. EVERYTHING", but now you're telling me that although things can be valued in dollars, it's not always possible to determine what this value is. So of what use is it to talk about qualitative valuations?
The most important principle is that we value some things more than others, and that we can provide a greater than/less than calculus for things. With respect to the topic at hand, this means that paying that I am willing to pay the $200 of a windows license even though I have no use for windows, while the author of the original article is not. It is thus not a matter of principle as to whether you seek the refund, but a matter of valuations.
If you can't fix a quantity, or necessarily even bound it, how is it useful?
I did not say you could not bound it. In fact, I am very specifically saying that you can bound it. In fact, I bounded the value of my life to myself.
Currency is not a system for measuring the value of things, it's a system for facilitating exchange
You are confusing currency with pricing. Prices, like meters, yards, liters, kelvin, etc. is a unit of measure. Currency is independent of price. It is an abstract concept that represents a value independent of the things being valued. Thus, three (or more)-way exchanges can be enabled without requiring the presence of all three players.
Given that fact, how is it possible to establish a dollar value on your life? Can we use some sort of a market to determine it?
I never claimed there was a meaningful market value to everything. There is a market value--but not a meaningful one--to everything. The only things that general have meaningful market values are commodities.
So, clearly, it is not correct to say that "Everything can be assigned a dollar value", since many things have many dollar values.
If everything has at least one dollar value, then "everything can be assigned a dollar value" is a true statement.
There are many things which I wouldn't exchange for any amount of money, or anything else, either. For example, my children's lives. How then can I assign a dollar value to these things? Since I'm not interested in exchanging them, there is no way a system for facilitating exchange can have any bearing on them.
This is sentimental nonsense. Just because the value is very, very high does not imply a value does not exist. Would you sacrifice your children to save the freedom of our country? To support the continued existence of the human race? The entire universe? At some point, you would agree, that yes, you would sacrifice your children. And that is beginning of the calculus for assigning a dollar value. Of course, the dollar value is really, really big and probably practically incalculable. But you can still bound it and use it to determine actions.
Eh? Your valuation of the lives of the rest of the world is greater than your valuation of your own life? Gosh, that sounds like *principle* at work, in contrast to purely cold-blooded value calculation. Or can you also assign a dollar value to your principles? How would you go about estimating *that*, I wonder?
I do not know whether or not you would call it principle, but, yes, you can assign a dollar value to a principle just as I noted in the part your are responding to.
Here is your problem:
"Gosh, that sounds like *principle* at work, in contrast to purely cold-blooded value calculation."
You seem to think there is something inherently negative about something havin
Totally false. Emotions and sentimentality have value.
work in a UPS Store. A customer comes in and wants to ship some photographs. How much should the customer insure that package for? The photographs could very well be irreplaceable. More often than not, they are. The person may very well be willing to play $50,000 for those photographs (if they were in such a position). Does that mean that UPS should be obligated to pay $50,000 if the person insures them for that much?
You are confusing replacement costs of an item with the value placed on them by an individual. They are very different concepts. If that person is willing to pay $50,000 for those photographs, then they are worth $50,000 to them! End of story.
To tell the truth, UPS should not care about replacement costs. It should have a schedule of insurance values for various values and let the sender determine how much the package is worth to them.
My only guess is that UPS is concerned with fraud. When fraud comes into play, market value, best demonstrated by replacement value, provides a company like UPS with an objective metric for the item's value to most people. As a general rule, market value works most of the time. Unfortunately, it fails in situations where one person's subjective value of an item differs dramatically from the market value.
The important point, however, is not that some things cannot be assigned a dollar value (as you tried to argue). It is simply that people assign different values to different things.
This principle, by the way, is a critical reason why capitalism works and communism does not. Communism fails to recognize that people place different values on things and instead attempts to assign a single, global value on an item, service, or whatever for all. Capitalism, however, leverages the disparity in valuations to create wealth. Whenever you and I engage in a capitalist transaction, we both end up richer as a result of the transaction because we are giving up things we value less for things we value more.
