I missed this yesterday so probably no one will read thus but anyway...

It's always amusing to see a story like this on Slashdot because it just drives the crowd on here fucking nuts. A largely superior form of listening to music exists and yet people are buying more and more music on an ancient medium.

I'm sure there are people who believe vinyl sounds absolutely better. I used to be one of them. Over the many years since I've been in high school and had that belief I've learned a lot about technology, sound engineering (just a pinch), music mastering, and so forth to realize that the notion that vinyl is better is not an absolute thing at all. It has the potential to sound better in certain circumstances, usually involving an expensive turntable, but overall it mostly just potentially sounds different, not necessarily better.

But for most people, I don't think that's the reason they're buying vinyl. Today, if you're buying physical music in any format you're basically buying a souvenir.

Consider a CD. What's the difference between buying a CD in the store and burning one from MP3 files? Cover art, liner notes, silk screening on the disc and some amount of added audio fidelity. The fidelity is not insignificant but really when you're buying a CD you're buying something you could almost make yourself from downloaded files (regardless of how you got the files).

And that's before you consider the fact that if you're buying a CD you probably also want it on MP3 and you'll have to rip it yourself with an optical drive you're increasingly unlikely to have.

A vinyl record, on the other hand, is not something you can make yourself. And there's a decent chance it comes with an MP3 download code. And even if it doesn't, it's a big, huge tangible thing that done correctly can be a work of art. The vinyl can be colored, or using funky patterns, or translucent. It can have things like etched holograms in it, or weird tricks like the ones Jack White pulls where he has alternate intro tracks based on where your needle falls or hidden songs in the space on the label. It's just neat.

Plus digital music has done lots of great things but it's true, digital music devalues music. An album comes out, you listen to it once, you say "cool" and then you hit shuffle on your whole collection and you listen to the songs as they occasionally pop up. Listening to CDs was more atomic - you would tend to listen to one CD in your car over and over, or however many your home or car disc changer could handle. A vinyl record though, that's a commitment. You have to decide you want to listen to pretty much the entire side of an album. If you want to listen to a double album you have to get up and flip or change the record three times. If you want to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack you have to get up or flip the record seven times. This is why a lot of the vinyl that sells well to this day are things like Dark Side of the Moon where it's more album oriented than song/single oriented. And a lot of you reading this probably think this is stupid but a lot of us think it's neat. If vinyl continues to grow in popularity we might see a return to the album oriented rock it popularized.

But yeah if you're buying physical music you're buying a souvenir. And it looks like more and more people figure if they're going to buy music, might as well buy a souvenir. Something with big, cool album art and a tangible experience. The rest of the public is fine with music services like Spotify and Apple Music. So the CDs are leaving stores, the vinyl isn't, and although a small handful of people with breathlessly fight to the death to argue that vinyl is superior in some form or fashion the simple reality is that digital music and streaming services aren't going anywhere.

So let the vinyl weirdos like me have our fun.

An AC on another Slashdot story had a really interesting point:

Here's the thing. When a real problem is being solved, the tech that addresses it is used DESPITE its issues. Like Word Perfect embedded formatting characters you had to manage yourself because WYSIWYG tech didn't actually quite work yet. But office secretaries everywhere were forced to learn that crap because the value of editing a doc and reprinting it was too valuable to pass up.

VR is not like this. No one really uses it to solve a real problem, in any form. And so instead of the tech naturally moving forward by necessity and use, it moves forward by marketing and for research purposes. When it does finally work, it will be used in a few places, but it will never really go mainstream because it isn't solving a mainstream problem. If it were, we'd already be using it and tolerating its issues instead of saying they have to be fixed first.

I would say another example are the original BlackBerry pager devices. They're a sad joke compared to what the mobile phone industry would become after the iPhone and Android phones hit the market but the use case - sending email from anywhere - was so compelling that people used them despite the fact that they were primitive. Heck they got the nick name CrackBerries as a result. Now we have an entire world of people staring at their phones sending messages with any number of devices when they're not playing Fortnite.

The tech maturity argument is valid. The cost concerns are valid. The logistical concerns are valid. But I think the real thing is that at the end of the day, most people don't care a damn thing about VR and even if all of those things get sorted out the number of people who want to strap a thing to their face and be in that world for anything more than a few minutes a couple of times to see what's the big deal is nowhere near where it would need to be to make something like that viable.

And I'm saying this as someone who got a Virtual Boy Emulator using Google Cardboard VR running on the iPhone.

Hope it didn't Vita itself with high development costs.

Reports are that Switch Dev Kits are $500 or less. This is why there's so many indie games on it, like Axiom Verge or Celeste. A bunch of AAA devs took a wait-and-see attitude and when sales took off they started working on Switch games. Meanwhile the indies could afford $500 dev kits and got their less complicated games running on it quickly.

Never had to install a special package to log into my bank.

I have. Back in college if you wanted to access Bank of America you went there and they handed you a handful of floppy diskettes to install software. Seriously. It wasn't too much longer after that that online banking through websites became a thing but up until a certain point in time you were seriously having to physically acquire software

I agree that part of their plan was tracking their users, especially since the CEO bragged about it, but then they had to shut down that part of it when people complained, later calling it a glitch or something.

