I'm not trying to tell you the Asian scene is "more diverse" -- I have trouble imagining how you'd measure it.
My point is largely that there's a hell of a lot of stuff going on in Asia -- for example, I was reading an article in "The Wire" not
long ago about an avant jazz/new music scene in Beijing. I think the diversity of recorded music in Asia is at least roughly comparable to the US: there are
"dominant" acts that may indeed be relatively generic, but there are many splinter groups and undergrounds and different traditions and
ethnic groups that add up to a whole that's difficult to comprehend in it's entirety.
And that's the point: to object to calling asian music diverse, you're claiming to know something
about an incredibly broad field -- and it sounds like you've mostly been exposed to the J-pop ditties favored by some
anime geeks.
Let's take Japan:
There's the band "Crucial Section": thrashy punk rock bordering on grind core.
Otomo Yoshide - experimental noise electronics/turntablist: he has a totally deranged live act, crumbling records to pieces as he plays them (and plays with them).
Emi Elenola, of the band "Demi Semi Quaver" -- does some crazy scream, singing warbling (ala Yoko Ono/Diamanda Galas) in her video "Tokyo Escalator"
Naoko Nozawa, front woman of the band "Ass Baboons of Venus": whacky, raunchy pop-punk
Shoko Hikage -- an excellent, experimental and yet restrained kotoist (currently Bay Area, but I think she's representative of another strain of Japanese music, she never hesitates to credit her teachers, in Japan: Chizuga Kimura, Seiga Adachi and Shizuga Adachi).
the "japanese noise" scene was notorious some years back -- merzbow, masonna, CCCC, etc.
And this is just me, off of the top of my head -- I don't claim to know much of anything about even Japanese music, let alone all of Asia, or even just "East Asia". It isn't just me name-dropping a few odd acts, there's genuinely a hell of a lot of stuff going on over there, in addition to
the sheer numbers of population, there's a huge number of different ethnic groups and traditions. Try doing web searches on "asian underground music" some time.
Witness Obama's early opposition to the Iraq war, and the precise words with which he framed the reasoning and position associated with that opposition; witness Hillary's position on Iraq changing with the wind.
Ah, but she's very steadfast in her determination to blow with the wind in just the same way she always has.
My personal favorite Hillaryism is "Israel has the right to defend itself", on the occasion of their most recent attempt
to bomb Lebanon back to the stone age, because they figured there were some terrorists in there somewhere.
(My sole gripe about Obama at this point is that he's been backing off from making any sympathetic remarks about Palestianians.)
I've heard quite a bit of random Asian music, whether it's sent by friends, in Asian films or on random peoples myspace pages. It's always the same - some syrupy pop with some girl singing over it.
It may be that I have a higher tolerance for this than you do, but myself I'm a fan of the Vietnamese version of this sort of
thing -- it reminds me a bit of French torch-singing, but the Vietnamese language is so complex it forces the vocal melodic
line to be pretty interesting, even if the backing music is a little dull.
There's an older Indonesian pop style called "dangut" that I usually think is listenable.
Maybe I'm just not used to it and it all sounds the same for the same reason Asian faces look the same to Westerners,
And maybe you've only scratched the surface of what's out there, eh?
but I would never describe the Asian music scene as "diverse".
Can't tell the difference between J-pop and Mongolian throat singing, eh?
If you aren't into ballads what has Asia got to offer you?
Well, just thinking about Bali, there's the band "Superman is Dead", that does a kind
of trashy, thrash rock, and there's this guy "Balawan" who does a fusion between traditional Balinese
music and American jazz-rock fusion, and then there's "Yudane" who comes up with some really
interesting out/avant music that's still rooted in the Balinese culture.
(And does Bollywood count as Asia? I can never figure out how people draw their boundaries...)
I dunno. That's a pretty common sentiment. But I have two problems with it:
* Clearly some people like this music. It gets bought, it gets downloaded.
And it gets forgotten a year later.
The major labels make most of their money off of the back catalog.
They can manufacture hit acts -- by spending a lot of money on promotion --
and then the acts die-off: they pay off the initial investment, but not a lot more than
that.
These are pretty much facts (I picked them up from an article in The Economist), and they were facts before the current problems with
ripping and downloading music...
Another thing that's a fact is that when CDs were introduced they cost twice as much as
a vinyl album, and as they became more popular, the price never really came down all that
much -- to me, that smells of oligarchy, and an industry riding fat but living on borrowed
time.
