I still have my original copies of "It Takes a Nation of Millions" and "Straight Outta Compton" from the 1980s, so it's not like I don't think I'm capable of enjoying rap music. It's just that contemporary rap music is pretty abrasive to me.
I think you could say that by 2000, "alternative rock" had been completely commercialized and there were few bands in that niche that didn't start out as commercialized entities.
Generally though I agree that the first half of the 1990s still had some non-commercial origin and originality, even if some of it was follow-on acts of punk/alternative acts that gained commercial success in the mid-late 1980s.
It does seem that so much of pop music these days revolves around visual image and anyone aspiring to be a pop star needs to look like a model.
Janis Joplin wasn't conventionally pretty, but she did fit the hippie aesthetic well and it may be hard to say how pretty or not pretty she was when a big part of the hippie thing was looking "authentic" and "natural" and not gussied up.
Of course the counter-argument to Janis is Grace Slick, who actually was a model for a while and was conventionally pretty. You might add in Nico (from the Velvet Undergound) there as well, who was also a model but you can argue she wasn't really a meaningful musical contributor and her presence was a byproduct of Andy Warhol's involvement.
And now that I think about it, you can probably lump in Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell into the 1960s "prettier than they needed to be" musical camp. And not to take anything away from their musical merits, either, it's just that all of them were quite good looking as well.
I think pop music blows. It seems to be one "singer" who doesn't really sing, and the music is mostly some kind of beat and there's almost no melody or music at all besides the percussion beat and maybe some kind of occasional synthesizer fill in. There seems to be a side version of this, featuring only a guitar with someone who can't lift their fingers off the strings.
And the artist? It's like "Sharyian, Featuring Gtili and Wryannn" or some other kind of "collaboration" which ranges from the featured artists' presence being almost unknowable without the credits or totally dominating the song so that you don't know it was the "main" artists' song.
But my kid loves it, so who am I? Some old guy who thinks this younger generation is full of it? Where have I heard that one before?
My larger take is that this is just pop music subsuming "rap" music. The kid if given the choice will also try to play the rap station, which is even worse. Lyrics totally devoid of meaning and a "beat" that's just kind of a cacophony of rhythm and noise. It makes flipping the station back to classic rock like discovering something amazing.
No, I was referring to specific situations where you find yourself needing to make a change in vCenter to support a vCenter recovery step.
IMHO, vCenter is a real house of cards for VMware environments. There are kind of workarounds, like running multiple clusters with vCenter running in the "other" cluster, frequent cloning/replication, etc, but none of them really solve the core problem that vCenter is 8 gallons of shit in a 4 gallon pail.
I like the fact that host installs are pretty lightweight (ie for install to flash, etc), but at the same time I think some of the self-imposed limitations on built in native host functionality this requires can be kind of frustrating.
Too much functionality relies on vCenter and it has proved too fragile on too many occasions. I'd kind of hope for something more clever at this point that involved some of it moved back into the host and vCenter streamlined a bit to only be larger scale functionality and larger database elements.
MS would like to be #1, but they are trying to do it through licensing breaks for VMs not software quality and reliability. Hyper-V still sucks and their management tools are worse than VMware.
Way too many acquisitions are just sniping of almost-mature products just to prevent someone else from buy them or the IP, not because the buyer really cares about making them work.
I can't comment on the internals of VMware, but as a longtime user and vendor I feel like VMware went off the rails a few years ago. I think once they had a lot of SMB penetration the MBA geniuses knew growth was going to stall and they moved into the "tools and extensions" mode where they pushed all the add-ons...which maybe only bigger customers buy.
The few we installed always sucked, a weird mix of appliance VMs, Windows services, etc, and much of it was a mish-mash of configuration in vCenter web and Windows.
And while we're talking about vCenter -- jeezus, can we make the fucking web interface work worth a damn? It's been a trainwreck forever and still is IMHO, and got help you if it gets fucked up AND you need to do some kind of vCenter-only action...to recover vCenter! Which you will have to do since they make stupid mistakes like chronically undersizing vCenter disk partitions which then fill up and crash the Jenga structure of 1001 processes that make up vCenter.
It's high time base vCenter functionality like VM migration (including storage migration) was built into the base host install.
IMHO, for basic virtualization it's still a shitload better than Hyper-V. I keep waiting for 3rd party KVM-based products (like Nutanix) to catch up to Vmware. When they do, VMware's strategy of relying on bolt-ons and big license fees will drain them.
And I'll accept Google's liability when it comes in a minimum of 5 bundles of cash with "$10,000" wrappers around each one and I can take that cash and put it in my bank account.
