Twenty years ago, I would have agreed with the poster you are arguing with. I could not quantify the reasons why, but in a simple double-blind test I would choose analog sources over the best available digital stuff every time.
However, most of what we thought, back then, to be the flaws of "the digital sound" had precious little to do with sample rates. The problems with early digital were in fact due to the following:
1. Shitty D/A conversion logic. Early CD players (or D/A break-out boxes) were extremely stupid about how to fill in high-frequency waves based on the samples given. This resulted in a "harshness" which became very obvious when listening to brass instruments, violins, or soprano singers. It also caused percussion cymbals and other sibilant sounds to become a bit more unpleasant.
2. Component bias. Analog audio introduces several flaws into the process. The biggest being that records can't store low-frequency signals at their full amplitude relative to the rest of the wave. To get around this problem, the RIAA (yes, that RIAA) developed a standard "Phono EQ", by which recording engineers would dial down the low frequencies, and another EQ circuit in your stereo would crank them back up. This rather destructive compromise results in recording which are not, in fact, as good as the full potential of digital recording; however, the entire history of Hi-Fi from the 60s through the 80s evolved around building components which produced the best sound from these flawed sources.
So, an amplifier was judged as a "very good" amplifier if it more effectively "undid" the flaws of analog recording than a competing amp. Since the bass has been muddied by electronic tweaking, an amp that creates the illusion of "tightening" it up is regarded as a better amp.
Now, plug in a source without the audio problems of vinyl into one of these magically "good" amps, and what do you suppose the result is going to be? You've now got an amp applying corrections to a source which doesn't need to be corrected, resulting in an unsatisfying sound.
3. Source bias. For reasons similar to what provoked the component bias, many of the "gold standard" hi-fi recordings of the 70s and 80s were made by producers who knew their stuff would be played back on phonographs, and they adjusted their studio habits accordingly. Compression was carefully used in order to never veer outside the dynamic range of a turntable. Noise below the S/N floor of a needle being dragged along a wax groove was completely ignored. Prior to the mastering process, sources were colored to favor the playback experience of the final pressing above all else. When albums started getting moved to CD, these new CD's not only uncovered the warts in the original source material, they often enhanced them. Until digital recording technology caught up with the analog gear in top-end studios, most of the CDs you bought were from masters which were never meant to be rendered so perfectly.
4. Listener bias. A lot of people grew to love the sound of a good hi-fi record playing from a good hi-fi system, and failed to notice that the very pleasant "warmth" that they hear when listening to records is not actually present in a live perfromance. A CD can sound much, much closer to an actual string quartet sitting in the room with you, but the vinyl aficionado will consistently prefer the sound of his record, not because it sounds more real, but because it sounds more satisfying.
I am a recovering vinyl addict myself. I still love the sound of those old Scheffield Labs direct-to-master albums (even if most of the music on them is crap), but as CD sound got better and better during the 90s, the myths surrounding the "shortcomings" of 44.1 digital sound became more and more obviously debunked.
What's my incentive to spend $500 if I'm an average-Joe satisfied with my current television?
None, except that TV sets wear out, and when the time comes to buy the next one you might as well go high-def.
Then again, if you are Joe Average and satisfied with your current TV, you might also be satisfied with your current PS-2, X-Box, or Game Cube, and have no incentive to buy a Wii either.
Wiimote aside, what an underpowered console means for games is that you might as well buy a cheap used console from the previous generation and game makers might as well keep developing for the previous generation consoles.
Give it up, AC. Wii fanboys will not see reason on this issue.
It's not a vastly underpowered (for the current generation) game system being sold for more than the parts are worth (when the competition is selling hot new tech at a loss), propped up by a gimmicky controller.
No, it's not that at all. It's a REVOLUTION!
BILLIONS of people who never had any interest in gaming before are going to want to buy this thing to play games because it's... uh... so cheap, and the controls are... uh... so intuitive. Yeah, that's it, intuitive. You can play bowling games where you move your arm just as if you are bowling!!! That's so awesome!!! Forget the fact that the main competition for capturing the "casual" game market is those $20 joysticks that are pre-loaded with arcade classics. This thing will let you go online and play all those classic NINTENDO games which they never played. How can they resist getting sucked into the nostalgia which being able to play the original Super Mario Bros. will surely inspire in other people???
To say otherwise is to be bitchslapped by fanboys abusing their mod points until your IP is banned, as happened to me last time I dared to say the emperor has no clothes. (And is probably about to happen again... just watch.)
