they [the IRA] tried to focus on political targets because they were attempting to achieve a political goal. I'm not excusing their actions, nor am I saying that they didn't kill hundreds of innocent bystanders, but they generally didn't go out of their way to blow up coffee shops, discos, and bus stations.
WTF?!
I can't let this go uncorrected.
I'll take a wild guess that you're not British. I might even go further and guess that you're in America (where many people happily funded the IRA's regular bombing of civilians, until 9/11 there was a distinct lack of aversion to terrorism it seems).
As I read it, you're confirming his point more than refuting it. I thought he was saying (to transfer to your analogy) that the root problem is not police in your bedroom, it's fellatio being illegal.
Agreed. I got the cd single of "Battleflag", my ex-roommate later got it on vinyl. I was amazing to discover it was 'supposed' to say "on your motherf***in' knees": my radio edit had said "on your n-n-n-n-n-knees", and the stutter effect sounded sufficiently cool that not only did I fail to realise it was there to cover a swear word, I actually prefer it.
Likewise, there was a briillant radio edit of a Mekon and Schoolly D track, which replaced the swear words with old-school hiphop style samples, cuts and scratches. I could never find the radio edit which disappointed me as once again I actually preferred it to the uncensored version!
Troll? What, because I criticised an OSS project? Oh please. Grow the fuck up. Every word of that post was meant sincerly and non-trollingly, and is factually correct.
Your place just sounds idiotic to me. I don't think I [c|w]ould tolerate it.
I come in at about 10, wearing whatever I want, fire up Firefox, cruise around the (unfiltered) internet for a bit, ooh, I need to do some vector graphics today, I'll install Inkscape and see what that's like...
Sure, the pay isn't all that great compared to Big Corporates-ville (which is what I'm guessing your place is), but it's worth it to me to work in a place populated by sane people doing things because it helps the overall aim of the organisation, not insane people doing insane things for the sake of it.
I use Thnderbird at home. Every day @ work using Outlook reminds me why I prefer Thunderbird.
I use Thunderbird at home. Every day @ work using Outlook reminds me why I prefer Outlook. Thunderbird is rubbish, really. Even the littlest things are shabby, like it's insistence on spawning from one window to nine.
Fortunately, it doesn't really matter, since email @ work is alive and kicking, but email outside the corporate environment is pretty much dead as far as I'm concerned anyway.
Well yeah. That's kind of the entire point of web pages - you look at them visually.
No, that's not the entire point, the entire point is that they contain information/data. Often processed visually, yes, but by no means "the entire point".
No, but the vast majority do. In excess of 99% I'm guessing.
You evidently didn't really grasp the point of my post. Which is that vague handwaving that you're satisfying "most" people by taking assuming your content will always be consumed visually, doesn't help the disabled users who find using your site tortuous, it doesn't help the users who never find your site because your search ranking is poor, it doesn't help your web staff when marketing decide to rebrand and you're altering 10,000 pieces of markup instead of one stylesheet...
If it were really so difficult to do it with CSS, and end up with a page of fully semantic markup that looks just as good to the 99% as one with tables, then I might have more sympathy for the "settling for a vast majority" attitude. But it's really not that difficult.
Regarding your last point: You're assuming that phone browsers miraculously know which bits of the CSS to change so it looks good on a phone screen.
If your menu is in the leftmost cell, then typically this gets rendered first and the rest of the page gets rendered below this. This is no different to how it would render on a text-based browser or mobile-browser if you implemented it in CSS.
Great. And if your menu is in the right-hand column, then what?
I honestly don't see the problem with using one or two tables to define the site layout. Nobody has ever given me a good reason why doing the same thing using only DIVs and CSS is better (and don't even think about using rendering speed as an argument - I've benchmarked it myself and table layouts usually render faster - probably because usually they require less code).
It's because using a table for layout means it only makes sense when looked at visually. When rendered, your nested arrangement of rows and columns and rowspan= and valign= means a person "parsing" your web page with their eyes, gets the information in the way you expect. This thing/picture/text relates to this thing/picture/text because it's next to it. Right?
Trouble is, not everybody "receives" webpages by looking, with their eyes, at a rendering in a fully-fledged latest-gen GUI browser.
