I'm a mastering engineer and hang out on mastering web boards, and the iPod came up in conversation. FWIW, a tech heavyweight (trying to remember if it was Bruno Putzeys?) said they'd measured the iPod and got a perfect 10K tone out of the bugger with virtually unmeasurable sidebands. NOT easy. That outperforms a heck of a lot of high-quality CD players, never mind mp3 portables. iPods apparently have very good tech if you know how to measure them. Jitter is what that 10K tone test measures, and it performed very, very well, I'm told.
I don't know. I don't think for one second that this Grey Album is likely to be any good, because I doubt I'd like the Black one at all. The White album is pretty freaking good by many standards- hell, even the recordings are considerably more 'vibey' and intense than most modern work for various specific technical reasons. I bet this Grey album has at least some decent loops because the source material will support them. I think that's a bit of a waste.
However, I'm happier with some clown doing this than I am with someone grabbing a slightly longer snippet of the same thing and using it to sell aftershave. Know what I mean? What really bothers me about modern culture is not so much rampant recycling by people who won't take the effort to come up with their own music, it's rampant recycling by corporate agendas that are determined to recast EVERY possible historical reference and cultural landmark into a meaningless orgy of brainless consumption. That bothers me. Some things matter. When something that was originally intended as a childishly idealistic outburst representing a vague but passionate worldview is repackaged to suggest that it might just as well mean that you should buy Post Toasties, something is lost. It's the impoverishment of intent- that once there was a time that people got passionate and expressed these idealistic views in their vague hippie ways, and then the world came around later and proved that it was meaningless. Maybe the original idealism was not wrong- maybe it's the impoverishment of intent that is wrong. It's like a kind of theft. At what point do you grow so tired of resisting the theft of your meaning that you give up? A few years? All your life? Do you get to have your expressions still convey what you meant even after death? Is the very concept that you 'meant' something by it irrelevant? If you don't change your mind, at what point does the world get to pervert what you meant and steamroller what you intended?
John Densmore of the Doors has written about his efforts to resist corporate hijacking of the Doors' music. He's had Robby Krieger's support and has had a lot of conflict with Ray Manzarek, who likes da money. The offers apparently just kept escalating- millions and millions offered to use that stuff for commercials. Densmore would bring up Vietnam vets who'd written him saying 'When I was in 'Nam your music saved my life. I hung on to life through listening to it because it was something real and honest and it wasn't another lie". To Densmore that was reason enough to fight for the intent of the music to be unaltered.
If some rapper guy wanted to rip off loops from the Doors, how would that change the intent of the original music? Maybe it would be unfair to the musicians but that's another story. In some ways doing it without permission is all the better- rip it off and do something interesting, like you're making an audio collage from stolen things, the stealing is part of the gestalt of the artwork.
With the commercial stuff, part of the gestalt is the implication that this new use is just as good a meaning, perhaps better, than whatever the music originally meant- and that permission had to be forthcoming. It's like a sanctioning, and again, impoverishment of intent.
Three cheers for the Grey Album then, even if it sucks, and especially if it's stolen. At least THAT intent is upfront.
Um- if that were to happen it would be part of a pump and dump strategy and would be a useful indication of the IMMEDIATE collapse of Microsoft. Such a plan is not sustainable in any way. Microsoft thinks about future strategy- granted, they're in trouble but they are not in THAT much trouble that they would have to resort to such a desperate and implausible ploy. Sorry, no. Ain't happening...
You're thinking of intermodulation distortion. Actually, a better reason to do 192K is that you get to filter using a much more suitable filter. At 44.1K the filter has to be a brick-wall infinite slope filter, and those have a characteristic sound. Up at 22K this is more felt than heard, for instance it might feel like 'glare' on cymbals or harmonically rich content or bright ambience like a tiled room. At 192K you can still use a brickwall filter but it's well past even what can be vaguely sensed, but you can also use a better-sounding, gentler filter starting at 20K and ending at 96K. Also, using the really steep filters means that the reconstructed waveform from extremely harmonically rich content (read: almost any commercial CD released in the last few years) will clip the DAC, and that sounds nasty. You're synthesizing a reconstructed, 'stairstepless' waveform using the filter, and the output wave can easily go way beyond the power supply rail voltages even if your samples aren't clipped. If you want to brute-force prevent this by just turning the gain down, you have to turn it down more than 6 db to accomodate all possible sample values, legal and illegal. Consider a bunch of -FS samples followed by a +FS sample and then a bunch of -FS samples again. Easily created from legal input by simply turning up the gain in the digital domain. Flat-out illegal values that could not have been sampled directly on a ADC with a working anti-aliasing filter. Present on more CDs than you think... (or values like it, if not literally that)
I haven't finished the videotape in which he says he had WMDs and was working with Al Quaeda yet. It's hard to make his mustache move along with his lips, and I have to draw in each of his teeth frame-by-frame because they're too grungy to computer model:) Wait, this is a public post?...doh!;)
You'd be a fool. Microsoft is bankrolling SCO's stock price for just such an eventuality. They want you to short it and then get caught with your pants down on a margin call. Look it up.
