I know a number of music critics and writers for both large and small publications.
In my personal experience, these people seem even more narrow in their interests than others. Your typical critic seems to have an "auto pilot" mode where he cranks out rather benign reviews, and then if a group specifically piques his narrow interests, he goes hog-wild.
Since it's all subjective, one could say that there is as much an art to defining a style and approach that appeals to a composite of music critics, and they in turn can influence the industry. I think "Beck" is a good example of this. His popularity was primarily driven by a select number of critics who totally freaked out at his approach. I think it was less talent and creativity as it was him pushing the critics' buttons properly.
I like Beck. I like Radiohead. I think they're deserving of their critical acclaim. However, I think the Beastie Boys are the most overrated group in the last 15 years. I credit their "critical acclaim" to good management and the ability to manipulate critics and media. Their music is otherwise uninspiring as far as I'm concerned.
To me, what makes a valued pop critic would be someone who recognizes innovation and creativity. I think there are a ton of really great groups that are under-recognized in this area; there are also even more overrated groups. Just about everything that you hear on Clear Channel's alternative stations are homogenous crap. And when one band gets a hit, suddenly there's a dozen clones out. Being a music critic nowadays is probably more political than anything else.
I remember several years ago I was writing a manual for a software product using Word - back when Word was the "big thang" and people were moving from WordPerfect en masse. I kept running into problems getting this 100-page manual to properly generate table of contents and indices. I finally called up Microsoft tech support and they suggested I break the document into separate smaller files. Their system couldn't properly handle a document that large! Of course, nowhere in the manual did it say there were any limitations of this nature. This was particularly annoying because that's one thing you didn't typically have to worry about with WordPerfect. It seemed to handle large documents as well as small ones.
If there's a word processor I miss, and this might sound goofy, but I really liked Leading Edge Word Processor. I used to install this on client PCs when I did consulting. It was a very innovative product at the time. It's a shame it was abandoned.
Nowadays, I use word, but I've never particularly been fond of it. The user interface has never been very intuitive. But Microsoft has basically destroyed competition in this area so we don't have the choices we used to.
Critics are not static instruments. The whole idea that a critic has standards that don't change is ludicrous. What's popular now and what was popular in the 80s are completely different things. Critics simply reflect the current flavor of what most people like, which is constantly in a state of flux. Trying to tie a formula to their results is a waste of time unless you take into account the influence of modern media, which generally has the most influence over what people think is "good."
Nirvana is a good example. The critical acclaim of Nirvana is tied to the state that society was in at the time. Ten years prior, nobody would have considered the band good. I'm not sure that now they would have gotten the attention they did several years ago.
Has anyone had any experience with Dell's RAID standalone products?
We've been using Compaq's for storage and they work well but getting parts are expensive. The standard Seagate drives are modified for Compaq so you have to get their special OEM versions at much higher costs. I'd like to find a cheap, reliable, pro level raid array and have been looking at some of Dell's products. Anyone have experience?
What's the best stand-alone raid system? A Raid % setup that is self-contained and can plug into a SCSI port on a PC? Are there IDE systems that can perform well in web/mail environments?
this stuff really pisses me off... not the closing down of the site... the hoards of whiny little selfish users who sucked at this guy's teat, cost and ad-free for so long and then have the audacity to whine and complain.
Web hosting whores and other "free" services contribute to these problems and breed a new brand of user who thinks that other people should pay for "free" services that he demands. There'd be a lot more innovation and better customer service if users weren't so pathetically cheap and insensitive to what it takes to make these services reliably run.
My friend doesn't want to make a big stink about the issue, but the case was filed with the FBI and the DA turned it down. The spammer broke into his server and repurposed a formmail script that had been lying around for awhile. The FBI felt it was a very strong case and all the data was compiled. But the DA turned down prosecution of the case.
What are you going to do? One problem is, making a big stink about federal agencies can tend to come back to haunt you. It's such a demoralizing process trying to get others to do the right thing. My friend is burned out and has no faith in the system. I don't blame him.
In fact, I've always wondered why the feds haven't used this fact to go after them. I know, I know - you can't track down the spammer, since they're mostly launching spam from bots in China.
You can track them, no matter where they're from.
I had a friend who filed a case with the Feds, and took it to the DA in two jursidictions - he had spammers on multiple felony crimes and even knew where they lived and worked and had tons of evidence to nail them. The DAs with both jurisdictions refused to prosecute the case.
This is the problem. All these spammers can be easily, EASILY tracked whether they go through a foreign country or not.
One more law would actually help. If we can get spammers declared terrorists or enemy combatants then we can just have the delta force swoop in and make them disappear. That might put a dent in spam.
