Elliott Jang
Beethoven is a distant 2nd to Mozart in regards to composing
Alex Prendergast
Whew! Thank goodness that's settled!
Patera Milenko
No, you can't really compare the two. They are both brilliant beyond time.
deathtokoalas
bah. beethoven was a creative genius. mozart just knew how to follow all the stupid rules. the result is that beethoven has aged splendidly, while mozart just comes off as a conforming tool.
to put it another way: mozart is merely a period composer. beethoven is truly timeless.
MrEitinha
"You're a Mozart fan!" - Norman Stansfield
toni8675
Any simple comparison between the two of them is just plain childish. Mozart died way younger (and when he died, he already started composing more mature, experimented with chromatic harmony beyond others of his time, and added serious ployphony to his last symphonies), Beethoven lost his hearing, not to mention the 14 years between their births... No one knows how many more things Mozart would have accomplished had he lived as much as Beethoven. There are simply too many variables, that's why you just can't really compare the two of them...
deathtokoalas
it's a very easy comparison: beethoven is exciting, mozart is boring. i see no reason to think mozart would have gained a deeper sense of artistry had he lived longer. what he lacked wasn't age, but emotional attachment to his writing.
toni8675
If the requiem, symphony no. 40, the piano concerto no. 23 (adagio) etc. lack emotional attachment, then I'm curious what's your definition of attachement...
deathtokoalas
well, the comparison is to beethoven; pick something, little of what he did was schmaltzy (with the exception of this piece). but rachmaninov is the apex, specifically his 2nd and 3rd concertos.
almost all of mozart's pieces sound like solutions to engineering problems, those ones included. perfect? sure: perfectly trite.
i was able to reconstruct and authoritatively back up my archival material a lot easier than i thought i would be able to. the only thing i've lost of any consequence is a couple of backing files for 'ignorance is bliss'. i can live with that.
now that i'm a little more focused as to what i'm looking for, i'm going to do one more data recovery scan through the other two physical disks to see if i can salvage anything. i'm not overly confident.
as for the script? i did this once before and concluded the data was garbled, but if i can reconstruct the directory structure and file names of the script, and get a bit lucky in pulling out a few text fragments, i should be able to rebuild the script with minimal effort - even if it takes a few days to write it all out and do some virtual testing. well, shit, it could be a month before the bus pirate gets here, anyways.
i'm going to move some things around with the expectation of getting used to living with three discs for the time being. i'm not sure i could even buy a 250 gb sata II drive new anywhere (and second hand hard drives are a dumb idea). so i'm going to end up upgrading.
when i do, i'll move the music files to the new drive. they're both the most important and need the most space. that'll leave me with two 250s i can boot into 32 and 64 bit, respectively, and one to use for various types of backup.
for right now, though, i don't have the appetite to set up a 64 bit system. but i might end up at least nliting it, depending on how much time i end up waiting for, and how successfully i can salvage the other laptop.
as the problem with the other laptop is the hard drive (there's a pattern here; i'm tempted to go to ssd, i'll have to check prices), what i'll have to do is work off an external. then again, it hasn't actually died yet. in the long run, that's another component i'll have to replace, but it's not a priority.
so, i'm chugging away at this. i can't provide an eta for getting back to what i was doing, but i can at least report having a few ideas.
cmd files may technically be programs, but people interact with them like text. they're more like modern-day scripts, really.
in trying to salvage old files off my working drives (to replace the files on the trashed one), i've noticed that i'm often able to pull text files up that have been deleted for up to five years but i can't pull off cmd files that were deleted last month. it doesn't seem to be dependent on size. i'm led to conclude that ntfs is filing cmd files as programs and they're getting easily corrupted as binary.
but they're not really programs. they're certainly not binary they're text...
i realize that there may be some security issues with treating scripts as text files. but how serious an obstacle is this nowadays really? i mean, if you can launch notepad remotely, you're pretty much in control, are you not? even so, wouldn't it make more sense to block at the kernel than the file system? even backup drives crash. rather, this strikes me as an ancient windows artifact from the early 90s or the late 80s when cmd files really were programs and that should be updated for modern usage. i can't be the first person that's run into this.
i don't know enough about other file systems to comment.
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
the topic matter is considerably less intense, but i borrowed the drum loop (figuratively, not sampled) for the song of the day ("too cold").
so, i'm going through some old files and decided to put this up...
the backstory is connected to a covers compilation put together by cleopatra records called "hymns of the warlock", as well as a remix compilation put together by nettwerk records called "remix dystemper". this compilation was put together between the releases of those two compilations.
the easiest thing to say is simply that there were always two different types of skinny puppy fans, related to a now historical split in electronic music between those who preferred "ebm" (that is electronic booty/body music) and "idm" (intelligent dance music). ebm is only reasonably listened to in clubs because it's simplistic and repetitive; idm is the kind of thing you put on when you're doing homework or reading a book. the separation has been much maligned, but it is intuitively obvious that there are some types of electronic music that do not have much depth (and yet are fun to dance to) and some types of electronic music with dozens of layers to disentangle (and may be less danceable), so i see little point in getting silly about it. skinny puppy existed in a middle point; they always had the ability to attract both audiences because their music was both highly danceable and yet also in an art rock and political/punk rock tradition. this is not unique within electronic music, but it *is* rare. they're not considered to be the high point of electronic art music in the modern era for no reason.