The one (you must be able to assign a number) does not follow from the other (everything can be valued in dollars). You also need something to help measure that value.
Yes, I can, in principle, devise a number that would be the value of my life to me in dollars. The reservation price is a very large number. In other words, I would pay any amount given the choice to live or not to live. In practice, however, that is never the choice. So the calculation of worth is dependent on calculating other contextual values, such as the cost to society, the cost to my family, etc., etc.
For example, assume I could manage to get hold of the entire GDP of all of the world's countries and that would keep me alive. In principle, I would do that because that is less than my reservation price. Unfortunately, taking all of the world's GDP has associated costs that make it not worth appropriating it for myself.
So, that very large number is somewhere greater than all of the world's GDP but less than my valuation of the lives of the rest of the world.
The fact that *I* do not have the mental capacity to calculate the exact value does not mean it does not have an exact value any more than our inability to calculate any number of scientific values suggests they do not exist.
Yes, it is. Somehow, however, I doubt you actually value them at $5 million. Claiming to value them at that much is not valuing them no more than my claiming to weigh 2000 lbs means I actually weigh 2000 lbs. The true value for you is how much you are willing to pay to acquire the thing.
In short, it has nothing to do with principle. It has to do with value.
Everything can be assigned a dollar value. EVERYTHING. That is because everything has value and anything that has value can be measured and the dollar is one of many units for measuring value.
If you want a computer built to your exact specs, then go to a company that does that. Otherwise, accept the fact that it comes with PS2 ports and Windows.
You also do not understand that Sun is a vendor of Linux solutions that are an important part of delivering entry-level systems for Sun.
No, that is not why. It is simply a relatively new philosophy in language design. And it seems to work a hell of a lot better since it lowers the learning curve and empowers people to successfully build software that previously could not.
Java doesn't even have a goto FFS, how broken is that?
Not broken at all. There is no need for goto.
Is there a language that does this perfectly? No. Few languages even try. Of those, IMHO, Java is the best at making the balance, even if imperfect.
On the other hand, in simple SQL examples demonstrating join tables outside the context of any higher level programming language, the use of bind variables is completely inappropriate.
Though you may think I am not taking criticism well, I am simply pointing out that you and the previous poster are looking at the issue outside the proper context. Using bind variables in this chapter would have been WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. On every level.
a) Not a best practice in database architecture, so inappropriate to call out as a best practice at that point
b) Too complex a concept to assume knowledge of at that point in the book
As a side note, I do call this out as a best practice in a later chapter and all subsequent chapters use callable statements in their examples.
It is a book on Java database best practices, not third-party persistence tools. Though Justen Stepka did contribute a good overview on alternate third party persistence tools, so the concept is not ignored.
And best practices are always evolving. Many past best practices for Java are no longer best practices because Java has changed. Sometimes best practices help you get around a flaw in the underlying tool (like closing result sets and statements in JDBC code). Those best practices eventually become addressed by the tool itself and thus become outdated.
In short, there is nothing wrong with the fact that best practices change. Furthermore, I seriously doubt Sun's marketing department is in any way involved with the concept of best practices.
And finally, if people were really capable of following "best practices" why the hell did Java have to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator?
As I stated before, a best practice sometimes should be violated. Java cannot and should not enforce every best practice since sometimes you need to violate it. Java tries very hard to choose the right point in the continuum between best practice and "coding law".
Sometimes it may come down on the wrong side by treating some things as best practices that should be law or as treating as law something that should be a best practice. All in all, I think they did a great job even if not close to perfection.
Ask Tom Kyte (of Oracle) his opinion about doing something like that
In that article, Tom talks about a specific kind of application-level sequencer. The sequence he talks about is, in fact, a bad sequencer. When implementing an application-level sequencer, you must take into account the following:
- Generated IDs must be guaranteed to be unique.
