Traditionally, folk music has referred to traditional musics, the native music of any culture which are played on specialized instruments. This includes aboriginal music, tribal music, any kind of culture-specific music. Stuff that Alan Lomax recorded. Stuff on Smithsonian Folkways. Etc. In the 1960's, Bob Dylan and his ilk co-opted the term "folk" to describe their music but this has nothing to do with folk music; it is pop music. I put the term "traditional" there hopefully to make it clear.
First of all, who are you? Why should I care what you think about how artists should get paid? How many symphonies have you written which have been performed by the Vienna Phiuharmonic? Do you speak for all musicians? Second, there are two extremely compelling reasons to pay artists:
So they can work full-time. The more time artists have to spend in music, the better they will be. If they have to spend 60-80 hours per week on their day job, the quality of their music will suffer.
Quality equipment. Music sounds better when recorded on high quality equipment. We pay for it, partly to fund the recording process. Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto would not sound good on an out-of-tune upright, with toy violins with broken strings, recorded in a high school auditorium on a cassette tape, and it is worth N dollars to have it performed and recorded in the best standards possible. This costs money! If music is free, who pays for it? Do I need to buy t-shirts sponsoring the recording engineer? Nobody has ever been able to answer that, and until I hear an adequate answer, which is demonstrably better than paying for the recording, I'll happily pay for music.
The former is about maintaining a stranglehold on intellectual property
A right which is guaranteed by the US Constituion, which explictly gives Congress the right to give artists exclusive control over their works for a limited period of time. It sounds like you're interested in pruning the Constitution to fit your own agenda - you're all over freedom of speech, but you neglect the rights of the businesses, which are guaranteed by the Constitution.
restricting freedom of speech (If I can't tell someone, in English or in C, how to bypass a broken encryption scheme, yes, it's restricting freedom of speech)
Incorrect. This is a specific case of violating trade secrets, which people indeed have been sued and put to jail for. Didn't you follow the Avant! vs. Cadence case a couple of years ago?
the removal of rights from a majority of society (the hundreds of millions of consumers who *used* to have "fair use rights" guaranteed by the supreme court) by a minority (the IP providers who can make more money off of restricting content distribution channels, controlling content player manufacturers, and moving even digital data to read-only and pay-per-use systems)
Ah, but you propose to remove the rights from the minority: the big businesses. It's OK to take away rights from the minority? How do you figure?
You don't understand the difference between different types of music. There are three fundamental genres of music:
(1) Folk (traditional) music - music which is disseminated by memory/performance
(2) Classical music - music which is disseminated by score
(3) Pop music - music which is disseminated by recording
All three can be recorded, but only (3) depends on recordings. Most music in categories (1) and (3) can NOT be reproduced in score. There are things like "fake books" which try to in some cases, but it is not possible to reproduce fully the nuances of pop and traditional music, where EVERYTHING needed to reproduce a classical piece is (by definition) available on the score (obsolesence of instruments and skills, notwithstanding). Music in genre (1) is by definition constantly changing, and its dissemination is weak, and it usually depends on specialized instruments, and specialized talent.
Composing music certainly does not guarantee its immortality. Even if pop music were composed, it would still be difficult to reproduce. Even instruments of a few decades ago, which are required to reproduce the sound fully which is on record, are often collectors items. Who knows if the instruments which are in pop music today -- such as electric guitar -- will be around in 200 years? Much pop music performance depends on the very things you foresee disappearing. For example, much rap performance depends on turntables. If turntables go away, so do contemporary rap performances!
Clearly, the best way to preserve pop music is to preserve the only thing which can properly disseminate it -- the recording. The short life of digital media is well known and there is much work being done to resolve this.
Record labels allow those people with relatively slow 'Net connections (me and my 56k modem...) to easily purchase music. They also can work wonders for marketing. If a record label already has a deal with several major stores (Best Buy and all of the CD retail stores in the malls) then they can get the artists music out to a lot of people.