But how else are you going to come up with the fingerprint database and be ready for when the government determines which patterns of whorls on fingers mean you are a terrorist? They will be able to pre-emptively execute or at least imprison terrorists thanks to this simple practice, except you, you ungrateful wretch, you're trying to get in the way. How will George Bush know which sorts of whorls mean you're a terrorist? I'm sure God will be good enough to tell him.:P
That short selling is not a safe bet. If you are certain some stock will tank for reasons of your own, and somebody with deep pockets wants to hurt you, they can get involved overtly or covertly and pump up the price until you have to meet a margin call at the new, higher price, and they will ruin you. How many open sourcers have been ruined already because they figured the bottom line was SCO's _case_? I'd be very interested to know. In spy thrillers John Le Carre called this sort of thing a 'honey trap'. Oh, look, what a wonderful opportunity! Look how unreasonable the situation is! Short me, short me! Look a step farther to see who benefits from that stock artificially held up. Who benefits from margin calls ruining inexperienced OSS investors? Who benefits from SCO presenting the appearance of valuation, month after month, appearing more and more valuable in spite of what happens and what they're up against, viz. IBM? No points for the answer. Somebody with deep pockets and a long history of being willing to try anything. This is a pretty smart tactic, though it's costly. You can't buy this kind of disruption through just throwing money at marketing and/or journalists. It would be interesting to see the money trail traced, though it might be difficult.
I'll believe it is free trade when I can make something in Vermont and market it to workers in China and India. That would be REAL globalization- if I could make something and a tenth of a percent of those people wanted it, I'd be doing great. There's so many of them. Free trade would mean them being able to buy stuff I make, not just me being able to buy stuff they make.
Actually, it's number 2:) If you take all multiplatinum albums ever, by number of platinums, and weight them by the number of years they've been out (sales has increased over the years and you want to reward continued sales and re-sales of the same album in your figures) you get:
675 Eagles, Eagles Greatest Hits 660 Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV 594 The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album) 506 Pink Floyd, The Wall 494 Michael Jackson, Thriller 432 Fleetwood Mac, Rumours 420 The Beatles, The Beatles 1967-1970 420 Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon 405 Elton John, Greatest Hits 400 Boston, Boston 399 AC/DC, Back In Black 392 The Beatles, The Beatles 1962-1966 390 Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti 384 Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II 375 Eagles, Hotel California 374 The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 360 Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack 352 The Beatles, Abbey Road 336 Billy Joel, Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II 324 Various, Great Band Era 324 Journey, Frontiers 312 Meat Loaf, Bat Out Of Hell 308 Led Zeppelin, Houses Of The Holy 300 Carole King, Tapestry 290 Simon & Garfunkel, Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits 275 James Taylor, James Taylor's Greatest Hits 258 Elvis Presley, Elvis's Golden Records, Volume 1 256 Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin I 255 Bruce Springsteen, Born In The U.S.A. 252 Patsy Cline, Greatest Hits 252 Kenny Rogers, Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hits 250 Doobie Brothers, Best Of The Doobies 230 Van Halen, Van Halen 221 Prince & The Revolution, Purple Rain Soundtrack 217 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Deja Vu 216 The Beatles, Rubber Soul 216 Billy Joel, The Stranger 215 Johnny Mathis, Merry Christmas...and so on, down to
001 K-Ci & JoJo, X 001 Joe, My Name Is Joe 001 Jill Scott, Who Is Jill Scott?: Words And Sounds, Volume 1 001 Jennifer Lopez, J. Lo 001 Jagged Edge, J. E. Heartbreak 001 Ja Rule, Rule 3:36 001 Godsmack, Awake 001 George Strait, Latest Greatest Straitest Hits 001 Fuel, Something Like Human 001 Everclear, Songs From An American Movie Volume One 001 Erykah Badu, Mama's Gun...and so on.
