You might want to take a remedial course in reading comprehension.
First, I did not say or even suggest there were only 4 good albums or even that I knew of only 4. I said, instead, "I think there are only 4 that have used the format itself as an art."
Ok, so you are unable to comprehend the difference. Let me explain. Take, for example, Garbage by Garbage. IMHO, it is an awesome album. I love every song on it and listen to it all the time. My experience listening to them does not really change whether I listen to the full album in order, listen to it in random order, or listen to the songs mixed in with other songs with my iPod on random play.
The 4 albums I mention, however, lose something when the songs are played independent of the album in the order intended. That is why they make my list and Garbage does not. To make my point even strong, I think the album Garbage is better than all of them except Pornography if you simply look at the album as a collection of random songs.
Second, I fully admit that people may disagree with this list. It is not central or salient to my point that you agree with my selections. The point is that the ratio of albums that treat the whole album as an art form rather than as collection of songs is extremely low.
Finally, as to your personal attack, I listen to a hell of a lot of music. I used to be program director for my college radio station for 2 years, was APD for another 2, and DJ for all 4 years. I was responsible for programming shows with a maximum of diversity. Classic jazz, fusion jazz, heavy metal, glam metal, speed metal, hardcore, punk, goth rock, russian folk, world music, classical, classic rock, new alternative college rock, disco, industrial, rap. In fact, my biggest contributions were recognizing the music tastes of the community in which we were in and getting huge ratings in a genre I personally despise, speed metal.
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Shelly
I have been an avid REM fan since the mid 1980's. Monster and Lifes Rich Pageant rock. Up is total crap.
I am also disappointed that this thread has turned into a discussion of what albums are good as albums. My point is that extremely few are, not that I am the authority on which ones are.
Artists have had 40 years to do something creative with albums. Instead, they have used it as a forum for pawning off a handful of good songs with a mass of shitty songs they could not otherwise sell. In the 40 years of the LP format, I think there are only 4 that have used the format itself as an art:
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
The Beatles, The Beatles (the white album
The Final Cut, Pink Floyd
Pornography, The Cure
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.
Here is something even sadder.
I have ripped all of mine and my wife's CDs onto a server in my house. That is 22 GB of music.
I then went through and rated all of the songs I liked. Of the 22 GB of music, I consider only 7 GB worth listening to in the quirkiest of moods. That is 15 GB I consider complete worthless crap.
Now, it is true you can dismiss some of the crap as "what the hell was I thinking back then" or "what relative thought I listened to this shit" or "why does my wife like heavy metal". That accounts for 2-3 GB.
Under a charitable view of things, this suggests that 12 out of every 19 songs released is considered crap by an artist's own fans! And they want to keep forcing me to pay for this shit?
No more buying albums for me. No thanks. I will preview each new song on the Apple Music Store. If it is any good, I will buy it. If I like the band, I will preview it several times. This will also prevent me from buying crap like REM's Up.
The book was not really aimed at you. It was aimed at open source programmers and hackers getting their first taste of database development.
I think the book was great for that audience.
No book is for everyone. In the end, you can only judge it by its success communicating to its intended audience.
Fortunately, with Managing and Using MySQL, we did tackle the needs of people with dba backgrounds and dba needs.
Re:"O'Reilly's worst dud: MySQL & mSQL"
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 1
Just for fair disclaimer, I am one of the authors and I naturally do not think it is one of "O'Reilly's worst duds".
In actuality, the book got a very good/. review. In fact, reviews on it tended to be fairly schizo. People either loved the book or they did not like it at all. I think this reflects partly the fact that we tried to deal with MySQL and mSQL together (a mistake, though it does reflect that at the time the market is was in transition from mSQL to MySQL) and that the book was aimed at MySQL programmers. If you were a MySQL programmer, you loved it. If you were a MySQL admin, you did not love it so much:)
Our current offering (Managing and Using MySQL) is, of course, dedicated solely to MySQL and addresses both programmers and admins.
I really feel sorry for you. I am willing to bet good money you will never succeed.
Of course, brilliant managers are occasional... just as are abusive managers. The rest are, by and large, about average. Yet you are lumping all manageers in with the few bad ones.
As to the comment they are all out looking for #1... damn straight, everyone is. Obviously you are. The difference between a good manager and a bad one is recognizing that the success of the people who work for him is in his own best interest.