Yes there's no question there are exceptions to the rule that manufactured bands suck (e.g. The Monkees),
but it doesn't take a genius to see that there are Beatles revivals like clockwork and no one cares
about "New Kids on the Block" now that they're old.
It may also have something to do with a downturn in the economy, uncertainty about the future, record levels of consumer debt, and energy prices that take up an ever-increasing share of people's budgets.
And also other competition from new products, DVDs for example.
Why do they always pick Q1 to sound the alarm? No one sells anything in the first
quarter, nearly everyone makes their money in the fourth quarter on gift sales.
When people get over the idea that giving someone a physical object as a gift is
important, then they'll really be in trouble.
Though on the other hand, if physical objects like CDs start seeming like overpriced
gimcrack pieces of plastic, they're not going to seem much like "gifts" any more,
either.
I will agree with you though, to look upon the complete destruction of this industry with glee is not something I share with some others.
Neither do I, I just think that they destroyed themselves back around 1980,
when they decided to rely on manufactured pseudo-bands instead of attempting
to discover new music. Thought experiment: would a big outfit like Columbia give a Leonard
Cohen a recording contract today?
Their current problems are largely, though not entirely, reflections of the fact.
Right. Because after World War II, it became illegal to build them... the country went totally bonkers over a dream of car-based sprawl, and nearly everywhere zoning regulations were changed to demand low-density development. So there's a shortage of places like San Francisco, with an urban density that was grandfathered in, and because no-one can build more of them, the prices are getting bid up.
I'm not sure how you get that it's illegal to build pedestrian-friendly areas. I think it's just an economic thing: most people (i.e. potential customers) expect things to be convenient for driving, so developers build things that way. It's not impossible to make things both pedestrian-friendly and car-friendly, but it's not easy, so if they have to choose, developers will choose car-friendly.
I get it because it's true, and you need to look into this a little further if you think that suburbia is solely the
result of economic choices in a free market. For example, in most places, new buildings require a certain amount
of parking space so the buildings get pushed further apart to allow for parking (or you can house fewer people in
the construction to make room for the rather expensive stacked parking garages), and it gets much less-friendly to
walk between them, and much harder to provide any kind of public transit cover the area.
For what it's worth, the mayor of the City of Austin (Texas) has declared that it his goal to redevelop downtown to radically increase the residential usage. Presently there are about 5000 people living in downtown Austin and his goal is 25,000 residents [austinchronicle.com] over the next decade or so. Apparently as a result of this (maybe through changes to zoning laws, or through some kind of incentives),
This is great news, but there's no "maybe" about the changes to the zoning laws. Post-war, nearly everywhere in the United States
embraced a rigid seperation of functions: residential over here, commerce over there, offices down the road, and industrial areas confined to the west New Jersey of your choice.
there are condos going in everywhere. There are so many projects going on at once you can't keep track of them. High-rise, low-rise, whatever -- you name it, and it's going in.
And, there has been a general trend towards mixed-use development in the last several years. It doesn't automatically make things pedestrian-friendly, but it helps. At least you have some chance of having corner shops you can easily walk to.
Yes, exactly. This is the kind of stone-cold-obvious idea that's been coming out of the "New Urbanism" crowd, and it really is taking
forever to sink in. Remember Austin is a relatively enlightened place (despite the state of it's State).
If you care the place to start reading up on this sort of thing is Jane Jacobs "Death and Life of Great American Cities".
Some of James Howard Kunstler's immoderate rants aren't too bad: "Geography of Nowhere", "Home from Nowhere".
Right. The term 'computer science' has become so muddled because people confuse applied computer science (computer information systems) with actual computer science. Computer science is pure science -- solving the hard problems to advance computing technology.
And the complaint that I would make is that 'computer science' is punting on working on the
really hard problems, because it's populated by mathematicians who all want to be Donald knuth.
My personal peeve is that no one seems to be doing studies of how
computer language design interelates with the social dynamics of groups of software developers.
The author of the article has some other complaint: it's a call to found a New Interdiciplinary Discipline, to focus on popular buzzwords like "complexity", "biological sciences", and "computers".
A little reducto ad absurdum here... Suppose I release the following program under GPL:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
Does that now mean that any Perl script that "includes" mine is now subject to the GPL? How big does an "inclusion" have to be to trigger the GPL? One line of code? Ten? One hundred?