The other part of it, and I think this is the real key, is that MoviePass got tired of being a small fish in a nonexistent pond and decided to go huge in the hopes of being bought by someone else and having it be their problem. YouTube, for example, was hemorrhaging money because their bandwidth costs were doubling every single month. And then Google bought them and that became Google's problem (which wasn't a problem because Google has no problem getting the bandwidth it wants). I think MoviePass was hoping someone would buy them, either for the data part or to shut them down, and either way the founders cash out and leave.

I do have to say that the thing I despised about MoviePass was that anyone with half a brain could see either they were up to something or they were going to go out of business fast. This would be like paying a $20/month fee and getting a card that will pay for all the gas your car ever needs. Something doesn't add up here. But whenever you'd tell anyone they'd treat you like you were some asshole who wanted to ruin everything. And reading all these people who experienced surge pricing or who couldn't get their app or card to work or who had to photograph ticket stubs like they were submitting some corporate expense report... I'm glad I never signed up or bothered with it. They're going to be dead by the end of the week at this rate.

I'm no expert but this quote from Distrowatch has always stuck with me:

There is a saying in the Linux community that if you learn Red Hat, you'll know Red Hat, but if you learn Slackware, you'll know Linux. This is particularly true today when many other Linux distributions keep developing heavily customised products to meet the needs of less technical Linux users.

https://distrowatch.com/dwres....

It seems to me that if you want to get into using Linux, use Ubuntu or Mint or something. If you want to get into Linux the hard way and really get your hands dirty then Slackware is up to the challenge.

Again you're getting this wrong. They said they were going to bring UIKit to macOS. That's all. The press is reporting on this like it's going to be some sort of magic thing that lets your iOS apps run on the Mac, oe that they're merging the operating systems, or that the Mac is going to have at touch interface. It's not that.

There's two UI libraries in the Apple world. The Mac uses AppKit and iOS uses UIKit. They have similarities but they're different enough to be a challenge. The big overall thing is that AppKit is much older than UIKit which makes sense as the Mac is older than the iPhone. It's been said that to some extent UIKit is what AppKit would be if they started over on it today and were able to use all of the stuff they've learned over the years, which is basically exactly the situation they were in when making the iPhone.

So for example, let's say you have an iOS app and you have a screen where you need a text view. Like, it's a box with text in it and if it needs to, it can scroll if you have too much text in it. You can make it read-only or editable. So you drag a UITextView onto the screen and you're most of the way there. It has a text property and you set that to be what the text is, either in the designer or in the code. You can specify if it's editable, scrollable, etc. in the same way.

Now let's say you want to do that same thing on the Mac. You have a form and you drag an NSTextView control onto it. It has the same name except for the first two letters because Apple's naming convention (at least in the Objective-C era) is to have the first 2-3 letters be uppercase and the rest be descriptive. UI stands for UIKit. The NS? That stands for NEXTSTEP (that's really the name in all caps like that), because macOS is derived from what used to be NEXTSTEP, which was the OS from the company Steve Jobs started when Apple gave him the boot. Yeah.

OK so UITextView vs. NSTextView. Simple enough, right? Well not quite. See, when you drag that onto the form you'll notice that it's an NSTextView embedded in an NSClipView, and then that's embedded in an NSScrollView along with two NSScroller objects for the scrollbars. So everything involved in this equation gets its own separate object and so you have to remember to specify the text in the NSTextView but the scrolling in the NSScrollView. And I'm not sure what the NSClipView does other than just provide a window into whatever part of the view the NSTextView is visible.

Basically at some point they realized everyone wanted to work with the one object and have it handle all the stuff like scrolling and scrollbars itself. And this is one simple example. But it means that it's not quite as simple as writing some library that says "if Mac then NSTextView else UITextView", although some have tried. In fact apparently Apple has a library of their own called UXKit that basically does that but it's not available for use yet.

This is like a 2-for-1, it invokes Betteridge's Law of Headlines as well as the knee-jerk reaction of the Slashdot crowd to any sort of design change Apple makes at all. If only we could rope in Bitcoin somehow it would be like the holy trinity of triggers.

Man, people here on Slashdot are not understanding this report at all.

According to this report, Apple is planning on replacing the processor in the Mac with an ARM-based processor. That is all. This is something they have done, successfully, twice before. The original Macintosh from 1984 ran on the Motorola 68k architecture. In 1994 they switched to PowerPC and in 2005 they switched to x86. Now they're considering switching again to their own ARM-based chips like the ones they use in the iPad Pro. One would assume that the processors for the Mac would be more powerful than the ones they use in mobile devices and less concerned with things like heat since you can actually use fans and the user can be OK with a shorter battery life.

When they did this with the x86 switchover they told everyone in 2003 to start using Xcode and if they weren't, switch to it. When the switch occurred in 2005, everyone who was using Xcode could just do a recompile and their app was good to go. The version of Mac OS X that ran on Intel processors for years had a software layer called Rosetta which would allow you to continue to run your PowerPC-based apps for a while. In 2011 when they released Mac OS X 10.7 they removed it but that was a five year stretch where people could upgrade their apps. Some apps never got upgraded but that was part of the gamble Apple took.