Your complete lack of understanding of management will only cause you misery in the long run. I am sure there are managers who fit the characature you have stereotyped management with. I have met such managers--twice.
Almost no one thinks like that. Unfortunately, since you labor under this false belief, you are doomed to treat management with contempt and suspicion, which ultimately will do nothing for your career.
Technologists are particularly prone to the delusion that the company cannot run without them. In truth, everyone in an organization is expendable. If you are not expendable, that really means you are doing a bad job and they are probably better off in the long term without you anyways.
If you are unhappy where you work, execute a job search and leave when you have another job. In the mean time, work with your bosses to see if you cannot improve the situation. If you do work with them and improve it, you will be happy AND you will be more important. If it does not improve, at least you have ammunition when you are asked what steps you took before deciding to leave at an interview.
Under no circumstances should you talk about leaving or hint that you are actively seeking another job. Their first hint should be your 2 weeks notice. Even if you think you are being nice, you really risk only creating suspicion.
Again, just idle assertions. There is no history of us removing GPS access except in war zones. In fact, there is no history of us removing any similar advancement.
And your freedom rant is absurd. Just because I think the Galileo project is an absurd waste of resources does not mean that I am getting in the way of other people's freedoms.
I'd have a hard time thinking of a bigger waste of resources. Unnecessarily duplicating a very expensive piece of infrastructure that the world needs only one instance of.
This is just some yellow journalist trying to get support for the stupid Galileo concept. It has been widely reported that the government intends no such thing. The only impact of the war on GPS will be reduced availability in the theater of war.
Nerds have no social skills whatsoever. They also fail to bathe regularly (which is probably a symptom of having no social skills). What exactly is the mystery here?
There is, however, a class of sites that are mission-critical. Such an important thing as controlling your domain name or finding information on the site of a TLD authority, must work in any browser, down to those used by 0.01% visitors.
I will guarantee you that 99% of so-called mission critical sites that decide they absolutely must support Netscape 4 are not accessible to users with disabilities. Besides, your statement is blatantly false. There is not web site that needs 100% browser coverage.
Besides, not working in Netscape 4, while often being nearly meaningless in itself, is actually a reliable sign of further troubles with your Web design. It's just a correlation that for some reasons exist in today's Web design.
Quite the contrary, all the contortions you have to go through to get to NS 4 support suggest you probably have tons of non-standard (and thus non-working) HTML/DHTML code.
.com is a stupid extension based on the faulty concept that the world can fit in a flat namespace. It cannot.
Meaningful TLDs are necessary. Unfortunately, ICANN labors under the belief that namespaces are static concepts that should be regulated from high. That is just as stupid as believing in a flat namespace.
Re:.name TLD has incompatible site!
on
.NAME at a Crossroads
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Anyone who builds a site to work for Netscape 4 is wasting their time.
The Myth of the Demand for Multiple Languages
on
The Future of Java?
·
· Score: 1
In reality, most OO languages or languages that can support an OO paradigm can be compiled into JVM byte code. Several projects support that notion. I know, for example, that Python can be compiled to JVM byte code.
You do not, however, see a lot of demand for this. The reason is simple. Organizations do not want the complexity of managing dozens of programming languages. Ideally, they would like to hire only Java or only C# developers and have those developers be able to manage all of their code.
In the real world, of course, companies have an existing investment in multiple languages. They have old COBOL, VB, C++, C, etc. systems to maintain. This fact is used by the C# crowd as an argument for the need for a multi-language VM (which Java is in spite of their arguments to the contrary). In reality, however, it would be foolish to take a working, monolithic COBOL system and stick it in a.NET runtime environment. That's a lot of work for little benefit.
It is a much better design practice to build a facade around that system and enable interaction through that facade.
When people do this, they do not end up "throwing out their investment" as Miguel suggests. They instead empower themselves to retain the investment as long as it makes sense and replace it it makes sense.
In other words, I am saying that, all else being equal, even for.NET people support for multiple languages will prove to be a non-feature. If it were, people would be using that feature of the Java platform. I know that.NET advocates make the claim that.NET bytecode better supports multiple languages. It is true that it is marginally better. Nevertheless, it still carries a bias towards C#. In other words, languages a lot like C# will be supported easily and languages much unlike C# will be harder.
