The Free Software movement was started my RMS because the spooler for the new Xerox printer installed at the AI Lab did not come with source code. It had a tendency to jam and not tell the user before he walked across the campus to retrieve his job. The old printer did this (IIRC) but RMS had the source and was able to notify the user (actually, all of the users with print jobs in the queue) so that the printer could be unjammed before a trip was wasted.
Accepting non-free drivers is giving up your freedom. Personally, I use GNU/Linux because I am freed from the whims of the developer. If you wish to be a slave again please return to Windows or the Mac OS while the rest of us continue to use our Free Software.
The driver argument is foolish anyway. If you really must keep things secret (e.g. wireless cards) then move more things into the firmware and make the driver more simplistic (e.g. only allow the driver for the 802.11 card choose the channel to broadcast over instead of the exact frequency).
It's funny how you want to give in to non-free drivers when they are essentially the reason GNU/Linux exists in the first place.
Jesse Smith of Zao once said something like there are no Christian donut makers, so why should there be Christian musicians? That is why Zao stopped being a Christian band and became a band with four Christian guys in it. They then began to produce better music (until they wanted to quit but had two more albums left on their record deal...).
I cannot stand music where every song is about how cool God is, or is emo about how the singer's girlfriend broke up with him but it is ok because God is cool and keeps him happy.
A girl I met a few weeks ago found it really shocking that the only remotely Christian band I listen to is Zao (and I don't really even listen to them anymore). "But the Christian Music Industry is great." No, it sucks. Absolutely sucks. I used to be stupid and would only listen to music made by Christians. Now I listen to every kind of metal I can get my hands on because I realized that music is music. The repetive theme of Christian bands are no better than the repetive themes of die-hard anti-Christian bands (e.g. Deicide, one of the worst death metal bands ever...mostly because the lyrics are boring "Satan spawned a cacodaemon...kill the Christian...I hope Jesus dies...blah blah this is the same song as the last one and the next one").
Not to mention that most "Christian" musicians do not live a very Christian life. I used to be on a moral high horse and wouldn't even let a bad word slip from my mouth. I am reminded of another one of Jesse Smith's stories where an amp fell on his head, broke his tooth, and then he screamed "God dammit!" and a little CMI kid told him he was going to hell because he said "the D-word." Yet he was living a more Christian lifestyle than most overtly Christian musicians do. Sex, Drugs, Rock&Roll, and Jesus. All to sell a dollar.
I think most good musicians who also happen to be Christian have given up on the CMI. You can only succeed in the CMI if you suck and yell "JESUS" as every other world.
I think I'll start a Christian industrial band. It will be my keyboard, drum machine, Jesus, and I making music together. F-G, F-G, F-G, IV inversion of G (OM*G THAT MAKES IT PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN INDUSTRIAL UNKNOWN_LAMER IS SUCH A VIRTUOSO).
What the fuck are you on? The data is exactly the same on a CD-R copy as it is on the original. The discs may not last as long but they should sound the same. If they skip or anything it is because the disc has become damaged or your CD deck is too old to pick up the lighter reflections from a CD-R.
The Neuros has the ability. It works fairly well and even does Ogg Vorbis.
It's not the most polished or small portable music player, but the FM broadcast feature is nice. The best part about it is that it inspired me to take my attenna off of my car (to reduce interference) and now no one can steal the radio and turn it to something stupid (like anything played on the radio). I still get the AM news station with the attenna off, but FM is gone.
The quality of the broadcast is limited by the low power of the transmitter and the limits of FM radio. If I had a non-stock sound system (91 Camaro so the stock is a lot better than evil tinny early 90s Asian cars but is still kind of bad) I would patch it into my head unit via line-in. If you are looking to replace a cassette tape adaptor it sounds a lot better and works when you lack a cassette deck.
Actually, CDs do cost $20. If you are stupid and shop at places like Sam Goody and FYE.
It's your own damn fault if you do that though. If you are looking for mainstream music then buy at Best Buy ($1 over cost in an attempt to trick you into wasting your money on other things), otherwise use the internet. CDUniverse usually beats Amazon in price, but the CDNOW Prefferred Buyers Club is a cheap way to get a lot of major-label stuff (they even have some stuff like Porcupine Tree) for about $9 a CD. There are also many zShops on Amazon (like cdquest and Caiman, both of which I have ordered from several times without issue) which list prices lower than CDUniverse and friends.