The whole reason we switched to CDs from records and cassettes was supposedly the higher fidelity of CD audio.
Early CD audio was inferior to a good turntable. The adoption of CD players happened because:
1. An "okay" CD player was cheaper than a "barely acceptable" turntable.
2. Records are a royal pain in the ass to keep clean, unbroken, and unwarped. Mere house dust can damage them forever, and even simply using them as intended in a mythical perfect environment will degrade them eventually.
3. Cueing up tracks on a record is kind of a hassle on most players.
The very fact that you hold up the UI similarities between Win 3.1 and Motif as an example of Microsoft's history of "getting it right" tells me everything I need to know about your evaluation of OS front-ends. Cheers.
Clockwork Orange came out during a time where DRM wasn't commonplace, people could afford (and wanted to go) to the local movie theater and we didn't pay extra money for special home versions that were a couple frame different than the original film. Don't get confused by things.
And who would I buy this evil-free DVD from? Some entertainment distributor completely free of these practices you detest so much, certainly...
Since nobody is likely to do a Google search for "miserable failure" unless a liberal blogger friend calls them and says, "hey, Dude! *snicker* Do a Google search for 'miserable failure'. It is soooooo funny! ROTFLOL!"
So, it's relatively harmless, and will probably be a practice which loses steam once nobody finds it all that witty anymore.
Why is that every time I read one of these tirades it sounds like some guy strapped to a chair with his eyelids propped open ala Clockwork Orange?
Guess what? You have the right (no quotes) to not buy the DVD in the first place. You have the right (no quotes) to tell Hollywood, the RIAA, and the entire goddamn entertainment industry to shove this crap up their ass. You have the right (no quotes) to show them with your wallet that you don't want their drivel, DRM'd or not.
Instead, you (i.e.. the consumer) pay $9 for a $2 movie. You go out and buy the Super Amazing Collector's Edition with one more frame redone than the last time. You make films like Nacho Libre a commercial success.
And by reccommending "Clockwork Orange", a classic Hollywood movie, you have become part of the problem as you have defined it.
Like it or not, Film-making is the predominant American art form, and to disconnect from movies and TV is to disconnect from our culture.
This is a new phenomenon. It's only recently that these people have bought macs, due to OSX.
Wrong again, but thanks for playing. Most of my Mac-using friends and contacts, including myself, were System 7 users back in the day. In college in the early 90s, few people knew Windows inside-out half as well as the Mac geeks I rolled with.
You must not know very many mac users.
Only a couple hundred. Not enough of a sample for you?
A lot of them are confused by too many buttons, and I am not making this up.
Maybe things are different outside of Minnesota, but in my experience there are two major groups of Mac users: 1. Creative work geeks, 2. Computer science geeks. (As a professional programmer and semi-pro musician, I fit in both groups.) In all cases, mac users deal with Windows on an extremely regular basis. For example, printing professionals like to use Macs, but not all of their customers do. To survive in business, they need to MASTER both systems. Having done so, they almost invariable choose Macs for themselves.
Windows users, on the other hand, are made up by: 1. Gamers, 2. People who have a system chosen for them by their employer, 3. People who only really know Windows and fear change. There's a lot of overlap in groups 2 and 3.
Now, I do think that OSX is superior to Windows in most ways, but the user interface isn't one of them...
Spoken like a Windows geek who doesn't want to let go of his blankie.
But seriously, the classic profile of the mac user is that they don't know how to use any other computer and are afraid to learn.
Every Mac user I know is intimately familiar with Windows; a couple of them are even MSCEs. For my own part, I make my living writing Windows software.
It's BECAUSE we know Windows so well that we choose Macs.
If there's anybody "afraid to learn" a new system, it's typically Windows users. My father, for example. He has weekly nightmares with his Windows box (for which he must call me for support), and he's fully aware that my life is much easier because I use Macs. Yet no force in the universe will get him to change. He's convinced that it would be too hard to change to a new OS, no matter how miserable he is with the one he's got.
There are decades of data to prove the corellation between IQ and actual, demonstrated intelligence and success in the real world. Maybe you would like to clarify yourself, Timothy?
The disproportionately high representation in groups like MENSA of lonely singles who earn below average salaries in unsatisfying jobs seems to counter your "decades of data" (which I have never seen.)
