Yeah, I was gonna mention Tim Exile too, although I would do, cos I know him:)
I've actually had a play on the system he built (well, I had a play about 3-4 years ago, I dare say he's changed it a lot since then. A constant work in progress as far as I could tell...). It's a lot of fun.
See timexile.com for more info and (I expect) tunes / vids etc. Oh, there's also a mass technical interview / Q&A with him here.
Right, I'm getting back to work before I read the usual surprisingly stone-age slashdot schtick that comes up on music related stories. You know, if it involves any sort of technology it's cheating, it doesn't take any skill whatsoever, it shouldn't even be called music, I could make that crap in five minutes, you'd never get this back when men were men and Zep were Zep..
(As it happens, I grew up about half a mile east of the prime meridian. There was a cute little sundial by the roadside to mark it. These days, though, I've traitorously switched hemispheres, and live at 0.0731 deg W.)
Probably because the more childish contingent of Linux zealots who frequent this site unfailingly tag every article relating to a Microsoft/Apple/BSD/whatever security flaw or bug "haha". So now users of all those systems are 'getting their own back'. Pretty juvenile all round really.
hehe, damnit, I so wish I had mod points right now.
To go up, not down, that is. I think you nailed the perfect mix of humourous rant and truth.
Sure, you're a little unfair, in that some blogs are decent writing / "real" journalism; but by and large there seems to be a pretty strong anti-correlation (if you see what I mean) between the authors of the decent ones and the people using the idiotic and irritatingly self-important phrase "blogosphere".
It's impossible to download Open Office on Windows? You can only buy it in a shop? Really?
It's impossible to play a full screen movie without annoying messages in Windows? Really? Funny, I thought that was Quicktime - an Apple product, remember? Yes, you can get it on Windows, but then again you can also get umpteen other media players which happily play full screen without doing this - including, er, the one that comes built in with Windows (rubbish as it is in every other regard, it at least doesn't match Quicktime in that department).
That this tripe is moderated +4 insightful makes a bit of a mockery of slashdot groupthink. Bash Windows + Praise Linux = modded to the roof, even when it's essentially complete nonsense.
Well that's why any halfway serious "prosumer", let alone actually pro, soundcard houses the converters in a breakout box. Like the Delta 1010 through which I am currently listening to music.
I'm not even going to bother reading what sort of overpriced audiophile stuff these guys are slashvertising, about 150 quid gets you something like an m-audio 2496; spending any more money beyond that sort of point (ie, 24 bit, 96khz, breakout box, half decent DACs and ADCs, half decent noisefloor) is utterly pointless, because I can promise you that you can't hear any difference by changing your PC hardware, if you're listening on coloured hi-fi/consumer speakers and/or listening in an acoustically untreated room. If you're going to try and tell me you can hear a difference, you're probably one of those people with the wooden volume knob already linked here, in which case your opinion is automatically a joke.
All a matter of taste, isn't it, though? I watched about 20 minutes of Clerks and turned it off because IMHO it was completely crap. For a film that's (apparently) all about dialogue, that dialogue was unwatchably contrived, stage-y and smugly smart-alec-y, I just couldn't handle it. Strange, because I thought Chasing Amy had outstandingly realistic dialogue and that's the same guy (IIRC?)
their investment is paying out worse than a Scotsman on comic relief night
I do realise you're joking, and I'm not being defensive/offended because I'm Scottish, because I'm not Scottish (well, if I have any Scottish blood, it's at least three generations back)... But...
Just out of interest, did you know that the Scots are statistically the most generous charity-givers in the UK? Sorry, too drunk to find a proper source to cite
I like hard drives. I'm not a child - I can carry around an iPod without dropping it.
Heh. That's what I thought. Proved myself wrong though...
Credit where it's due - I dropped my Zen several times without it flinching. But a couple of weeks ago, running for a train, flies out of my pocket onto the pavement (er, "sidewalk"), kaput.
Needless to say, this was nine days after my guarantee ran out:(
Anyway. I bought another one. Did I get a flash player instead? Heh, as if - was pleased to pick up an 80GB model for less than my previous 40GB me cost a year (and nine bloody days) earlier. So, I'm not actually disagreeing with you. Huge hard drive players for the win!