There's also the used music store. Record and Tape Traders in the DC/Baltimore area is a good chain of used music shops with a good selection and low prices.
But some people are dumb and just have to get their music in the mall at FYE after they are done buying their clothes at American Eagle Outfitters...
The song 6DoIT was originally going to be one long track but Mike Portnoy decided to split the eight movements into tracks because paging through it to get to a certain section was painful. Each section of the song stands alone as well as a movement in a classic symphony piece does; it may be good by itself but it makes more sense when listened to in the context of the larger work. This is emphasised in the song 6DoIT by a lot of riff sharing and a common theme.
My friend Mike hates ToT and I was a bit lukewarm about it until I saw them live in DC a few weeks ago. The live version of that album is ripping; people were moshing to Dream Theater! The pit carried on into "Pull Me Under" too which was amazing. The really good lighting and obscene volume helped too (John Mung did not need that many bass cabs!).
They almost played "Space-Dye Vest" live for the Live Scenes From New York album but Kevin Moore declined the band's request to join them for the performance. The song is pretty much his (I can't tell if it is him who starts to sing the last verse or not...the vocals don't sound like normal James LaBrie vocals) and is rather personal to him so they won't play it live unless he joins them. Maybe the song will be played live during the OSI tour if there is an OSI II (not likely...all the guys who were in OSI said they would do it again but none of them have any time). One can always hope.
The copying from long term storage into RAM is covered by Fair Use. Distribution to other users is not. This is why "End User License Agreements" are intrinsically invalid (they cover use when copyright only allows the copyright holder to control distrbution).
The reason Disc 2 is that long is because that disc is actually a single song. Look at the booklet; Disc 2 is "Degree 6," the title track.
6DoIT is an ok album, but we all know that Awake was the best:) Most people seem to not like 6DoIT or Train of Thought but I love them. "The Glass Prison" was the first Dream Theater song I ever heard... my friend DCCed it to me and it inspired me to go and buy all three Dream Theater albums which were on the shelf at the store.
Dream Theater - Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (Disc 2, which is the 42 minute long song split into eight tracks) (2002)
Falconer - The Sceptre of Deception (2003)
Gamma Ray - No World Order (2001)
Kamelot - Epica (2003)
Iced Earth - Night of the Stormrider (1992)
Iced Earth - Dark Saga (1996)
Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)
Opeth - Still Life (1999)
Those are just a few concept albums, there are many more. There are a lot of other albums like everything by NIN or the Devin Townsend Band that need to be listened to in order to fully understand the music (most of the songs stand alone fine but are a lot better when listened to in order because you can see the interconnections better). Same goes for most live albums. The same goes for internal inter-song structure (e.g. Kamelot has a song "Elizabeth" which is spread over three tracks on their album Karma).
I'd like to see a player which allowed me to mark tracks as needing to be played alongside another track so I didn't have to make XMMS visible and queue the next song when stuff like that happened.
Now that I know of a DS filter which is a far smaller download than Winamp 5 Full (the Vorbis module is no longer included in the non-huge version, feh) and then enables Vorbis support for a lot of apps. Thanks for the link, I'll trick everyone into installing it now:)
There would be no problems if people still used Winamp. When I last used Windows Winamp 2.6 was brand new and came with Vorbis support out of the box. Everyone used Winamp because WMP sucked even more than it does now. Sucks that times have changed so much.
I am a card carrying member of the FSF (Associate Member #114) and don't use Windows.
Windows users are already slaves to proprietary vendors...at least they can be freed from proprietary formats I suppose. The better solution is to stop using Windows and switch over to GNU/Linux where Ogg Vorbis is supported by everything;)
Exactly. This is why it is perfectly legal to use PlayFair as long as the resulting file is not distributed. Whether or not copying the file onto a portable player counts as distribution is questionable. The GPL cannot restrict your usage of GPLed software because of Fair Use; Apple cannot restrict your usage of music files because of Fair Use.
I don't know why anyone would pay money for a lossy file "protected" by Digital Restrictions Management anyway. The only way I would pay for electronic music would be if it were FLAC or another lossless format. This is why I still buy CDs (that and the pretty artwork). It's also nice to know that my CDs will still work if the record store I purchased it from goes under.