Already done. The USA Patriot act could be interpreted in this way. Spammers interfere with commerce, which is considered an act of terrorism. Technically speaking, spammers could get the death penalty.
Again, the problem is, law enforcement doesn't go after these cases and the District Attorneys will not prosecute. Contact your DA and demand they start prosecuting these cases.
"A national do-not-e-mail registry, without a system in place to authenticate the origin of e-mail messages, would fail to reduce the burden of spam and may even increase the amount of spam received by consumers," the commission said.
If new authentication plans fail to emerge, the FTC will convene a federal advisory committee to determine whether the government could require Internet providers to adopt one.
"Michael" works the FBI or another government agency and they are bummed out that this bogus do-not-spam list would have given them a nifty database to cross-reference with all the other databases the government has been collecting on people.
The only productive purpose for such a stupid database would be to encroach upon the privacy and security of the populace. Spammers would never follow the guidelines. Unlike telemarketing, which uses a communications medium that is more easily trackable and regulated by the government, an e-mail do-not-call list would only serve to compile information on people that would obviously be used for less-than-honorable purposes. Slashdot needs to refresh their moderator staff.
For the zillionth time, can we put an end to boneheaded ideas like this?
Almost all spammers are violating Federal law right now. A do-not-email list would be the most ridiculous thing ever heard of, and would more likely serve as a great source of addresses for spammers.
The problem is there is no enforcement of existing laws in this area. We don't need more laws; we don't need more goofy schemes. We need resources dedicated towards educating and funding law enforcement authorities on how to catch and prosecute spammers.
I'm a big fan of Air America Radio - very intelligent and thought-provoking talk that's quite entertaining.
journalists
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If there were any real legitimate journalists left in the world Bloggers wouldn't matter, but in lieu of the mainstream media and news networks no longer having any journalistic credibility, someone has to do a little research.
I'm curious if those of you out there may have some recommendations based on your personal experience?
I've been snooping around for a stand-alone RAID array. Ideally I'd like it to be SCSI-compatible and I can plug it into a SCSI port on a server and it would be relatively OS-independent. RAID 5.
What are the most economical options in this area? Any recommendations for brands/manufacturers? Are there IDE-based RAID 5 drive arrays that have a SCSI interface and are they worth exploring?
Whenever a story on Diebold is run, the editors should put in a META tag on the web page to play the O'Jays' "For The Love Of Money". It would really drive the point home. Plus it's a wicked bass line.
You think it's amusing, but you might not think it's so amusing if, for example, Kerry wins in a landslide and then the repubilcans cry foul and rake up all the muck over the machines' insecurity and send the election outcome back to the Supreme court.
And even though they are not blocking port 25 for me, I've found that if I send from their network, a good portion of my email bounces because a lot of companies have all of comcast's network blacklisted.
I am one of those ISPs and until Comcast blocks all port 25 traffic for all non-commercial DUL/Broadband users, I will continue to block all their IP space. I feel sorry for legitimate Comcast customers, but then again, not that sorry because Comcast sucks.
And do you think Comcast finally took this step because they decided to stop their spamming users?
Hell no!
The only reason they got off their asses is because admins started wholesale blacklisting of their IP space and their customers started complaining.
Blacklisting WORKS! It's the only way to force these ISPs to be responsible.
If you're running content-based filtering, you're part of the problem. If you refuse SMTP traffic from confirmed spam sites, you are part of the solution.
Just in case this latest tour doesn't work, I'd like to offer some suggestions for Microsoft's marketing department for future promotions:
* Produce a study that reveals "Linux users have smaller penises"
* Include free Windows 2000 server license in new McDonald's Happy Meals.
* Purchase one of the Internet backbone providers and start refusing to process packets from non-Microsoft networks.
* Offer Microsoft-Certified-Linux-Professional-Systems-Eng ineer certification, which is in effect, a room where they strap people to chairs a la "A Clockwork Orange" and show them a never ending stream of Steve Balmer video speeches.
* Release "Windows For Linux" desktop which at first appears to be a window manager, but actually removes Linux and installs Server 2000.
* Start rumor that Linus Torvalds is a member of Al Quaeda.
* Get patent on common sense and free thinking and charge all Linux users with IP infringement.
* Update scripts of upcoming Star Wars and Harry Potter movies to show that Darth Vader and Valdemort are "powered by Linux."
Slashdot Mirror
I know a number of music critics and writers for both large and small publications.