That's from _my_ statistical wank: http://www.airwindows.com/analysis/EvergreenAlbums Sorted.txt which is over 3000 entries, rated entirely mathematically. I wanted to figure out what albums people kept buying most, and study their sound engineering.
Sorry- The Eagles Greatest Hits is 'the best album of all time' if you are looking at customer-driven sales numbers. Led Zep IV is number two by the numbers:)
I don't have a gatekeeper- because I don't have that kind of 'gate'. No IM here. I won't deal with it, and in fact I have my phone ringer off as well. What I do find is that I need help keeping track of the information I do want. I once wrote a program named 'Staccato' to do that: it ran on boot and reminded me what was up that day. I went to OSX and was in the puzzling situation of trying to dig through loads of information to find the same thing, as freeware, but in the end I did something totally different but better with two free programs one of which is a front end on a really fundamental UNIX tool. I ran system console on my desktop (MkConsole) and stuck my reminders into cron as >&/dev/console so they were added to the list of messages. So now, I may not have a secretary, but something starts gently reminding me every hour past midnight, "...did you do some writing on my novel yet?" knowing that I write late and have been known to forget. And my weekly events and appointments are in there as well. The computer is not acting to block information coming in. The computer is allowing me to NOT HAVE that information in my head in the first place, and feeding me it only when I want it. Otherwise I'd have to keep it all 'live' in order to know what was relevant that day and what was not. It's not always about writing the bot to decide for you who you don't want to hear from. Sometimes it's the bot that acts as a clever alarm clock. I could also see using a heinous shell script to do something like *crunchcrunchcrunch* "Um, it looks like you haven't touched this project in three months. Do you still want to finish it? Your busiest project was X..."
The question isn't whether people would still buy Office some of the time, or how many years Microsoft could operate on its cash reserves (at least, what people THINK is their cash reserves- proof? bueller?) The question is to what extent Microsoft's wealth and influence is a bubble. It doesn't have any goodwill and is weak on performance- the one thing MSFT has always been able to do is be a money machine. That drives everything. Some (such as Bill Parish) say they have been doing it through paying wage expenses not charged to earnings, i.e. paying people in stock. I'd like to know if they are still speculating on themselves through put options- the stuff Parish talks about tends to go over my head, but his basic point is that Microsoft is its own financial institution dependent on continued rapid valuation growth to maintain itself. He calls that a 'pyramid scheme' but even if you don't call it that, they should not be having a flat year under any circumstances. People underestimate how much effort they've always made to avoid that ever happening. I think if they are having flat earnings it has horrible significance- BECAUSE they aren't primarily a software company. They are a money company, an earnings company. Nobody cares if Windows Whatever rolls over and dies, but a run on MSFT should terrify you. It could take down the US economy with it. Investment in MSFT is _everywhere_.
Who the hell is going to sign a music industry contract with Microsoft? That's just crazy. They don't have the glamour to attract musicians, and God knows no labels are going to sign off on contracts with Microsoft. Unlike a hell of a lot of other businesses, the music business is no stranger to treachery. It's founded on deep-rooted treachery itself, these are not people who will happily get into bed with Microsoft. This is the only business I know of that's really comparable to MS. The lawyers will never reach an agreement. Each side will be certain the other side is totally untrustworthy and plotting horrible tricks, and that would be perfectly true- no deal.
But terrorism isn't futile- just evil.
When "even the little kids and old ladies are VC" you can't win. Terrorism only happens when the opponent can't fight traditionally, when their situation is futility. If the situation is still intolerable, they turn to terrorism, preferring to die fighting than to be destroyed anyhow.
Iraq hasn't really been into terrorism so much as it's been into outright warfare against other Middle Eastern states, but even so Iraq is not and has not been 'Saddam's supporters'. He's only a figurehead and got to be too much to bear anyhow. Without him- the Middle East will continue to be the Middle East. I'm not sure you quite understand what that means. Call this your rebuttal, FWIW.