Or are you defining "demonstrated intelligence" as the ability to recite Star Trek dialog by rote and "success in the real world" as having your very own crafts store at the local Renaissance Festival?
Anybody on Slashdot who has an independent and/or unsigned band, or has a passing interest in the indie rock scene would be crazy NOT to have a MySpace page.
As a massive social network which reaches a lot of young people, it is the *best* marketing tool your band could have right now. (Assuming you are good enough that friends of friends linking to your site and/or MP3 samples works in your favor, that is. It can't help you much if you suck.)
The Guardian is a high-brow newspaper by comparison with most of the others out there. I'm guessing that the root of your hatred lies more with their politics than their quality.
Guess again. I'm not even from their country, so I really don't care about their politics. You are the first person I've ever heard describe that particular tabloid rag as "high-brow."
Then again, most of my exposure to them has been via their technology section. Perhaps other parts of the paper are better-written. This particular article certainly does not support that theory, though.
I promise to never use -gate as a shorthand suffix for government scandal, if people can stop using -aholic as a shorthand for compulsive behavior which resembles addiction. (i.e., "workaholic")
I'm 37, have been on MySpace for several months now, and have many people on my "Friends List" who are quite a bit older than me.
The various time-wasters like quizzes and profiles are kind of fun.
Sharing favorite music and random YouTube discoveries is a kick.
Having a semi-private blog to keep your friends up-to-date with what's going on in your life is nice.
Adding your favorite bands' official MySpace sites to your "friends" list is an easy way to stay in the loop about tour dates and release announcements.
Some of the MySpace groups are fun and interesting discussion forums.
Plus, it's free.
All in all, it's useful enough and fun enough to be worth putting up with retards like you trying to belittle those of us who use it.
I was all set to complain that the summary sucked because nowhere is it mentioned exactly what the fuck the "Ig Nobel" awards are.
So I RTFA, even though it meant following a link to the Guardian, quite possibly the worst newspaper in the entire world.... And I still didn't even know what the "Ig" stands for after reading the entire article! The fonts of both./ and the Guardian make it look like lower-case "LG" rather than a capitalized "ig"
Thank God for wikipedia.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early autumn -- around the time the recipients of the genuine Nobel Prizes are announced -- for ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Organized by the scientific humor journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by genuine Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University.
The Guardian shared about half of that information... buried deep within the article.
More importantly
The name is a play on the word "ignoble" and the name "Nobel" after "Alfred Nobel". The official pronunciation used during the ceremony is "ig no-BELL" (IPA:) "?g n?? b?l" it is not pronounced like the word "ig-noble" -- but this distinction eludes many people.
A quick Google news search provided dozens on non-Shitty news sources you could have gone with on this one. Why link to a fish-wrapper like the Guardian???
Same with music...as a former professional musician (and by that, I don't mean I've played a few bars) I've never really worried about CD vs. MP3 and I know very few pros that do.
Oddly enough, professional musicians tend to be much, much more tolerant of bad audio fidelity than serious music lovers who don't play or only play as non-professionals. As long as there are no obvious distractions (such as surface noise from a record or tape hiss), they tend to "listen around" missing data better than most people.
The best theory for this I've ever heard is the "dirty window" analogy. If you look out a dirty window from a living room you've never been in, you will notice it's dirty right away. If you look out a dirty window from your own living room, which you have sat in every day for decades, you are less likely to notice the dirt because your mind knows what to expect to see. You know what that tree looks like, and where the row of hedges meets the curb, and the color of all the stones in the rock bed at the edge of your yard. When you look out your window, your brain "fills in" the missing information for you, and you don't notice the obstruction of the dirt.
A professional musician, one who spends several hours a day honing their craft and rehearses daily with an ensemble that if you play a sub-par recording on a sub-par sound system, they will only hear the music, not the digital compression artifacts or the cross-over "bulge" of the speakers or the "edginess" of bad D/A algorithms. They can probably tell the difference between a top-line system and total junk in a direct A/B comparison, but won't really notice the subtle differences between different quality speakers, nor will they have any idea what you are talking about when you complain about a 128-bit AAC file mangling a track.
It's not that their ears are not as good. Their ears are (often) excellent; they make their living with their ears as much as anything else. It's simply a matter of psycho-accustics.
Of course, then there are the professional musicians who simply have bad ears. Many rehearsal spaces used over the last 50 years by universities and professional concert halls over the past few decades utterly failed to meet OSHA safety requirements for db levels. My own music prof was forced to retire early due to severe hearing loss and tinnitus. A lot of musicians avoid going in for regular hearing tests, because they simply don't even want to know what the news will be.