Presuming this is a serious question, you need to understand the doctrine of "fair use" a little better. You can't use copyright to get a monopoly on small bits of stuff like this -- the precise size is not defined in the law (because despite their repuation, lawyers are not as anal retentive as programmers), but there's no way a claim of infringement on something like this would stand up in court.
The thing about the US is that the pedestrian-friendly areas tend to be more expensive to live in.
Right. Because after World War II, it became illegal to build them... the country went totally bonkers over a dream of car-based sprawl, and nearly everywhere zoning regulations were changed to demand low-density development. So there's a shortage of places like San Francisco, with an urban density that
was grandfathered in, and because no-one can build more of them, the prices are getting bid up.
This is one of those things that's pretty well known by anyone who cares to know it,
but it refuses to sink-in to the mass consciousness.
Ever since I heard about this case, I have always steered any purchasing I could toward AMD simply because of the case.
Yup, same here. I like my dual-core opteron box, by the way, and my turion-based laptop is pretty good too.
If enough people did that, and told Intel about it,
Now that's something I've never gotten around to... I just bad mouth them on slashdot.
From what I understand, Intel has some problems hiring sysadmins now.
But Randal's case is probably only a tip-of-the-iceberg thing, I would guess...
anyone I know who's worked at Intel always comes away saying things like
"meat-grinder", "Big Brother", and so on.
I would be fairly surprised if Randal was able to get a security clearance
I was once working as an engineer at a secure facility, where one of my
friends explained to me that he had never actually planned on working there.
He figured he'd let them pay them while the background check was in progress,
but never expected to actually be cleared (the interview with the Feds went
something like Q: "So what about all these hits of acid they found in your refrigerator?",
A: "Well, they were there.")
But they did indeed give him a clearence, I would infer because they concluded he
wasn't vulnerable to blackmail on the point, and so on.
And I have to say that the opinion of "someone who has gone through a security check"
isn't terribly authoritative, unless you were turned down for having a similar background
to Randal's.
The slashdot crowd has a short memory.. This is not a simple issue of "embarassing the management", as the summary states. In fact, in all the original writeups, I don't remember ever hearing executive passwords being an issue.
I remember reading this in a column in a free weekly computer rag, shortly after it happened. The author of the column wasn't willing to mention "Intel" by name... but he was willing to mention that a vice-president of the company was using the password "vicepresident".
In point of fact, I have a long memory. It is not always very good, however, but in this case I think I did okay (though the password in the story is "pre$isdent"...):
That is one of the most common mistakes we software engineers make. Design software to be how we want it, not how the users want it. The users want a slow loading flash page with lots of sounds and a delay due to animation every time you click on something.
This is what the designers tell you, at any rate, but with very few exceptions no one knows whether this is true.
You need to do some useability studies, ala Jakob Nielsen's recommendations to find out whether people use your
site because of the design or inspite of it.
And I would further suggest that the useability study should not be under the control of the
web designers, because the designers have an amazing ability to ignore criticism of their wonderful
designs.
Q: I heard that MP3 files can contain viruses, are they safe?
A: Every file sold on Puretracks, regardless of the format, is guaranteed to be 100% virus free. While MP3 viruses are uncommon, it is possible to get an infected MP3 file from a source such as a peer to peer (P2P) network. All Puretracks MP3 files are delivered to our customers free of viruses and abnormalities.
Well, I didn't mean that to be taken personally... but consider the fact that ESR is on your side.
Egad, you're right! Is it too late to come back?
No, no, never too late. Perl culture is pretty open, when you come down to it.
No idea is too small to steal, and no programmer too weak to corrupt. Uh, I mean
"train".
(Don't worry, you can keep your perl use "minimal"... at first.)
In real life, most OO perl programmers are bombarded with example code, third party modules, and CPAN modules that are not OO. Because of this, most perl code falls back on it's procedural roots out of frustration. You can blame this on the programmers, but this doesn't happen nearly as much in Ruby or Python.
What it might be is that OOP itself has been over-sold as a holy grail, and it's not such a bad thing to be able to bail on it and write proceedural code.
"Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) -- the language which was created by Larry Wall is arguably one of the greatest programming languages."
Hmm, kinda like George W. Bush is arguably one of the greatest presidents.
If I'm well skilled in BASH plus sed and awk, what does perl buy me?