Some major categories:
The visually impaired, who may use screenreaders and so on. Your table arrangement turns your page into a nightmare for them, as source order and source "closeness of related items", versus visually-perceived order and "closeness of related items", are wildly divergent. You might not care about blind people, but the lawdoes.
Electronic systems. The most obvious, important real-world example right now is search spiders. They, too, do not "look" at your visually rendered table. They only "understand" the document by reading the source. Thus, something appropriately marked up as <div id="photos"> rather than the 9th <td> inside the 4th <tr> inside the 5th <table> means it has a much better idea of what it IS. Thus improving your SEO. However, do not be fooled into thinking "electronic systems" only means SEO, really this is a vast category, if you have a logically/semantically defined page the possibilities for easy, reliable "mashups" (yes, I hate the word, too), client side customisation (user stylesheets, greasemonkey, adblock, etc) and so on are enormous.
Non full-fat browsers of other kinds, such as on pdas, iphone, smartphones. A clean, semantically marked up page can be intelligently re-rendered to best suit the device. For example a listing of train times is exactly that, a list, and on a small screen would be more comfortably read if rendered as a very vanilla <ul> list, text naturally wrapped to the small phone display width, rather than displayed in a table which forced a minimum width greater than the phone screen really allowed, thus ending up with tons of horizontal scrolling.
I have suggested this before and always got shouted down for it... but as a web developer, I really wish they had simply implemented tags like 'date', which the browser would automatically know about as a date field and have its own built-in popup calendar for browsing dates, rather than having to either rely on plain text, lame dropdown menus, or else implementing yet another date popup javascript library (or including yet another javascript library which slows down the user experience even more).
Excellent idea.
"The TABLE tag is for tabular data only, don't use it for arranging the page". What crap. The table tag is amazingly useful, it works in all browsers, and no I don't mind in the least typing TR and TD everywhere. It's simple and it works. Yes, it's more verbose perhaps than the CSS version but at least it works in all browsers and doesn't end up with overlapping crappy text all over the place.
Absolute load of rubbish, sorry. I see this crap all the time on slashdot, with all due respect it's quite obvious the people who say it are people with a little personal homepage or something. Not actual web professionals who have to consider maintainability and reusability (across different staff, countries, projects), accessibility (backed up with legal teeth in many places now), SEO, device portability, centrally controlled corporate branding vs delegation of content provision, etc.
Now don't get me wrong, you sadly do have a point, table based layouts do "work" and hence they're still around. Like the primary website (10,000 public pages, lots more inside an extranet area) I maintain, which is still table based. But that's awful: awful to maintain, awful for accessibility, awful for SEO, awful on mobiles, awful at letting me have others submit articles directly without f&%$king the format/style. Our newer stuff, done with CSS instead, wipes the floor with it in every department.
Sorry, but if you know what you're doing, doing layouts that "render properly" and "works in all browsers and doesn't end up with overlapping crappy text all over the place" is not difficult, and the benefits are enormous.
Out of interest, which bank? Natwest works fine with Firefox, I'd be really surprised if one of the other big guns like Barclays, Lloyds etc thought it could get away with cross browser compatibility!
Re:Whatever happened to voting with your feet?
on
Woz on Open Source, DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because he's a billionaire...
Does not compute; doesn't answer the question at all. That explains how he can buy a lot of <anything>, but not why.
Being a billionaire, he could have bought 97,000 jellyfish-shaped strawberry cheesecakes, but he (presumably) didn't, so "being able to buy something" clearly doesn't in itself explain why he/anyone DID buy something.
And Apple only sold DRM music until recently.
Again, completely specious argument I'm afraid, as Apple are not the only vendors of music.
"Doesn't make sense" is different than "strongly opposed to." Like I said he is a billionaire, and he probably has lot of other stuff on his mind (like more pranks, apparently.) Just because you think something is a bad idea doesn't mean you equate it to Satan. People have different priorities in their life
On the other hand this is an absolutely fair point. I must admit his 'anti-DRM' remark was so extremely vague/weak it's a stretch to start contrasting it against his behaviour. In fairness that rant was more of an "in general" thing, not so much aimed at him specifically (he just gave me the topical 'hook' to rant off), and more based on seeing/hearing people do this in general.
