I lost my (musical)life's work the way you said, optical media not working. I burned the most significant work I ever did as multitrack master files zipped onto dvd. Being "smart" and "cautious". Then I had a lightning strike.
No prob, right? Wrong. Nothing will open the.zip file. No DVD +/- R/RW, no zip recovery tools, nothing. All gone. To make matters much, much worse, the sound card I was using had some quirky excess presence, which deceived me into mixing everything way too bassy, like "who put a pillow over the speakers" bassy mud if you play it on anything other than the card I was mixing with. Just putting some EQ on the finished mixes doesn't work right, the bass guitar is just too damn loud, and the cymbals way too quiet, among other problems. I need to get at the masters and remix it. So, even though I have finished mixes for most of my better music, I can't fix them. Years of work lost.
And I ALWAYS verify after burning. Anymore, USB flash and/or redundant networked backup seems like the only way to be safe.
I think that in some places "breaking" actually does mean breaking, but there is an equivalent crime, "illegal entry". In my state, (I think) they carry approximately the same penalty.
...seems to be consistently fairly good and cheap.
I usually shop around, then end up at NewEgg.
I avoid TigerDirect. I've had bad experience with defective merchandise more than once, they give the illusion of cheapness with rebates, and the customer service is poor.
"Short answer is...at some point, you really do have to say fuck it, and throw it in the trash."
True! I just moved to a new town(still in the process, actually), and I couldn't believe how much crap I had accumulated. Ancient monitors and cases were the big space consumers, but things like crappy old keyboards and mice, obsolete cables, things like that... they seemed to go on and on forever.
A salvage guy to whom I sold a junk car took most of the old cases for the scrap metal value, but the most of the rest got bagged into giant contractor cleanup bags and taken to the county dump.
Silly, how difficult a process it was to make myself let all that old useless junk go, even though I know intellectually that I'll never use it.
I want to believe that if a phone had the requisite hardware and it supported JAVA, then over time all your needs could be met by the community or even yourself.
I have a Samsung u520. Not a super phone but a nice little camera phone and mp3 player. Well, the dang thing runs BREW. It has all these things I hate(celltop for one), but I can't get rid of them or even change the configuration of the menus to get them out of my way.
So I downloaded the BREW SDK, and I was actually ready to learn it just to fix my phone. But then I found out that you have to pay Qualcomm $30,000 just to "unlock" an software you write, otherwise no BREW-enabled phone will run it. So, scratch that.
I was able to hack it a little with BitPim, so that I can at least make my own ringtones, but you wouldn't believe the hoops I had to go through to do that: rename an mp3 as '.mid' and place it in one of a dozen magic directories with meaningless numeric names, then manually edit a database entry in the same directory; the directory and its contents can only be gotten to with 3rd-party hackware.
If I had the money, I would definitely pay a premium for a phone with good, well-specified hardware that was open in the sense that I could write my own software for it and/or modify the software that comes on it. I don't know if that's in the OS or what.
Also: the carriers make plenty of money just selling me the damn service. I don't like all the hidden marketing ploys.
I was going to buy Squandered.org,.com,.net to release some original music and essays. Squandered.org was to be the band name, with the.org in the name to emphasize the "new media" thing.
So I checked via godaddy.com, and it was available, but I didn't purchase it because my checking account was overdrawn. A while later(2 weeks to a month), I went to buy it, and it was taken. Whois said it was taken shortly after my availability check, by a company in Maine. It was cash-parked at Network Solutions.
Anyway, a few months later(the dates are vague, I didn't mark my calender) I checked it to see what the people from Maine were doing with the title of my life's work. It was still just cash-parked at Network Solutions. So I checked WHOIS again, to refresh my memory about the name of the company, and it was now owned by an individual in Maryland instead of a company in Maine, but here's the scariest part: the registration date had *magically* moved backwards to 2005!
I had personal reasons to remember very specifically that the location of the owner was in Maine. I didn't remember the company name, but I definitely remembered that the date of registration was just after I had checked it.
And it's still just cash-parked. When it first happened, because of "Maine" and some personal events, I suspected a certain person I knew from certain forums had taken it for basically spiteful reasons. But when the date was altered, I was mystified and paranoid. "Why would the CIA and time-traveling lizard-people from Sirius conspire to keep me from doing my little project under that name?" Now, I'm relieved to find a more plausible explanation. A scammer or scammers with access to official registration data. Makes sense, I also own several other domains, so I might pop up as a high-probability purchaser. But I never contacted the owner, and in the intervening time I've reworked things to release soon under another name that I've owned for years.
I did, however, pop off an email to ICANN detailing the events.
Let me reiterate what's been said by others on this thread: don't check a domain unless you're ready to purchase it immediately.
I am working on a website with my own music, and it occurs to me that I'll be lost in a sea of over-hyped, over-produced, under-inspired music and media that was never intended to be "free" in any sense. I can't imagine how I could begin to get noticed, much less "compete" with all this stuff that's been promoted so vigorously in the establishment media. When people go looking for music that's free-as-in-beer, they're looking for bootleg versions of mainstream artists. If that were unavailable to them, then their searches would be more likely to find music produced by artists who are not affiliated with any of the corporations that we all love to hate.
Just a thought: if mainstream media were less freely accessible, it might give alternative artists a real visibility boost in the online marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
Please stop misusing "begs the question". It makes you seem very, very stupid.