What's bad is that the record labels take a huge chunk of cash from the artists and Microsoft tries to run other companies out of business or buy them up. I really like a lot of MS products (Visual Studio, Win2k, Office and Age of Empires I and II) but that doesn't mean I always agree with them.
The best function of the record industry is that they redistribute wealth from profitable artists to unprofitable artists, and every gets an equal share. This is good. 90% of artists are not commercially successful, and the profits from the 10% cover the rest. Who pays for the best music to be produced? Britney Spears. When artists start selling direct, only the 10% which are actually profitable (i.e. Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, and N*Sync) will become filthy rich (MUCH more so than they are now, since there profits aren't taken away and given to unproftable artists), and the rest will have to get day jobs.
Another big question is the CPU. What the hell kind of CPU is MP-105-D? An Altavista search borught NOTHING on that. First of all, the Linux kernel would have to run on it. But the biggie is: the SETI@home client would have to be available for it, since that is not available as binary. That client is only available for a few well known architectures. The only way this is possible is if it is X86 compatible. Second, the bus looks totally fake. There's no way you can put 6 processors each with 200+ lines that close together with no interconnection logic. Furthermore, you would need some way to multiplex the flash memory since it's shared, and presumably doesn't have 6 read ports. There is no glue logic on this. It would have to be a custom ASIC, and there's no way they could sell it that cheap. Third, I don't see anything resembling a flash part on the board. Yes, this definitely looks like a fake.
I recently heard the official figure for the FDIV return rate. It was VERY low, much lower than I expected, around 20% (I forget the exact figure). However, that bug was only present in the first stepping of the Pentium, which themselves are rare (since they were very high-end at the time!)
Ah. I see. Napster doesn't list some music that isn't Top 40 bullshit, therefore everything on Napster is Top 40 bullshit. Got some news for you, man. The stuff I like ain't exactly Top 40 (early '80s punk and hardcore, industrial, grindcore, etc) but I can find it on Napster no problem.
ROTFL. Punk, hardcore, and industrial ARE top 40 pop music. What did you think they are? Top 40 pop music = any music which is disseminated by recordings. This includes rock, punk, industrial, hardcore, new age, ska, dance, techno, etc., etc., etc. Napster does not list any music beyond this extremely narrow segment of mass-consumed, mass-produced top 40 pop music such as the genres you list above.
Napster is driven by what people actually listen to. I get the impression "Blackwell"'s mostly about classical and chamber music, which isn't in particularly high demand these days. If no one who listens to that stuff uses Napster, then you're not going to find it out there. I suggest you stop being so narrow-minded about music and look at all the other stuff out there that's not on Top-40 charts.
Hmm. So those of us who actually strike out our own paths and find the best music, instead of listening to mass-produced, mass-consumed hardcore, industrial, and punk are at the mercy of what everbody else likes? So the whole purpose of Napster is to make everybody into little conformist listeners of mass-consumed top 40 pop music? How is this better than the current system where I can listen to whatever I want regardless of what "everybody else" likes? Why does Napster demand that I be like "everybody else"? That's bullshit.
Can you back this up, VAXman? I've been reading your posts for quite a while, and I think you're either trolling, or at the very least are pulling these facts straight from your ass.
Backup what? The fact that most people cannot afford to download 70 minutes of music? This should be obvious. Most people have 56k or slower connections. Unless you are VERY low paid (less than $50/hour) it is much cheaper to buy the CD than to download it.
Fact is that there is more to napster than top 40. I reccomend giving napster a second chance and ask some of your more worldly freinds what overseas acts would be a good listen. Chances are you'll find them.
Nope. Napster only lists top 40 pop music. I have a copy of "The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Contemporary Music" right here, and I entered the names into Napster (I'm logged on right now). Messiaen. Holmboe. Maconch. Matrinu. Egk. Hambraues. Eben. Xenakis. Jolivey. Takemitsu. Jolas. Sculthorpe. Denisov. Tredici. Schinttke. Rautavaara. Zwilich. Nope, Napster doesn't list ANY of these musicians; they only list top 40 pop music.