Whatever happened to voting with your feet?
on
Woz on Open Source, DRM
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sorry, I know Woz is a geek god and all that, but I still don't see why he should be let off this one. If you don't think DRM "makes sense", why on earth have you bought so much DRM-d content and so little DRM-free content?
I'm not sure how many tracks I have (I'm not at home to check) but I think perhaps 60 gig or so (legal, I hasten to add - 99% cd rips), but I do know exactly how many DRM-free tracks I have in my library: all of them. There isn't a DRM'd track on my hard drive. There isn't a user account in my name with any vendor of DRM'd tracks.
It's really not very difficult to simply not buy something you think is a poor product or morally objectionable idea, and I don't half get fed up of seeing people complain about <Apple / MS / Walmart / RIAA / MPAA / Nike / Nestle / etc> and in the next breath telling us all about their latest purchase from said company.
And I know what slashdot is like, so if anyone is thinking of arguing the technicality that Woz didn't decry DRM, only "forever" DRM, perhaps they can be ready with the evidence that ITMS DRM is built to turn itself off any time sooner.
Try doing a basic three column-layout (left bar, main, right bar) with header and footer in IE. Trust me you'll be ready to strangle something long before you get it working in IE.
"All layouts use valid markup and CSS, and have been tested successfully on Internet Explorer/win 5.0, 5.5, 6 and beta 2 preview of version 7; Opera 8.5, Firefox 1.5 and Safari 2."
It seems to me there are main driving forces behind moving to software as a service:
For the company - the chance to charge ($n x months) instead of $n - replacing one-off income with ongoing income
For the user - no longer having to maintain their own box, worry about updates and patches, configuration, malware, etc
In the first case, why would Linux/OSS developers be interested in this? Generally speaking, it is free (as in gratis) software. They're not in it to maximise profits. Of course, Linux/OSS companies (Red Hat, etc) like to make money, but they generally do so via support contracts which are ($n x months) anyway.
In the second case, why would Linux/OSS users be interested in this? Generally speaking, they are the type of people who like to tinker, and opted for Linux precisely because they can "own" / control everything on their box. People who think nothing of compiling their applications from source aren't going to be in a hurry to give up that sense of control in exchange for not having to worry about applying patches!
I realise these are generalisation, and there are always counter-examples. For example, the notion of "Linux for Mom / Grandma" many slashdotters talk about to get them out of virus/spyware hell - this could make sense, as then they'll always get the latest Firefox and OO.o's and whatnot, without the slashdotter having to go round or ssh in to do the upgrades.
Well, the problem is that without some incentive, there won't be any non-smoking bars.
Speaking as someone in the UK, with about 6 weeks left before the smoking ban...
I would have to say: if there won't be any non-smoking bars without a special govt incentive, doesn't that indicate that there is no demand for no smoking bars?
The whole smoking ban thing seems crazy to me. If there are REALLY so many non-smokers who absolutely hate smoke in pubs/bars, then all it takes is ONE pub/bar to voluntarily go non-smoking and WHOOSH! their custom goes through the roof, the smoky bars are empty, the customer base floods to the smoke-free business instead. Before long, some of those smoky bars see the trend, and go non smoking too. Eventually, we end up with a % of smoky vs smokefree bars that correlates with the % of (smokers / people who don't care about smoke) vs (non smokers / people who get really upset by smokiness).
It's ironic, normally on slashdot I'm rolling my eyes at the naive "basement-dwelling / high-school-attending libertarian" posts claiming that "the market will fix everything", but in this particular case, I kinda fail to see why this shouldn't be the case.
Oh well. I'll just have to hope for the best WRT smirting.
Which RSS reader is that? In the unlikely event that I ever feel the need to install such a piece of software, I want to make sure I don't pick that one.
Maybe it's just the crowd you hang with/get emails from. Certainly, the non-techie users I see around here are mostly using Hotmail, and if not that then Yahoo.
Totally off-topic, but one of the most curious things I've done is stick my hands into a giant vat of boiling toffee. I can't even remember the occasion, some school/college thing I think, but a whole bunch of us were being taught how to make toffee, and the stage of getting from the giant vat of bubbling liquid into smaller units, was done by simply reaching in and grabbing a fist-size chunk at a time.
I'm sure it doesn't take much imagination to think: "Jesus Christ, TOFFEE? That's going to be far worse than water, because it'll stick and basically rip all your skin clean off!"