I am not sure I should take the time to followup when you start your post with something so absurd as:
You are forgetting the most obscene part of this scenario: paying $0.01 per skipped commercial is the most ridiculous rip-off since the Louisiana Purchase.
The thrust of your argument seems to be based on the crappy state of Nielsen ratings. Clearly, if you are going to start getting information on who is skipping commercials, you can also get good information on who is watching them. When a commercial is skipped, the viewer pays. When a commercial is watched, the advertiser is pays. The cable company does not rake in the money by getting paid twice.
Now, both sides of the equation are currently counter-factual. There is no way to reliably track who is either skipping or watching commercials. And, as I noted in my earlier post, it is a bit problematic to determine what exactly defines skipping or watching a commercial. Those issues, however, are simple implementation issues for an otherwise creative plan to define a new business model in the world of media convergence.
You clearly posted before you thought through the business model he is proposing. The point is that advertising subsidizes the broadcast of copyrighted content. If advertisers stop advertising, there will be no free TV. You will have to pay through subscriptions or some other model.
Under a "pay-per-skip" model, you are paying the broadcaster, not the commercial maker, $.01 for skipping the commercial. In other words, the broadcaster needs to get $.01 from someone. Thet advertiser is not going to pay it unless you watch the commercial. If you do not watch the commercial, you need to pay that $.01 to make sure you can keep getting the content.
The real problem with this model, however, is:
What constitutes skipping a commercial?
Clearly, using ReplayTV autoskip is skipping commercials. Is going to the bathroom? What about pausing the TV, going to the bathroom, and using autoskip? What about changing the channel?
These are big problems for the proposed business model. It is possible, however, to address them if you try to think them through in a way that will benefit all involved instead of jump to some socialist knee-jerk reaction.
Inherent to the Constitution is the idea that what is a good time limit in 1776 is not necessarily a good time limit in 1900 or 2002. That is why the Constitution prescribes a limit but does not set one. And this was wise on the part of the framers of the Constitution.
Congress needs the ability to change those limits based on changing economic climates in order to protect the balance between public interest and the promotion of science and the arts. Unfortunately, as Lessig argues, this power has been abused to create an effective perpetual copyright term under the guise of a limit.
Lessig argues that any extensions should apply only to new works because any discretion congress has in setting limits applies to the promotion of new works. Extending copyrights on existing works does no such thing. The government attempted to counter with the very weak argument that people who create works expect to be included in any such extensions. I would bet lots of money that not one single work has been created under that line of thought. NO ONE holds back on the creation of a work out of fear they will not be included in the next extension of copyrights. And NO ONE creates works today because they know they will be included in the next extension.
No, it is not. We are detaining them and treating them in accordance with the rules governing prisoners of war. The only thing we are not doing is calling them prisoners of war. We are not shooting them or anything else.
Furthermore, they are members of an enemy force. Comparing that to people talking about computer patches is absurd.
As long as you do not have any weird need to configure your network in any specific locations, forget about the Location feature. Everywhere I go has DHCP enabled. As a result, I go home and plug in or walk around, it just knows its IP and whether to use ethernet or airport. I take the TiBook to work, same thing. No reboot, no changing location, no selecting wireless networks from the menu bar, NOTHING. I have not had to touch network configuration in the 18 months since I switched from Win2k to OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, what does that have to do with the point of the thread?
First, I did not say or even suggest there were only 4 good albums or even that I knew of only 4. I said, instead, "I think there are only 4 that have used the format itself as an art."
Ok, so you are unable to comprehend the difference. Let me explain. Take, for example, Garbage by Garbage. IMHO, it is an awesome album. I love every song on it and listen to it all the time. My experience listening to them does not really change whether I listen to the full album in order, listen to it in random order, or listen to the songs mixed in with other songs with my iPod on random play.
The 4 albums I mention, however, lose something when the songs are played independent of the album in the order intended. That is why they make my list and Garbage does not. To make my point even strong, I think the album Garbage is better than all of them except Pornography if you simply look at the album as a collection of random songs.
Second, I fully admit that people may disagree with this list. It is not central or salient to my point that you agree with my selections. The point is that the ratio of albums that treat the whole album as an art form rather than as collection of songs is extremely low.