And as for all these people saying "you can't possibly listen to that music or if you do you probably stole it". Um - newsflash - not everybody is exactly like you? Personally I couldn't give a monkeys (er, "rat's ass") about compiling my own operating system, playing any sort of computer games / consoles, or many of the other pastimes which are clearly very popular here. Doesn't mean I'm piping up in the OSS stories saying "if you took 14 seconds to read a line of code, it would take you 82 years to read the Linux source, therefore nobody ever has any use for the Linux source". Or "if you took 11 seconds to look at every square km of the World of Warcraft environment, it would take you 17 years to see it all, therefore nobody has any valid reason to play an RPG".
Personally, music is easily my biggest "luxury" spending. Usually I'll pick up a handful of CDs every week. My 40GB Zen was full when I broke it, and I still regularly found myself frustrated at not finding something to suit my exact mood. All these maths posts about how long it would take to listen to every track end-to-end are spectacularly missing the point, nobody does that, it's about ALWAYS having something to fit your mood RIGHT NOW, whatever that may be. It's about a random event suddenly triggering the memory of a song you haven't heard in months or years, and being able to dial it up on the spot, or bumping into someone and wanting to play them something they'll love, without ever having to think "oh dear, shame I didn't have space for that when I stocked up my player three weeks ago".
One of the guys in this thread argued against that point by saying something like "you can still get a huge variety; for example you could put X amount of five different genres..." Five genres? Don't be f###ing ridiculous! So I put on (eg) some classic rock, some soul/funk, some ambient/downtempo, some hiphop, and some drum'n'bass. Oops - I'm in the mood for classical. Oh dear, shame I haven't got any trance. I could fancy a little jazz or maybe even some country - too bad I didn't include them in my five genre allocation. Honestly, what can you say to that except laugh?
In short, much as slashdotters might like to try, you can't actually explain away the mind of the music-obsessive with back-of-an-envelope arithmetic. Then again, every music related story is dominated by people saying "but all music you can buy these days is manufactured rubbish", which clearly illustrates that the poster doesn't care about music enough to spend even five minutes seeking out stuff beyond ClearChannel playlists. So from the outset their view on how much ipod space people "need" clearly bares no relation at all to people who actually love music more than anything (ie, the people buying those large hard drive players).
Congratulations, your tedious repetition of a tedious joke, so clumsily adapted for "relevance" to this story, and so obviously only posted in a cravenly transparent bid for circle-jerking approval from all the other chair-joke retards, is actually less funny than cancer.
What planet are you on? DAT is a higher definition format than CDs (48khz instead of 44.1). Minidiscs are lower, being (lossily) compressed. DAT machines are still found (in use) in pretty much every professional audio facility in the world. Minidisc players are mostly found (broken) at junk sales or at the bottom of boxes in attics. In what way are minidiscs better again?
Blade Runner - the plot was fairly straightforward.... bad guys... hunted down by a cop (the good guy).
Yes, and that's why it was a fundamentally piss-poor PKD adaption.* Hollywood rubbish non-plot 101. Cop chases bad guys. Whoop-de-doo.
The questions that the plot raised - what made the replicants not human? what makes humans human? Was the cop human or not? How do we know our memories are real? - are all pretty deep, complex, and ambigious.
I would be more inclined to word that sentence, "the questions that the plot dodged" - those sort of complex issues accounted for most of the book, but were basically cut out in favour of a bog standard chase plot. Of course they don't stop you from thinking about them if you want, but they don't exactly give them the weight they deserve from the original.
However, the main thing which I think is absolutely awful about Bladerunner as a sci fi film, is the soundtrack. A sci fi film set in the future requires that I suspend my disbelief, and accept the action is taking place in the future. This is pretty much impossible when every few seconds there's a burst of some cheap 8-bit synthesiser or Kenny G style saxophone which, musicologically speaking, scream "EARLY 80s! EARLY 80s! EARLY 80s!" as loudly as they can.