As for micropayments destroying the album, my feeling is that people will demand, and eventually get their way. Yes there will be an amazing amount of spoonfed tripe in the future: this has been the case ever since the 45. As more and more people people get their high bandwidth connections, it ought to get to a point where there will be more music to get than time to listen to just what suits your taste. If albums are important then they will be made, and people will find them.
There ALREADY is more music than there is time to listen to. Much, much more. Since you are not very knowledgeable about music, and listen only to top 40 pop music which is played on the radio, you are not aware of the huge world of recorded music which exists which is NOT present on Napster. Napster only carries top 40 pop music, and not the more serious and diverse genres.
Folk/Bluegrass is one of my two or three favorite genres, and, unfortunately, not extremely well documented. It is relatively difficult to find out what the best folk music is being produced.
Firstly, I will say that the situation for folk is much more bleak on Napster than in record stores. Napster has none of my favorite folk artists (I've searched for them), which are readily available in the largest record stores (Carrie Newcomer, Lucy Kaplansky, Iris DeMent, Nanci Griffith, Doyle Lawson, Blue Highway, James King, John prine, Julie Miller, etc.) MP3.com has lots of folk music, but all unknown artists or washed out artists, and you have to go through HOURS of cruft to find songs on par with the best folk artists who record CD's, or even songs which don't put you to sleep.
Now, as to finding the best folk music, I suggest two strategies. First, read some of the folk/bluegrass/alt.country magazines such as Bluegrass Unlimited, No Depression, Folk Roots, and the like. These have extensive reviews, which will point you to the best music. Second, with a lot of this music you can look at the label for an idea of the sound and quality. Labels such as Sugarhill, Compasss, Rounder, Philo, and Hightone produce consistently awesome quality folk music. Thirdly, actually, most of those labels put out low cost samplers. I have actually gotten into many a new artist this way (Rounder has a bunch of samplers!)
I think that folk music is much more healthy on record than on the net, and I do not believe it can be healthy on the net since the barrier to entry is so low, that anybody with a guitar and a voice can record folk music and put it on the web, even if they aren't very talented, but the current record system assures that only the cream of the crop get recorded.
Folk is overall, moderately well documented. The best documented genre, by far, is classical. The worst is current jazz (but old jazz is well documented). It is almost impossible to find out what the best current jazz records are. The only good magazine I know of is Cadence, but they review so many records, and they don't rate them so it is difficult to tell what the best records are each month, and it's not clear what the most pretisgious independent labels are.
A year or 2 ago, 50% of the cds I bought sucked and I had no way to find out until after i bought it; like buying a DVD only because of the trailer of the movie.
You are an incompetent consumer. I own over 1,000 CD's, and over 90% I bought without hearing a single note before the purchase. About 80% of my collection is absolutely rivetting, and less than 1% is "bad".
A hint for the clueless: read review books and music magazines, and buy primarily from independents with a good reputation. I subscribe to over a dozen music magazines, buy review books regularly, and am loyal to the best independent labels.
The stakes will be higher though - because with the fall of the single, people will be more demanding of the entire album.
Yeah, but with the rise of online delivery, the single will rise again, because people can't afford to download 70 minutes of music. Note how people talk about micropayments on a per ***SONG*** basis, not a per album basis. Online delivery will destroy the album. That's the point.
If you are interested in learning about VMS, I suggest you check out the following: The VMS FAQ and VMS documentation site, which have a plethora of info. There is not much info on VMS available from source besides Compaq, online or off.
The best way to learn about VMS is to get a VMS system. You can get a VAX system on eBay very cheap (sub-$100) and you can get a complete VMS system software for free (see ). The VMS hobbyist page. There's also a VAX emulator which comes with VMS (Charon VAX).
The Unix texts which refer to Unix as a kludged system are "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Raymond, and "The Unix Philosophy" by Gancarz, both of which admit that Unix is a rapid-prototyping environment, and that design is not done when programming for the system. Projects like the Hurd and Linux make me yawn because they are just more implementations of Unix. What's the point? If you inist on cloning an existing system, at least clone something interesting!