Finally, as to your personal attack, I listen to a hell of a lot of music. I used to be program director for my college radio station for 2 years, was APD for another 2, and DJ for all 4 years. I was responsible for programming shows with a maximum of diversity. Classic jazz, fusion jazz, heavy metal, glam metal, speed metal, hardcore, punk, goth rock, russian folk, world music, classical, classic rock, new alternative college rock, disco, industrial, rap. In fact, my biggest contributions were recognizing the music tastes of the community in which we were in and getting huge ratings in a genre I personally despise, speed metal.
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Shelly
I am also disappointed that this thread has turned into a discussion of what albums are good as albums. My point is that extremely few are, not that I am the authority on which ones are.
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
- The Beatles, The Beatles (the white album
- The Final Cut, Pink Floyd
- Pornography, The Cure
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.Here is something even sadder.
I have ripped all of mine and my wife's CDs onto a server in my house. That is 22 GB of music.
I then went through and rated all of the songs I liked. Of the 22 GB of music, I consider only 7 GB worth listening to in the quirkiest of moods. That is 15 GB I consider complete worthless crap.
Now, it is true you can dismiss some of the crap as "what the hell was I thinking back then" or "what relative thought I listened to this shit" or "why does my wife like heavy metal". That accounts for 2-3 GB.
Under a charitable view of things, this suggests that 12 out of every 19 songs released is considered crap by an artist's own fans! And they want to keep forcing me to pay for this shit?
No more buying albums for me. No thanks. I will preview each new song on the Apple Music Store. If it is any good, I will buy it. If I like the band, I will preview it several times. This will also prevent me from buying crap like REM's Up.
I think the book was great for that audience.
No book is for everyone. In the end, you can only judge it by its success communicating to its intended audience.
Fortunately, with Managing and Using MySQL, we did tackle the needs of people with dba backgrounds and dba needs.
In actuality, the book got a very good /. review. In fact, reviews on it tended to be fairly schizo. People either loved the book or they did not like it at all. I think this reflects partly the fact that we tried to deal with MySQL and mSQL together (a mistake, though it does reflect that at the time the market is was in transition from mSQL to MySQL) and that the book was aimed at MySQL programmers. If you were a MySQL programmer, you loved it. If you were a MySQL admin, you did not love it so much :)
Our current offering (Managing and Using MySQL) is, of course, dedicated solely to MySQL and addresses both programmers and admins.
Of course, brilliant managers are occasional... just as are abusive managers. The rest are, by and large, about average. Yet you are lumping all manageers in with the few bad ones.
As to the comment they are all out looking for #1... damn straight, everyone is. Obviously you are. The difference between a good manager and a bad one is recognizing that the success of the people who work for him is in his own best interest.
I do truly feel sorry for you.
Almost no one thinks like that. Unfortunately, since you labor under this false belief, you are doomed to treat management with contempt and suspicion, which ultimately will do nothing for your career.
If you are unhappy where you work, execute a job search and leave when you have another job. In the mean time, work with your bosses to see if you cannot improve the situation. If you do work with them and improve it, you will be happy AND you will be more important. If it does not improve, at least you have ammunition when you are asked what steps you took before deciding to leave at an interview.
Under no circumstances should you talk about leaving or hint that you are actively seeking another job. Their first hint should be your 2 weeks notice. Even if you think you are being nice, you really risk only creating suspicion.
Wah! Wah! Wah!
What an unprofessional little twit.
And your freedom rant is absurd. Just because I think the Galileo project is an absurd waste of resources does not mean that I am getting in the way of other people's freedoms.
And what evidence do you have that the rest of the world cannot rely on the US run GPS system?
I'd have a hard time thinking of a bigger waste of resources. Unnecessarily duplicating a very expensive piece of infrastructure that the world needs only one instance of.
This is just some yellow journalist trying to get support for the stupid Galileo concept. It has been widely reported that the government intends no such thing. The only impact of the war on GPS will be reduced availability in the theater of war.
Nerds have no social skills whatsoever. They also fail to bathe regularly (which is probably a symptom of having no social skills). What exactly is the mystery here?
I will guarantee you that 99% of so-called mission critical sites that decide they absolutely must support Netscape 4 are not accessible to users with disabilities. Besides, your statement is blatantly false. There is not web site that needs 100% browser coverage.
Besides, not working in Netscape 4, while often being nearly meaningless in itself, is actually a reliable sign of further troubles with your Web design. It's just a correlation that for some reasons exist in today's Web design.