I have a MySpace page... Please leave Slashdot, you have been reported to the e-police.
Ah, an anti-MySpace snob.
MySpace not only host free blogging space for me to share things with my friends, but it also keeps me up-to-date with concert tours of my favorite bands, provides an easy means to stay in touch with distant friends, introduces me to interesting people I've never would have otherwise met, and is actually kind of fun to monkey around with.
Sure, I can write valid HTML and host a web site on a Linux box running Apache via my DSL line. In fact, I did so for back in the 90s. No, I don't expect you to be impressed. That's not my point.
My point is, having a MySpace page is more fun. I don't give a shit what other nerds might think about it. I'd rather do the More Fun thing.
With all the movies on personal myspaces it makes one wonder how many were actually watched Its not often someone will visit the same youtube video daily. Very common for one to visit their friend's myspace daily though.
I have a MySpace page, and I have many friends with MySpace pages which I visit frequently. Video links on a MySpace page are *not* viewed every time the page is visited. You must click on "Play" to see them.
Also, it seems that the vast majority of videos shared on MySpace are embedded YouTube objects, so to say MySpace is "trumping" YouTube is silly. They are very much intertwined.
In fact, I'm far more likely to find interesting and entertaining YouTube videos via the blogs of friends (or the Videos links on Fark.com) than I ever would by simply rummaging through YouTube's main page. They are a video hosting service, not a video search engine service.
Slashdot Mirror
Twenty years ago, I would have agreed with the poster you are arguing with. I could not quantify the reasons why, but in a simple double-blind test I would choose analog sources over the best available digital stuff every time.
However, most of what we thought, back then, to be the flaws of "the digital sound" had precious little to do with sample rates. The problems with early digital were in fact due to the following:
1. Shitty D/A conversion logic. Early CD players (or D/A break-out boxes) were extremely stupid about how to fill in high-frequency waves based on the samples given. This resulted in a "harshness" which became very obvious when listening to brass instruments, violins, or soprano singers. It also caused percussion cymbals and other sibilant sounds to become a bit more unpleasant.
2. Component bias. Analog audio introduces several flaws into the process. The biggest being that records can't store low-frequency signals at their full amplitude relative to the rest of the wave. To get around this problem, the RIAA (yes, that RIAA) developed a standard "Phono EQ", by which recording engineers would dial down the low frequencies, and another EQ circuit in your stereo would crank them back up. This rather destructive compromise results in recording which are not, in fact, as good as the full potential of digital recording; however, the entire history of Hi-Fi from the 60s through the 80s evolved around building components which produced the best sound from these flawed sources.
So, an amplifier was judged as a "very good" amplifier if it more effectively "undid" the flaws of analog recording than a competing amp. Since the bass has been muddied by electronic tweaking, an amp that creates the illusion of "tightening" it up is regarded as a better amp.
Now, plug in a source without the audio problems of vinyl into one of these magically "good" amps, and what do you suppose the result is going to be? You've now got an amp applying corrections to a source which doesn't need to be corrected, resulting in an unsatisfying sound.
3. Source bias. For reasons similar to what provoked the component bias, many of the "gold standard" hi-fi recordings of the 70s and 80s were made by producers who knew their stuff would be played back on phonographs, and they adjusted their studio habits accordingly. Compression was carefully used in order to never veer outside the dynamic range of a turntable. Noise below the S/N floor of a needle being dragged along a wax groove was completely ignored. Prior to the mastering process, sources were colored to favor the playback experience of the final pressing above all else. When albums started getting moved to CD, these new CD's not only uncovered the warts in the original source material, they often enhanced them. Until digital recording technology caught up with the analog gear in top-end studios, most of the CDs you bought were from masters which were never meant to be rendered so perfectly.
4. Listener bias. A lot of people grew to love the sound of a good hi-fi record playing from a good hi-fi system, and failed to notice that the very pleasant "warmth" that they hear when listening to records is not actually present in a live perfromance. A CD can sound much, much closer to an actual string quartet sitting in the room with you, but the vinyl aficionado will consistently prefer the sound of his record, not because it sounds more real, but because it sounds more satisfying.
I am a recovering vinyl addict myself. I still love the sound of those old Scheffield Labs direct-to-master albums (even if most of the music on them is crap), but as CD sound got better and better during the 90s, the myths surrounding the "shortcomings" of 44.1 digital sound became more and more obviously debunked.