- The act of generating a new ID must not impact performance negatively.
The example I provide in the book meets both conditions. In fact, it gets around common deficiencies in database-specific sequence generation schemes.Actually, with some slight transactional modifications, it can be used in a clustered environment as designed. It was, in fact, originally designed to support a clustered pre-EJB application. I made the transaction support for the sake of this book simpler to illustrate the point.
The key to this scheme is that each application gets its own sequence key, so multiple applications or cluster nodes are free to generate unique IDs without duplication by other nodes or applications.
I have never quite figured out why some developers have a visceral negative reaction to the expression "best practices". In any field, a best practice is nothing more than a rule of thumb that guides your decision making. It is a heuristic.
Best practices cannot be fully incorporated into a language. Java does a good job of that, but new best practices grow from further use. As the reviewer noted, the chapters on newer technologies (e.g. JDO) were lighter in this book because programmers simply have not had as much experience in developing best practices with those technologies as with older ones (e.g. JDBC).
Furthermore, a best practice is not something you get sent to the electric chair for violating. When your decision violates a best practice, the "best practice" status simply indicates that you need to understand why it is a best practice and make sure you go to great lengths to justify its violation. On the other hand, you do not need to think a lot about sticking with a best practice.
By leveraging best practices, you simply gain a short-cut in decision-making. For those people who would say "short-cuts in decision making are bad", get real. Short cuts are necessary. You cannot analyze all possibilities resulting from every decision you make. Otherwise, you would never manage to flip a switch to turn on a light bulb.
I have my issues with the RIAA and MPAA, but I would never suggest to anyone with any sanity whatsoever to become a partner with Kazaa.
In my experience, Apple is picking up users right and left. People I would never have imagined as Apple users. I have not met one person who as adopted Linux as their desktop. I honestly do not see why anyone would.
On the price issue, people need to stop bitching about that. Apple always will be higher priced. That is the cost of innovation. They will also always be second, because you do not corner the market by being the most expensive.
It is sufficiently random for the purposes at hand. In general, so is anyone else's record collection as long as the record collection is not selected on the basis of its artistry with respect to being an album.
Of course, you could argue that some genres are over-represented in my collection and those genres are more prone to abusing the album format. I do think you would have a hard time making that argument with any genre other than straight pop, however. And my collection is not straight pop.
I'd say at least 50% of them exhibit "MEANINGFUL uses of the album format".
And I would find that hard to believe. Even still, I find that an appalling number when artists are trying to argue that the album format is sacred. Remember, that is 50% of albums you actually like! Nevertheless, I doubt that # is truly 50%. I bet, at best, it is closer to 5-10%. You are just counting albums you really, really like as meaningful uses of the album format.
Also, I sincerely recommend that you acquire a copy of DSotM.
I really do not like Pink Floyd. However, IMHO, Pink Floyd is the only artist who has really, consistently tried to make use of the album as an artistic format, not just the song.
And I do have a quite good collection of albums and quite a varied collection of albums. It is 22GB, however many albums that translates to. While that is not humungous, it is certainly much larger than average.
Whether you think my examples are shitty or not is IRRELEVANT. What would be a good counter argument is some argument that tries to show a higher concentration of MEANINGFUL uses of the album format with respect to a decent random sample of albums.
I am sure others exist, and I am sure people can bring up lists of their own favorites. My point is more that out of the hundreds and hundreds of CDs and LPs I own, I only consider 4 to be artistically harmed by pulling them apart. That's just sad.
It is very unfortunate everyone has decided to ignore that point and ignore the overall larger point of my post to attack my list. I hope moderaters will knock down anyone critiquing the list as off topic.
What Paul McCartney thinks about anything, whether he wrote it or not, has NO IMPACT on my appreciation for it. NONE. I am making no claims on the overall thematic purpose of the album WHATSOEVER. I am making claims on what I FEEL about it.