Until then, Google's liability means a ream of paperwork that covers nothing and most likely will not cover any individual losses I might incur.
Nobody misses Java applets or Flash blobs. IMHO, the hope was that when Flash expired those sites would be forced to migrate to less obnoxious interfaces. Unfortunately the Black Mirror like outcome was that all those dumb Flash and Java applets waited until HTML5 matured enough that they could basically just produce the same shit as HTML5.
I almost wonder if there were tools made that allowed for cross-compiling (translating?) a Flash project as HTML5 directly.
Have you noticed how it's not really gotten any *better*, though?
Unlike many other web sites, Amazon seems to use a product description keyword based categorization system. If you're searching for a widget in a broad category (eg, "headphones"), it's nearly impossible to use Amazon to filter the search accurately by attributes because the filter categories are based on production descriptions, not actual specifications.
I always seem to end up with a bunch of junk, accessories, etc, only tangentially related to the actual thing I'm shopping for because the seller have spammed their description with keywords.
I sure wish Amazon had a detailed advanced search like NewEgg, where you can really drill down accurately.
I started using Facebook about 2009 and until the last couple of years found it a fairly entertaining way to waste time and keep up with old friends and family. I was bothered by Facebook's occasional lapses in privacy control, but not overly so.
I've quit using it for the last six months and what really drove me away was the relentless partisan bitching. Gone were the random food snapshots, the ephemera of people's daily lives and humorous observations. In their place was a relentless sharing of political memes, "news" articles and sociopolitical scolding and partisanship.
And I mean by both sides -- lunatic right AND left wing bullshit. I live in a liberal community and by default know more liberal people, so it was worse from that side of the equation but there wasn't a shortage of right wing bullshit either.
My sense is that the turning point was the ability to re-share unoriginal content. Somebody taking the effort to cut and paste a link and hopefully comment is mostly fine, but too much is low-effort resharing and not enough original content. I think this nicely set the stage for partisan ranting and bitching.
I also think it creates a false social dynamic. While it seemed great to keep in touch with people I didn't get to see too often, the reality is I don't see those people or stay in touch "manually" for all kinds practical and probably social reasons. FB lets you stay in touch, but to what end? I didn't actually end up seeing 90% of those people.
Why is this so hard to accept as not only true, but also a giant image recognition/computer vision challenge?
You go to nearly any zoo with large primates and you're bound to hear someone say "They look so human!" Well of course they do, humans are primates.
Which means that it works in reverse, too, primates look like humans. And it's not surprising that blacks look more like gorillas. I mean, there is the whole black coloration to begin with, but also the flatter nose and other facial features of gorillas which are shared with black more than Caucasians.
Of course no reasonable human would think that a black *is* a gorilla or vice versa. But computer vision? It's like version 0.01 alpha and the similarities are strong enough that it's not surprising at all that it would misidentify blacks as gorillas or vice versa.
Reading these comments, it seems nobody has actually been to the Villages in Florida.
The summary is right, it's huge -- it goes on and on and on. What it leaves out, though, is that the entire place is meant to be navigable on foot but mostly via golf cart. Everybody there has a customized golf cart, and you can go anywhere in the Villages via golf cart and everyone does. There's almost no automobile traffic.
The place is split up into "towns" with each one having a little town square and often its own recreational features (pools, community centers, golf courses, etc). They're all open to all Villages residents, too, and the little squares have businesses that are unique.
It's also pretty affluent -- the newer parts of the Villages are pretty luxurious and I think they get a lot of money for the homes/townhouses. The older parts are more similar to small prefab houses, but I think the whole place is in demand and while parts are cheaper, none are cheap. (Side fact: very high STD incidence in the Villages).
Anyway, it seems like a reasonable place to test self-driving cars due to the limited traffic. The downside is you'll never pull these people out of their golf carts. I'd wager that there are people who can't drive a car but still drive their golf cart. Plus, most of the residents are still in a pretty mobile/independent stage of living. If you already can't drive at all, you probably have other problems that make living in your own home a challenge, limiting the audience for self-driving cars.
This is the real problem -- if it was a feature, why wasn't it advertised or even made switchable/adjustable?
It's hard not to see it as deliberate obsolescence at worst or just crummy software engineering at best (ie, not producing builds with battery sucking features handled more efficiently in newer hardware).
But when you find it they were slowing phones deliberately, it makes the whole thing seem like excuse making.
I've thought that rods of god would be the best way to deal with DPRK.
The total absence of any missile trajectory, radar signature or aircraft flight path could give the US plausible deniability, possibly even a way to argue it was meteor fragments and not a man made object, especially since there would be no explosive residue or radiological signature.