Are you joking? The guy was hiding out in a hole in the ground, not coordinating anything. If they dragged him from an armed bunker with lots of communications lines I might see your point, but he was always a lousy figurehead for radical Muslim aggression. He wasn't even backing Al Quaeda. Some of you guys have got to learn to quit trying to associate social forces with single individuals. The funny thing is, even the 'enemy' could be sort of grateful Saddam was captured, because although he was a figurehead he was also a total creep who apparently tortured his own people and had insane sons who ran completely amok with power. If it was up to me I'd rather have my enemy led by someone like that, because it's less likeable. Be worried that some guy will come to light leading extreme radical Muslim aggression who is not a bastard to his own people. I am given to understand Bin Laden used to win loyalty by working as a paramedic for his own troops. Saddam wasn't that cagey.
Why? One less argument for continuing to stay in Iraq, something that he needs arguments for continuing to do. Too soon, way too soon. Bush would have vastly prefered to have captured the guy on Election Eve or thereabouts. There's way too much time left now for the Iraq situation to continue to suck, and Saddam is: (a) going to be forgotten (b) looks like the pitiful lack of threat to the US he really was. Really, it would have been better for Bush if he was in some well-armed bunker- or captured days before the election- or both. This is very bad news for Bush's re-election as far as the timing and circumstances, though I gotta give them props for not simply hiding the man until they could 'discover' him at the last possible moment. Maybe they thought of that but the word got out before it could be done.
MP3.COM did not assert ownership of files, but claimed perpetual rights over anything you gave them, provided it was for the purpose of something they called a 'secure account'. I forget the exact hose job, but the upshot was they got nonexclusive rights to your music forever and didn't actually have to pay you.
I hope all the musicians kept local copies, but I'm not sorry MP3.COM is to be destroyed.
Stay out of this one- I think you called it. I'm betting that Microsoft is pumping them with cash SPECIFICALLY to hose 'open source' novice investors who go "Woohoo, I'll short them!". It'll cost MS a lot to do this, but the prize is doing serious financial harm to a bunch of OSS folks who think they can out-clever the stock market. Yeah guys, SCOX is overvalued. Yeah, it's short bait. Ask yourself what happens when the price continues being pushed higher. Are you willing to gamble that Microsoft won't make a point of hosing you at any cost? SCOX is linux-lover-short-bait. The hook is the prospect of having to cover your short position, if I'm following this correctly. The purpose is to legally financially ruin a whole bunch of too-clever linux-nerds. This trap is for YOU.
MacOS Classic didn't have so much in the way of automated scripting tapping deeply into system tasks. Hell, even Applescript pretty much needed applications to be written especially to handle scripting events.
MacOS Classic didn't have so much in the way of auto-execute, auto-run etc. stuff- compare that to Windows. MacOS did copy one feature from Windows: auto-running programs on insertion of a CD, for ease of use. MacOS got a well-known worm, one of the 40 or so that have been recorded in Mac history, called the Autostart worm. There was also a way to stop it: turn off auto-start in the Quicktime control panel. And MacOS didn't go around turning it back on for you, either.
Most Mac-capable viruses are exclusively Microsoft software viruses for the simple reason that most are Office macro viruses.
The article author has a point. Leave the OS sitting there like a lump rather than scampering about trying to convince you that it's intelligent and friendly, and you don't get the viruses. Viruses REQUIRE a degree of autonomy from the OS. Even the example of how you could edit login.rc files on Linux take advantage of a degree of autonomy present in the OS, that auto-runs common programs to save you the trouble. If you logged in and manually typed everything in initrc every time, not even a user-space virus could auto-run, even if you'd run it yourself and infected your linux box. It requires the autonomy of an OS that's doing trusted stuff.
Old MacOS has very little of that, and as a result can be incredibly reliable IF you have it in a condition that's not bugladen: too many extensions and microsoft programs that run OS-level support code at all times, and you're hosed.
Even then, the coding culture of old MacOS was to let the user totally run the show. Not so many labor saving devices- not so many vectors for hostile code to work. It's that simple.
I'll get one some day, and I have a slashdot user ID.
I might be old and gray by then, though. If a blacksmith or a short story writer can get them then I can get one for my work designing opensource high-performance wordlength reduction routines that aggregate quantization error into intermittent noise rather than trying to distribute it evenly. That takes advantage of the ear's capacity to hear past certain kinds of noise. Or for my work investigating how the nonlinear characteristics of analog phenomena (even the simple compression of air) are missed when audio is perfectly summed using digital summing. Or for my speaker designs- really too much to get into.
Not that I can do lots of that work on around $8k a year: I have Asperger's syndrome and have a history of losing regular jobs from being too much of a freak, and I'm disabled. But hey, some day someone's going to decide to see what I can do if they bankroll me. Until then, I live only for the work I do, and go hungry half the time to do it.