In my personal experience, these people seem even more narrow in their interests than others. Your typical critic seems to have an "auto pilot" mode where he cranks out rather benign reviews, and then if a group specifically piques his narrow interests, he goes hog-wild.
Since it's all subjective, one could say that there is as much an art to defining a style and approach that appeals to a composite of music critics, and they in turn can influence the industry. I think "Beck" is a good example of this. His popularity was primarily driven by a select number of critics who totally freaked out at his approach. I think it was less talent and creativity as it was him pushing the critics' buttons properly.
I like Beck. I like Radiohead. I think they're deserving of their critical acclaim. However, I think the Beastie Boys are the most overrated group in the last 15 years. I credit their "critical acclaim" to good management and the ability to manipulate critics and media. Their music is otherwise uninspiring as far as I'm concerned.
To me, what makes a valued pop critic would be someone who recognizes innovation and creativity. I think there are a ton of really great groups that are under-recognized in this area; there are also even more overrated groups. Just about everything that you hear on Clear Channel's alternative stations are homogenous crap. And when one band gets a hit, suddenly there's a dozen clones out. Being a music critic nowadays is probably more political than anything else.
I remember several years ago I was writing a manual for a software product using Word - back when Word was the "big thang" and people were moving from WordPerfect en masse. I kept running into problems getting this 100-page manual to properly generate table of contents and indices. I finally called up Microsoft tech support and they suggested I break the document into separate smaller files. Their system couldn't properly handle a document that large! Of course, nowhere in the manual did it say there were any limitations of this nature. This was particularly annoying because that's one thing you didn't typically have to worry about with WordPerfect. It seemed to handle large documents as well as small ones.
If there's a word processor I miss, and this might sound goofy, but I really liked Leading Edge Word Processor. I used to install this on client PCs when I did consulting. It was a very innovative product at the time. It's a shame it was abandoned.
Nowadays, I use word, but I've never particularly been fond of it. The user interface has never been very intuitive. But Microsoft has basically destroyed competition in this area so we don't have the choices we used to.
Critics are not static instruments. The whole idea that a critic has standards that don't change is ludicrous. What's popular now and what was popular in the 80s are completely different things. Critics simply reflect the current flavor of what most people like, which is constantly in a state of flux. Trying to tie a formula to their results is a waste of time unless you take into account the influence of modern media, which generally has the most influence over what people think is "good."
Nirvana is a good example. The critical acclaim of Nirvana is tied to the state that society was in at the time. Ten years prior, nobody would have considered the band good. I'm not sure that now they would have gotten the attention they did several years ago.
Has anyone had any experience with Dell's RAID standalone products?
We've been using Compaq's for storage and they work well but getting parts are expensive. The standard Seagate drives are modified for Compaq so you have to get their special OEM versions at much higher costs. I'd like to find a cheap, reliable, pro level raid array and have been looking at some of Dell's products. Anyone have experience?
Are there drivers for FreeBSD available? I couldn't find any info on that.
What's the best stand-alone raid system? A Raid % setup that is self-contained and can plug into a SCSI port on a PC? Are there IDE systems that can perform well in web/mail environments?
this stuff really pisses me off... not the closing down of the site... the hoards of whiny little selfish users who sucked at this guy's teat, cost and ad-free for so long and then have the audacity to whine and complain.
Web hosting whores and other "free" services contribute to these problems and breed a new brand of user who thinks that other people should pay for "free" services that he demands. There'd be a lot more innovation and better customer service if users weren't so pathetically cheap and insensitive to what it takes to make these services reliably run.
Air America is probably a major reason why lots of people are purchasing satellite radio. I only wish they'd broadcast it on the cable audio stations.
My friend doesn't want to make a big stink about the issue, but the case was filed with the FBI and the DA turned it down. The spammer broke into his server and repurposed a formmail script that had been lying around for awhile. The FBI felt it was a very strong case and all the data was compiled. But the DA turned down prosecution of the case.
What are you going to do? One problem is, making a big stink about federal agencies can tend to come back to haunt you. It's such a demoralizing process trying to get others to do the right thing. My friend is burned out and has no faith in the system. I don't blame him.
In fact, I've always wondered why the feds haven't used this fact to go after them. I know, I know - you can't track down the spammer, since they're mostly launching spam from bots in China.
You can track them, no matter where they're from.
I had a friend who filed a case with the Feds, and took it to the DA in two jursidictions - he had spammers on multiple felony crimes and even knew where they lived and worked and had tons of evidence to nail them. The DAs with both jurisdictions refused to prosecute the case.
This is the problem. All these spammers can be easily, EASILY tracked whether they go through a foreign country or not.