I don't think CEOs really work for the "owners" of the company. That seems to be a naive and rosy textbook example of how a share-based company works, not a how most of them really work.
You might argue the CEOs work for the board, but usually they are the chairmen of the board, too, and have a lot of influence on the board. Through the overlapping corporate officer board memberships, they're prone to having a lot of influence over the compensation committees, allowing for very generous pay packages.
They seem most responsive to "the market", the amorphous entity that can influence stock prices, but only when their stock performance seems to deviate from guidance or expected outcomes.
You can't talk about obsolete on Slashdot or you're inundated with people running Pentium I systems, ancient Nokia phones, etc. It's an audience that takes pride in wringing the last bits of life out of old hardware.
Hasn't there long been an ability to build a safe that self-destructs its contents if forcibly opened? And prior to electronic communications, wiretaps weren't even possible -- you had to intercept the messenger (with risk that the interception would be known) or eavesdrop physically. Even with wiretaps, criminals have beaten in various ways -- random payphones, burner cell phones, not talking on phones at all, etc.
I think encryption really just reverts policing back to more of a historical mean. Today's senior FBI people are all of a generation where "get a warrant" and the cooperation of telecom carriers or online providers easily gave them access to most communications. They didn't do policing when there were no cell phones, no computers and a bribe (or threat) to a telco employee could get you an off-the-record landline, possibly even associated with another business or residential customer.
Worse, the FBI's demands basically line up with a surveillance state, relying on their good will to not violate privacy or constitutional rights.
I think this is the best answer. I doubt "Western Digital" had much to do with the actual software development. They probably had some web designer approve the user interface look and feel for compliance to their design standards and the rest was done who knows where.
The downside to open source software seems to be the ease at which it allows multinationals to buy the cheapest software possible without actually having to invest much at all in software development, all they need is someplace minimally competent to glue together a bunch of open source components.
Yeah, but statistically significant portions of N live in 3-4 metro areas. If those areas seem some localized shift it can move the national statistics without other areas seeing changes.
Slashdot Mirror
I still have my original copies of "It Takes a Nation of Millions" and "Straight Outta Compton" from the 1980s, so it's not like I don't think I'm capable of enjoying rap music. It's just that contemporary rap music is pretty abrasive to me.
I think you could say that by 2000, "alternative rock" had been completely commercialized and there were few bands in that niche that didn't start out as commercialized entities.
Generally though I agree that the first half of the 1990s still had some non-commercial origin and originality, even if some of it was follow-on acts of punk/alternative acts that gained commercial success in the mid-late 1980s.
It does seem that so much of pop music these days revolves around visual image and anyone aspiring to be a pop star needs to look like a model.
Janis Joplin wasn't conventionally pretty, but she did fit the hippie aesthetic well and it may be hard to say how pretty or not pretty she was when a big part of the hippie thing was looking "authentic" and "natural" and not gussied up.
Of course the counter-argument to Janis is Grace Slick, who actually was a model for a while and was conventionally pretty. You might add in Nico (from the Velvet Undergound) there as well, who was also a model but you can argue she wasn't really a meaningful musical contributor and her presence was a byproduct of Andy Warhol's involvement.
And now that I think about it, you can probably lump in Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell into the 1960s "prettier than they needed to be" musical camp. And not to take anything away from their musical merits, either, it's just that all of them were quite good looking as well.
I think pop music blows. It seems to be one "singer" who doesn't really sing, and the music is mostly some kind of beat and there's almost no melody or music at all besides the percussion beat and maybe some kind of occasional synthesizer fill in. There seems to be a side version of this, featuring only a guitar with someone who can't lift their fingers off the strings.
And the artist? It's like "Sharyian, Featuring Gtili and Wryannn" or some other kind of "collaboration" which ranges from the featured artists' presence being almost unknowable without the credits or totally dominating the song so that you don't know it was the "main" artists' song.
But my kid loves it, so who am I? Some old guy who thinks this younger generation is full of it? Where have I heard that one before?
My larger take is that this is just pop music subsuming "rap" music. The kid if given the choice will also try to play the rap station, which is even worse. Lyrics totally devoid of meaning and a "beat" that's just kind of a cacophony of rhythm and noise. It makes flipping the station back to classic rock like discovering something amazing.
No, I was referring to specific situations where you find yourself needing to make a change in vCenter to support a vCenter recovery step.
IMHO, vCenter is a real house of cards for VMware environments. There are kind of workarounds, like running multiple clusters with vCenter running in the "other" cluster, frequent cloning/replication, etc, but none of them really solve the core problem that vCenter is 8 gallons of shit in a 4 gallon pail.