I think the reason it was moderated down to flaimbait is the reason that you have not provided any reasoning to your claims that Unix is "kludged together" VMS may very well be a better OS.
Substitute "Linux" for "VMS", and "Windows" for "Unix", and I guarantee it would have gotten (Score 5; Insightful). Clearly, it was moderated down because the moderator didn't like the idea of his prescious little OS called a kludge (even though this fact is widely documented, including many Unix advocacy texts).
Few of us have had the experience of a VMS system.
Because most readers of this web site are high school students, who care more about case designs that what's in the box (c.f. the Mac Cube stories), and who care more about politics than how the technology works.
Maybe the flaimbait was a bit harsh but the response simply shows that the claims cannot be backed up with evidence.
If you want to make a claim be sure to have real evidence of it.
I have backed up this elsewhere (and so does Eric S. Raymond!), but the place for debate is not a website which is mainly frequented by high school students who haven't used VMS.
Unix's biggest design blunder was having a different implementation language from the shell language. Things like "cat", "grep", and "cut" are very loosely coupled with your program if you call it from them. A much more advanced, well designed system, is the Lisp Machines, were Lisp is used everywhere. All of the components were written in Lisp, your shell is Lisp, and you call everything with Lisp. In Unix, you write your programs in C, but you call programs through this awkward, fragile interface which provides you with no feedback while the program is running, no meaningful results except an 8 bit status code, opr if you're really lucky a one way text stream. Unix is primitive and fragile. All of those text utilities are not objects which can be called. On much more advanced operating systems, BETTER components are already available, with better interfaces. Those text utilities do not come close to what the more advanced, more stable, and more reliable, systems provide out of the box.
Of course, I would argue that engineering a properly designed system cannot be DONE with open source. The whole premise of open source is not doing design, but hacking code without DOING design. This premise is very well documented by ESR in the Cathedral and the Bazaar and in the Unix Philospohy by Gancarz.
For a prooperly engineered system you need discipline, and you need rigid standards. You don't just hack code together, and if you do you'll just get another system just as bad as Unix. Good engineering is premised on good design, and the bazaar skips this step. Good engineering is a cathedral. It's not a matter of coding, it's a matter of discipline, design, and standards.
For an example of software which doesn't suck, look at VMS.
Unix has libraries (what OS doesn't?), but Miguels point was that the libraries aren't very good. There is no library call to bring up a printing configuration dialog. That's the point. Unix is fragile, and incomplete. Unix's libraries were kludged together and no thought was put into making them good. This is why the OS is in such poor state today, and constantly playing catchup with the more advanced systems, such as VMS.
Sigh - another moron who thinks computers didn't exist before the peecee. Typical of slashdot. Have you ever heard of an OS called TOPS-10? It predated Unix, and did most things much better than Unix. Multics, another fine OS, also predated Unix.
Go to spec. Search for "powerpc" and "power3" for processor. Note how some RS/6000's come with PowerPC, and some come with POWER3. Different processors, with different performance. QED.
POWER and PowerPC are most definitely NOT the same architecture. Yes, they are made by the same company, but VAX and Alpha also are. Do you think those are the same architecture? Please get a clue before you start posting to websites.
It's also very interesting that Jon Katz's favorite cliche, which he babbles about almost constantly, is "information wants to be free". Of course, privacy is information. Why shouldn't THAT information be free? Privacy advocates want information to NOT be free. It is a contradiction to be a privacy advocate and an advocate of free information. Jon Katz is a hypocrite about almost all of his main issues (e.g. advocating digital media, but refusing to release his book online), but this one is particularly glaring.
The fact that any slashdotter would be against this is just another point in the long list of the techno-rebel's hypocritical stance on copyright. The techno-rebels believe that all software should be free, and anybody should be able to modify it and distribute it. The same people who think they have the right to use recorded music and recorded video in any form, including what the producers do not want to use it as, think they have the right to control their own Usenet posts. Clearly, what Deja is doing is compatible with this. Furthermore, any type of service which does interprets your post falls under this category. What Deja is really doing is interpreting your keywords, perhaps incorrectly (i.e. it may make your words into an endorsement). Is this any different than a wrongly translated output from Babelfish? So is Babelfish violating copyright because it makes a derived work from yours without permission?