What's my incentive to spend $500 if I'm an average-Joe satisfied with my current television?
None, except that TV sets wear out, and when the time comes to buy the next one you might as well go high-def.
Then again, if you are Joe Average and satisfied with your current TV, you might also be satisfied with your current PS-2, X-Box, or Game Cube, and have no incentive to buy a Wii either.
Wiimote aside, what an underpowered console means for games is that you might as well buy a cheap used console from the previous generation and game makers might as well keep developing for the previous generation consoles.
Give it up, AC. Wii fanboys will not see reason on this issue.
It's not a vastly underpowered (for the current generation) game system being sold for more than the parts are worth (when the competition is selling hot new tech at a loss), propped up by a gimmicky controller.
No, it's not that at all. It's a REVOLUTION!
BILLIONS of people who never had any interest in gaming before are going to want to buy this thing to play games because it's... uh... so cheap, and the controls are... uh... so intuitive. Yeah, that's it, intuitive. You can play bowling games where you move your arm just as if you are bowling!!! That's so awesome!!! Forget the fact that the main competition for capturing the "casual" game market is those $20 joysticks that are pre-loaded with arcade classics. This thing will let you go online and play all those classic NINTENDO games which they never played. How can they resist getting sucked into the nostalgia which being able to play the original Super Mario Bros. will surely inspire in other people???
To say otherwise is to be bitchslapped by fanboys abusing their mod points until your IP is banned, as happened to me last time I dared to say the emperor has no clothes. (And is probably about to happen again... just watch.)
Actually, if you fill a car with CD's and drive them from one end of the country to the other, you've got some incredible bandwidth there.
Some simplified math:
A car holds, what? 600 CDs in the cases (assuming room for the driver)?
Let's call it 1000.
A typical album is around 45 minutes of music, let's call it about 410 MB. That's 410,000 MB
Driving from LA to NY takes just over 41 hours, according to MapQuest.
That's 10,000 MB per hour, or 2.78 MB per second.
The trip is 2780.82 miles, so At 20 MPG and $2/gallon, the transfer will cost $278.08, or $100 per MB of data.
The whole reason we switched to CDs from records and cassettes was supposedly the higher fidelity of CD audio.
Early CD audio was inferior to a good turntable. The adoption of CD players happened because:
1. An "okay" CD player was cheaper than a "barely acceptable" turntable.
2. Records are a royal pain in the ass to keep clean, unbroken, and unwarped. Mere house dust can damage them forever, and even simply using them as intended in a mythical perfect environment will degrade them eventually.
3. Cueing up tracks on a record is kind of a hassle on most players.
The very fact that you hold up the UI similarities between Win 3.1 and Motif as an example of Microsoft's history of "getting it right" tells me everything I need to know about your evaluation of OS front-ends. Cheers.
Clockwork Orange came out during a time where DRM wasn't commonplace, people could afford (and wanted to go) to the local movie theater and we didn't pay extra money for special home versions that were a couple frame different than the original film. Don't get confused by things.
And who would I buy this evil-free DVD from? Some entertainment distributor completely free of these practices you detest so much, certainly...
Since nobody is likely to do a Google search for "miserable failure" unless a liberal blogger friend calls them and says, "hey, Dude! *snicker* Do a Google search for 'miserable failure'. It is soooooo funny! ROTFLOL!"
So, it's relatively harmless, and will probably be a practice which loses steam once nobody finds it all that witty anymore.
Why is that every time I read one of these tirades it sounds like some guy strapped to a chair with his eyelids propped open ala Clockwork Orange?
Guess what? You have the right (no quotes) to not buy the DVD in the first place. You have the right (no quotes) to tell Hollywood, the RIAA, and the entire goddamn entertainment industry to shove this crap up their ass. You have the right (no quotes) to show them with your wallet that you don't want their drivel, DRM'd or not.
Instead, you (i.e.. the consumer) pay $9 for a $2 movie. You go out and buy the Super Amazing Collector's Edition with one more frame redone than the last time. You make films like Nacho Libre a commercial success.
And by reccommending "Clockwork Orange", a classic Hollywood movie, you have become part of the problem as you have defined it.
Like it or not, Film-making is the predominant American art form, and to disconnect from movies and TV is to disconnect from our culture.
One has to ask... What is the deal with the board at HP?