"Begs the question" does not mean the same thing as "Raises the question."
Please don't be stupid on the internet. Please.
I lost my (musical)life's work the way you said, optical media not working. I burned the most significant work I ever did as multitrack master files zipped onto dvd. Being "smart" and "cautious". Then I had a lightning strike.
No prob, right? Wrong. Nothing will open the .zip file. No DVD +/- R/RW, no zip recovery tools, nothing. All gone. To make matters much, much worse, the sound card I was using had some quirky excess presence, which deceived me into mixing everything way too bassy, like "who put a pillow over the speakers" bassy mud if you play it on anything other than the card I was mixing with. Just putting some EQ on the finished mixes doesn't work right, the bass guitar is just too damn loud, and the cymbals way too quiet, among other problems. I need to get at the masters and remix it. So, even though I have finished mixes for most of my better music, I can't fix them. Years of work lost.
And I ALWAYS verify after burning. Anymore, USB flash and/or redundant networked backup seems like the only way to be safe.
(eying the sun nervously)...
I think that in some places "breaking" actually does mean breaking, but there is an equivalent crime, "illegal entry". In my state, (I think) they carry approximately the same penalty.
I usually shop around, then end up at NewEgg.
I avoid TigerDirect. I've had bad experience with defective merchandise more than once, they give the illusion of cheapness with rebates, and the customer service is poor.
True! I just moved to a new town(still in the process, actually), and I couldn't believe how much crap I had accumulated. Ancient monitors and cases were the big space consumers, but things like crappy old keyboards and mice, obsolete cables, things like that... they seemed to go on and on forever.
A salvage guy to whom I sold a junk car took most of the old cases for the scrap metal value, but the most of the rest got bagged into giant contractor cleanup bags and taken to the county dump.
Silly, how difficult a process it was to make myself let all that old useless junk go, even though I know intellectually that I'll never use it.
I used it and couldn't believe how bad it was. Few results, most of them irrelevant.
Alltheweb.com is a better alternative to Google, if that's what you're looking for.
I've honestly not used a WORSE search engine than Cuil in many years.
Makes me wonder: why the hype?
I have a Samsung u520. Not a super phone but a nice little camera phone and mp3 player. Well, the dang thing runs BREW. It has all these things I hate(celltop for one), but I can't get rid of them or even change the configuration of the menus to get them out of my way.
So I downloaded the BREW SDK, and I was actually ready to learn it just to fix my phone. But then I found out that you have to pay Qualcomm $30,000 just to "unlock" an software you write, otherwise no BREW-enabled phone will run it. So, scratch that.
I was able to hack it a little with BitPim, so that I can at least make my own ringtones, but you wouldn't believe the hoops I had to go through to do that: rename an mp3 as '.mid' and place it in one of a dozen magic directories with meaningless numeric names, then manually edit a database entry in the same directory; the directory and its contents can only be gotten to with 3rd-party hackware.
If I had the money, I would definitely pay a premium for a phone with good, well-specified hardware that was open in the sense that I could write my own software for it and/or modify the software that comes on it. I don't know if that's in the OS or what.
Also: the carriers make plenty of money just selling me the damn service. I don't like all the hidden marketing ploys.
So I checked via godaddy.com, and it was available, but I didn't purchase it because my checking account was overdrawn. A while later(2 weeks to a month), I went to buy it, and it was taken. Whois said it was taken shortly after my availability check, by a company in Maine. It was cash-parked at Network Solutions.
Anyway, a few months later(the dates are vague, I didn't mark my calender) I checked it to see what the people from Maine were doing with the title of my life's work. It was still just cash-parked at Network Solutions. So I checked WHOIS again, to refresh my memory about the name of the company, and it was now owned by an individual in Maryland instead of a company in Maine, but here's the scariest part: the registration date had *magically* moved backwards to 2005!
I had personal reasons to remember very specifically that the location of the owner was in Maine. I didn't remember the company name, but I definitely remembered that the date of registration was just after I had checked it.
And it's still just cash-parked. When it first happened, because of "Maine" and some personal events, I suspected a certain person I knew from certain forums had taken it for basically spiteful reasons. But when the date was altered, I was mystified and paranoid. "Why would the CIA and time-traveling lizard-people from Sirius conspire to keep me from doing my little project under that name?" Now, I'm relieved to find a more plausible explanation. A scammer or scammers with access to official registration data. Makes sense, I also own several other domains, so I might pop up as a high-probability purchaser. But I never contacted the owner, and in the intervening time I've reworked things to release soon under another name that I've owned for years.
I did, however, pop off an email to ICANN detailing the events.
Let me reiterate what's been said by others on this thread: don't check a domain unless you're ready to purchase it immediately.
I am working on a website with my own music, and it occurs to me that I'll be lost in a sea of over-hyped, over-produced, under-inspired music and media that was never intended to be "free" in any sense. I can't imagine how I could begin to get noticed, much less "compete" with all this stuff that's been promoted so vigorously in the establishment media. When people go looking for music that's free-as-in-beer, they're looking for bootleg versions of mainstream artists. If that were unavailable to them, then their searches would be more likely to find music produced by artists who are not affiliated with any of the corporations that we all love to hate.
Just a thought: if mainstream media were less freely accessible, it might give alternative artists a real visibility boost in the online marketplace.