I love Blind Guardian. They were the first power metal band I really got into. If it hadn't been for them I would still be listening to nothing but death metal. Or perhaps I would have given up since straight death metal seems to be a bit... boring. Listening to a song about shredding a girl to pieces for the seventeen thousandth time sucks. Especially once you start to understand the words. They lyrics basically suck. There are a few really good death metal band though (Obituary for one).
Blind Guardian seems to have peaked around Imaginations From the Other Side (I love the song, but Somewhere Far Beyond is my favorite Blind Guardian album). They do deserve credit for inspiring a lot of other bands. And life wouldn't be worth living without Demons & Wizards. It's like Iced Earth but so much better.
Liquid Tension Experiment's "Three Minute Warning" is a 26 minute long circle jerk, but "A Change of Seasons" is not. The song is told in seven parts and maps the course of a man's live and his quest to live life to the fullest.
Dream Theater wrote a 42 minute long song ("Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence," song six on the album with the same name; it has its own disc because the other five songs clock in at around 65 minutes). This is progressive music we're talking about; the muscians love to show off and do crazy things because they can.
The only reason you don't love what is coming out is because you don't listen to quality music.
Personally, I love a lot of the music being released today. Opeth, Dream Theater, Blind Guardian...all of then are amazing and consistently release worthwhile material.
Part of the problem with a lot of popular bands today is that, upon achieving stardom, they stop practicing and their playing goes to shit. There also seems to be a problem with releasing albums which are mostly tracks which should have been shelved for a while or worked on more before release.
Hell, a good example of this is OSI. The second disc of the special edition version of the album contains a track entitled "The Thing That Never Was" which is a 17 minute and 20 second long track. They recorded everything except for the vocals and then scrapped the song. Yes, they scrapped a pretty much finished song. All was not in vain however; they yanked pieces of the song and turned those pieces into the beginnings of many other songs which comprised the album. Another classic example is Dream Theater's "A Change of Seasons." The song was written in 1989. It wasn't recorded until 1995. The song was played live several times and a new keyboardist reworked the keyboard sections and the song was heavily changed. The result was a really really good song clocking in at 23 minutes and 8 seconds.
A lot of popular musicians need to release albums every two or three years instead of every year or year and a half. Most professional musicians would have thrown out most of the material which actually makes it onto a lot of those albums. Thus you get one or two good songs and a bunch of demo material which needs to be ripped apart and rewritten. Or scrapped entirely.
I have a nearly 250 album collection and there are only maybe 30-40 songs which I could say weren't at least mildly enjoyable. Most of those are Iron Maiden;). Out of 2,227 track on my computer, maybe 100 of them are songs which I skip when they come up (XMMS on random).
People need to listen to more stuff like Dream Theater, a band who seems to have no difficulty with pumping out excellent material every other year (Falling Into Infinity doesn't count...the live versions of all of the songs on that album are different [rather, the album versions are different than what the band wrote] because the produce forced them to change every single one at the request of the label in order to make DT more marketable...DT self produce their albums now for a reason).
Actually, no. Perhaps your mom would do it, but no one I know would. It pisses me off because I hate MP3 (aside from the patent issues, it sucks when compared with Vorbis). Winamp has had support for Vorbis for many years now (Hell, I remember it having Vorbis support in the default install when I last used Windows...three and a half years ago) but the Windows Media Player has pretty much killed Winamp. People are lazy and refuse to install Winamp even though most of them are on broadband and it would take a grand total of two minutes of their time.
I convinced the guy who runs hxcmp3.com to enable Vorbis support in the software the site uses. My former band put all of our music on the site as Vorbis. We had a respectable ranking in the download listings, but I recieved a number of complaints about not being able to play the songs. I put a blurb about installing Winamp, but then I got complaints about it requiring too much effort to listen to the songs.
The Mac is better off; the QT Components for the Mac are easy to install and work right away. For a while after the release of QuickTime 6 they were broken, but now they work again. After being installed, everything which makes use of QuickTime on the Mac or Windows gains support for Vorbis. This is more useful on the Mac than on Windows since pretty much everything used QuickTime.
Now, if Ogg Vorbis had a DirectShow filter, the situation would be different. Simply link to a quick 30 second DS filter or QT component download and even Windows Media Player or QuickTime could play Ogg Vorbis. I don't use Windows, but there has to be someone who would be willing to write the needed code (unless it has already been done).