To appoint one monumentally bad CEO is unfortunate. To appoint two... smacks of carelessness.
This is a new phenomenon. It's only recently that these people have bought macs, due to OSX.
Wrong again, but thanks for playing. Most of my Mac-using friends and contacts, including myself, were System 7 users back in the day. In college in the early 90s, few people knew Windows inside-out half as well as the Mac geeks I rolled with.
You must not know very many mac users.
Only a couple hundred. Not enough of a sample for you?
A lot of them are confused by too many buttons, and I am not making this up.
Maybe things are different outside of Minnesota, but in my experience there are two major groups of Mac users: 1. Creative work geeks, 2. Computer science geeks. (As a professional programmer and semi-pro musician, I fit in both groups.) In all cases, mac users deal with Windows on an extremely regular basis. For example, printing professionals like to use Macs, but not all of their customers do. To survive in business, they need to MASTER both systems. Having done so, they almost invariable choose Macs for themselves.
Windows users, on the other hand, are made up by: 1. Gamers, 2. People who have a system chosen for them by their employer, 3. People who only really know Windows and fear change. There's a lot of overlap in groups 2 and 3.
Now, I do think that OSX is superior to Windows in most ways, but the user interface isn't one of them...
Spoken like a Windows geek who doesn't want to let go of his blankie.
But seriously, the classic profile of the mac user is that they don't know how to use any other computer and are afraid to learn.
Every Mac user I know is intimately familiar with Windows; a couple of them are even MSCEs. For my own part, I make my living writing Windows software.
It's BECAUSE we know Windows so well that we choose Macs.
If there's anybody "afraid to learn" a new system, it's typically Windows users. My father, for example. He has weekly nightmares with his Windows box (for which he must call me for support), and he's fully aware that my life is much easier because I use Macs. Yet no force in the universe will get him to change. He's convinced that it would be too hard to change to a new OS, no matter how miserable he is with the one he's got.
Success is not a measure of intelligence.
Which was my point, I believe. Or rather, the corollary to it.
I guess if headphones being inserted are a turn off, any other penetration is right off the menu.
In my earholes, yes.
Oh, forget it then!
Once you've done the auricle, you never go back.
There are decades of data to prove the corellation between IQ and actual, demonstrated intelligence and success in the real world. Maybe you would like to clarify yourself, Timothy?
The disproportionately high representation in groups like MENSA of lonely singles who earn below average salaries in unsatisfying jobs seems to counter your "decades of data" (which I have never seen.)
Or are you defining "demonstrated intelligence" as the ability to recite Star Trek dialog by rote and "success in the real world" as having your very own crafts store at the local Renaissance Festival?
Anybody on Slashdot who has an independent and/or unsigned band, or has a passing interest in the indie rock scene would be crazy NOT to have a MySpace page.
As a massive social network which reaches a lot of young people, it is the *best* marketing tool your band could have right now. (Assuming you are good enough that friends of friends linking to your site and/or MP3 samples works in your favor, that is. It can't help you much if you suck.)
The Guardian is a high-brow newspaper by comparison with most of the others out there. I'm guessing that the root of your hatred lies more with their politics than their quality.
Guess again. I'm not even from their country, so I really don't care about their politics. You are the first person I've ever heard describe that particular tabloid rag as "high-brow."
Then again, most of my exposure to them has been via their technology section. Perhaps other parts of the paper are better-written. This particular article certainly does not support that theory, though.
I promise to never use -gate as a shorthand suffix for government scandal, if people can stop using -aholic as a shorthand for compulsive behavior which resembles addiction. (i.e., "workaholic")
I'm 37, have been on MySpace for several months now, and have many people on my "Friends List" who are quite a bit older than me.
The various time-wasters like quizzes and profiles are kind of fun.
Sharing favorite music and random YouTube discoveries is a kick.
Having a semi-private blog to keep your friends up-to-date with what's going on in your life is nice.
Adding your favorite bands' official MySpace sites to your "friends" list is an easy way to stay in the loop about tour dates and release announcements.
Some of the MySpace groups are fun and interesting discussion forums.
Plus, it's free.
All in all, it's useful enough and fun enough to be worth putting up with retards like you trying to belittle those of us who use it.
I was all set to complain that the summary sucked because nowhere is it mentioned exactly what the fuck the "Ig Nobel" awards are.