But it's well possible and doesn't hurt at all. You just put your hands in a bowl of ice water for a good 5 minute or so beforehand, til they go totally numb. Bash 'em into the vat, in, out, quick as that, you don't feel a thing.
Heh. I have to admit, I'd absolutely never thought of that. I have an external USB hard drive, but I never considered using them as backup devices. If you unplugged it and tucked it in a cool, dry, stable cupboard (or whatever optimum storage conditions would be), how long could you expect to leave it and still have it operational and readable?
Buying/ripping CDs is starting to look like a good idea again.
It never stopped being a good idea, imho.
Many point out these advantages:
DRM free
Lossless audio quality which you can rip to VBR/320 now and still have the option to rip to FLAC in a few years time, WAV a few years after that (as HDD capacities increase), if you so desire.
Artwork/lyrics
But these miss the biggest advantage of all, imho: Backup.
Yup, hard drives die. What happens when yours dies with all your MP3s (oggs, whatever) on it? You've got it all backed up - right? Well, I sure as hell haven't made a backup. I've got 80, 90 gig of music and a DVD burner that won't burn working DVDs - so that's 150-odd CD-Rs I'd have to sit there burning.
If you buy an albums' worth of music on CD, then rip, you get MP3s, and your CD goes on the shelf as a physical backup. Buy an albums' worth of music on MP3, if you want the physical backup you have to burn one. Well, do you burn CDRs every time you buy mp3s? Really? And even if you, consider:
Which disc lasts longer - the glass-mastered, pressed redbook CD, or the burnt consumer CD-R? I know a load of my backup CD-Rs from five years ago, that never left their storage case in the meantime, no longer read. (If I hadn't been paranoid enough to burn everything twice, it'd be lost. So now that's 300 CD-Rs I'd have to burn...) Whereas well-kept twenty year old audio CDs still play fine.
Just my opinion of course. I'm not telling anyone what format to buy in - I see plenty of people come up with well argued reasons why MP3 suits them better, fair enough. I buy MP3s too, occasionally. When there's only one or two tracks on a CD that I want, then obviously it makes much more sense. This doesn't happen that often, though, simply because I mostly prefer artists who are capable of putting out albums that aren't 80% crap! In these situations, iTunes would need to be DRM-free, 256kbps, track for £0.50 / album for £5 or less* to be remotely attractive competition for CDs, in my eyes.
(* I realise that $0.99 / $9.99 is less than £0.50 / £5 at the moment, but we get the usual $=£ stitch up with iTunes.)
As a big soccer/football fan myself (forza juventus!) sometimes YouTube is the only way I can watch the premiership or international football games in the US.... [but] people often upload it in segments.
Nice link. Contrary to Wired's claim, I didn't think they all felt like art at all. #12 does, I suspect because it's a pretty traditional form of artistic composition; and I agree, it's nice. #3 and #6 I really liked, actually more than #12, because they were strongly thought provoking. By essentially representing the number through what is (ironically) another "encryption scheme", they really make you question the legal / conceptual / philosophical aspects of the situation. Take for example #6 accompanied by the words represents "the number represented as binary and converted into an image with 16x8 dimensions." You think "But that doesn't contain the number at all, so even if you accepted that they could shut down 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, how you can accept they could shut this image + caption down?" - and yet it does very, very obviously transmit the number.
So, yeah, those ones powerfully illuminated the key issues behind all this, more sharply than prose can, and thus I can happily call them art.
#5: too obvious for my taste, but I can't argue with the concept/principle.
#2 and #4: seeing people actually take this into the real world, and not just posting it on the interwebs, is very nice, but the photos of the result of that aren't really art in themself imho.
TBH, though? All the rest are fairly low grade rush job basic internet humour 'chops, as found in any sizeable forum within four minutes - and, worse, often combined with toe-curling vacuous "I (pretend to) have read Chomsky, and, like, ya know, fuck the system and shit" 'political' sloganeering.
Hehe, nah, sorry. Actually, at the time I played with it, it was back on Reaktor 4 I think; well before he gave away that cut down version for NI anyway.