I like the fact that host installs are pretty lightweight (ie for install to flash, etc), but at the same time I think some of the self-imposed limitations on built in native host functionality this requires can be kind of frustrating.
Too much functionality relies on vCenter and it has proved too fragile on too many occasions. I'd kind of hope for something more clever at this point that involved some of it moved back into the host and vCenter streamlined a bit to only be larger scale functionality and larger database elements.
MS would like to be #1, but they are trying to do it through licensing breaks for VMs not software quality and reliability. Hyper-V still sucks and their management tools are worse than VMware.
Way too many acquisitions are just sniping of almost-mature products just to prevent someone else from buy them or the IP, not because the buyer really cares about making them work.
I can't comment on the internals of VMware, but as a longtime user and vendor I feel like VMware went off the rails a few years ago. I think once they had a lot of SMB penetration the MBA geniuses knew growth was going to stall and they moved into the "tools and extensions" mode where they pushed all the add-ons...which maybe only bigger customers buy.
The few we installed always sucked, a weird mix of appliance VMs, Windows services, etc, and much of it was a mish-mash of configuration in vCenter web and Windows.
And while we're talking about vCenter -- jeezus, can we make the fucking web interface work worth a damn? It's been a trainwreck forever and still is IMHO, and got help you if it gets fucked up AND you need to do some kind of vCenter-only action...to recover vCenter! Which you will have to do since they make stupid mistakes like chronically undersizing vCenter disk partitions which then fill up and crash the Jenga structure of 1001 processes that make up vCenter.
It's high time base vCenter functionality like VM migration (including storage migration) was built into the base host install.
IMHO, for basic virtualization it's still a shitload better than Hyper-V. I keep waiting for 3rd party KVM-based products (like Nutanix) to catch up to Vmware. When they do, VMware's strategy of relying on bolt-ons and big license fees will drain them.
And I'll accept Google's liability when it comes in a minimum of 5 bundles of cash with "$10,000" wrappers around each one and I can take that cash and put it in my bank account.
Until then, Google's liability means a ream of paperwork that covers nothing and most likely will not cover any individual losses I might incur.
Nobody misses Java applets or Flash blobs. IMHO, the hope was that when Flash expired those sites would be forced to migrate to less obnoxious interfaces. Unfortunately the Black Mirror like outcome was that all those dumb Flash and Java applets waited until HTML5 matured enough that they could basically just produce the same shit as HTML5.
I almost wonder if there were tools made that allowed for cross-compiling (translating?) a Flash project as HTML5 directly.
Have you noticed how it's not really gotten any *better*, though?
Unlike many other web sites, Amazon seems to use a product description keyword based categorization system. If you're searching for a widget in a broad category (eg, "headphones"), it's nearly impossible to use Amazon to filter the search accurately by attributes because the filter categories are based on production descriptions, not actual specifications.
I always seem to end up with a bunch of junk, accessories, etc, only tangentially related to the actual thing I'm shopping for because the seller have spammed their description with keywords.
I sure wish Amazon had a detailed advanced search like NewEgg, where you can really drill down accurately.
People at least are experts in the trivialities of their life.
Literally nobody I was FB friends with was an expert in politics.
I started using Facebook about 2009 and until the last couple of years found it a fairly entertaining way to waste time and keep up with old friends and family. I was bothered by Facebook's occasional lapses in privacy control, but not overly so.
I've quit using it for the last six months and what really drove me away was the relentless partisan bitching. Gone were the random food snapshots, the ephemera of people's daily lives and humorous observations. In their place was a relentless sharing of political memes, "news" articles and sociopolitical scolding and partisanship.
And I mean by both sides -- lunatic right AND left wing bullshit. I live in a liberal community and by default know more liberal people, so it was worse from that side of the equation but there wasn't a shortage of right wing bullshit either.
My sense is that the turning point was the ability to re-share unoriginal content. Somebody taking the effort to cut and paste a link and hopefully comment is mostly fine, but too much is low-effort resharing and not enough original content. I think this nicely set the stage for partisan ranting and bitching.
I also think it creates a false social dynamic. While it seemed great to keep in touch with people I didn't get to see too often, the reality is I don't see those people or stay in touch "manually" for all kinds practical and probably social reasons. FB lets you stay in touch, but to what end? I didn't actually end up seeing 90% of those people.
I'm 51 this year and my great-grandmother was only born in 1882.
You must be over 60 and your previous generation parents must have had their kids when they were somewhat older to go back to the Civil War.
Why is this so hard to accept as not only true, but also a giant image recognition/computer vision challenge?