Slashdot Mirror
Traditionally, folk music has referred to traditional musics, the native music of any culture which are played on specialized instruments. This includes aboriginal music, tribal music, any kind of culture-specific music. Stuff that Alan Lomax recorded. Stuff on Smithsonian Folkways. Etc. In the 1960's, Bob Dylan and his ilk co-opted the term "folk" to describe their music but this has nothing to do with folk music; it is pop music. I put the term "traditional" there hopefully to make it clear.
The former is about maintaining a stranglehold on intellectual property
A right which is guaranteed by the US Constituion, which explictly gives Congress the right to give artists exclusive control over their works for a limited period of time. It sounds like you're interested in pruning the Constitution to fit your own agenda - you're all over freedom of speech, but you neglect the rights of the businesses, which are guaranteed by the Constitution.
restricting freedom of speech (If I can't tell someone, in English or in C, how to bypass a broken encryption scheme, yes, it's restricting freedom of speech)
Incorrect. This is a specific case of violating trade secrets, which people indeed have been sued and put to jail for. Didn't you follow the Avant! vs. Cadence case a couple of years ago?
the removal of rights from a majority of society (the hundreds of millions of consumers who *used* to have "fair use rights" guaranteed by the supreme court) by a minority (the IP providers who can make more money off of restricting content distribution channels, controlling content player manufacturers, and moving even digital data to read-only and pay-per-use systems)
Ah, but you propose to remove the rights from the minority: the big businesses. It's OK to take away rights from the minority? How do you figure?
You don't understand the difference between different types of music. There are three fundamental genres of music:
(1) Folk (traditional) music - music which is disseminated by memory/performance
(2) Classical music - music which is disseminated by score
(3) Pop music - music which is disseminated by recording
All three can be recorded, but only (3) depends on recordings. Most music in categories (1) and (3) can NOT be reproduced in score. There are things like "fake books" which try to in some cases, but it is not possible to reproduce fully the nuances of pop and traditional music, where EVERYTHING needed to reproduce a classical piece is (by definition) available on the score (obsolesence of instruments and skills, notwithstanding). Music in genre (1) is by definition constantly changing, and its dissemination is weak, and it usually depends on specialized instruments, and specialized talent.
Composing music certainly does not guarantee its immortality. Even if pop music were composed, it would still be difficult to reproduce. Even instruments of a few decades ago, which are required to reproduce the sound fully which is on record, are often collectors items. Who knows if the instruments which are in pop music today -- such as electric guitar -- will be around in 200 years? Much pop music performance depends on the very things you foresee disappearing. For example, much rap performance depends on turntables. If turntables go away, so do contemporary rap performances!
Clearly, the best way to preserve pop music is to preserve the only thing which can properly disseminate it -- the recording. The short life of digital media is well known and there is much work being done to resolve this.
Record labels allow those people with relatively slow 'Net connections (me and my 56k modem...) to easily purchase music. They also can work wonders for marketing. If a record label already has a deal with several major stores (Best Buy and all of the CD retail stores in the malls) then they can get the artists music out to a lot of people.
What's bad is that the record labels take a huge chunk of cash from the artists and Microsoft tries to run other companies out of business or buy them up. I really like a lot of MS products (Visual Studio, Win2k, Office and Age of Empires I and II) but that doesn't mean I always agree with them.
The best function of the record industry is that they redistribute wealth from profitable artists to unprofitable artists, and every gets an equal share. This is good. 90% of artists are not commercially successful, and the profits from the 10% cover the rest. Who pays for the best music to be produced? Britney Spears. When artists start selling direct, only the 10% which are actually profitable (i.e. Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, and N*Sync) will become filthy rich (MUCH more so than they are now, since there profits aren't taken away and given to unproftable artists), and the rest will have to get day jobs.