Such is life. I'm lucky to be allowed to live as I am, and I am not bitching.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend with two children doomed to die of muscular dystrophy, so I have to wonder if this might be a relevant breakthrough in that area...
I'm a mastering engineer and hang out on mastering web boards, and the iPod came up in conversation.
FWIW, a tech heavyweight (trying to remember if it was Bruno Putzeys?) said they'd measured the iPod and got a perfect 10K tone out of the bugger with virtually unmeasurable sidebands.
NOT easy. That outperforms a heck of a lot of high-quality CD players, never mind mp3 portables. iPods apparently have very good tech if you know how to measure them. Jitter is what that 10K tone test measures, and it performed very, very well, I'm told.
Deejay. ..oh please oh please let it be deejay...
However, I'm happier with some clown doing this than I am with someone grabbing a slightly longer snippet of the same thing and using it to sell aftershave. Know what I mean? What really bothers me about modern culture is not so much rampant recycling by people who won't take the effort to come up with their own music, it's rampant recycling by corporate agendas that are determined to recast EVERY possible historical reference and cultural landmark into a meaningless orgy of brainless consumption. That bothers me. Some things matter. When something that was originally intended as a childishly idealistic outburst representing a vague but passionate worldview is repackaged to suggest that it might just as well mean that you should buy Post Toasties, something is lost. It's the impoverishment of intent- that once there was a time that people got passionate and expressed these idealistic views in their vague hippie ways, and then the world came around later and proved that it was meaningless. Maybe the original idealism was not wrong- maybe it's the impoverishment of intent that is wrong. It's like a kind of theft. At what point do you grow so tired of resisting the theft of your meaning that you give up? A few years? All your life? Do you get to have your expressions still convey what you meant even after death? Is the very concept that you 'meant' something by it irrelevant? If you don't change your mind, at what point does the world get to pervert what you meant and steamroller what you intended?
John Densmore of the Doors has written about his efforts to resist corporate hijacking of the Doors' music. He's had Robby Krieger's support and has had a lot of conflict with Ray Manzarek, who likes da money. The offers apparently just kept escalating- millions and millions offered to use that stuff for commercials. Densmore would bring up Vietnam vets who'd written him saying 'When I was in 'Nam your music saved my life. I hung on to life through listening to it because it was something real and honest and it wasn't another lie". To Densmore that was reason enough to fight for the intent of the music to be unaltered. If some rapper guy wanted to rip off loops from the Doors, how would that change the intent of the original music? Maybe it would be unfair to the musicians but that's another story. In some ways doing it without permission is all the better- rip it off and do something interesting, like you're making an audio collage from stolen things, the stealing is part of the gestalt of the artwork. With the commercial stuff, part of the gestalt is the implication that this new use is just as good a meaning, perhaps better, than whatever the music originally meant- and that permission had to be forthcoming. It's like a sanctioning, and again, impoverishment of intent. Three cheers for the Grey Album then, even if it sucks, and especially if it's stolen. At least THAT intent is upfront.
Calm down, Darl... and put the pipe down...
Um- if that were to happen it would be part of a pump and dump strategy and would be a useful indication of the IMMEDIATE collapse of Microsoft. Such a plan is not sustainable in any way. Microsoft thinks about future strategy- granted, they're in trouble but they are not in THAT much trouble that they would have to resort to such a desperate and implausible ploy.
Sorry, no. Ain't happening...
You're thinking of intermodulation distortion.
Actually, a better reason to do 192K is that you get to filter using a much more suitable filter. At 44.1K the filter has to be a brick-wall infinite slope filter, and those have a characteristic sound. Up at 22K this is more felt than heard, for instance it might feel like 'glare' on cymbals or harmonically rich content or bright ambience like a tiled room. At 192K you can still use a brickwall filter but it's well past even what can be vaguely sensed, but you can also use a better-sounding, gentler filter starting at 20K and ending at 96K.
Also, using the really steep filters means that the reconstructed waveform from extremely harmonically rich content (read: almost any commercial CD released in the last few years) will clip the DAC, and that sounds nasty. You're synthesizing a reconstructed, 'stairstepless' waveform using the filter, and the output wave can easily go way beyond the power supply rail voltages even if your samples aren't clipped. If you want to brute-force prevent this by just turning the gain down, you have to turn it down more than 6 db to accomodate all possible sample values, legal and illegal.