* I choose the phrase carefully, as opposed to simply 'poor movie' - because having read the book before seeing the film, and being unable to un-read it and see the film first, it is impossible for me to really judge the film in any other terms. FWIW, IMHO the best PKD adaption, most faithful in spirit, is Total Recall. Yes, seriously.
Hmm. Most of my favourite 30-40 albums, which all file under "no more than a couple of duff tracks", don't qualify, as they don't have 15 tracks on them at all. (I guess I listen to a lot of stuff with long tracks, heh.) However, I could still mention a few favourites like "Little Feat - Waiting for Columbus", "Shpongle - Nothing Lasts... But Nothing Is Lost", or the Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik".
It's a strange measure anyway, what's wrong with the CDs that have the same total amount of music split into, say, 12 excellent tracks?
How does "quite obviously a tongue in cheek joking post, look, even with a wink smilie and everything" imply "negative Apple comment alert! I had better respond to this slight straightaway and with great literalism!" I don't think that anybody except fawning Mac fans like you equates the two.
When the story is about Microsoft or Linux PCs, then all the Apple fans fall over themselves to post in the story about how their products "just work".
When the story is actually about Apple, they're lulled into thinking they're just talking amongst themselves, without the MS and Linux fans listening, and all the mucky truth about the myriad ways in which Macs fail to "just work" come out of the woodwork.
All I want is a decent quality analog to digital conversion... there just doesn't seem to be any market for a plain old sound card, just like it's impossible to buy a plain old cell phone.
I'm pleased to say you're wrong. You just need to stop looking in general computer/consumer shops/magazines, and start looking in hobbyist "prosumer" audio circles. Manufacturers like M-Audio, Echo, RME, Terratec etc do a wide range of cards which have no tacky wank like "environmental FX", and just concentrate on high quality ADC and DACs.
For example, the M-audio 2496 gives you 24 bit / 96 khz stereo in/out and cost about £180 last time I looked (admittedly that was about 4-5 years ago!) The creative Audigy on the other hand gave you 16 bit depth and a fixed 48 khz sample rate (WTF? because Audigy users interface with a DAT more often than they play CDs? bwahaha, right), and far worse audio performance (noisefloor, THD, etc) - and cost about £220 at the same time.
Basically Creative cards these days are a joke amongst anyone who knows anything about soundcards. Overpriced toss. If you're going to get a card from them, get one sold under the Emu brand, they're actually half decent. I think the Creative brand only exists to milk gullible gamers with more money than computer knowledge, tbh.
I agree, as far as I can tell Linksys are garbage.
Bought one of their routers the about 10 days ago. Plugged it in - picked up my house's wireless, "you are authenticated with the access point but the internet cannot be found". Er.... You what? Switch it off, switch on again, and occasionally the internet would be "found", occasionally it wouldn't be. It seemed like a problem with DHCP, because when it didn't work/ipconfig was giving me nothing for gateway/etc - when I filled in those values manually it would work - but that was rather academic since regardless of whether it assigned me an IP or not, I only got between 20 seconds and 4 minutes online before it went haywire. I'd be keeping an eye on my CPU and it would push up, and up, and up, 60%, 70%, just doing something ultra-lightweight like loading the google homepage as a test, before dropping the connection. At which point I'd switch off, switch on, CPU drops back to 0, begin all over again...
One time I didn't switch it off and just let the CPU do it's thing - the result? A "hard", no-warning-whatsoever reboot of my entire machine. Now, despite all the slashdotters' outdated jokes about blue screens - XP has never done that to me once since I got the machine (about four years back). Nor have I ever seen it happen at work or at a friend's house. So that's clearly one shitty, shitty peripheral / driver.
Final proof of the pudding came the next day, when I went back to the shop and bought a cheaper, smaller, wireless router by a "never heard of them in my life" brand, and it worked flawlessly first time.
I know that data is not the plural of anecdote, but sadly for Linksys, I only need one product experience as abysmal as that to avoid a company completely in future.