Another big question is the CPU. What the hell kind of CPU is MP-105-D? An Altavista search borught NOTHING on that. First of all, the Linux kernel would have to run on it. But the biggie is: the SETI@home client would have to be available for it, since that is not available as binary. That client is only available for a few well known architectures. The only way this is possible is if it is X86 compatible. Second, the bus looks totally fake. There's no way you can put 6 processors each with 200+ lines that close together with no interconnection logic. Furthermore, you would need some way to multiplex the flash memory since it's shared, and presumably doesn't have 6 read ports. There is no glue logic on this. It would have to be a custom ASIC, and there's no way they could sell it that cheap. Third, I don't see anything resembling a flash part on the board. Yes, this definitely looks like a fake.
I recently heard the official figure for the FDIV return rate. It was VERY low, much lower than I expected, around 20% (I forget the exact figure). However, that bug was only present in the first stepping of the Pentium, which themselves are rare (since they were very high-end at the time!)
Ah. I see. Napster doesn't list some music that isn't Top 40 bullshit, therefore everything on Napster is Top 40 bullshit. Got some news for you, man. The stuff I like ain't exactly Top 40 (early '80s punk and hardcore, industrial, grindcore, etc) but I can find it on Napster no problem.
ROTFL. Punk, hardcore, and industrial ARE top 40 pop music. What did you think they are? Top 40 pop music = any music which is disseminated by recordings. This includes rock, punk, industrial, hardcore, new age, ska, dance, techno, etc., etc., etc. Napster does not list any music beyond this extremely narrow segment of mass-consumed, mass-produced top 40 pop music such as the genres you list above.
Napster is driven by what people actually listen to. I get the impression "Blackwell"'s mostly about classical and chamber music, which isn't in particularly high demand these days. If no one who listens to that stuff uses Napster, then you're not going to find it out there. I suggest you stop being so narrow-minded about music and look at all the other stuff out there that's not on Top-40 charts.
Hmm. So those of us who actually strike out our own paths and find the best music, instead of listening to mass-produced, mass-consumed hardcore, industrial, and punk are at the mercy of what everbody else likes? So the whole purpose of Napster is to make everybody into little conformist listeners of mass-consumed top 40 pop music? How is this better than the current system where I can listen to whatever I want regardless of what "everybody else" likes? Why does Napster demand that I be like "everybody else"? That's bullshit.
Can you back this up, VAXman? I've been reading your posts for quite a while, and I think you're either trolling, or at the very least are pulling these facts straight from your ass.
Backup what? The fact that most people cannot afford to download 70 minutes of music? This should be obvious. Most people have 56k or slower connections. Unless you are VERY low paid (less than $50/hour) it is much cheaper to buy the CD than to download it.
Fact is that there is more to napster than top 40. I reccomend giving napster a second chance and ask some of your more worldly freinds what overseas acts would be a good listen. Chances are you'll find them.
Nope. Napster only lists top 40 pop music. I have a copy of "The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Contemporary Music" right here, and I entered the names into Napster (I'm logged on right now). Messiaen. Holmboe. Maconch. Matrinu. Egk. Hambraues. Eben. Xenakis. Jolivey. Takemitsu. Jolas. Sculthorpe. Denisov. Tredici. Schinttke. Rautavaara. Zwilich. Nope, Napster doesn't list ANY of these musicians; they only list top 40 pop music.
As for micropayments destroying the album, my feeling is that people will demand, and eventually get their way. Yes there will be an amazing amount of spoonfed tripe in the future: this has been the case ever since the 45. As more and more people people get their high bandwidth connections, it ought to get to a point where there will be more music to get than time to listen to just what suits your taste. If albums are important then they will be made, and people will find them.
There ALREADY is more music than there is time to listen to. Much, much more. Since you are not very knowledgeable about music, and listen only to top 40 pop music which is played on the radio, you are not aware of the huge world of recorded music which exists which is NOT present on Napster. Napster only carries top 40 pop music, and not the more serious and diverse genres.
Folk/Bluegrass is one of my two or three favorite genres, and, unfortunately, not extremely well documented. It is relatively difficult to find out what the best folk music is being produced.
