I haven't read the proposed standard (mostly because, not being a sound engineer, I suspect I wouldn't understand a thing), but wouldn't the problem be solved by limiting not the maximum, but the average instead? us Classical fans get our cannon shots just as Tchaikovsky intended, while mainstream Rock music stops sounding like someone fucking your ear with an ice pick, it's win/win. And as a bonus, anyone wanting to have their music louder would have to have more quiet parts to compensate, meaning they'd be encouraged to utilize the full dynamic range instead of pushing everything to the maximum.

And yet the same World of Warcraft you defend was, and still is, blasted left and right as another "me too" MMO only with Warcraft characters and less demanding graphics.

As the GP said, being creative is a terribly subjective phrase. So much, that in the eyes of anyone who thought WoW was generic, your post comes across as a defense of Carmack's position rather than an attack on it.

The beauty of being an homo sapiens is that I don't need to.

That's like saying Java is superior to C because the latter being "portable assembly" was its whole purpose. Yes, it was so at the beginning, but the language and the frameworks built on top of them grew to encompass much more than that.

Not really. Funny thing about math is that, regardless of your political affiliations or position on same-sex marriages, 2 + 2 still equals 4. Science is pretty much the same, as you'd know if you had bothered to learn it.

Funny way of showing it, perhaps you need more nicotine?

I know it's paraded around here to the point of being cliche, but... correlation does not imply causation. I'm the same as you yet I've never smoked in my life, so rather than your nicotine addiction being the cause I'd just bet on you having shitty friends to begin with.

Well... yeah. Is there any reason why someone would believe otherwise?

The interesting thing is that, if you managed to keep it there long enough, it'd actually work.

Let's be honest: if I asked you which are the modern world's wonders, would you check out UNESCO or Wikipedia? and what would everyone else in your family do?

It's kind of scary, in fact.

Ahh, yes, the good old "I have a right to my opinion, and don't you dare criticize my criticism!" cry that everyone holds until they realize their own working field has been driven to the ground by marketing departments paying more attention to the "faux connoisseurs" than to professionals in the area due to the former spending more money than the latter.

Unless, of course, you do work in Marketing and PR in which case you've never had it better.

Nope, nothing in any of the parents showing how Ogg support implies no MP3 support. The conversation went pretty much like this: "there hasn't been many people asking Ogg support" -> "because most stuff already does" -> "which sucks for the rest of us" -> "explain why" -> "no mp3 support" -> me WTFing.

Even ignoring "clones" that ultimately surpassed the original such as Unix, Linux, GCC and so, Miro is already a well-established project that's been going on for years (the project formerly known as "DemocracyPlayer" btw) and has got a sizeable userbase on PCs, this new marketing strategy is merely the result of one guy noticing that, if Miro makes for such a neat app on PCs it'd be pretty cool to have it on Android as well, and since it'd work roughly iTunes-ish they could market it as such rather than explain all its features one by one.

Except it doesn't. Other than purely Free Linux apps and the odd game engine or two, pretty much everything that supports OGGs supports MP3, and given its licensing costs if OGG weren't there chances are they still wouldn't support MP3s.

Honesty. Simply put, both Miro and iTunes have some glaring design issues, but Miro acknowledges them while iTunes merely says "they're not bugs, they're features, or would be if you were using OSX you dirty heathen".

In theory, you'd be right. In theory. You see, in theory the big labels would hire the best bands out there, give them the best resources available so they can do the best work they can, while the indies only have lower prices to compensate for their lack of talent and resources.

However, what happens in *practice* is that the big labels hire whatever's more marketable (read: a young, attractive singer), then hire an engineer that destroys whatever semblance of music was there by making everything LOUD while the indies continue making actual music, many of which had more musical talent than the marketable hires even before they were hired so the end result is that the indie album produced on a shoestring budget ends up being a hundred times more pleasant than the LOUD trash of the big labels.

It's a pity though, as the best non-classical album I've ever heard was from a professional sound engineer making rock albums for pleasure. Makes one wonder how much better the labels' music would be if they didn't cripple themselves at every step of the way.

They did, they failed, and like so many of their failures the loyalists just try to pretend it never happened.

No, I don't waste my time following every single Apple product ever released, why? do you?

Don't worry, that's purely rhetorical.

iPhones do not, at least not yet, but eMacs did in the most garish colors imaginable. They initiated a fad that the Apple loyalists loved to praise as the final nail in the coffin of the "ugly, brown box", only to die a quick, merciful death a few years later. Just as the "haters" predicted, huh, who would've thought.

Good for you, but I practically grew up with Apple idiots calling more than one button "too complicated for non-geeks to use". Until Apple released its own, official model and finally, *FINALLY*, the loyalists... admitted they were wrong? hell no, they just stopped talking about it and started bringing up some obscure third-party accessory produced for a year in the '90s to "prove" how Apple had always been in support of multi-button mice and we'd always been at war with Eurasia.

No, it became so the same way Scientology gained such momentum: a personality cult built around their leader, a massive propaganda campaign to make their members look part of a "distinguished elite" merely for being members, and the insane profits that come from selling new trash to your followers every month.

Face it, the zealots love to parade things like CmdrTaco's infamous comment on the iPod as "proof" of how "haters" always get it wrong but the fact is, they get it wrong just as often as they get it completely right, Steve Jobs isn't a divine, flawless being that can make no mistake and every word of his mouth is the absolute truth, and just because it's got an Apple logo doesn't mean it's the golden standard which all competing products must be measured against.

Still, fat chance of you ever admitting *that*, you're way too invested into the company (both emotionally as well as economically, judging from your initial post) to admit any flaw in your reasoning. Psychology is a bitch, isn't it?

The company with the failed PDA, the company that started the idiotic but mercifully short-lived "fruity colors" fad, the company that shouldn't have tried to replace USB with Firewire, the company that should've allowed mice with more than a single button, the company whose closed ecosystem would lead to its cellphone market being overtaken by a competitor's open alternative.

But I guess in your world none of those ever came to pass either, Android died a quick, merciful death just as Windows did due to its confusing idea of having a "right click", and the bright pink iPhones are a hit comparable only to the original Apple Newton. Pity that you somehow got transported to this world, though.