throughout the 90s, skinny puppy fans connected with each other and discussed various topics over the epilogue internet mailing list. within this list, there was much derision directed at the cleopatra compilation due to it's over-representation of the ebm side of the band's sound. the more musically inclined members of the list claimed they could put together a better record, were challenged to do so and eventually did.
i was a fairly recent addition to the list and volunteered for distribution for the sole reason that i had the tools to do so (cd burners were still relatively rare in 1998). the cover art was put together by other members of the list and sent to me for reproduction.
while i would argue that the disc more accurately represents the experimental aspect of the band than either of the officially released compilations did, i listen to it now and wish i would have been more selective. the reality is that i didn't really have the standing necessary in the list (you have to have an understanding of 90s internet communications to get that, i guess) to act as a filter on material coming in. nor did i receive enough material to have the luxury of cutting tracks. there's some interesting remixes/reconstructions, but some of it is very blatantly the work of amateur musicians. i should also point out that i considered some of those amateur musicians to be my friends.
it's up here, as is, for listening ears. should either of the kevins express an opposition to this (i doubt that, but i am not able to tap into their consciousnesses from a distance), they own it and get to make the choices.
tracklisting:
1) the intonarumori project: rain (souless mix)
*2) dmt: blackout
3) animoid row: jahya (meld)
4) livesidog: smothered hope
5) pool-a: downlode
6) krewl: meat flavour
7) inri: hexonxonx (featuring ogrebot)
8) j deell: 200 years
9) triptamine: circustance (vitriol remix)
10) amputate: shore lined poison (deformed)
11) lunar caustic: worlock
12) dmso : anger (adrenergic brap)
13) jesus h. christ: assimilate (ambient mix)
14) lichaem: who's laughing now? (offended)
15) j deell: basement
*16) dj billpheus and oscar the grouch (with special guest vocals by the infinite hheathen): love
* - features bill van roy, later briefly of download
also, i got a copyright notice on this. that's reasonable - some of the remixes differ only mildly from the originals. when i initially put it together, i was selling it roughly at cost (i set up a flat rate, meaning i was at a gain or a loss depending on shipping in a way that mostly washed out. i got some complaints from people that didn't understand shipping rates from canada to the us, but the reality is that it balanced out to something like $50 over a few hundred shipped discs. that just means my estimate of a good flat rate was accurate.) but it hasn't been for sale in 15 years. i don't and never did claim any exclusive rights over distribution (i actually emailed the tracks to some people), it was just something the fan community wanted amongst itself and i volunteered to do because i could and most others couldn't.
the point is i can't control the ads if they appear (i can't tell, i run adblock). i'm guessing nettwerk controls most of this. i don't know what lingering relationship, if any, exists between that label and the remaining members of the band.
yeah. the spindle motor was broken
i'm a dumb chimp with any kind of tool. taking a pair of vice grips to it pretty much destroyed the platter.
but
i couldn't fix that in a freezer, anyways. and the idea that i was
going to pay $600 or more for recovery is flat out laughable.
this is precisely why i can't hold a job :)
it
took no more than fifteen seconds for me to irreversibly damage the
drive. and i'd be no less patient with your face, or a power plant.
or care more than i do about the drive.
so be happy i realize that.
that's going to cost me several months.
there was no answer....
i
was hoping i could get the drive spinning by unjamming it, but it was
clear within seconds that the motor was burnt. the drive was burning up.
zero movement.
to replace the motor would mean removing the
platters. i neither have the tools nor the co-ordination to carry out
something like that. so, removing the platters means trashing the drive.
simple as that.
i panicked and twisted hard with the vice grips,
hoping a harsh tug would pull it free (but knowing the motor was
burnt). i'm clumsy; it shot out of my hands, and pushed the heads deep
into the platters, as well as taking a chunk out of the top platter
itself.
which was foreseeable the second i grabbed the vice grips. i mean, i knew. but i also knew it was dead.
my only hope at the point was to just tear it apart trying to get the motor to spin. nope. dead.
i know it wasn't electrical because i swapped the boards out. plus, the heat indicates the electricity was getting there.
lost: install scripts going back 5 years, the musical work i'd done over the last six months.
the motor in this unit is actually connected directly to the board. it would have been a (de)soldering job.
the
musical work was mostly compiling and remastering. i have the final
files, and the source files. what i lost was the intermediate work,
which is unfortunate but not catastrophic.
i could theoretically
reconstruct the script from my old pc, which has a more stripped down
version of it. i don't know if i'll bother.
now that the drive is
officially kaput, i'm going to start the process of reconstructing what i
had compiled - which was a total of three isos i had put aside to burn
at a later date.
right now, i should try to sleep.
seeming as it's a cover of this track, i have no option but to post my obligatory "influential on song of the day" post right here.
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
it's not firewire, but hdmi. *grumbles*. screwed...
...except...