Firstly, I will say that the situation for folk is much more bleak on Napster than in record stores. Napster has none of my favorite folk artists (I've searched for them), which are readily available in the largest record stores (Carrie Newcomer, Lucy Kaplansky, Iris DeMent, Nanci Griffith, Doyle Lawson, Blue Highway, James King, John prine, Julie Miller, etc.) MP3.com has lots of folk music, but all unknown artists or washed out artists, and you have to go through HOURS of cruft to find songs on par with the best folk artists who record CD's, or even songs which don't put you to sleep.
Now, as to finding the best folk music, I suggest two strategies. First, read some of the folk/bluegrass/alt.country magazines such as Bluegrass Unlimited, No Depression, Folk Roots, and the like. These have extensive reviews, which will point you to the best music. Second, with a lot of this music you can look at the label for an idea of the sound and quality. Labels such as Sugarhill, Compasss, Rounder, Philo, and Hightone produce consistently awesome quality folk music. Thirdly, actually, most of those labels put out low cost samplers. I have actually gotten into many a new artist this way (Rounder has a bunch of samplers!)
I think that folk music is much more healthy on record than on the net, and I do not believe it can be healthy on the net since the barrier to entry is so low, that anybody with a guitar and a voice can record folk music and put it on the web, even if they aren't very talented, but the current record system assures that only the cream of the crop get recorded.
Folk is overall, moderately well documented. The best documented genre, by far, is classical. The worst is current jazz (but old jazz is well documented). It is almost impossible to find out what the best current jazz records are. The only good magazine I know of is Cadence, but they review so many records, and they don't rate them so it is difficult to tell what the best records are each month, and it's not clear what the most pretisgious independent labels are.
A year or 2 ago, 50% of the cds I bought sucked and I had no way to find out until after i bought it; like buying a DVD only because of the trailer of the movie.
You are an incompetent consumer. I own over 1,000 CD's, and over 90% I bought without hearing a single note before the purchase. About 80% of my collection is absolutely rivetting, and less than 1% is "bad".
A hint for the clueless: read review books and music magazines, and buy primarily from independents with a good reputation. I subscribe to over a dozen music magazines, buy review books regularly, and am loyal to the best independent labels.
I have over 600 GB of music. And they're all original. I don't have one single solitary pirated MP3.
The stakes will be higher though - because with the fall of the single, people will be more demanding of the entire album.
Yeah, but with the rise of online delivery, the single will rise again, because people can't afford to download 70 minutes of music. Note how people talk about micropayments on a per ***SONG*** basis, not a per album basis. Online delivery will destroy the album. That's the point.
Just remember, 2 * 550Mhz processors != 1.1Ghz of processing power for most games and other common applications.
Of course, some applications would be MUCH faster on the dual 550 MHz system than on a single 1.1 GHz. It goes both ways.
If you are interested in learning about VMS, I suggest you check out the following: The VMS FAQ and VMS documentation site, which have a plethora of info. There is not much info on VMS available from source besides Compaq, online or off.
The best way to learn about VMS is to get a VMS system. You can get a VAX system on eBay very cheap (sub-$100) and you can get a complete VMS system software for free (see ). The VMS hobbyist page. There's also a VAX emulator which comes with VMS (Charon VAX).
The Unix texts which refer to Unix as a kludged system are "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Raymond, and "The Unix Philosophy" by Gancarz, both of which admit that Unix is a rapid-prototyping environment, and that design is not done when programming for the system. Projects like the Hurd and Linux make me yawn because they are just more implementations of Unix. What's the point? If you inist on cloning an existing system, at least clone something interesting!
I think the reason it was moderated down to flaimbait is the reason that you have not provided any reasoning to your claims that Unix is "kludged together" VMS may very well be a better OS.
Substitute "Linux" for "VMS", and "Windows" for "Unix", and I guarantee it would have gotten (Score 5; Insightful). Clearly, it was moderated down because the moderator didn't like the idea of his prescious little OS called a kludge (even though this fact is widely documented, including many Unix advocacy texts).