Consider a bunch of -FS samples followed by a +FS sample and then a bunch of -FS samples again. Easily created from legal input by simply turning up the gain in the digital domain. Flat-out illegal values that could not have been sampled directly on a ADC with a working anti-aliasing filter. Present on more CDs than you think... (or values like it, if not literally that)
I haven't finished the videotape in which he says he had WMDs and was working with Al Quaeda yet. It's hard to make his mustache move along with his lips, and I have to draw in each of his teeth frame-by-frame because they're too grungy to computer model :) ...doh! ;)
Wait, this is a public post?
You'd be a fool. Microsoft is bankrolling SCO's stock price for just such an eventuality. They want you to short it and then get caught with your pants down on a margin call.
Look it up.
But how else are you going to come up with the fingerprint database and be ready for when the government determines which patterns of whorls on fingers mean you are a terrorist? They will be able to pre-emptively execute or at least imprison terrorists thanks to this simple practice, except you, you ungrateful wretch, you're trying to get in the way. :P
How will George Bush know which sorts of whorls mean you're a terrorist?
I'm sure God will be good enough to tell him.
That short selling is not a safe bet. If you are certain some stock will tank for reasons of your own, and somebody with deep pockets wants to hurt you, they can get involved overtly or covertly and pump up the price until you have to meet a margin call at the new, higher price, and they will ruin you.
How many open sourcers have been ruined already because they figured the bottom line was SCO's _case_? I'd be very interested to know.
In spy thrillers John Le Carre called this sort of thing a 'honey trap'. Oh, look, what a wonderful opportunity! Look how unreasonable the situation is! Short me, short me!
Look a step farther to see who benefits from that stock artificially held up. Who benefits from margin calls ruining inexperienced OSS investors? Who benefits from SCO presenting the appearance of valuation, month after month, appearing more and more valuable in spite of what happens and what they're up against, viz. IBM?
No points for the answer. Somebody with deep pockets and a long history of being willing to try anything. This is a pretty smart tactic, though it's costly. You can't buy this kind of disruption through just throwing money at marketing and/or journalists.
It would be interesting to see the money trail traced, though it might be difficult.
I'll believe it is free trade when I can make something in Vermont and market it to workers in China and India.
That would be REAL globalization- if I could make something and a tenth of a percent of those people wanted it, I'd be doing great. There's so many of them.
Free trade would mean them being able to buy stuff I make, not just me being able to buy stuff they make.
Actually, it's number 2 :)
...and so on, down to
...and so on.
s Sorted.txt which is over 3000 entries, rated entirely mathematically. I wanted to figure out what albums people kept buying most, and study their sound engineering.
:)
If you take all multiplatinum albums ever, by number of platinums, and weight them by the number of years they've been out (sales has increased over the years and you want to reward continued sales and re-sales of the same album in your figures) you get:
675 Eagles, Eagles Greatest Hits
660 Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV
594 The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album)
506 Pink Floyd, The Wall
494 Michael Jackson, Thriller
432 Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
420 The Beatles, The Beatles 1967-1970
420 Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
405 Elton John, Greatest Hits
400 Boston, Boston
399 AC/DC, Back In Black
392 The Beatles, The Beatles 1962-1966
390 Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
384 Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II
375 Eagles, Hotel California
374 The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
360 Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack
352 The Beatles, Abbey Road
336 Billy Joel, Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II
324 Various, Great Band Era
324 Journey, Frontiers
312 Meat Loaf, Bat Out Of Hell
308 Led Zeppelin, Houses Of The Holy
300 Carole King, Tapestry
290 Simon & Garfunkel, Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
275 James Taylor, James Taylor's Greatest Hits
258 Elvis Presley, Elvis's Golden Records, Volume 1
256 Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin I
255 Bruce Springsteen, Born In The U.S.A.
252 Patsy Cline, Greatest Hits
252 Kenny Rogers, Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hits
250 Doobie Brothers, Best Of The Doobies
230 Van Halen, Van Halen
221 Prince & The Revolution, Purple Rain Soundtrack
217 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Deja Vu
216 The Beatles, Rubber Soul
216 Billy Joel, The Stranger
215 Johnny Mathis, Merry Christmas
001 K-Ci & JoJo, X
001 Joe, My Name Is Joe
001 Jill Scott, Who Is Jill Scott?: Words And Sounds, Volume 1
001 Jennifer Lopez, J. Lo
001 Jagged Edge, J. E. Heartbreak
001 Ja Rule, Rule 3:36
001 Godsmack, Awake
001 George Strait, Latest Greatest Straitest Hits
001 Fuel, Something Like Human
001 Everclear, Songs From An American Movie Volume One
001 Erykah Badu, Mama's Gun
That's from _my_ statistical wank: http://www.airwindows.com/analysis/EvergreenAlbum
Sorry- The Eagles Greatest Hits is 'the best album of all time' if you are looking at customer-driven sales numbers. Led Zep IV is number two by the numbers
I don't have a gatekeeper- because I don't have that kind of 'gate'. No IM here. I won't deal with it, and in fact I have my phone ringer off as well. /dev/console so they were added to the list of messages.
What I do find is that I need help keeping track of the information I do want. I once wrote a program named 'Staccato' to do that: it ran on boot and reminded me what was up that day.
I went to OSX and was in the puzzling situation of trying to dig through loads of information to find the same thing, as freeware, but in the end I did something totally different but better with two free programs one of which is a front end on a really fundamental UNIX tool.
I ran system console on my desktop (MkConsole) and stuck my reminders into cron as >&
So now, I may not have a secretary, but something starts gently reminding me every hour past midnight, "...did you do some writing on my novel yet?" knowing that I write late and have been known to forget. And my weekly events and appointments are in there as well. The computer is not acting to block information coming in. The computer is allowing me to NOT HAVE that information in my head in the first place, and feeding me it only when I want it. Otherwise I'd have to keep it all 'live' in order to know what was relevant that day and what was not.
It's not always about writing the bot to decide for you who you don't want to hear from. Sometimes it's the bot that acts as a clever alarm clock. I could also see using a heinous shell script to do something like *crunchcrunchcrunch* "Um, it looks like you haven't touched this project in three months. Do you still want to finish it? Your busiest project was X..."
The question isn't whether people would still buy Office some of the time, or how many years Microsoft could operate on its cash reserves (at least, what people THINK is their cash reserves- proof? bueller?)
The question is to what extent Microsoft's wealth and influence is a bubble.
It doesn't have any goodwill and is weak on performance- the one thing MSFT has always been able to do is be a money machine. That drives everything. Some (such as Bill Parish) say they have been doing it through paying wage expenses not charged to earnings, i.e. paying people in stock. I'd like to know if they are still speculating on themselves through put options- the stuff Parish talks about tends to go over my head, but his basic point is that Microsoft is its own financial institution dependent on continued rapid valuation growth to maintain itself. He calls that a 'pyramid scheme' but even if you don't call it that, they should not be having a flat year under any circumstances. People underestimate how much effort they've always made to avoid that ever happening.
I think if they are having flat earnings it has horrible significance- BECAUSE they aren't primarily a software company. They are a money company, an earnings company. Nobody cares if Windows Whatever rolls over and dies, but a run on MSFT should terrify you. It could take down the US economy with it. Investment in MSFT is _everywhere_.
Then why did they get a flat quarter? That can't happen.
You don't seem to understand how deftly they've played their valuation all this time...
If you pump with hundreds of women till dawn, you ain't gonna LIVE to 60 years of age. ;)
What a way to go, though
Who the hell is going to sign a music industry contract with Microsoft? That's just crazy. They don't have the glamour to attract musicians, and God knows no labels are going to sign off on contracts with Microsoft. Unlike a hell of a lot of other businesses, the music business is no stranger to treachery. It's founded on deep-rooted treachery itself, these are not people who will happily get into bed with Microsoft. This is the only business I know of that's really comparable to MS. The lawyers will never reach an agreement. Each side will be certain the other side is totally untrustworthy and plotting horrible tricks, and that would be perfectly true- no deal.
But terrorism isn't futile- just evil. When "even the little kids and old ladies are VC" you can't win. Terrorism only happens when the opponent can't fight traditionally, when their situation is futility. If the situation is still intolerable, they turn to terrorism, preferring to die fighting than to be destroyed anyhow. Iraq hasn't really been into terrorism so much as it's been into outright warfare against other Middle Eastern states, but even so Iraq is not and has not been 'Saddam's supporters'. He's only a figurehead and got to be too much to bear anyhow. Without him- the Middle East will continue to be the Middle East. I'm not sure you quite understand what that means. Call this your rebuttal, FWIW.
Are you joking? The guy was hiding out in a hole in the ground, not coordinating anything.