....i could in theory work out the crux of what i was working on by installing the pod drivers direct through usb.
and
on that note, i've wanted to set up my other (half broken) laptop as a
real-time sound processing device for a while. guitars, mostly, of
course - but drums, too. see, the hard drive comes up and down. i was
going to wait until i could replace it....
i also wanted to dual-boot it. that's something to keep me occupied as i'm waiting...
i'm
just finding the idea of blowing this time reading to be depressing. i
jumped through hoops to set this up. i'm pissed off that i'm dealing
with broken hardware, and depressed that it's my own stupidity at the
root of it.
the problem with the hard disk, btw, is physical. and the
way the heads are aligned in the model is really tricky. i don't want
to open this up, but i'm going to have to. however, i'm also only going
to touch it under the precise circumstance that the arm is unaligned.
anything else, and i'm screwing it back up and throwing it in the
freezer, because it's pretty much hopelessly broken.
i didn't realize that my bus pirate was being shipped from asia. i'm pretty sure that the website was registered to chicago. i would have picked somewhere closer, if i realized that.
as far as i can tell, it's sitting in a boat off the coast of singapore, waiting to be filled up with mail. and it could be there for weeks...
so, i'm considering converting the laptop, which is what i'll have to do if the bus pirate doesn't work anyways. i'm going to do some reading and decide in a few days.
i don't see any rational reason that this couldn't handle a firewire device. i just really don't like the idea of mixing with a laptop sound card. ugh...
but, at least if i get the tracks down, i can remix it later.
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
bass influence, on the track, especially in the bridge.
(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
i
think it's a shame that corgan never fully explored his cyber-metal. i
mean, there's some material out there, but he never did an opus and sort
of ended up getting upstaged on it by bands like boris.
this
was about as metal as i ever really got or ever wanted to get (not due
to lack of looking, it's just that the genre becomes self-parody at
nearly the moment it amps itself - through the course of my life, and
since the 80s at least, it's been virtually impossible to do metal
without sounding like an idiot), and informed my punchier outbursts on
the track in question. i specifically remember thinking to myself "i
want it to hit as hard as xyu". :).
(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), liquify, first movement)
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
guitars,
and song structures. i haven't analyzed it, but this sets itself apart
from a lot of fuzzy riff music by the fact that it's written in a weird
modal key (rather than just building itself up on boring old fifths.
those iommi riffs are fun, but they're fucking dead on any level of
musicality. this isn't.). love the unexpected intervals that show up in
the lead part near the end, but it's the way the riffs shift through the
chorus underneath the fuzz like some kind of demented cello that really
captured my attention and my imagination...
(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), many others)
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
guitars,
and song structures. this is one of corgan's guitar masterpieces and
one of the corgan tracks that i took the time to teach myself how to
play. during this brief period over '98, i was actually trying to keep
the excessive soloing down, but the bridge in this track, specifically,
was important in the writing of viewless.
(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), many others)
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
song structuring. also, the jazz chords he's using (not just here but throughout the record).
again:
i loved this record as a compromise between heavy riffage and melodic
content. regardless of your views of his later work, you can't take this
raw pop-punk classic away from the guy.
(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
anybody else pick up the similarity between this track and sdre's "8"?
i
loved this disc - great compromise between the heavy and the melodic.
it's truly a shame what's become of dave grohl, but it's not fair to
take this first disc away from him.
(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
it's
always weird for me to cite sdre as an influence, given how oblivious i
was to what they supposedly represented (i remain convinced that the
history written around the band is mostly bullshit) and the reality that
i only ever really liked lp2. but, i did love that record for a few
years and do still come back to it
...and i did rip the riff to 8 off pretty blatantly in my tune viewless, which was first demoed in late '96.
(relevant tracks: teenage jesus (viewless))
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post. i used to listen to this on repeat for hours...
(relevant tracks: teenage jesus (epilag), jesus gets fucked on robitussin, others)
(i think this was a link to nurse with wound's spooky loop, from the foxtrot comp for jhon balance, which does not appear to be available on youtube)
Monday, April 7, 2014
Shawn Murphy
at first i thought his was new Offspring. They have similar sound.
Skylineblue
I don't think they sound similar at all, I hate The Offspring yet I love Rise Against.
alwayssum41
"I hate the Offspring" omfg, go listen to "Smash", or "Ignition", or "Ixnay" albums u_u
dinkum83
I hate them to except for no brakes.. they sound NOTHING alike..
alwayssum41
Nothing alike ? Seriously ? And you're taking for example a song from Americana ? Rofl... As I said before go take a serious look at their first albums...
deathtokoalas
the vocalists sound similar, and the woahing is very characteristic.
in a certain, sense, though, every punk band from california since 1978 has sounded broadly similar. this does very much sound like the offspring trying to sound like bad religion.
i don't normally find myself agreeing with sum41 fans, but smash isn't just a punk classic but a general rock music classic. ixnay is kind of mixed, but the jerden-driven jane's addiction phase was definitely more interesting than anything they've done since. i've tried to listen to a few of their later records repeatedly, and the biggest problem isn't that they started working in poppier aspects (i could actually deal with that just fine if it were a bit more tasteful; soundgarden's later work is very different but just as interesting as their early work) but that they just started recycling their own songs. i mean, how many times have they redone dirty magic? there was a punkier one (i think it was splinter) that i gave a really close listen to and it's...it's just subpar by any way of measuring it. it's a shame.