Anyway, the reason he deserves special mention in this article (I was too rushed to say this earlier), is because he is firmly improvisational. If you understand this -- and grasp/literally see how the movements and combinations of the sliders under his control correspond, real-time, to the changes in the resulting output -- I think you see he makes a much stronger case for "the laptop as instrument" than almost any of the Ableton jockeys can.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF?!
I can't let this go uncorrected.
I'll take a wild guess that you're not British. I might even go further and guess that you're in America (where many people happily funded the IRA's regular bombing of civilians, until 9/11 there was a distinct lack of aversion to terrorism it seems).
Actually, they happily bombed shopping malls and city centres , offices, pubs, restaurants, public transport...
The IRA VERY MUCH systematically "went out of their way" to kill and injure hundreds of civilians.
As I read it, you're confirming his point more than refuting it. I thought he was saying (to transfer to your analogy) that the root problem is not police in your bedroom, it's fellatio being illegal.
Agreed. I got the cd single of "Battleflag", my ex-roommate later got it on vinyl. I was amazing to discover it was 'supposed' to say "on your motherf***in' knees": my radio edit had said "on your n-n-n-n-n-knees", and the stutter effect sounded sufficiently cool that not only did I fail to realise it was there to cover a swear word, I actually prefer it.
Likewise, there was a briillant radio edit of a Mekon and Schoolly D track, which replaced the swear words with old-school hiphop style samples, cuts and scratches. I could never find the radio edit which disappointed me as once again I actually preferred it to the uncensored version!
Frankly it'd be nice just to meet a dealer who gave you the first one free.
I've never been given free drugs, first time or otherwise.
Just more scare-story horseshit made up by people who don't know what they're on about because they've never had the balls to try drugs anyway.
Troll? What, because I criticised an OSS project? Oh please. Grow the fuck up. Every word of that post was meant sincerly and non-trollingly, and is factually correct.
Call me crazy, but couldn't you... um... leave?
Your place just sounds idiotic to me. I don't think I [c|w]ould tolerate it.
I come in at about 10, wearing whatever I want, fire up Firefox, cruise around the (unfiltered) internet for a bit, ooh, I need to do some vector graphics today, I'll install Inkscape and see what that's like...
Sure, the pay isn't all that great compared to Big Corporates-ville (which is what I'm guessing your place is), but it's worth it to me to work in a place populated by sane people doing things because it helps the overall aim of the organisation, not insane people doing insane things for the sake of it.
I use Thunderbird at home. Every day @ work using Outlook reminds me why I prefer Outlook. Thunderbird is rubbish, really. Even the littlest things are shabby, like it's insistence on spawning from one window to nine.
Fortunately, it doesn't really matter, since email @ work is alive and kicking, but email outside the corporate environment is pretty much dead as far as I'm concerned anyway.
If it were really so difficult to do it with CSS, and end up with a page of fully semantic markup that looks just as good to the 99% as one with tables, then I might have more sympathy for the "settling for a vast majority" attitude. But it's really not that difficult. No, I'm assuming that XHTML and CSS standards come with a method of delivering different stylesheets to different devices, and allow user (agents) to add additional user stylesheets to the cascade. Great. And if your menu is in the right-hand column, then what?
It's because using a table for layout means it only makes sense when looked at visually. When rendered, your nested arrangement of rows and columns and rowspan= and valign= means a person "parsing" your web page with their eyes, gets the information in the way you expect. This thing/picture/text relates to this thing/picture/text because it's next to it. Right?
Trouble is, not everybody "receives" webpages by looking, with their eyes, at a rendering in a fully-fledged latest-gen GUI browser.
Some major categories:
Excellent idea.
Absolute load of rubbish, sorry. I see this crap all the time on slashdot, with all due respect it's quite obvious the people who say it are people with a little personal homepage or something. Not actual web professionals who have to consider maintainability and reusability (across different staff, countries, projects), accessibility (backed up with legal teeth in many places now), SEO, device portability, centrally controlled corporate branding vs delegation of content provision, etc.
Now don't get me wrong, you sadly do have a point, table based layouts do "work" and hence they're still around. Like the primary website (10,000 public pages, lots more inside an extranet area) I maintain, which is still table based. But that's awful: awful to maintain, awful for accessibility, awful for SEO, awful on mobiles, awful at letting me have others submit articles directly without f&%$king the format/style. Our newer stuff, done with CSS instead, wipes the floor with it in every department.