However, nothing else about this announcement even begins to imply that anything else is going on. They're not trying to turn macOS into iOS. They're not adding a touch screen to the Mac. They're not looking to lock down the Mac and make it a walled off platform like iOS. They're not looking to make fundamental shifts in how the Mac operates. They're just looking to switch out the processor. And we know basically how they'll do it because they done it before. Twice.

Apple's roadmap on the Mac is beholden to Intel's roadmap and when Intel's roadmap gets delayed, Apple's roadmap gets delayed. This is not something they would be able to tolerate on the iPhone where they want to put a new one out every year. Switching from Intel to an Apple-made ARM processor will make one more item that they're not dependent on an outside company for.

I know, reading is hard, but the LPs sold on iTunes are the extra content, liner notes, etc. Not iTunes itself.

To expand on this slightly, there's a couple of similarly named concepts people get tripped up on.

iTunes was and is the name of the music player and organization app on Mac and Windows. It's also what Apple uses to sell people content via the iTunes Store.

Apple has been selling full albums from day one of the iTunes Music Store. They also sell the songs individually for varying amounts - usually $0.99/pop, though after some label finagling they also have $0.69 and $1.29 price points.

The record industry has used the term "LP" for many years to refer to a full length album to be sold at full price. The term comes from "Long Play" and it's a holdover from the early phonograph days. The record industry also uses the term "EP", for "Extended Play" and despite the naming it's the term they use for a smaller, shorter album that sells at a reduced price (the etymology comes from the fact that it's extended compared to a single).

Some artists don't like their albums to be purchased song-by-song and notable examples like Pink Floyd were slow to adapt for that reason.

"iTunes LP" was a format idea Apple came up with. The idea was to both provide incentive to purchase full albums as well as recreate some of the look/feel of albums with liner notes, etc. They borrowed the term "LP" to invoke the notion of it being a more substantial thing than just buying the album. I believe it was designed to help you envision buying an LP record (i.e., gatefold cover, lyric sheet, etc.)

Like a number of half baked Apple ideas it never really got the attention it needed and it never really got used much. So they're phasing it out.

But so everyone is clear:

• iTunes, the application, is not going anywhere.
• The iTunes Store is not going anywhere.
• The iTunes Store is still going to sell whole albums just like it always has
• Even if Apple did want everyone to be an Apple Music subscriber, they still use iTunes the application and the iTunes Store sell tons of other things like movies and TV shows.
• iTunes LP, a technique and format for packaging certain albums with extra digital materials, is being phased out. That's what the memo is about. That's what the story got wrong.

It is true that Apple does name things somewhat confusingly, with most product offerings having some combination of "iTunes", "iCloud" or other words and it can be tricky to make sure you're referring to the right thing. But the notion that someone could take a memo about the iTunes LP digital music format being phased out and extrapolate it to Apple is finally killing off the main program they have all their users tied in to is just comical.

I'm sure he didn't mean that exchanging files was impossible prior to the Internet but you can't seriously compare the concept of mailing floppy disks or dialing up with AOL to the era where suddenly everyone was online all the time.

The author, Joel Spolsky, was a Program Manager on Excel back in the day, so this article is based in part on his experiences working on Excel, it's not just some blogger spitballing.

Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office.

No, the reason Office document interoperability is so difficult is because Microsoft designed these formats for themselves, for their own programs, with no thought to interoperability in either direction, and with other concessions in mind like how the early versions of Word and Excel needed to run on really old computers.

Pretty much exactly ten years ago Microsoft released documents to satisfy the EU that detailed exactly how the Word and Excel file formats worked, and they were PDF files that were 400 and 450 pages long. People like yourself speculated that perhaps they had been purposely obfuscated to thwart developers but the truth of the matter is that these things were designed over the course of decades and had a whole lot of stuff in them as a result of the increased complexity of the requirements.

To some extent, Office applications have the contents of the document loaded into memory and the document file itself is basically a memory dump of the contents of the memory serialized to disk. Loading the document deserializes it into memory. People complain about this but again, when your perspective is you need to have this application you're programming write out files and then read them in later, it makes perfect sense as a plan of action. It also explains why occasionally Office breaks compatibility with itself on upgrades which is unacceptable but it happens.

In that vein, LibreOffice has had the specs for the Office documents for a decade now, so I think the "what is the excuse?" question is still pretty valid. But the issue is not that Microsoft deliberately sabotages efforts. They're not that smart and they're not that dumb.

...until they stop doing pretty well, at which point they'll likely change to subscription pricing. After hiking up the prices for the perpetual licenses to no avail. aka the Paint Shop Pro path.

I believe the Stitcher app does insert ads, possibly the feeds themselves come from Stitcher where they've gone in and edited the podcasts. If that's the case perhaps it's possible you have one or more Stitcher-modified RSS feeds in your Apple Podcasts app.

But yeah the Apple Podcasts app doesn't insert ads.