but i really just wanted to add that their first record, the self-titled one from the 80s, is a really good listen as well. "kill the president", "tehran", etc.
also, if you like ignition, please check out the damned's classic "smash it up".
alwayssum41
They've redone "Dirty Magic" just once. The original was on Ignition and they've made it again on Days Go By, 'cause it was Ignition's 20th anniversary. I'm not into their new stuff so much even if "DGB" clearly deserve to be listen compare to "R&F/R&G".. And yeah, the self-titled one and Ignition are totally insane albums. Not to mention "Smash" is completely insane too, even if it was their first record on major label.
deathtokoalas
smash was on epitaph - it was actually the best selling independent record ever for a long time (might still be, i don't know). but i meant that they used the chord progression for dirty magic on three or four albums straight. i'd have to look it up to be more specific...
i actually did a cover of dirty magic myself, back in the fall of '98. it draws a little on their sense of humour.
i remember downloading americana and being borderline heartbroken, lol. haven't paid much attention since.
alwayssum41
Sad, since i consider Conspiracy of One a great album as well (the last one with Ron Welty.. :'( ) And yup Smash was on Epitaph, like Ignition was. I just meant this was the first album being able to be this big 'cause of Epitaph's "explosion" (Hope you got me, I'm french and it's hard to explains my feelings in english). Just noticed the "i don't normally find myself agreeing with sum41 fans", ahah I don't get why, they're so great :)
Shawn Murphy
Well. I believe the singers sound similar. The guitar is a more complex than the typical Offspring song but the rhythm guitar is using a simple power chord arrangement like a typical offspring song. I would consider them the same genre.
deathtokoalas
i suppose the complexity in the offspring's guitar work has taken a nose dive since about '97. it's weird to hear somebody say that, though, because one of the things that initially separated the offspring from most of their peers (bad religion notably excepting) was more elaborate, noticeably thrash-influenced guitar work. noodles used to be an interesting player. now that you mention it, that might be the biggest factor in the offspring going substantially downhill.
there are a few breaks that sound a lot like early green day, especially in the open bass notes. and there's a certain melodramatic poppiness that ultimately stems from bon jovi (people get upset when i point out bon jovi's massive influence on modern punk, but it's true). but it really sounds the most like mid 90s bad religion...
...as mentioned, though, all the so-cal punk bands sound very similar (i know they're not from there, but they sure sound like they are). it's never really made a lot of sense to accuse one of ripping the other off. the thing is that this kind of punk is like a type of modern folk: yeah, folk only produced a handful of original compositions, but they kept being redone with different lyrics. that's really what it's about.
it's the same thing with this. there's not a lot of point in questioning it's musical originality. what do people think of what he's talking about? i do get it, though. i have nothing bad to say about their messaging, but, personally, i'd like these guys a lot better if they were a tad less arena rock. i just can't get my fists pumping like that...
obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.
yeah, i got into the process through nine inch nails. well, i was born ten years too late. sorry....
this was novel and exciting to me about late '97 and early '98, and you can certainly hear it.
(relevant tracks: idiotic, others)
obligatory influential post.
joy
division was more a late 90s thing for me. up until that point, i'd
heard bits and pieces, but it was one of the many "before my time"
things. about mid-98, i was listening to a lot of adore-period pumpkins
bootlegs (that much maligned record was better in bootleg form), and
corgan was routinely doing a cover of "transmission" (edit: there is a
corgan version of isolation under the name starchildren. that was a long
time ago...). that convinced me to pick up still second-hand, and i was
hooked...
i'd argue this is a more engaging listen
than either of their official records. joy division was at it's best
when it was existing in that space between punk and goth. there's this
sort of malevolence in his voice...
(relevant track: idiotic, too cold, drive, teenage jesus, others)
obligatory influential post.
i connected with this some time in the early 90s, between achtung baby and zooropa. i was young - around ten. but it was this, rather than war or boy, that introduced me to early u2.
(relevant track: idiotic)
Sunday, April 6, 2014
deathtokoalas
well,
given that my song of the day is the remix of this i did for the souls
that create back in '98, it is obvious that this is where i need to make
my post for the day.
it's really incredibly ironic that the
military picked an anti-exxon track to torture guantanamo inmates with,
as though they're fucking gloating or something. "we are the evil
empire, we kill and maim with impunity and don't you fucking forget
it.". it's enraging....
666alikat
i dont think anyone could consider listening to this torture. that just doesnt seem reasonable. It seems more reasonable that some journo saw the name and thought "yeah thats weird enough to scare old people and anger idiot youths"
deathtokoalas
yeah, i have to admit i was a little skeptical. apparently, the band was told they used the song "according to an inside source" (i'm paraphrasing). i suspect the invoice they sent them was a pr/awareness thing.
the thing is that the torture is mostly about the volume, and they could have used just about anything to do that, so the source is largely irrelevant.
Jesse Waters-Wolfe
It was a heavily edited, distorted version of the song.