I wonder if Real Player has support for Vorbis? After all the hubbub about the Helix "Open Source" stuff it would be a shame if it didn't.
There are also many people like me who traded music with friends and now buy a good 100-200 albums a year.
I only used Napster for a few tracks (28.8...) and the rest I got by burning mp3s and oggs of my friends music. Now I own most of those albums and no longer have any of the old files around (I hate mp3s because they suck...and the tagging sucked. My collection is now mostly beautifully tagged and encoded as Vorbis).
You can't get the pretty pictures in the CD jacket on the internet. I listen to Prog Metal and Power Metal; most of the liner artwork is beautiful. I like impressing people with my music collection.
At the Quiznos indoctrination session nearly two years ago when the store I worked at opened, the corporate guys told us all to save our clock in reciepts just in case something like that happened (accidentally, of course).
Our store is small and the owner is nice. He doesn't like to pay overtime but does when he has too. When most of us graduated from High School and everyone but five of us (including the owner) went away for senior week...90 hours in one pay period + 28 the weekend before + 45 the week after (as people began to trickle back in I didn't have to work 14 hour shifts anymore). Ah, I love time and a half. I wish everyone were going away again:)
As an owner of a Dual AthlonMP 2800+ rig, I can tell you that the extra $1000 for the SMP would be worth it...once you go SMP you can never go back. And SMP should be an extra $1000 (unless you can only get SMP on the highest end G5 and compare that price against a slightly lower end model). All in all it only cost me about $300 more for the SMP system ($70 more for the board + $100 for the extra proc + $30 for the extra HSF + $100 more for the RAM since the board only takes Registered ECC).
Having two oggencs running at once both chugging along at 14x realtime while the system remains responsive (because, at that speed, it is the speed of my hard disk that is limiting things...14x = ~14 MB/s being processed, * 2 = ~28M per second being pulled from the hard drive after being pulled off of a CD) so I still have enough CPU time left for everything else.
Being able to rip a DVD to XViD + Vorbis and watching that rip while it is being encoded is also really nice. Or playing Quake 2 while running a three pass encode. Ardour and The GIMP love me more too. SMP is just plain cool. I need more RAM though...GCC 3.x eats RAM while compiling C++ so having two copies of GCC both using 700M stresses my system a bit (since I only have 1G of RAM). Otherwise everything is really responsive.
Dear Moderators: Please don't moderate this comment. I turned off the karma bonus because I know it is off topic and wish for it to be ignored by most people.
Debian can use kudzu (RedHat's hardware detection stuff), but it doesn't work as well as discover does (which is the native Debian hardware detection code). Discover uses (or at least used to, I don't know about discover2) the Mandrake hardware data and maybe some code from hwdetect (not sure).
Discover + Hotplug + Udev is an amazing combination. It is really nice to be able to add a single line to the hotplug configuration to have my Neuros mount and synchronize itself as soon as I plug it in, or running a quick script after the installation of gphoto2 to add the lines so that I can simply plugin any digital camera supported and have it work (I could even have set it up to run GTKam or Kamera for me but right now I just have it set to set the permissions of the device files correctly so I can use everything when I'm not running X or logged in as another user).
Mandrake is cool because they borrowed some stuff from Debian like menu and alternatives which are really nice. I ran Mandrake 6 for a long time before I made the switch to Debian after happening upon all three potato CDs at a LUG meeting. I install Debian the October after Potato was released...it's been a fun time.
There is a Mesopotamian creation story (I forgot which one) in which Marduk splits the water goddess (Tiamat?) in two and creates the earth in between the upper and lower waters of her corpse. The sky is blue, the sea is blue. Naturally it follows that both are water.
Both Yahweh and Marduk are storm gods as well. Marduk was even made the head of the pantheon as a result of his destruction of Tiamat and the creation of men (I know Mami [I think that was her name] birthed man kind, but Marduk did the convincing) to do all the work for the lower gods. The resemblence between the two is interesting.
One doesn't have to take everything written in the Tanakh as being literal or entirely factual in order to accept the whole thing as being generally sound.
