New Zealand researchers said Monday they have restored the first recording of computer-generated music, created in 1951 on a gigantic contraption built by British genius Alan Turing.
Meanwhile at iTunes:
JESUS CHRIST: It didn’t just add duplicates — iTunes fucking replaced several hundred songs. On its own. Without so much as asking.
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) September 26, 2016
itunes…never had it, never will. This kind of crap is another reason why people pirate digital music…it’s often not because of the money.
Actually come to think of it, there is nothing that Apple does that I’m even remotely interested in having anything to do with.
I’m a long-time Apple user but I’ve stopped being impressed by it and its products. Ever since it introduced that dad-blasted iPod, its attitude has gone downhill.
A number of years ago, I had problems with one of my machines. First off, Apple no longer offered any customer support because I had it for quite a while, so I was out of luck there. Second, I couldn’t even get the spare parts that I could have used to fix the malfunction. (Actually, I could, but I would have had to buy an entirely new machine, but Apple would never admit to that.)
That’s when I started moving towards open-source operating systems and hardware. I’m in the process of shifting everything over to my FreeBSD machines. The OS is free and I can modify it if I wish. As for the computers, I can swap out individual parts if I have to fix or upgrade something and I can get them from any number of suppliers.
Apple can disappear overnight as far as I’m concerned. I’m done with it.
I just switched back to Blackberry, because their sh1t does not mess with my music library, my notes, my calendar, and I can actually SEE my file system. Blackberry Classic, unlocked, $450 at Staples, free delivery, I got mine next day. Beats the hell out of the iPhone 5C, and has a physical keyboard. Important for those of us with giant fingers.
Also, be it noted, CANADIAN COMPANY. Apple got the last of my money that they’re going to see a while ago. They’ll have to do something pretty amazing to get me back, their walled garden is really hacking me off.
Incidentally, for those seeking a nice music player that actually plays music instead of mostly serving advertisements and tracking your every move, may I suggest Winamp?
http://www.winamp.com/
It is old,old,old technology from the 1990s. It runs on your PC just fine, windows/Mac/Linux and Android and it does everything you want it to do just like it always did. It really whips the llamma’s @ss! ~:)
Apple is what Scientology would be if it were an IT company.
Ha! You win the internet for today.
Here’s the money quote from that article Coyne was talking about:
“For about ten years, I’ve been warning people, “hang onto your media. One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so. They can alter history, and they can make you keep paying for things that you formerly could have bought. Information will be a utility rather than a possession. Even information that you yourself have created will require unending, recurring payments just to access.”
“When giving the above warning, however, even in my most Orwellian paranoia I never could have dreamed that the content holders, like Apple, would also reach into your computer and take away what you already owned. If Taxi Driver is on Netflix, Netflix doesn’t come to your house and steal your Taxi Driver DVD. But that’s where we’re headed. When it comes to music, Apple is already there.”
And that is why I never throw away old computers and old hard drives. It is really difficult for Apple or Google to delete a file on a 20 gig hard drive sitting in a box in my basement. Sure I have a bunch of dusty crap sitting around, but more than once some of that dusty crap has saved my bacon.
Sure I upgraded my current boxen to Win 10. I have to. But I also have Win 7, XP, 98, 95, and probably a DOS box kicking around somewhere. Also some SGI boxes running IRIX, a really ancient Mac, and so forth.
Cloud computing is fine for big companies with terabytes of data to store. It is NOT GOOD for consumers. If it isn’t sitting on your hard drive at your house, it isn’t really yours anymore.
I’ve seen how data storage changed over the past few decades. During my early programming days, everything was kept on the mainframe system.
Personal computers allowed us to keep it on various devices, including floppy disks and tape cassettes. Then came external hard drives, Zip drives, and USB thumb drives.
The advantage of those methods was that we could access our data at our own convenience and, in some cases, make copies of it and send it around.
Now the computing business wants to tell me that the “cloud” is an improvement. Yeah, right.
Like you, TDP, I have all sorts of older hardware here at home. If it works, why get rid of it?
About Apple,
I read recently that at some big event they showed a sales graph that was a lie. Their sales are down but the graph does not show it.
How did Apple do that? they made a graph of cumulative sales, in other words even if they sold 10 times less Apple product that sort of graph would still go up because they add new sale to old sales.
Apple is full of it just as any other company is.
And don’t get me started on Apple stores, those are the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life, the service at Apple store is the worse I have ever experienced in my life. You have to fight a crowd of people who just walked in , and if you succeed in getting their attention, you then have to prove to the Apple “genius” that they – the Apple store – just texted you and that it is your turn for your appointement you have been waiting for for 2 hours. That you are not someone who just walked in and cut in line. The only way you can do that is being rude, very rude…if you are not you will wait another hour or two.
About the Cloud,
Obviously the only reason the Cloud exists is so that it is easier to spy on us or to do “markets studies”. There is no other reason why a service such as that would be offered for free.
Apple cannot TOUCH my vinyl. Not physically. Not by sound quality. I will put my Bernie Grundman http://www.berniegrundmanmastering.com/ engineered lp’s up against any digital file produced by Apple. Esp. when Engineered by Analogue Productions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_Productions pressed by Quality Records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Record_Pressings … NOTHING can TOUCH the work these MASTERS do for recorded music. Making one of the BEST SOUNDING lp sets ever pressed … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1051WR1uEhU NOBODY even comes close to Analogue Productions and QRP ! except maybe some Japanese vinyl …
Music created the way it was supposed to be … bumps in a plastic disc
It seems to me that must have been what happened to a whole mess of tunes I pirated from Napster back in the day. Cause they wuz gone! No right to complain, though.
I’m fortunate to have a large library system which I can search online. Borrow CD, burn it and it’s mine forever.
This doesn’t help if you need latest pop tune, but I’m way too classy for that. And too friggin’ old as well.
Andrew. Why you think that blaspheming the name of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for your sins and mine, somehow adds anything to your post, is beyond me. Grow up.
Thank you Maureen.
The irony…he worships the music and the technology and it failed him.
hilarious…
Unfortunately, Andrew would have to read this blog to read your comment, which many of us support. Someone should twitter him about it. Who twitters?
As a liberal, he could claim that he doesn’t know any better, although one can be certain he wouldn’t have said anything similar about the Muzzie’s Mo.
Scientology is the religion that Apple is trying to be.
In the future, we’ll always be online:
http://www.costco.ca/.product.100136912.html?&EMID=CA_EN_2016_0926_1095_Lachlan
I too once used Apple’s Itunes. At one time it was the only place you could find and purchase hard to find albums and songs. So I purchased music and then immediately converted it over to MP3 from their format so I can use it on my numerous devices and car stereos. That’s all I used Itunes for — legally buying music.
Sure glad I did. One day I found I couldn’t add more cards to my account without a shitload of privacy surrendering options. That was the last I used them and promptly deleted the app. Reading this stuff just makes me so glad I ran the software in a virtual machine all those years ago. Can’t trust anything that wants you to use the cloud.