Tami Smith
“As it turned out, the soundtrack being played at a deafening volume was by the band Skinny Puppy. It bothered me greatly that they would use this music. Skinny Puppy was something that I always listened to growing up. I have memories of my life that I have assimilated to memories of the music of Skinny Puppy. Skinny Puppy has been the soundtrack to my life! So to hear something that was so personal to be used as a form of torture, that really hit home. That made it something that I was no longer able to turn a blind eye to. I really focused on it and it really bothered me.” -Terry Holdbrooks former guard
Saturday, April 5, 2014
well, i got the ram updated in my old pc from 640mb to 1gb, which cost me $12. 1 gb is the max the board can take (this thing is ooooold). i haven't re-installed my sleek image yet, but it's definitely faster just browsing through the desktop. i have a usb 2.0 card (yes, the ports are 1.1, it's that old) coming for $10. i'll eventually have to replace the hard drive (mechanical parts, *will* eventually die), but this old clunker is otherwise absolutely maxed out.
the guy that sold it to me jerked out, though. he said he'd sell the 256 sticks for $4 each or give me 5 for $12. well, it's no brainer. i was expecting at least one of them wouldn't work, and sure enough one of them doesn't. but, within the 5 sticks are 2 64s. so, i got 2 working 256s, a broken 256 and two working 64s. well, i would have paid $6 a stick (that's still stupidly cheap), but if you're going to sell them at $4 a piece (and having one that doesn't work is a reasonable chance one takes when buying 15 year old ram from kijiji), why bother basically giving me two 64s for free? why not just tell me you only had 3 in the first place?
i'm going to hope he made an honest error on that, cause it doesn't otherwise make sense to me.
...not like i have any use for two sticks of 64-mb sdram.
this is one of the ones that your great great grand kids will go to the theatre to see....
(relevant tracks: confused, others)
people
have heard swans and lpd, but the truth is that my analog string sounds
in the late 90s were mostly trying to emulate the mellotron found on
this record, which would subsequently be purchased by tony banks and
used prominently in genesis. in any case, this is the root of all of it.
so, the other suggestions are not wrong, they're just finding a common
influence.
(relevant tracks: constant, throughout)
this
more or less replaced fixed as my go-to nin record for busing and had a
big influence on me in terms of rhythms slowly developing over time.
it's something that mostly comes out in the remixes, this sort of
evolving, mutating thing...it's very much process music....
(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, symphonies 4 & 5, teenage jesus (suicide), others)
this
record had such a weird influence on me, mostly because the sequencers
are consistently using vanilla general midi settings, which is all i had
available to me at the time through my pc sequencer. so i found myself
relating really heavily to these primitive string sections...
(relevant tracks: schizoid, wish, on sexual awkwardness in adolescence)
deathtokoalas
this
was their comeback disc, after their disastrous attempt at trying to be
real life big ass rock stars. it's interesting to note how many people
are pointing out they were young when it was released. i was 14 as well.
first sonic youth disc. and, yes, it had a huge effect on me..
(relevant tracks: screwed up, all the symphonies, [2002], more)
Paul S
they've never screwed up, not artistically. Don't think they ever been considered 'big-ass rock stars' ----where did you get that from ? theyr'e like the artiest rock band ever,
deathtokoalas
they toned things down dramatically at the precise time they signed to geffen. the band had a bit of a split personality for pretty much it's entire existence, but they were very obviously in world domination mode between daydream nation and washing machine, and i don't think it's a coincidence that that's their weakest period (non-inclusive), musically.
Paul S
I like all their albums but fair enuff.
rickiwarrior
Hi. I could not help reply.... I understand how this album is a comeback, but I do not consider it´s predecessors disastrous attempts at all. I think that Sonic Youth´s relevance is based in that period you call "weakest" as well, because then, they proved that their talent can be comprehended massively (or commercially), not only by hardcore fans.---------------------------------------------------- I was born in 1982, so in 1995 I was just 13 years old. I started with Sonic Youth recently, around 2000, after I borrowed Dirty from a friend, and since then, is one of my Sonic Youth favorite albums. Washing Machine is really difficult to dig, so it takes 5 times more to love, and at this moment, for me it´s equally loveable as Dirty, I don´t know how would I feel about this in the future - (by the way, I can get enough of WM and The Diamond Sea.....ufff)---------- Finally, where does the Geffen period ends and begins?
deathtokoalas
what you mean to say is that they watered the sound down to sell more records.
sonic youth's cultural relevance is not their geffen years. it's their sst years. sister and daydream nation, particularly (although daydream nation wasn't on sst). the stuff after washing machine was very good for a while, but it will have no cultural impact. likewise, as bad a record as it was, people in their 40s today may look back at dirty as something they liked in a period of their life, but it will not be passed on to the next generation.
daydream nation, on the other hand, will be referenced for the next century.
this redefined epic for me.
(relevant files: screwed up, first movement, too cold, others)
if you haven't heard this, well.....you gotta hear this.
(relevant file: inrisampled)
well,
this is hardly under-rated. and who doesn't know of it's existence? but
i should also mention it as relevant, for a great number of files. i
take the contentious position that this was their peak and it was
downhill from here.
(relevant files: nope.mp3, wish, drive, many others)
i also should have pointed out the underratedness of this album yesterday, but it's still underrated today.
(relevant file is nope.mp3)
i should have said this was a great song yesterday.
it's still a great song today.
(relevant file is nope.mp3)
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
this isn't just bowie's best record, it's one of the decade's best records. that little comeback stint in the 90s was his most interesting period, musically. but, will we ever hear it in it's initial and intended form?