Sorry, but if you know what you're doing, doing layouts that "render properly" and "works in all browsers and doesn't end up with overlapping crappy text all over the place" is not difficult, and the benefits are enormous.
*SMACK*
Out of interest, which bank? Natwest works fine with Firefox, I'd be really surprised if one of the other big guns like Barclays, Lloyds etc thought it could get away with cross browser compatibility!
Being a billionaire, he could have bought 97,000 jellyfish-shaped strawberry cheesecakes, but he (presumably) didn't, so "being able to buy something" clearly doesn't in itself explain why he/anyone DID buy something.
Again, completely specious argument I'm afraid, as Apple are not the only vendors of music. On the other hand this is an absolutely fair point. I must admit his 'anti-DRM' remark was so extremely vague/weak it's a stretch to start contrasting it against his behaviour. In fairness that rant was more of an "in general" thing, not so much aimed at him specifically (he just gave me the topical 'hook' to rant off), and more based on seeing/hearing people do this in general.
Sorry, I know Woz is a geek god and all that, but I still don't see why he should be let off this one. If you don't think DRM "makes sense", why on earth have you bought so much DRM-d content and so little DRM-free content?
I'm not sure how many tracks I have (I'm not at home to check) but I think perhaps 60 gig or so (legal, I hasten to add - 99% cd rips), but I do know exactly how many DRM-free tracks I have in my library: all of them. There isn't a DRM'd track on my hard drive. There isn't a user account in my name with any vendor of DRM'd tracks.
It's really not very difficult to simply not buy something you think is a poor product or morally objectionable idea, and I don't half get fed up of seeing people complain about <Apple / MS / Walmart / RIAA / MPAA / Nike / Nestle / etc> and in the next breath telling us all about their latest purchase from said company.
And I know what slashdot is like, so if anyone is thinking of arguing the technicality that Woz didn't decry DRM, only "forever" DRM, perhaps they can be ready with the evidence that ITMS DRM is built to turn itself off any time sooner.
Well, why are you re-inventing the wheel, anyway?
"All layouts use valid markup and CSS, and have been tested successfully on Internet Explorer/win 5.0, 5.5, 6 and beta 2 preview of version 7; Opera 8.5, Firefox 1.5 and Safari 2."It seems to me there are main driving forces behind moving to software as a service:
In the first case, why would Linux/OSS developers be interested in this? Generally speaking, it is free (as in gratis) software. They're not in it to maximise profits. Of course, Linux/OSS companies (Red Hat, etc) like to make money, but they generally do so via support contracts which are ($n x months) anyway.
In the second case, why would Linux/OSS users be interested in this? Generally speaking, they are the type of people who like to tinker, and opted for Linux precisely because they can "own" / control everything on their box. People who think nothing of compiling their applications from source aren't going to be in a hurry to give up that sense of control in exchange for not having to worry about applying patches!
I realise these are generalisation, and there are always counter-examples. For example, the notion of "Linux for Mom / Grandma" many slashdotters talk about to get them out of virus/spyware hell - this could make sense, as then they'll always get the latest Firefox and OO.o's and whatnot, without the slashdotter having to go round or ssh in to do the upgrades.
I would have to say: if there won't be any non-smoking bars without a special govt incentive, doesn't that indicate that there is no demand for no smoking bars?
The whole smoking ban thing seems crazy to me. If there are REALLY so many non-smokers who absolutely hate smoke in pubs/bars, then all it takes is ONE pub/bar to voluntarily go non-smoking and WHOOSH! their custom goes through the roof, the smoky bars are empty, the customer base floods to the smoke-free business instead. Before long, some of those smoky bars see the trend, and go non smoking too. Eventually, we end up with a % of smoky vs smokefree bars that correlates with the % of (smokers / people who don't care about smoke) vs (non smokers / people who get really upset by smokiness).
It's ironic, normally on slashdot I'm rolling my eyes at the naive "basement-dwelling / high-school-attending libertarian" posts claiming that "the market will fix everything", but in this particular case, I kinda fail to see why this shouldn't be the case.
Oh well. I'll just have to hope for the best WRT smirting.
Which RSS reader is that? In the unlikely event that I ever feel the need to install such a piece of software, I want to make sure I don't pick that one.
