Whenever, the subject of vinyl comes up on Slashdot I am reminded of this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatAreRecords The joke is that old people make jokes about young people not recognizing vinyl.

Unfortunately even in DNB this is the case. I play strictly vinyl and have a couple hundred DNB plates - however fewer and fewer releases are coming out on wax. I have been purchasing for my new mix and many of the tunes I've been following I have discovered were digital only, or i couldn't find in a main distributor and had to buy through discogs. It varies greatly between labels, and Nu Urban, one of the biggest DnB vinyl distributors just went out of business. The sad fact is that between declining sales and the rising cost of pressing runs, fewer labels are willing to take the risk and put something out on wax - which is too bad because it is definitely the best for spinning - the interface is built right into the medium. If you play dnb please continue to buy vinyl! And Elements is a great night B)

The centerpiece of any hip hop studio is the sampler. There exists a very high quality open source sampler called linuxsampler but they are not included in any mainstream linux repos because of their bone-headed, legally invalid licence. So you have to build it from source, a painful process that I've never been able to do in under 2 hours. There is a lot of high quality foss studio software out there, but as long as developers keep dropping the ball like this we're going to see more reinventing of the wheel like this and not a lot of progress. An excellent foss program for beat-making I would recommend is qtractor, but it does not come with a sampler.

You're kidding me right? Not only was MD an abysmal format for what it was marketed as, it was terrible because of exactly the kind of cartoonishly-evil format restrictions that get Sony routinely bashed on here! If you were going to white-knight a Sony media format, you definitely should have picked a better one. MD was marketed primarily as a _recording_ medium, a cheaper replacement for DAT. But the content division wanted it to also be used for distribution, god only knows why (really, who in their right mind would pay more money for a bulkier (thicker) CD just for the plastic case, a fact the market made clear). So even though it was ostensibly for recording, they made it as difficult as possible to actually _get_ the audio you recorded onto your computer!

As another poster mentioned, you couldnt just rip the disk onto your computer, you had to trans-code (Hopefully you had one of those oh-so-ubiquitous optical spdif port on your sound card. MD computer drives were never allowed to be made). Granted, this was a digital transfer so there was no loss in quality, but you still had to sit it there in front of your computer for an hour re-recording the thing like a freaking cassette tape. Much later, they introduced a proprietary, windows-only software program that would transfer the disk to an audio file faster than 'real time' (i.e. like a freaking cdr that everyone was used to at that point). Never used it, always had mac or linux, but I heard it was awful. Keep in mind that this was all to prevent people from ripping commercial MD releases, making this flabbergasting piece of anti-technology in a 'recording' medium one of the worst and most salient examples of Sony's chronic double-think in their consumer electronics division that has led to market failure after market failure for Sony formats.

MD was simply a cash-grab with a garbage proprietary format that noone wanted, and a textbook case of Sony's content division crippling their electronics division. I should have coughed up a little more money and gotten a DAT machine, at least that format is still around, better quality, and more convenient than MD, even though its ~10 years older.

The speed of high capacity drives can matter a great deal depending on what the system is used for, and read/write speed is not just important for applications and the OS. Ask anyone who does realtime uncompressed video or multi-track audio recording.

Oh yeah. I forgot that 'Openness' is what makes or breaks products in the marketplace.

Oh god I wish! I would _LOVE_ for the app store to replace the dogs that are macports and fink. Ancient, unmaintained packages, sparse selection, and poor integration with mac's default programs make them pretty aggravating to use, especially considering the potential of FOSS on the mac. Admittedly, I doubt that the app store has the dependency-resolution that a full-fledged package manager needs in a modular unix environment, but at least the app store packages will be up-to-date and compatible with the system.

It's an honest question since I know nothing about this website. I thought this court motion from the defendants was very interesting, especially this part:

"Xcentric encourages consumers to post complaints about companies, while at the same time offering its “services” to help these companies improve their image -- for a fee. Xcentric’s practices are controversial. In one recent lawsuit, the plaintiff alleged that Xcentric “actively solicit[s] defamatory content from third parties and directly encourage[s] the use of hyperbole and exaggeration in the title and body of the complaint to maximize the impact and marketability of false reports.”"

The motion then goes on to say that this issue is addressed in an faq on Ripoff Report's website, but I was unable to find it. While I certainly don't agree with the brittish model of "sue for libel first, ask questions later", I think we're all in agreement that protecting defamation is definitely not in the spirit of free speech. Is this really part of Ripoff Report's business plan? Anyone familiar with Ripoff Report care to enlighten?

Based on this article, I would count on quantum computing having a big impact on computer graphics. A quantum algorithm that can crunch matrices exponentially faster than current techniques would be as important for graphics (and many other fields) as a quantum computer's ability to quickly factor large numbers would be for cryptography.

Actually, while I was also irked by the buzzword-compliance of TFA, I think the point about linking virtualization and the cloud with giving small businesses access to data tools is actually quite valid. Storage and processing are commodities now thanks to these technologies, which significantly reduces the staff and overhead required for a startup or small company to utilize large data sets. I work for a small web design and hosting company and we certainly wouldn't be considering scaling up our data management solutions for our clients if we had to carry the whole infrastructure on our backs. And just because you haven't thought of a novel way to leverage a lot of data doesn't mean that another company won't (and they will).

You really think the housing market (or the 'business model' of building homes) didn't change with the invention of the hammer? I suppose the business model of IT didn't change when people stopped coding in assembly - after all, coding in C is the same thing only faster, and what's all the hype around high level languages since they don't do anything by themselves without a team of software analysts and programmers? I'm actually surprised your post got modded so high since the first half basically amounts to "If it's worth doing it would have been done by now" and the second half is a just a bizarre, directionless and inappropriate outpouring of nerd rage. I guess it's just feels good to rally around someone declaring the popular technology du-jour irrelevant (in this case the cloud - a popular target around here). I'm actually finding it difficult to simultaneously respond to your uninformed opinions and your disrespectful attitude without feeling some nerd rage myself. We should be fucking ashamed? Really?

That's because iTunes intentionally breaks the id3 tag standard, and it's not the only standard it flouts. Virtually all of the tags that iTunes writes are encrypted and shoehorned into the 'comments' section of the standard id3 header, making it impossible for any non-Apple product to read. Not only that but the open daap music sharing protocol that APPLE HELPED DEVELOP was broken by iTunes when they realized that they could lock users into using iTunes to share music. You can't share a media library between iTunes and linux, even though they use the same supposedly 'open' standard.

Oh silly me, I read the summary as "Led by Oscar [winner Steven] Speilburg..."

Reminds me of SCSI, Fast SCSI, Fast-Wide SCSI, Ultra SCSI, Ultra-Wide-Fast SCSI, etc

I also took formal language theory and found it to be one of the most thought provoking classes I ever took as well as one of the most difficult. The bi weekly assignments would take me about 20 hours, but man I learned a lot, including how to program a turing machine, an exercise in abstraction which still blows my mind. I'd like to give a big shoutout to my professor, David Barrington, an amazing teacher who also seems to be doing very interesting work in the analysis of this paper. See links to his posts here

from the WSJ: "[A reporter asks] 'Are you willing to make an apology?' 'You know, most of the customers that have iPhone 4s think it is the coolest thing they ever owned,' says Jobs. To the customers that are having problems 'I apologize to them.'"