I don't get it. If you're trying to imply "likeliest" is not a perfectly cromulent word, I'm afraid you're wrong, it definitely is a real word. If there's no sarcasm / tongue in cheek and you do literally wish to point out the word does exist, I don't understand why you'd pick on "likeliest" instead of any of the other words they used which do exist:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was gonna mention Tim Exile too, although I would do, cos I know him :)
I've actually had a play on the system he built (well, I had a play about 3-4 years ago, I dare say he's changed it a lot since then. A constant work in progress as far as I could tell...). It's a lot of fun.
See timexile.com for more info and (I expect) tunes / vids etc. Oh, there's also a mass technical interview / Q&A with him here.
Right, I'm getting back to work before I read the usual surprisingly stone-age slashdot schtick that comes up on music related stories. You know, if it involves any sort of technology it's cheating, it doesn't take any skill whatsoever, it shouldn't even be called music, I could make that crap in five minutes, you'd never get this back when men were men and Zep were Zep..
It is indeed a very interesting read (good old Stephenson!), thanks a lot for the link - keeping me entertained at work today ;)
Considering that Greenwich is FAR nearer the UK's easternmost extremity than its westernmost, I'd imagine it's actually a lot more than half.
Yes, this pedanticism is purely tongue-in-cheek.
(As it happens, I grew up about half a mile east of the prime meridian. There was a cute little sundial by the roadside to mark it. These days, though, I've traitorously switched hemispheres, and live at 0.0731 deg W.)
hehe, damnit, I so wish I had mod points right now.
To go up, not down, that is. I think you nailed the perfect mix of humourous rant and truth.
Sure, you're a little unfair, in that some blogs are decent writing / "real" journalism; but by and large there seems to be a pretty strong anti-correlation (if you see what I mean) between the authors of the decent ones and the people using the idiotic and irritatingly self-important phrase "blogosphere".
It's impossible to download Open Office on Windows? You can only buy it in a shop? Really?
It's impossible to play a full screen movie without annoying messages in Windows? Really? Funny, I thought that was Quicktime - an Apple product, remember? Yes, you can get it on Windows, but then again you can also get umpteen other media players which happily play full screen without doing this - including, er, the one that comes built in with Windows (rubbish as it is in every other regard, it at least doesn't match Quicktime in that department).
That this tripe is moderated +4 insightful makes a bit of a mockery of slashdot groupthink. Bash Windows + Praise Linux = modded to the roof, even when it's essentially complete nonsense.
I've no mod points and I've already replied in this topic anyway, but your comment deserves to be above 2 imho. Nail on head.
Well that's why any halfway serious "prosumer", let alone actually pro, soundcard houses the converters in a breakout box. Like the Delta 1010 through which I am currently listening to music.
I'm not even going to bother reading what sort of overpriced audiophile stuff these guys are slashvertising, about 150 quid gets you something like an m-audio 2496; spending any more money beyond that sort of point (ie, 24 bit, 96khz, breakout box, half decent DACs and ADCs, half decent noisefloor) is utterly pointless, because I can promise you that you can't hear any difference by changing your PC hardware, if you're listening on coloured hi-fi/consumer speakers and/or listening in an acoustically untreated room. If you're going to try and tell me you can hear a difference, you're probably one of those people with the wooden volume knob already linked here, in which case your opinion is automatically a joke.
All a matter of taste, isn't it, though? I watched about 20 minutes of Clerks and turned it off because IMHO it was completely crap. For a film that's (apparently) all about dialogue, that dialogue was unwatchably contrived, stage-y and smugly smart-alec-y, I just couldn't handle it. Strange, because I thought Chasing Amy had outstandingly realistic dialogue and that's the same guy (IIRC?)
I do realise you're joking, and I'm not being defensive/offended because I'm Scottish, because I'm not Scottish (well, if I have any Scottish blood, it's at least three generations back)... But...
Just out of interest, did you know that the Scots are statistically the most generous charity-givers in the UK? Sorry, too drunk to find a proper source to cite
Heh. That's what I thought. Proved myself wrong though...
Credit where it's due - I dropped my Zen several times without it flinching. But a couple of weeks ago, running for a train, flies out of my pocket onto the pavement (er, "sidewalk"), kaput.