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The Free Software movement was started my RMS because the spooler for the new Xerox printer installed at the AI Lab did not come with source code. It had a tendency to jam and not tell the user before he walked across the campus to retrieve his job. The old printer did this (IIRC) but RMS had the source and was able to notify the user (actually, all of the users with print jobs in the queue) so that the printer could be unjammed before a trip was wasted.
Accepting non-free drivers is giving up your freedom. Personally, I use GNU/Linux because I am freed from the whims of the developer. If you wish to be a slave again please return to Windows or the Mac OS while the rest of us continue to use our Free Software.
The driver argument is foolish anyway. If you really must keep things secret (e.g. wireless cards) then move more things into the firmware and make the driver more simplistic (e.g. only allow the driver for the 802.11 card choose the channel to broadcast over instead of the exact frequency).
It's funny how you want to give in to non-free drivers when they are essentially the reason GNU/Linux exists in the first place.
I'm more of a metalhead, but I don't know how to play guitar or bass so I wouldn't really be able to do a one-man Christian metal band ;)
Christian music is STUPID. Absolutely DUMB.
Jesse Smith of Zao once said something like there are no Christian donut makers, so why should there be Christian musicians? That is why Zao stopped being a Christian band and became a band with four Christian guys in it. They then began to produce better music (until they wanted to quit but had two more albums left on their record deal...).
I cannot stand music where every song is about how cool God is, or is emo about how the singer's girlfriend broke up with him but it is ok because God is cool and keeps him happy.
A girl I met a few weeks ago found it really shocking that the only remotely Christian band I listen to is Zao (and I don't really even listen to them anymore). "But the Christian Music Industry is great." No, it sucks. Absolutely sucks. I used to be stupid and would only listen to music made by Christians. Now I listen to every kind of metal I can get my hands on because I realized that music is music. The repetive theme of Christian bands are no better than the repetive themes of die-hard anti-Christian bands (e.g. Deicide, one of the worst death metal bands ever...mostly because the lyrics are boring "Satan spawned a cacodaemon...kill the Christian...I hope Jesus dies...blah blah this is the same song as the last one and the next one").
Not to mention that most "Christian" musicians do not live a very Christian life. I used to be on a moral high horse and wouldn't even let a bad word slip from my mouth. I am reminded of another one of Jesse Smith's stories where an amp fell on his head, broke his tooth, and then he screamed "God dammit!" and a little CMI kid told him he was going to hell because he said "the D-word." Yet he was living a more Christian lifestyle than most overtly Christian musicians do. Sex, Drugs, Rock&Roll, and Jesus. All to sell a dollar.
I think most good musicians who also happen to be Christian have given up on the CMI. You can only succeed in the CMI if you suck and yell "JESUS" as every other world.
I think I'll start a Christian industrial band. It will be my keyboard, drum machine, Jesus, and I making music together. F-G, F-G, F-G, IV inversion of G (OM*G THAT MAKES IT PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN INDUSTRIAL UNKNOWN_LAMER IS SUCH A VIRTUOSO).
What the fuck are you on? The data is exactly the same on a CD-R copy as it is on the original. The discs may not last as long but they should sound the same. If they skip or anything it is because the disc has become damaged or your CD deck is too old to pick up the lighter reflections from a CD-R.
The Neuros has the ability. It works fairly well and even does Ogg Vorbis.
It's not the most polished or small portable music player, but the FM broadcast feature is nice. The best part about it is that it inspired me to take my attenna off of my car (to reduce interference) and now no one can steal the radio and turn it to something stupid (like anything played on the radio). I still get the AM news station with the attenna off, but FM is gone.
The quality of the broadcast is limited by the low power of the transmitter and the limits of FM radio. If I had a non-stock sound system (91 Camaro so the stock is a lot better than evil tinny early 90s Asian cars but is still kind of bad) I would patch it into my head unit via line-in. If you are looking to replace a cassette tape adaptor it sounds a lot better and works when you lack a cassette deck.
Actually, CDs do cost $20. If you are stupid and shop at places like Sam Goody and FYE.
It's your own damn fault if you do that though. If you are looking for mainstream music then buy at Best Buy ($1 over cost in an attempt to trick you into wasting your money on other things), otherwise use the internet. CDUniverse usually beats Amazon in price, but the CDNOW Prefferred Buyers Club is a cheap way to get a lot of major-label stuff (they even have some stuff like Porcupine Tree) for about $9 a CD. There are also many zShops on Amazon (like cdquest and Caiman, both of which I have ordered from several times without issue) which list prices lower than CDUniverse and friends.