Quite the contrary, all the contortions you have to go through to get to NS 4 support suggest you probably have tons of non-standard (and thus non-working) HTML/DHTML code.
Meaningful TLDs are necessary. Unfortunately, ICANN labors under the belief that namespaces are static concepts that should be regulated from high. That is just as stupid as believing in a flat namespace.
Anyone who builds a site to work for Netscape 4 is wasting their time.
You do not, however, see a lot of demand for this. The reason is simple. Organizations do not want the complexity of managing dozens of programming languages. Ideally, they would like to hire only Java or only C# developers and have those developers be able to manage all of their code.
In the real world, of course, companies have an existing investment in multiple languages. They have old COBOL, VB, C++, C, etc. systems to maintain. This fact is used by the C# crowd as an argument for the need for a multi-language VM (which Java is in spite of their arguments to the contrary). In reality, however, it would be foolish to take a working, monolithic COBOL system and stick it in a .NET runtime environment. That's a lot of work for little benefit.
It is a much better design practice to build a facade around that system and enable interaction through that facade. When people do this, they do not end up "throwing out their investment" as Miguel suggests. They instead empower themselves to retain the investment as long as it makes sense and replace it it makes sense.
In other words, I am saying that, all else being equal, even for .NET people support for multiple languages will prove to be a non-feature. If it were, people would be using that feature of the Java platform. I know that .NET advocates make the claim that .NET bytecode better supports multiple languages. It is true that it is marginally better. Nevertheless, it still carries a bias towards C#. In other words, languages a lot like C# will be supported easily and languages much unlike C# will be harder.
You are forgetting the most obscene part of this scenario: paying $0.01 per skipped commercial is the most ridiculous rip-off since the Louisiana Purchase.
The thrust of your argument seems to be based on the crappy state of Nielsen ratings. Clearly, if you are going to start getting information on who is skipping commercials, you can also get good information on who is watching them. When a commercial is skipped, the viewer pays. When a commercial is watched, the advertiser is pays. The cable company does not rake in the money by getting paid twice.
Now, both sides of the equation are currently counter-factual. There is no way to reliably track who is either skipping or watching commercials. And, as I noted in my earlier post, it is a bit problematic to determine what exactly defines skipping or watching a commercial. Those issues, however, are simple implementation issues for an otherwise creative plan to define a new business model in the world of media convergence.
Nothing about the plan is a ripoff.
Under a "pay-per-skip" model, you are paying the broadcaster, not the commercial maker, $.01 for skipping the commercial. In other words, the broadcaster needs to get $.01 from someone. Thet advertiser is not going to pay it unless you watch the commercial. If you do not watch the commercial, you need to pay that $.01 to make sure you can keep getting the content.
The real problem with this model, however, is: What constitutes skipping a commercial?
Clearly, using ReplayTV autoskip is skipping commercials. Is going to the bathroom? What about pausing the TV, going to the bathroom, and using autoskip? What about changing the channel?
These are big problems for the proposed business model. It is possible, however, to address them if you try to think them through in a way that will benefit all involved instead of jump to some socialist knee-jerk reaction.
Congress needs the ability to change those limits based on changing economic climates in order to protect the balance between public interest and the promotion of science and the arts. Unfortunately, as Lessig argues, this power has been abused to create an effective perpetual copyright term under the guise of a limit.
Lessig argues that any extensions should apply only to new works because any discretion congress has in setting limits applies to the promotion of new works. Extending copyrights on existing works does no such thing. The government attempted to counter with the very weak argument that people who create works expect to be included in any such extensions. I would bet lots of money that not one single work has been created under that line of thought. NO ONE holds back on the creation of a work out of fear they will not be included in the next extension of copyrights. And NO ONE creates works today because they know they will be included in the next extension.
Furthermore, they are members of an enemy force. Comparing that to people talking about computer patches is absurd.
As long as you do not have any weird need to configure your network in any specific locations, forget about the Location feature. Everywhere I go has DHCP enabled. As a result, I go home and plug in or walk around, it just knows its IP and whether to use ethernet or airport. I take the TiBook to work, same thing. No reboot, no changing location, no selecting wireless networks from the menu bar, NOTHING. I have not had to touch network configuration in the 18 months since I switched from Win2k to OS X.