Needless to say, this was nine days after my guarantee ran out :(
Anyway. I bought another one. Did I get a flash player instead? Heh, as if - was pleased to pick up an 80GB model for less than my previous 40GB me cost a year (and nine bloody days) earlier. So, I'm not actually disagreeing with you. Huge hard drive players for the win!
And as for all these people saying "you can't possibly listen to that music or if you do you probably stole it". Um - newsflash - not everybody is exactly like you? Personally I couldn't give a monkeys (er, "rat's ass") about compiling my own operating system, playing any sort of computer games / consoles, or many of the other pastimes which are clearly very popular here. Doesn't mean I'm piping up in the OSS stories saying "if you took 14 seconds to read a line of code, it would take you 82 years to read the Linux source, therefore nobody ever has any use for the Linux source". Or "if you took 11 seconds to look at every square km of the World of Warcraft environment, it would take you 17 years to see it all, therefore nobody has any valid reason to play an RPG".
Personally, music is easily my biggest "luxury" spending. Usually I'll pick up a handful of CDs every week. My 40GB Zen was full when I broke it, and I still regularly found myself frustrated at not finding something to suit my exact mood. All these maths posts about how long it would take to listen to every track end-to-end are spectacularly missing the point, nobody does that, it's about ALWAYS having something to fit your mood RIGHT NOW, whatever that may be. It's about a random event suddenly triggering the memory of a song you haven't heard in months or years, and being able to dial it up on the spot, or bumping into someone and wanting to play them something they'll love, without ever having to think "oh dear, shame I didn't have space for that when I stocked up my player three weeks ago".
One of the guys in this thread argued against that point by saying something like "you can still get a huge variety; for example you could put X amount of five different genres..." Five genres? Don't be f###ing ridiculous! So I put on (eg) some classic rock, some soul/funk, some ambient/downtempo, some hiphop, and some drum'n'bass. Oops - I'm in the mood for classical. Oh dear, shame I haven't got any trance. I could fancy a little jazz or maybe even some country - too bad I didn't include them in my five genre allocation. Honestly, what can you say to that except laugh?
In short, much as slashdotters might like to try, you can't actually explain away the mind of the music-obsessive with back-of-an-envelope arithmetic. Then again, every music related story is dominated by people saying "but all music you can buy these days is manufactured rubbish", which clearly illustrates that the poster doesn't care about music enough to spend even five minutes seeking out stuff beyond ClearChannel playlists. So from the outset their view on how much ipod space people "need" clearly bares no relation at all to people who actually love music more than anything (ie, the people buying those large hard drive players).
Congratulations, your tedious repetition of a tedious joke, so clumsily adapted for "relevance" to this story, and so obviously only posted in a cravenly transparent bid for circle-jerking approval from all the other chair-joke retards, is actually less funny than cancer.
What planet are you on? DAT is a higher definition format than CDs (48khz instead of 44.1). Minidiscs are lower, being (lossily) compressed. DAT machines are still found (in use) in pretty much every professional audio facility in the world. Minidisc players are mostly found (broken) at junk sales or at the bottom of boxes in attics. In what way are minidiscs better again?
... Which has never had a chance to buy a Tivo, so putting it in the top #3 of "all time" products seems ... er... f***ing retarded.
Yes, and that's why it was a fundamentally piss-poor PKD adaption.* Hollywood rubbish non-plot 101. Cop chases bad guys. Whoop-de-doo.
I would be more inclined to word that sentence, "the questions that the plot dodged" - those sort of complex issues accounted for most of the book, but were basically cut out in favour of a bog standard chase plot. Of course they don't stop you from thinking about them if you want, but they don't exactly give them the weight they deserve from the original.
However, the main thing which I think is absolutely awful about Bladerunner as a sci fi film, is the soundtrack. A sci fi film set in the future requires that I suspend my disbelief, and accept the action is taking place in the future. This is pretty much impossible when every few seconds there's a burst of some cheap 8-bit synthesiser or Kenny G style saxophone which, musicologically speaking, scream "EARLY 80s! EARLY 80s! EARLY 80s!" as loudly as they can.