One more law would actually help. If we can get spammers declared terrorists or enemy combatants then we can just have the delta force swoop in and make them disappear. That might put a dent in spam.
Already done. The USA Patriot act could be interpreted in this way. Spammers interfere with commerce, which is considered an act of terrorism. Technically speaking, spammers could get the death penalty.
Again, the problem is, law enforcement doesn't go after these cases and the District Attorneys will not prosecute. Contact your DA and demand they start prosecuting these cases.
"Michael" works the FBI or another government agency and they are bummed out that this bogus do-not-spam list would have given them a nifty database to cross-reference with all the other databases the government has been collecting on people.
The only productive purpose for such a stupid database would be to encroach upon the privacy and security of the populace. Spammers would never follow the guidelines. Unlike telemarketing, which uses a communications medium that is more easily trackable and regulated by the government, an e-mail do-not-call list would only serve to compile information on people that would obviously be used for less-than-honorable purposes. Slashdot needs to refresh their moderator staff.
For the zillionth time, can we put an end to boneheaded ideas like this?
Almost all spammers are violating Federal law right now. A do-not-email list would be the most ridiculous thing ever heard of, and would more likely serve as a great source of addresses for spammers.
The problem is there is no enforcement of existing laws in this area. We don't need more laws; we don't need more goofy schemes. We need resources dedicated towards educating and funding law enforcement authorities on how to catch and prosecute spammers.
What do you know of the field of journalism? What do you know about writing, freelancing, working for a news company? What do you know of integrity?
I know quite a bit about journalism. I routinely write for a number of publications and papers. I have worked for news companies in the past.
If you think there isn't an issue with journalistic integrity in the states these days, you are obviously from another planet.
I'm a big fan of Air America Radio - very intelligent and thought-provoking talk that's quite entertaining.
If there were any real legitimate journalists left in the world Bloggers wouldn't matter, but in lieu of the mainstream media and news networks no longer having any journalistic credibility, someone has to do a little research.
I'm curious if those of you out there may have some recommendations based on your personal experience?
I've been snooping around for a stand-alone RAID array. Ideally I'd like it to be SCSI-compatible and I can plug it into a SCSI port on a server and it would be relatively OS-independent. RAID 5.
What are the most economical options in this area? Any recommendations for brands/manufacturers? Are there IDE-based RAID 5 drive arrays that have a SCSI interface and are they worth exploring?
Given the current state of things, isn't that redundant?
Whenever a story on Diebold is run, the editors should put in a META tag on the web page to play the O'Jays' "For The Love Of Money". It would really drive the point home. Plus it's a wicked bass line.
You think it's amusing, but you might not think it's so amusing if, for example, Kerry wins in a landslide and then the repubilcans cry foul and rake up all the muck over the machines' insecurity and send the election outcome back to the Supreme court.
And even though they are not blocking port 25 for me, I've found that if I send from their network, a good portion of my email bounces because a lot of companies have all of comcast's network blacklisted.
I am one of those ISPs and until Comcast blocks all port 25 traffic for all non-commercial DUL/Broadband users, I will continue to block all their IP space. I feel sorry for legitimate Comcast customers, but then again, not that sorry because Comcast sucks.
And do you think Comcast finally took this step because they decided to stop their spamming users?
Hell no!
The only reason they got off their asses is because admins started wholesale blacklisting of their IP space and their customers started complaining.
Blacklisting WORKS! It's the only way to force these ISPs to be responsible.
If you're running content-based filtering, you're part of the problem. If you refuse SMTP traffic from confirmed spam sites, you are part of the solution.
Just in case this latest tour doesn't work, I'd like to offer some suggestions for Microsoft's marketing department for future promotions:
g ineer certification, which is in effect, a room where they strap people to chairs a la "A Clockwork Orange" and show them a never ending stream of Steve Balmer video speeches.
* Produce a study that reveals "Linux users have smaller penises"
* Include free Windows 2000 server license in new McDonald's Happy Meals.
* Purchase one of the Internet backbone providers and start refusing to process packets from non-Microsoft networks.
* Offer Microsoft-Certified-Linux-Professional-Systems-En
* Release "Windows For Linux" desktop which at first appears to be a window manager, but actually removes Linux and installs Server 2000.
* Start rumor that Linus Torvalds is a member of Al Quaeda.
* Get patent on common sense and free thinking and charge all Linux users with IP infringement.
* Update scripts of upcoming Star Wars and Harry Potter movies to show that Darth Vader and Valdemort are "powered by Linux."
In the server world, though I've had impressive up times (>6 months, for example)
Only in the Microsoft world would server uptime of six months be considered "impressive."