There's also the used music store. Record and Tape Traders in the DC/Baltimore area is a good chain of used music shops with a good selection and low prices.
But some people are dumb and just have to get their music in the mall at FYE after they are done buying their clothes at American Eagle Outfitters...
The song 6DoIT was originally going to be one long track but Mike Portnoy decided to split the eight movements into tracks because paging through it to get to a certain section was painful. Each section of the song stands alone as well as a movement in a classic symphony piece does; it may be good by itself but it makes more sense when listened to in the context of the larger work. This is emphasised in the song 6DoIT by a lot of riff sharing and a common theme.
My friend Mike hates ToT and I was a bit lukewarm about it until I saw them live in DC a few weeks ago. The live version of that album is ripping; people were moshing to Dream Theater! The pit carried on into "Pull Me Under" too which was amazing. The really good lighting and obscene volume helped too (John Mung did not need that many bass cabs!).
They almost played "Space-Dye Vest" live for the Live Scenes From New York album but Kevin Moore declined the band's request to join them for the performance. The song is pretty much his (I can't tell if it is him who starts to sing the last verse or not...the vocals don't sound like normal James LaBrie vocals) and is rather personal to him so they won't play it live unless he joins them. Maybe the song will be played live during the OSI tour if there is an OSI II (not likely...all the guys who were in OSI said they would do it again but none of them have any time). One can always hope.
The copying from long term storage into RAM is covered by Fair Use. Distribution to other users is not. This is why "End User License Agreements" are intrinsically invalid (they cover use when copyright only allows the copyright holder to control distrbution).
The reason Disc 2 is that long is because that disc is actually a single song. Look at the booklet; Disc 2 is "Degree 6," the title track.
6DoIT is an ok album, but we all know that Awake was the best :) Most people seem to not like 6DoIT or Train of Thought but I love them. "The Glass Prison" was the first Dream Theater song I ever heard ... my friend DCCed it to me and it inspired me to go and buy all three Dream Theater albums which were on the shelf at the store.
Those are just a few concept albums, there are many more. There are a lot of other albums like everything by NIN or the Devin Townsend Band that need to be listened to in order to fully understand the music (most of the songs stand alone fine but are a lot better when listened to in order because you can see the interconnections better). Same goes for most live albums. The same goes for internal inter-song structure (e.g. Kamelot has a song "Elizabeth" which is spread over three tracks on their album Karma).
I'd like to see a player which allowed me to mark tracks as needing to be played alongside another track so I didn't have to make XMMS visible and queue the next song when stuff like that happened.
Now that I know of a DS filter which is a far smaller download than Winamp 5 Full (the Vorbis module is no longer included in the non-huge version, feh) and then enables Vorbis support for a lot of apps. Thanks for the link, I'll trick everyone into installing it now :)
There would be no problems if people still used Winamp. When I last used Windows Winamp 2.6 was brand new and came with Vorbis support out of the box. Everyone used Winamp because WMP sucked even more than it does now. Sucks that times have changed so much.
I am a card carrying member of the FSF (Associate Member #114) and don't use Windows.
Windows users are already slaves to proprietary vendors...at least they can be freed from proprietary formats I suppose. The better solution is to stop using Windows and switch over to GNU/Linux where Ogg Vorbis is supported by everything ;)
Exactly. This is why it is perfectly legal to use PlayFair as long as the resulting file is not distributed. Whether or not copying the file onto a portable player counts as distribution is questionable. The GPL cannot restrict your usage of GPLed software because of Fair Use; Apple cannot restrict your usage of music files because of Fair Use.
I don't know why anyone would pay money for a lossy file "protected" by Digital Restrictions Management anyway. The only way I would pay for electronic music would be if it were FLAC or another lossless format. This is why I still buy CDs (that and the pretty artwork). It's also nice to know that my CDs will still work if the record store I purchased it from goes under.
Actually, yes it is your content. The GPL only covers distribution. As long as you don't distribute the code you are not bound by the GPL.
Copyright only restricts distribution of works, not use.