* I choose the phrase carefully, as opposed to simply 'poor movie' - because having read the book before seeing the film, and being unable to un-read it and see the film first, it is impossible for me to really judge the film in any other terms. FWIW, IMHO the best PKD adaption, most faithful in spirit, is Total Recall. Yes, seriously.
Hmm. Most of my favourite 30-40 albums, which all file under "no more than a couple of duff tracks", don't qualify, as they don't have 15 tracks on them at all. (I guess I listen to a lot of stuff with long tracks, heh.) However, I could still mention a few favourites like "Little Feat - Waiting for Columbus", "Shpongle - Nothing Lasts... But Nothing Is Lost", or the Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik".
It's a strange measure anyway, what's wrong with the CDs that have the same total amount of music split into, say, 12 excellent tracks?
Heh.
How does "quite obviously a tongue in cheek joking post, look, even with a wink smilie and everything" imply "negative Apple comment alert! I had better respond to this slight straightaway and with great literalism!" I don't think that anybody except fawning Mac fans like you equates the two.
Moderated "interesting"? Oh my... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoshopping ;-)
Definitely, that's what I was about to suggest. A true WTF.
great article, thanks. deserves higher moderation.
No, no, no.... you don't understand.
;)
When the story is about Microsoft or Linux PCs, then all the Apple fans fall over themselves to post in the story about how their products "just work".
When the story is actually about Apple, they're lulled into thinking they're just talking amongst themselves, without the MS and Linux fans listening, and all the mucky truth about the myriad ways in which Macs fail to "just work" come out of the woodwork.
For example, the M-audio 2496 gives you 24 bit / 96 khz stereo in/out and cost about £180 last time I looked (admittedly that was about 4-5 years ago!) The creative Audigy on the other hand gave you 16 bit depth and a fixed 48 khz sample rate (WTF? because Audigy users interface with a DAT more often than they play CDs? bwahaha, right), and far worse audio performance (noisefloor, THD, etc) - and cost about £220 at the same time.
Basically Creative cards these days are a joke amongst anyone who knows anything about soundcards. Overpriced toss. If you're going to get a card from them, get one sold under the Emu brand, they're actually half decent. I think the Creative brand only exists to milk gullible gamers with more money than computer knowledge, tbh.
I agree, as far as I can tell Linksys are garbage.
/ipconfig was giving me nothing for gateway/etc - when I filled in those values manually it would work - but that was rather academic since regardless of whether it assigned me an IP or not, I only got between 20 seconds and 4 minutes online before it went haywire. I'd be keeping an eye on my CPU and it would push up, and up, and up, 60%, 70%, just doing something ultra-lightweight like loading the google homepage as a test, before dropping the connection. At which point I'd switch off, switch on, CPU drops back to 0, begin all over again...
Bought one of their routers the about 10 days ago. Plugged it in - picked up my house's wireless, "you are authenticated with the access point but the internet cannot be found". Er.... You what? Switch it off, switch on again, and occasionally the internet would be "found", occasionally it wouldn't be. It seemed like a problem with DHCP, because when it didn't work
One time I didn't switch it off and just let the CPU do it's thing - the result? A "hard", no-warning-whatsoever reboot of my entire machine. Now, despite all the slashdotters' outdated jokes about blue screens - XP has never done that to me once since I got the machine (about four years back). Nor have I ever seen it happen at work or at a friend's house. So that's clearly one shitty, shitty peripheral / driver.
Final proof of the pudding came the next day, when I went back to the shop and bought a cheaper, smaller, wireless router by a "never heard of them in my life" brand, and it worked flawlessly first time.
I know that data is not the plural of anecdote, but sadly for Linksys, I only need one product experience as abysmal as that to avoid a company completely in future.
I don't get it. If you're trying to imply "likeliest" is not a perfectly cromulent word, I'm afraid you're wrong, it definitely is a real word. If there's no sarcasm / tongue in cheek and you do literally wish to point out the word does exist, I don't understand why you'd pick on "likeliest" instead of any of the other words they used which do exist :)
The IT Crowd was from Channel 4, not the BBC.