You immediately get some efficiency gains in the form of code run times,
because you're not using six processes every time you turn around;
Having everything inside the one process means the pieces can all talk
to each other easily (you're never stuck trying to figure out how to get
a piece of data jump from one part of a chain of pipes to another);
Perl regular expressions are very powerful compared to the existing
tools, and once you get used to them you can start forgetting the multiple
flavors you're used to;
Perl is arguably the best documented language ever -- the O'Reilley books are
largely excellent, the books from other companies (like the one under review)
are often pretty good too, and the on-line documentation is also quite complete
(including a number of tutorials on different subjects);
Perl scales upward to fairly large projects (compared to bash/awk) -- just how
large is a matter of some debate, but if you get interested in doing something a
little heavier than sysadmin work you can continue to apply your perl skills;
There's a large quantity of existing packages out on CPAN, to the point where
it's difficult to think of something worth adding to the collection -- the problem
with perl is rarely "where will I find something like this", it's more like "how
will I evaluate the six existing solutions"?
Slashdot Mirror
And that's the point: to object to calling asian music diverse, you're claiming to know something about an incredibly broad field -- and it sounds like you've mostly been exposed to the J-pop ditties favored by some anime geeks.
Let's take Japan:
And this is just me, off of the top of my head -- I don't claim to know much of anything about even Japanese music, let alone all of Asia, or even just "East Asia". It isn't just me name-dropping a few odd acts, there's genuinely a hell of a lot of stuff going on over there, in addition to the sheer numbers of population, there's a huge number of different ethnic groups and traditions. Try doing web searches on "asian underground music" some time.
Actually, no I don't.
Ah, but she's very steadfast in her determination to blow with the wind in just the same way she always has.
My personal favorite Hillaryism is "Israel has the right to defend itself", on the occasion of their most recent attempt to bomb Lebanon back to the stone age, because they figured there were some terrorists in there somewhere.
(My sole gripe about Obama at this point is that he's been backing off from making any sympathetic remarks about Palestianians.)
It may be that I have a higher tolerance for this than you do, but myself I'm a fan of the Vietnamese version of this sort of thing -- it reminds me a bit of French torch-singing, but the Vietnamese language is so complex it forces the vocal melodic line to be pretty interesting, even if the backing music is a little dull.
There's an older Indonesian pop style called "dangut" that I usually think is listenable.
And maybe you've only scratched the surface of what's out there, eh?
Can't tell the difference between J-pop and Mongolian throat singing, eh?
Well, just thinking about Bali, there's the band "Superman is Dead", that does a kind of trashy, thrash rock, and there's this guy "Balawan" who does a fusion between traditional Balinese music and American jazz-rock fusion, and then there's "Yudane" who comes up with some really interesting out/avant music that's still rooted in the Balinese culture.
(And does Bollywood count as Asia? I can never figure out how people draw their boundaries...)
And it gets forgotten a year later.
The major labels make most of their money off of the back catalog. They can manufacture hit acts -- by spending a lot of money on promotion -- and then the acts die-off: they pay off the initial investment, but not a lot more than that.
These are pretty much facts (I picked them up from an article in The Economist), and they were facts before the current problems with ripping and downloading music...
Another thing that's a fact is that when CDs were introduced they cost twice as much as a vinyl album, and as they became more popular, the price never really came down all that much -- to me, that smells of oligarchy, and an industry riding fat but living on borrowed time.
Yes there's no question there are exceptions to the rule that manufactured bands suck (e.g. The Monkees), but it doesn't take a genius to see that there are Beatles revivals like clockwork and no one cares about "New Kids on the Block" now that they're old.
Why does it need to imitate every silly bell and whistle of every other website in the world?
(By the way, remember the days when slashdot was the one coming up with new ideas that other sites imitated?)
And also other competition from new products, DVDs for example.
When people get over the idea that giving someone a physical object as a gift is important, then they'll really be in trouble.
Though on the other hand, if physical objects like CDs start seeming like overpriced gimcrack pieces of plastic, they're not going to seem much like "gifts" any more, either.
Neither do I, I just think that they destroyed themselves back around 1980, when they decided to rely on manufactured pseudo-bands instead of attempting to discover new music. Thought experiment: would a big outfit like Columbia give a Leonard Cohen a recording contract today?
Their current problems are largely, though not entirely, reflections of the fact.
adrianmonk wrote:
I get it because it's true, and you need to look into this a little further if you think that suburbia is solely the result of economic choices in a free market. For example, in most places, new buildings require a certain amount of parking space so the buildings get pushed further apart to allow for parking (or you can house fewer people in the construction to make room for the rather expensive stacked parking garages), and it gets much less-friendly to walk between them, and much harder to provide any kind of public transit cover the area.