(relevant file: schizoid, confused, on sexual confusion in adolescence)
this might be the most awesome thing ever. i am not speaking lightly.
it's like 1% of the cost of the tools that recovery rip-offs use. it's actually cheaper to buy this little thing than it would be to hack together a homemade solution, and it's actually multipurpose - not only is it 1% of a pro device, it actually even pays for itself. it's even cheaper than a recovery evaluation would be...
but the assembled nature of it cuts out all the uncertainty of stringing together cannibalized cables to power sources. things get fried that way, but it's a last resort. not any more. it cuts out the need to use legacy hardware. should work direct from a laptop.
it's going to come with a learning curve, sure. but it could put the fucking vampires out of business. given what this could sell for, to manufacturer it like this and sell it for $30 is just shockingly decent.
was looking at a blu-ray writer for better storage. the
price of media is still ridiculous. but finding one for under $30 is no
longer infeasible (if still requiring a little luck). not a priority,
though...
there may be a new format out in the next two years. that should help bring the blu-ray prices way down.
the flash made it give up faster, which is actually an improvement.
cleaning the drive turned the fan noise down but didn't fix the read
issues. it just spins. windows. dos. no os at all. same thing. so, i'm
concluding that the drive is broken.
which means i haven't ruled out the ide on the board.
today,
i need to get an external sata/ide-->usb thing and some other
things. i'll be taking a run for old parts (ram for my secondary board
is like $2/stick, might as well fill it up. it's also time to upgrade to
usb 2.0, lol, given that usb 3.0 cards have pushed the price down. it's
useless from a store's perspective. like, $5. and if i can find one for
cheap enough ($10) i might even upgrade the chip from a pIII 500,
although the max the board can take is pIII 950.) tomorrow and will grab
an old ide then.
i mean, that board has maximum specs that are dirt cheap to attain. might as well...
alright, yamaha...
i know it's a little odd to go looking for a dos firmware installer for a cd-rom manufactured in 1999, but you really couldn't spare the 200 kb on your website? was it the bandwidth?
jerks.
there's legacy hardware sites, but they don't even support dos anymore, so i have to install windows to flash the drive. ugh...
i don't even think it's going to work, it's just a last chance before i trash it.
worse, people that flash things know it's not always so good to flash things from windows.
i could brick it trying to fix it. right now, i don't know if it's programming is corrupted, if it's physically broken or if it's just ridiculously dirty.
that little 200 kb (if that) file could prevent somebody from having to buy a new....
yeah. great system we've got going, here.
if you're curious, i'm trying to get the boot block on my motherboard to kick in. it's just simply not reading the floppy connector, but i think it's because the pin is damaged on it. the sata drives are spinning, but they're not reading. and i don't think i'm getting power to the usb ports. the ide connector seems to work, and the drive is spinning, but the drive isn't reading in my other pc at all, so i can't really conclude that that isn't working until i can verify that the drive is working. i have an ide dvd but i know it doesn't read cd-rs well. so i need the drive to work to rule out that the boot block isn't kicking in, before i go through the process of trying to serial in.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
48 hours until i can get back to working on my mobo. it's going to be a while before i'm back to recording.
so, i'm going to do a song a day. i've been playing with this "channel trailer" feature on youtube. honestly? ridiculous idea. but, it does provide for a big button to push. i'd rather they set it up so it cycles through a list, but it's clearly designed for tv shows rather than musicians...
but, i can do that myself with minimal effort. so, song a day, moving forwards, chronologically (and selectively).
i'm going to start here. this is actually from april 11, 1998.
so, the guy upstairs wants to turn the air conditioning on when it's a
high of two degrees. i'm an open-minded person, but that's really a
signal that it's time to lose some weight for your own health. and i see
no option but to turn the heat up to 25.
i get the feeling that the window is going to be open all summer.
Friday, March 28, 2014
i hereby declare this weekend to be....
PASTA WEEKEND.
(preferably stated with some ominous dread)
some of the other answers might get you something close (just be sure to crank the fuzz with some kind of tube preamp, and probably even a line booster - this is very high gain), but it sounds to me like that octave-y sound is actually an electronic relic of his guitar synthesizer tracking in and that the actual answer is something along the lines of digital distortion on a violin or cello patch, rather than anything created with guitar pedals you can get in a store. it's also probably manual whammy technique getting that envelope wah, rather than anything digital.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
this is also done right, with a proper amount of key force.
i'm done with rachmaninov for the night....
actually, rachmaninov and angst go well together. under 15, and it's just notes on a screen. but a little older than that is probably the ideal age to get this right.
she's hitting the keys with sufficient force. that's the big thing. and it's a russian thing, consistently. her western counterparts want to over-intellectualize and turn it into some dainty prance, rather than the noisy protopunk classic that it is.
i'm mildly relieved. i suppose that if we end up on the other side of some curtain, we can still rely on the former soviet states (and satellites) to play the russian classics for us properly, without having to endure westerners butchering them.
i have a moderately recent american version and a modded russian version designed for smashing pumpkins fans (creamy dreamer) and what i've found is that the russian muff seems to be designed for better sound at lower volumes. the russian version does sound clearer and more usable here, but that's why. it has to do with the way a muff works. it's supposed to be plugged directly into a tube amp at high volume levels. this test is consequently largely useless.
deathtokoalas
the orchestra sounds good, but she's just not hitting the piano hard enough.