... And I still didn't even know what the "Ig" stands for after reading the entire article! The fonts of both ./ and the Guardian make it look like lower-case "LG" rather than a capitalized "ig"
So I RTFA, even though it meant following a link to the Guardian, quite possibly the worst newspaper in the entire world.
Thank God for wikipedia.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early autumn -- around the time the recipients of the genuine Nobel Prizes are announced -- for ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Organized by the scientific humor journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by genuine Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University.
The Guardian shared about half of that information... buried deep within the article.
More importantly
The name is a play on the word "ignoble" and the name "Nobel" after "Alfred Nobel". The official pronunciation used during the ceremony is "ig no-BELL" (IPA:) "?g n?? b?l" it is not pronounced like the word "ig-noble" -- but this distinction eludes many people.
A quick Google news search provided dozens on non-Shitty news sources you could have gone with on this one. Why link to a fish-wrapper like the Guardian???
Same with music...as a former professional musician (and by that, I don't mean I've played a few bars) I've never really worried about CD vs. MP3 and I know very few pros that do.
Oddly enough, professional musicians tend to be much, much more tolerant of bad audio fidelity than serious music lovers who don't play or only play as non-professionals. As long as there are no obvious distractions (such as surface noise from a record or tape hiss), they tend to "listen around" missing data better than most people.
The best theory for this I've ever heard is the "dirty window" analogy. If you look out a dirty window from a living room you've never been in, you will notice it's dirty right away. If you look out a dirty window from your own living room, which you have sat in every day for decades, you are less likely to notice the dirt because your mind knows what to expect to see. You know what that tree looks like, and where the row of hedges meets the curb, and the color of all the stones in the rock bed at the edge of your yard. When you look out your window, your brain "fills in" the missing information for you, and you don't notice the obstruction of the dirt.
A professional musician, one who spends several hours a day honing their craft and rehearses daily with an ensemble that if you play a sub-par recording on a sub-par sound system, they will only hear the music, not the digital compression artifacts or the cross-over "bulge" of the speakers or the "edginess" of bad D/A algorithms. They can probably tell the difference between a top-line system and total junk in a direct A/B comparison, but won't really notice the subtle differences between different quality speakers, nor will they have any idea what you are talking about when you complain about a 128-bit AAC file mangling a track.
It's not that their ears are not as good. Their ears are (often) excellent; they make their living with their ears as much as anything else. It's simply a matter of psycho-accustics.
Of course, then there are the professional musicians who simply have bad ears. Many rehearsal spaces used over the last 50 years by universities and professional concert halls over the past few decades utterly failed to meet OSHA safety requirements for db levels. My own music prof was forced to retire early due to severe hearing loss and tinnitus. A lot of musicians avoid going in for regular hearing tests, because they simply don't even want to know what the news will be.
I have a MySpace page ...
Please leave Slashdot, you have been reported to the e-police.
Ah, an anti-MySpace snob.
MySpace not only host free blogging space for me to share things with my friends, but it also keeps me up-to-date with concert tours of my favorite bands, provides an easy means to stay in touch with distant friends, introduces me to interesting people I've never would have otherwise met, and is actually kind of fun to monkey around with.
Sure, I can write valid HTML and host a web site on a Linux box running Apache via my DSL line. In fact, I did so for back in the 90s. No, I don't expect you to be impressed. That's not my point.
My point is, having a MySpace page is more fun. I don't give a shit what other nerds might think about it. I'd rather do the More Fun thing.
When Apple switched to Intel chips for the Mac, a lot of people were asking "why not AMD?"
At the time, the answer from Apple was "Intel showed us their future road-map, and we wanted on board."
Now we are starting to get a glimpse of what they were talking about.
With all the movies on personal myspaces it makes one wonder how many were actually watched Its not often someone will visit the same youtube video daily. Very common for one to visit their friend's myspace daily though.
I have a MySpace page, and I have many friends with MySpace pages which I visit frequently. Video links on a MySpace page are *not* viewed every time the page is visited. You must click on "Play" to see them.
Also, it seems that the vast majority of videos shared on MySpace are embedded YouTube objects, so to say MySpace is "trumping" YouTube is silly. They are very much intertwined.
In fact, I'm far more likely to find interesting and entertaining YouTube videos via the blogs of friends (or the Videos links on Fark.com) than I ever would by simply rummaging through YouTube's main page. They are a video hosting service, not a video search engine service.
I wouldn't want to the fireman that has to use the jaws of life on one of these vehicles after a wreck...
Start making them out of non-conductive plastic composites, I guess?