Few of us have had the experience of a VMS system.
Because most readers of this web site are high school students, who care more about case designs that what's in the box (c.f. the Mac Cube stories), and who care more about politics than how the technology works.
Maybe the flaimbait was a bit harsh but the response simply shows that the claims cannot be backed up with evidence.
If you want to make a claim be sure to have real evidence of it.
I have backed up this elsewhere (and so does Eric S. Raymond!), but the place for debate is not a website which is mainly frequented by high school students who haven't used VMS.
Unix's biggest design blunder was having a different implementation language from the shell language. Things like "cat", "grep", and "cut" are very loosely coupled with your program if you call it from them. A much more advanced, well designed system, is the Lisp Machines, were Lisp is used everywhere. All of the components were written in Lisp, your shell is Lisp, and you call everything with Lisp. In Unix, you write your programs in C, but you call programs through this awkward, fragile interface which provides you with no feedback while the program is running, no meaningful results except an 8 bit status code, opr if you're really lucky a one way text stream. Unix is primitive and fragile. All of those text utilities are not objects which can be called. On much more advanced operating systems, BETTER components are already available, with better interfaces. Those text utilities do not come close to what the more advanced, more stable, and more reliable, systems provide out of the box.
Of course, I would argue that engineering a properly designed system cannot be DONE with open source. The whole premise of open source is not doing design, but hacking code without DOING design. This premise is very well documented by ESR in the Cathedral and the Bazaar and in the Unix Philospohy by Gancarz.
For a prooperly engineered system you need discipline, and you need rigid standards. You don't just hack code together, and if you do you'll just get another system just as bad as Unix. Good engineering is premised on good design, and the bazaar skips this step. Good engineering is a cathedral. It's not a matter of coding, it's a matter of discipline, design, and standards.
For an example of software which doesn't suck, look at VMS.
Unix has libraries (what OS doesn't?), but Miguels point was that the libraries aren't very good. There is no library call to bring up a printing configuration dialog. That's the point. Unix is fragile, and incomplete. Unix's libraries were kludged together and no thought was put into making them good. This is why the OS is in such poor state today, and constantly playing catchup with the more advanced systems, such as VMS.
Sigh - another moron who thinks computers didn't exist before the peecee. Typical of slashdot. Have you ever heard of an OS called TOPS-10? It predated Unix, and did most things much better than Unix. Multics, another fine OS, also predated Unix.
Go to spec. Search for "powerpc" and "power3" for processor. Note how some RS/6000's come with PowerPC, and some come with POWER3. Different processors, with different performance. QED.
Are you an idiot or a troll?
POWER and PowerPC are most definitely NOT the same architecture. Yes, they are made by the same company, but VAX and Alpha also are. Do you think those are the same architecture? Please get a clue before you start posting to websites.
It's also very interesting that Jon Katz's favorite cliche, which he babbles about almost constantly, is "information wants to be free". Of course, privacy is information. Why shouldn't THAT information be free? Privacy advocates want information to NOT be free. It is a contradiction to be a privacy advocate and an advocate of free information. Jon Katz is a hypocrite about almost all of his main issues (e.g. advocating digital media, but refusing to release his book online), but this one is particularly glaring.
The fact that any slashdotter would be against this is just another point in the long list of the techno-rebel's hypocritical stance on copyright. The techno-rebels believe that all software should be free, and anybody should be able to modify it and distribute it. The same people who think they have the right to use recorded music and recorded video in any form, including what the producers do not want to use it as, think they have the right to control their own Usenet posts. Clearly, what Deja is doing is compatible with this. Furthermore, any type of service which does interprets your post falls under this category. What Deja is really doing is interpreting your keywords, perhaps incorrectly (i.e. it may make your words into an endorsement). Is this any different than a wrongly translated output from Babelfish? So is Babelfish violating copyright because it makes a derived work from yours without permission?
Huh? This is Slashdot. Here, "Monopoly" means "any company who is really fashionable and trendy to hate", not "only company in an industry".