I love Blind Guardian. They were the first power metal band I really got into. If it hadn't been for them I would still be listening to nothing but death metal. Or perhaps I would have given up since straight death metal seems to be a bit ... boring. Listening to a song about shredding a girl to pieces for the seventeen thousandth time sucks. Especially once you start to understand the words. They lyrics basically suck. There are a few really good death metal band though (Obituary for one).
Blind Guardian seems to have peaked around Imaginations From the Other Side (I love the song, but Somewhere Far Beyond is my favorite Blind Guardian album). They do deserve credit for inspiring a lot of other bands. And life wouldn't be worth living without Demons & Wizards. It's like Iced Earth but so much better.
Liquid Tension Experiment's "Three Minute Warning" is a 26 minute long circle jerk, but "A Change of Seasons" is not. The song is told in seven parts and maps the course of a man's live and his quest to live life to the fullest.
Dream Theater wrote a 42 minute long song ("Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence," song six on the album with the same name; it has its own disc because the other five songs clock in at around 65 minutes). This is progressive music we're talking about; the muscians love to show off and do crazy things because they can.
The only reason you don't love what is coming out is because you don't listen to quality music.
Personally, I love a lot of the music being released today. Opeth, Dream Theater, Blind Guardian...all of then are amazing and consistently release worthwhile material.
Part of the problem with a lot of popular bands today is that, upon achieving stardom, they stop practicing and their playing goes to shit. There also seems to be a problem with releasing albums which are mostly tracks which should have been shelved for a while or worked on more before release.
Hell, a good example of this is OSI. The second disc of the special edition version of the album contains a track entitled "The Thing That Never Was" which is a 17 minute and 20 second long track. They recorded everything except for the vocals and then scrapped the song. Yes, they scrapped a pretty much finished song. All was not in vain however; they yanked pieces of the song and turned those pieces into the beginnings of many other songs which comprised the album. Another classic example is Dream Theater's "A Change of Seasons." The song was written in 1989. It wasn't recorded until 1995. The song was played live several times and a new keyboardist reworked the keyboard sections and the song was heavily changed. The result was a really really good song clocking in at 23 minutes and 8 seconds.
A lot of popular musicians need to release albums every two or three years instead of every year or year and a half. Most professional musicians would have thrown out most of the material which actually makes it onto a lot of those albums. Thus you get one or two good songs and a bunch of demo material which needs to be ripped apart and rewritten. Or scrapped entirely.
Amen.
I have a nearly 250 album collection and there are only maybe 30-40 songs which I could say weren't at least mildly enjoyable. Most of those are Iron Maiden ;). Out of 2,227 track on my computer, maybe 100 of them are songs which I skip when they come up (XMMS on random).
People need to listen to more stuff like Dream Theater, a band who seems to have no difficulty with pumping out excellent material every other year (Falling Into Infinity doesn't count...the live versions of all of the songs on that album are different [rather, the album versions are different than what the band wrote] because the produce forced them to change every single one at the request of the label in order to make DT more marketable...DT self produce their albums now for a reason).
Likewise with Devin Townsend, Blind Guardian, Opeth, Symphony X, Gordian Knot, Porcupine Tree...
Actually, no. Perhaps your mom would do it, but no one I know would. It pisses me off because I hate MP3 (aside from the patent issues, it sucks when compared with Vorbis). Winamp has had support for Vorbis for many years now (Hell, I remember it having Vorbis support in the default install when I last used Windows...three and a half years ago) but the Windows Media Player has pretty much killed Winamp. People are lazy and refuse to install Winamp even though most of them are on broadband and it would take a grand total of two minutes of their time.
I convinced the guy who runs hxcmp3.com to enable Vorbis support in the software the site uses. My former band put all of our music on the site as Vorbis. We had a respectable ranking in the download listings, but I recieved a number of complaints about not being able to play the songs. I put a blurb about installing Winamp, but then I got complaints about it requiring too much effort to listen to the songs.
The Mac is better off; the QT Components for the Mac are easy to install and work right away. For a while after the release of QuickTime 6 they were broken, but now they work again. After being installed, everything which makes use of QuickTime on the Mac or Windows gains support for Vorbis. This is more useful on the Mac than on Windows since pretty much everything used QuickTime.