Totally off-topic, but one of the most curious things I've done is stick my hands into a giant vat of boiling toffee. I can't even remember the occasion, some school/college thing I think, but a whole bunch of us were being taught how to make toffee, and the stage of getting from the giant vat of bubbling liquid into smaller units, was done by simply reaching in and grabbing a fist-size chunk at a time.
;)
I'm sure it doesn't take much imagination to think: "Jesus Christ, TOFFEE? That's going to be far worse than water, because it'll stick and basically rip all your skin clean off!"
But it's well possible and doesn't hurt at all. You just put your hands in a bowl of ice water for a good 5 minute or so beforehand, til they go totally numb. Bash 'em into the vat, in, out, quick as that, you don't feel a thing.
Again, kids, don't try this at home
Heh. I have to admit, I'd absolutely never thought of that. I have an external USB hard drive, but I never considered using them as backup devices. If you unplugged it and tucked it in a cool, dry, stable cupboard (or whatever optimum storage conditions would be), how long could you expect to leave it and still have it operational and readable?
Buying/ripping CDs is starting to look like a good idea again.
It never stopped being a good idea, imho.
Many point out these advantages:
But these miss the biggest advantage of all, imho: Backup.
Yup, hard drives die. What happens when yours dies with all your MP3s (oggs, whatever) on it? You've got it all backed up - right? Well, I sure as hell haven't made a backup. I've got 80, 90 gig of music and a DVD burner that won't burn working DVDs - so that's 150-odd CD-Rs I'd have to sit there burning.
If you buy an albums' worth of music on CD, then rip, you get MP3s, and your CD goes on the shelf as a physical backup. Buy an albums' worth of music on MP3, if you want the physical backup you have to burn one. Well, do you burn CDRs every time you buy mp3s? Really? And even if you, consider:
Just my opinion of course. I'm not telling anyone what format to buy in - I see plenty of people come up with well argued reasons why MP3 suits them better, fair enough. I buy MP3s too, occasionally. When there's only one or two tracks on a CD that I want, then obviously it makes much more sense. This doesn't happen that often, though, simply because I mostly prefer artists who are capable of putting out albums that aren't 80% crap! In these situations, iTunes would need to be DRM-free, 256kbps, track for £0.50 / album for £5 or less* to be remotely attractive competition for CDs, in my eyes.
(* I realise that $0.99 / $9.99 is less than £0.50 / £5 at the moment, but we get the usual $=£ stitch up with iTunes.)
Nice link. Contrary to Wired's claim, I didn't think they all felt like art at all. #12 does, I suspect because it's a pretty traditional form of artistic composition; and I agree, it's nice. #3 and #6 I really liked, actually more than #12, because they were strongly thought provoking. By essentially representing the number through what is (ironically) another "encryption scheme", they really make you question the legal / conceptual / philosophical aspects of the situation. Take for example #6 accompanied by the words represents "the number represented as binary and converted into an image with 16x8 dimensions." You think "But that doesn't contain the number at all, so even if you accepted that they could shut down 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, how you can accept they could shut this image + caption down?" - and yet it does very, very obviously transmit the number.
So, yeah, those ones powerfully illuminated the key issues behind all this, more sharply than prose can, and thus I can happily call them art.
#5: too obvious for my taste, but I can't argue with the concept/principle.
#2 and #4: seeing people actually take this into the real world, and not just posting it on the interwebs, is very nice, but the photos of the result of that aren't really art in themself imho.
TBH, though? All the rest are fairly low grade rush job basic internet humour 'chops, as found in any sizeable forum within four minutes - and, worse, often combined with toe-curling vacuous "I (pretend to) have read Chomsky, and, like, ya know, fuck the system and shit" 'political' sloganeering.
Hehe, nah, sorry. Actually, at the time I played with it, it was back on Reaktor 4 I think; well before he gave away that cut down version for NI anyway.
Anyway, the reason he deserves special mention in this article (I was too rushed to say this earlier), is because he is firmly improvisational. If you understand this -- and grasp/literally see how the movements and combinations of the sliders under his control correspond, real-time, to the changes in the resulting output -- I think you see he makes a much stronger case for "the laptop as instrument" than almost any of the Ableton jockeys can.