You go to nearly any zoo with large primates and you're bound to hear someone say "They look so human!" Well of course they do, humans are primates.
Which means that it works in reverse, too, primates look like humans. And it's not surprising that blacks look more like gorillas. I mean, there is the whole black coloration to begin with, but also the flatter nose and other facial features of gorillas which are shared with black more than Caucasians.
Of course no reasonable human would think that a black *is* a gorilla or vice versa. But computer vision? It's like version 0.01 alpha and the similarities are strong enough that it's not surprising at all that it would misidentify blacks as gorillas or vice versa.
To be honest, the Villages is about as good as it gets for senior living.
I'm not sure I'd want to be there at age 55, but it's actually a hell of lot nicer than senior living options in most other places.
Reading these comments, it seems nobody has actually been to the Villages in Florida.
The summary is right, it's huge -- it goes on and on and on. What it leaves out, though, is that the entire place is meant to be navigable on foot but mostly via golf cart. Everybody there has a customized golf cart, and you can go anywhere in the Villages via golf cart and everyone does. There's almost no automobile traffic.
The place is split up into "towns" with each one having a little town square and often its own recreational features (pools, community centers, golf courses, etc). They're all open to all Villages residents, too, and the little squares have businesses that are unique.
It's also pretty affluent -- the newer parts of the Villages are pretty luxurious and I think they get a lot of money for the homes/townhouses. The older parts are more similar to small prefab houses, but I think the whole place is in demand and while parts are cheaper, none are cheap. (Side fact: very high STD incidence in the Villages).
Anyway, it seems like a reasonable place to test self-driving cars due to the limited traffic. The downside is you'll never pull these people out of their golf carts. I'd wager that there are people who can't drive a car but still drive their golf cart. Plus, most of the residents are still in a pretty mobile/independent stage of living. If you already can't drive at all, you probably have other problems that make living in your own home a challenge, limiting the audience for self-driving cars.
This is the real problem -- if it was a feature, why wasn't it advertised or even made switchable/adjustable?
It's hard not to see it as deliberate obsolescence at worst or just crummy software engineering at best (ie, not producing builds with battery sucking features handled more efficiently in newer hardware).
But when you find it they were slowing phones deliberately, it makes the whole thing seem like excuse making.
I've thought that rods of god would be the best way to deal with DPRK.
The total absence of any missile trajectory, radar signature or aircraft flight path could give the US plausible deniability, possibly even a way to argue it was meteor fragments and not a man made object, especially since there would be no explosive residue or radiological signature.
I don't think CEOs really work for the "owners" of the company. That seems to be a naive and rosy textbook example of how a share-based company works, not a how most of them really work.
You might argue the CEOs work for the board, but usually they are the chairmen of the board, too, and have a lot of influence on the board. Through the overlapping corporate officer board memberships, they're prone to having a lot of influence over the compensation committees, allowing for very generous pay packages.
They seem most responsive to "the market", the amorphous entity that can influence stock prices, but only when their stock performance seems to deviate from guidance or expected outcomes.
I think a lot of businesses in NYC already do this, owing to the large Jewish population there.
You can't talk about obsolete on Slashdot or you're inundated with people running Pentium I systems, ancient Nokia phones, etc. It's an audience that takes pride in wringing the last bits of life out of old hardware.
Hasn't there long been an ability to build a safe that self-destructs its contents if forcibly opened? And prior to electronic communications, wiretaps weren't even possible -- you had to intercept the messenger (with risk that the interception would be known) or eavesdrop physically. Even with wiretaps, criminals have beaten in various ways -- random payphones, burner cell phones, not talking on phones at all, etc.
I think encryption really just reverts policing back to more of a historical mean. Today's senior FBI people are all of a generation where "get a warrant" and the cooperation of telecom carriers or online providers easily gave them access to most communications. They didn't do policing when there were no cell phones, no computers and a bribe (or threat) to a telco employee could get you an off-the-record landline, possibly even associated with another business or residential customer.
Worse, the FBI's demands basically line up with a surveillance state, relying on their good will to not violate privacy or constitutional rights.
I think this is the best answer. I doubt "Western Digital" had much to do with the actual software development. They probably had some web designer approve the user interface look and feel for compliance to their design standards and the rest was done who knows where.
The downside to open source software seems to be the ease at which it allows multinationals to buy the cheapest software possible without actually having to invest much at all in software development, all they need is someplace minimally competent to glue together a bunch of open source components.
Yeah, but statistically significant portions of N live in 3-4 metro areas. If those areas seem some localized shift it can move the national statistics without other areas seeing changes.