This is great news, but there's no "maybe" about the changes to the zoning laws. Post-war, nearly everywhere in the United States embraced a rigid seperation of functions: residential over here, commerce over there, offices down the road, and industrial areas confined to the west New Jersey of your choice.
Yes, exactly. This is the kind of stone-cold-obvious idea that's been coming out of the "New Urbanism" crowd, and it really is taking forever to sink in. Remember Austin is a relatively enlightened place (despite the state of it's State).
If you care the place to start reading up on this sort of thing is Jane Jacobs "Death and Life of Great American Cities". Some of James Howard Kunstler's immoderate rants aren't too bad: "Geography of Nowhere", "Home from Nowhere".
And the complaint that I would make is that 'computer science' is punting on working on the really hard problems, because it's populated by mathematicians who all want to be Donald knuth.
My personal peeve is that no one seems to be doing studies of how computer language design interelates with the social dynamics of groups of software developers.
The author of the article has some other complaint: it's a call to found a New Interdiciplinary Discipline, to focus on popular buzzwords like "complexity", "biological sciences", and "computers".
Presuming this is a serious question, you need to understand the doctrine of "fair use" a little better.
You can't use copyright to get a monopoly on small bits of stuff like this -- the precise size
is not defined in the law (because despite their repuation, lawyers are not as anal retentive as
programmers), but there's no way a claim of infringement on something like this would stand up in court.
Right. Because after World War II, it became illegal to build them... the country went totally bonkers over a dream of car-based sprawl, and nearly everywhere zoning regulations were changed to demand low-density development. So there's a shortage of places like San Francisco, with an urban density that was grandfathered in, and because no-one can build more of them, the prices are getting bid up.
This is one of those things that's pretty well known by anyone who cares to know it, but it refuses to sink-in to the mass consciousness.
Yes, life is such a drag, I look forward to these little convieniences that are guaranteed to shave years off of it.
msouth wrote:
Yup, same here. I like my dual-core opteron box, by the way, and my turion-based laptop is pretty good too.
Now that's something I've never gotten around to... I just bad mouth them on slashdot.
From what I understand, Intel has some problems hiring sysadmins now. But Randal's case is probably only a tip-of-the-iceberg thing, I would guess... anyone I know who's worked at Intel always comes away saying things like "meat-grinder", "Big Brother", and so on.
psykocrime worte:
Perhaps, but they gave one to Henry Kissinger...
I was once working as an engineer at a secure facility, where one of my friends explained to me that he had never actually planned on working there. He figured he'd let them pay them while the background check was in progress, but never expected to actually be cleared (the interview with the Feds went something like Q: "So what about all these hits of acid they found in your refrigerator?", A: "Well, they were there.")
But they did indeed give him a clearence, I would infer because they concluded he wasn't vulnerable to blackmail on the point, and so on.
And I have to say that the opinion of "someone who has gone through a security check" isn't terribly authoritative, unless you were turned down for having a similar background to Randal's.
tji wrote:
I remember reading this in a column in a free weekly computer rag, shortly after it happened. The author of the column wasn't willing to mention "Intel" by name... but he was willing to mention that a vice-president of the company was using the password "vicepresident".
In point of fact, I have a long memory. It is not always very good, however, but in this case I think I did okay (though the password in the story is "pre$isdent"...):
endianx wrote:
This is what the designers tell you, at any rate, but with very few exceptions no one knows whether this is true. You need to do some useability studies, ala Jakob Nielsen's recommendations to find out whether people use your site because of the design or inspite of it.
And I would further suggest that the useability study should not be under the control of the web designers, because the designers have an amazing ability to ignore criticism of their wonderful designs.
FUD, yes?
Hoax virus alert targets MP3
notwrong wrong:
No, no, never too late. Perl culture is pretty open, when you come down to it. No idea is too small to steal, and no programmer too weak to corrupt. Uh, I mean "train".
(Don't worry, you can keep your perl use "minimal"... at first.)
What it might be is that OOP itself has been over-sold as a holy grail, and it's not such a bad thing to be able to bail on it and write proceedural code.
Or for that matter, functional code: Higher Order Perl.
Limecron wrote:
Godwin!
Well, I didn't mean that to be taken personally... but consider the fact that ESR is on your side.