Eleanor Gay
Does she need to pound the keys to mke the music? Maybe for you to hear the music.
deathtokoalas
this particular piece needs to be pounded, yes. bourgeois westerners that want to focus on masturbatory techniques have consistently failed to understand that for close to a hundred years. the russians grasp it properly...
go find a russian recording to hear it bashed out the way it's supposed to be, then come back.
shantihealer
Your right, my friend, she not only underhits the piano but kind of smacks it.
SugarTomAppleRoger
You are joking of course. Few can play with such power as she does.
deathtokoalas
i've pointed out a few performances that have the proper level of aggression. she just doesn't sustain the smashing throughout.
Ricardo Macayo
y tú muerte a los koalas si que sabes de música!
deathtokoalas
i apologize if i've mistranslated, but i think you're asking me why i hate koalas.
the answer is that they're revoltingly cute.
valkhorn
I hear nothing wrong with it. The notes are clear enough, and she plays with finesse - which is very hard to do on this piece, esp. the last movement.
deathtokoalas
see, that's the problem - the finesse. this isn't a technical, subtle piece. it's a banger, meant to be played with all the bourgeois sophistication of "tutti frutti".
anyways, i'm repeating myself. thread closed.
ok, this sounds like a solid version. it's likely not coincidental that it's russian, but it does look like the whole concerto is up here.
so i was able to find a proper russian version on youtube, after all.
this is better, it seems to get the point better, but the playing is a little blurry (it sounds like he's using the sustain pedal to blur some of the notes he can't hit in the same way that electric guitarists use a distortion pedal), and the mix is pretty piano-heavy.
busted? lol...
no grit. and, look at 3:23: he's catching his breath? maybe his suit is too tight, and it's restricting his breathing. then he prances through the rest of it like it's some kind of gentle ballet...
this should be beaten down with every ounce of emotional and physical force that can be gathered, as though the police have shown up to steal your last ounce of vodka at 4:53 am and there's nothing you can do about it....
deathtokoalas
his is worse, he sounds bored through half of it. yeesh...
i have a version by the soviet symphony orchestra that owns everything i've seen online so far, but my discs are packed. i can't even find info online. fucking cold war, getting in the way of what really matters...
Concertos n°2 and n°3 (USSR Symphony Orchestra, feat. conductor: Gennady Provatorov, piano: Victor Eresko).
find that one if you want to hear somebody just bash this out.
XaverScharwenka
Or simply enjoy one of the best versions ever, by Earl Wild... but then again, we all like things differently.
deathtokoalas
earl wild does not sound like a very russian name.
perhaps, you'd like to suggest a wonderful slavic folk version of 'the entertainer' while you're at it? grigorii does gershwin? on balalaika?
fucking hipsters.
1231CarrieCheuk
your profile pic is so frightening
deathtokoalas
that's only because you can't see the muppets dancing around me.
South Texas Piano
Please tell them to save you
deathtokoalas
i believe that request ought to be formed in terms of a question, but you forget that the average muppet is a monster!
12x12surface
Can you post it on YT??
deathtokoalas
i don't have muppet copyright access.
deathtokoalas
i agree with those arguing that she's butchering this. i've always interacted with the piece as a blaring romp, written by an emotionally insecure male that is releasing all of his anger and frustration. she's playing it in a soft and sensuous manner that invites a sultry lounge singer.
the notes are flawless, but there's just no rage or sadness or frustration in it.
deathtokoalas
i mean, maybe she's trying to sex it up. fine.
...but this really needs to be played by 40 year old virgins (ok, i'm exaggerating) to get the maximum feel out of it.
Tim
your understanding of the composer's work is clearly limited if you think anything he wrote is devoid of lust or passion. also, wang's artistic conviction and integrity are what make her performance so remarkable. interpreting a piece in a way that deviates from the norm (or, in this case, your personal preference) is not indicative of poor musicianship.
deathtokoalas
did i not point out that she played the piece flawlessly? but if you understand where the piece is coming from, and all the self-doubt and insecurity attached to it, you'll realize she's completely missing the point.
i mean, if i want to listen to shmaltzy, upper class nonsense i'll go listen to mozart or shostakovich or something. what makes rachmaninov special is the social anxiety in the writing. you take that away, and it's just another delve into aristocratic masturbation. there's plenty of that for those that want it, without needing to ruin that which stands away from it.
i kind of held back a little bit initially, but does she look to you like somebody that has ever experienced the kind of shit rachmaninov went through? young, beautiful, rich. she'd need a brain transplant to get her mind around this. it would be remarkable if she did understand this emotionally, that is as something more than notes on a page - which she does clearly understand quite well.
Vlad
eugh...welcome to music, blessed art it is, where each comes with their own interpretation.
deathtokoalas
this is scored music, not jazz. personal contributions should be kept to an absolute minimum. the performer is a worthless intermediary between my ears and the composer's mind - a necessary evil. i don't care what she thinks.