If they dragged him from an armed bunker with lots of communications lines I might see your point, but he was always a lousy figurehead for radical Muslim aggression. He wasn't even backing Al Quaeda.
Some of you guys have got to learn to quit trying to associate social forces with single individuals. The funny thing is, even the 'enemy' could be sort of grateful Saddam was captured, because although he was a figurehead he was also a total creep who apparently tortured his own people and had insane sons who ran completely amok with power. If it was up to me I'd rather have my enemy led by someone like that, because it's less likeable. Be worried that some guy will come to light leading extreme radical Muslim aggression who is not a bastard to his own people. I am given to understand Bin Laden used to win loyalty by working as a paramedic for his own troops. Saddam wasn't that cagey.
Why?
One less argument for continuing to stay in Iraq, something that he needs arguments for continuing to do.
Too soon, way too soon. Bush would have vastly prefered to have captured the guy on Election Eve or thereabouts. There's way too much time left now for the Iraq situation to continue to suck, and Saddam is:
(a) going to be forgotten
(b) looks like the pitiful lack of threat to the US he really was.
Really, it would have been better for Bush if he was in some well-armed bunker- or captured days before the election- or both. This is very bad news for Bush's re-election as far as the timing and circumstances, though I gotta give them props for not simply hiding the man until they could 'discover' him at the last possible moment. Maybe they thought of that but the word got out before it could be done.
I hope all the musicians kept local copies, but I'm not sorry MP3.COM is to be destroyed.
Stay out of this one- I think you called it. I'm betting that Microsoft is pumping them with cash SPECIFICALLY to hose 'open source' novice investors who go "Woohoo, I'll short them!". It'll cost MS a lot to do this, but the prize is doing serious financial harm to a bunch of OSS folks who think they can out-clever the stock market. Yeah guys, SCOX is overvalued. Yeah, it's short bait. Ask yourself what happens when the price continues being pushed higher. Are you willing to gamble that Microsoft won't make a point of hosing you at any cost? SCOX is linux-lover-short-bait. The hook is the prospect of having to cover your short position, if I'm following this correctly. The purpose is to legally financially ruin a whole bunch of too-clever linux-nerds. This trap is for YOU.
MacOS Classic didn't have so much in the way of auto-execute, auto-run etc. stuff- compare that to Windows. MacOS did copy one feature from Windows: auto-running programs on insertion of a CD, for ease of use. MacOS got a well-known worm, one of the 40 or so that have been recorded in Mac history, called the Autostart worm. There was also a way to stop it: turn off auto-start in the Quicktime control panel. And MacOS didn't go around turning it back on for you, either.
Most Mac-capable viruses are exclusively Microsoft software viruses for the simple reason that most are Office macro viruses.
The article author has a point. Leave the OS sitting there like a lump rather than scampering about trying to convince you that it's intelligent and friendly, and you don't get the viruses. Viruses REQUIRE a degree of autonomy from the OS. Even the example of how you could edit login .rc files on Linux take advantage of a degree of autonomy present in the OS, that auto-runs common programs to save you the trouble. If you logged in and manually typed everything in initrc every time, not even a user-space virus could auto-run, even if you'd run it yourself and infected your linux box. It requires the autonomy of an OS that's doing trusted stuff.
Old MacOS has very little of that, and as a result can be incredibly reliable IF you have it in a condition that's not bugladen: too many extensions and microsoft programs that run OS-level support code at all times, and you're hosed.
Even then, the coding culture of old MacOS was to let the user totally run the show. Not so many labor saving devices- not so many vectors for hostile code to work. It's that simple.
I might be old and gray by then, though. If a blacksmith or a short story writer can get them then I can get one for my work designing opensource high-performance wordlength reduction routines that aggregate quantization error into intermittent noise rather than trying to distribute it evenly. That takes advantage of the ear's capacity to hear past certain kinds of noise. Or for my work investigating how the nonlinear characteristics of analog phenomena (even the simple compression of air) are missed when audio is perfectly summed using digital summing. Or for my speaker designs- really too much to get into.
Not that I can do lots of that work on around $8k a year: I have Asperger's syndrome and have a history of losing regular jobs from being too much of a freak, and I'm disabled. But hey, some day someone's going to decide to see what I can do if they bankroll me. Until then, I live only for the work I do, and go hungry half the time to do it.
Such is life. I'm lucky to be allowed to live as I am, and I am not bitching.
Oh, I write novels, too.