Now, if Ogg Vorbis had a DirectShow filter, the situation would be different. Simply link to a quick 30 second DS filter or QT component download and even Windows Media Player or QuickTime could play Ogg Vorbis. I don't use Windows, but there has to be someone who would be willing to write the needed code (unless it has already been done).
I wonder if Real Player has support for Vorbis? After all the hubbub about the Helix "Open Source" stuff it would be a shame if it didn't.
There are also many people like me who traded music with friends and now buy a good 100-200 albums a year.
I only used Napster for a few tracks (28.8...) and the rest I got by burning mp3s and oggs of my friends music. Now I own most of those albums and no longer have any of the old files around (I hate mp3s because they suck...and the tagging sucked. My collection is now mostly beautifully tagged and encoded as Vorbis).
You can't get the pretty pictures in the CD jacket on the internet. I listen to Prog Metal and Power Metal; most of the liner artwork is beautiful. I like impressing people with my music collection.
At the Quiznos indoctrination session nearly two years ago when the store I worked at opened, the corporate guys told us all to save our clock in reciepts just in case something like that happened (accidentally, of course).
Our store is small and the owner is nice. He doesn't like to pay overtime but does when he has too. When most of us graduated from High School and everyone but five of us (including the owner) went away for senior week...90 hours in one pay period + 28 the weekend before + 45 the week after (as people began to trickle back in I didn't have to work 14 hour shifts anymore). Ah, I love time and a half. I wish everyone were going away again :)
As an owner of a Dual AthlonMP 2800+ rig, I can tell you that the extra $1000 for the SMP would be worth it...once you go SMP you can never go back. And SMP should be an extra $1000 (unless you can only get SMP on the highest end G5 and compare that price against a slightly lower end model). All in all it only cost me about $300 more for the SMP system ($70 more for the board + $100 for the extra proc + $30 for the extra HSF + $100 more for the RAM since the board only takes Registered ECC).
Having two oggencs running at once both chugging along at 14x realtime while the system remains responsive (because, at that speed, it is the speed of my hard disk that is limiting things...14x = ~14 MB/s being processed, * 2 = ~28M per second being pulled from the hard drive after being pulled off of a CD) so I still have enough CPU time left for everything else.
Being able to rip a DVD to XViD + Vorbis and watching that rip while it is being encoded is also really nice. Or playing Quake 2 while running a three pass encode. Ardour and The GIMP love me more too. SMP is just plain cool. I need more RAM though...GCC 3.x eats RAM while compiling C++ so having two copies of GCC both using 700M stresses my system a bit (since I only have 1G of RAM). Otherwise everything is really responsive.
Dear Moderators: Please don't moderate this comment. I turned off the karma bonus because I know it is off topic and wish for it to be ignored by most people.
Yeah, but then IE stops working.
I hate IE so much because of that.
Debian can use kudzu (RedHat's hardware detection stuff), but it doesn't work as well as discover does (which is the native Debian hardware detection code). Discover uses (or at least used to, I don't know about discover2) the Mandrake hardware data and maybe some code from hwdetect (not sure).
Discover + Hotplug + Udev is an amazing combination. It is really nice to be able to add a single line to the hotplug configuration to have my Neuros mount and synchronize itself as soon as I plug it in, or running a quick script after the installation of gphoto2 to add the lines so that I can simply plugin any digital camera supported and have it work (I could even have set it up to run GTKam or Kamera for me but right now I just have it set to set the permissions of the device files correctly so I can use everything when I'm not running X or logged in as another user).
Mandrake is cool because they borrowed some stuff from Debian like menu and alternatives which are really nice. I ran Mandrake 6 for a long time before I made the switch to Debian after happening upon all three potato CDs at a LUG meeting. I install Debian the October after Potato was released...it's been a fun time.
There is a Mesopotamian creation story (I forgot which one) in which Marduk splits the water goddess (Tiamat?) in two and creates the earth in between the upper and lower waters of her corpse. The sky is blue, the sea is blue. Naturally it follows that both are water.
Both Yahweh and Marduk are storm gods as well. Marduk was even made the head of the pantheon as a result of his destruction of Tiamat and the creation of men (I know Mami [I think that was her name] birthed man kind, but Marduk did the convincing) to do all the work for the lower gods. The resemblence between the two is interesting.
One doesn't have to take everything written in the Tanakh as being literal or entirely factual in order to accept the whole thing as being generally sound.