Vlad
Scored music is still subject to interpretation (not talking about improvisation). Any two people will feel to play the same piece differently
deathtokoalas
completely wrong liberal bullshit. if i want to listen to yuja wang, i'll listen to one of her compositions. i'm here to listen to rachmaninov. the moment she brings her individuality into the process is the moment she completely fucks up. you need to get your head out of this relativistic gallow before it comes down. there are correct and incorrect ways to play a piece.
i don't want to continue this into perpetuity, so i'm just going to be clear about the non-relativistic reality of things before i close off further comments.
there are two ways to perform a scored piece of music:
1) the way it was written
2) incorrectly
this slutty performance is not capturing the piece the way it was written. it's a "modern interpretation" that replaces the tortured soul of the piece with vapid and gratuitous sexuality. therefore, it's wrong. there's no further worthwhile debate on the point, unless you want to resort to the idiocy of "it's just your opinion".
it's not. and that decadent attitude is destroying our culture and our civilization.
out.
benchmark disc.
benchmark disc.
benchmark disc.
you want to know why we can't have another cold war? because i can't find any decent recordings of rachmaninov. no, i don't want to listen to some asian child prodigy that can hit the notes but has no emotional investment because she lacks the maturity. i don't want to compete over who can do it better, either.
the best version i've heard of the second piano concerto (by far) is by the soviet orchestra, which i found as an import from france (you can keep your freedom fries) in a second hand store several years ago. it's nowhere to be found online. and, it's not hard to guess why. instead, we have versions by west germans, koreans, jews from chicago...WESTERN VERSIONS....
none of them compare to the soviet version.
what is important in life is not which set of bankers controls which oil rig. what is important is the ability to listen to high quality renditions of universally recognized russian classics. likewise, russians have an inalienable right to access american renditions of american jazz.
"we have bitches brew, too. dmitri play trumpet through superior delay system. better quality big muff for vladimir's guitar."
it's not the same, dammit.
we need to put this into perspective before we revert back to that fucking bullshit all over again.
rando
In my opinion, it was Fripp, who changed and developed Belew's guitar style and technique this way. This video basically shows, what guitar techniques and what playstyle you had to have, when wanted to be in King Crimson.
deathtokoalas
belew picked a lot up from fripp, but he never lost his more playful style - and it's something fripp desperately needed to counter his medieval dour. the biggest give away that it's belew rather than fripp is the presence of anything that contradicts the structure of the piece - be it a double time lick, an unexpected syncopation, etc. i love fripp, but the truth is that the man ticks like a clock.
this
was constructed out of commands in matlab as the project in a course i
took on wavelet design. no instruments or samples were used in this
recording.
so, i pulled some of the releases out and put them up for sale as lightscribe cd-rs in jewel cases with whatever cover art comes to mind. the discs will be standardized, but the package they come in could be all over the place.
it's not the point. the point is the number on the disc, for collectors, if any happen to take an interest in what i'm doing.
we should really rename "midlife crisis" to that period that exists
between pretending you've outgrown yourself to realizing you haven't,
because outgrowing one's self is an incoherent idea.
ok, maybe people are right. maybe if i'm going to post so much criticism i should post some stuff i like.
i'm further going to mark my favourite discs as i go forward.
.....'cause it's good marketing. i'm not pretending otherwise. i enjoy the conversations i have, but the point is that people are supposed to click on the link and check out my music. maybe i should just shut up. but youtube's advertising model really doesn't make any sense, given that people can post whatever they want right on the page (and that most people with a measurable quantity of brain cells use adblock).
about the best advertising i could pay for would be to interact with fans of records that have influenced me. that's actually not possible to buy, but it's certainly more meaningful than an annoying decal on the side that most people are going to literally or mentally block out.
then again, i'm certainly not the next katy perry. there's not really a way to mass market this stuff. it just has to somehow find the right audience.
ok. so, that cd drive doesn't read anything. it just spins. lol...
i
think it's the only actual *cd* i have. i have two dvd ides, and two
dvd satas. that was the initial cd-r i saved up to buy when i was in my
mid teens. you know those reasons you get a job when you're 15? i wanted
a cd burner, to make demoes with. but it seems to be cooked...
it doesn't sound good, either.
couldn't be more than $5 on kijiji. if i can find one...
this is some progress:
if
i put in a cd-r (not a dvd) into a cd-rom (not a dvd-rom) connected via
the master ide cable, with the jumper to master (not cable select) it
indicates drive activity that is otherwise not present.
unfortunately,
i burnt the motherboard cd on what seems like my last cd-r. i thought i
had a stack of lightscribe cds, but it turns out they're dvds. i'm not
sure why i bought lightscribe dvds, but whatever. and i was silly enough
not to put the amiboot.rom file on it.
so, now i'm searching for a cd-r to burn a 1 mb file on to. *sigh*.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
actually,
i had connected my floppy cable upside down in the process of swapping
drives around, which is why the light was solid :|. put in the right
way, there seems to be no power to the drive at all. no seek from the
boot block. bricked...
reason: there's no power to the board.
hotwiring it isn't going to get the read info. shorting things would
only be useful if it's not reading from boot block at all, which i'm not
convinced is it.
see, i may have two damaged drives. the pins on
both are bent all around. in contrast, the cd-r powers up, through ide
or through sata. i'm not convinced it's reading anything, especially
through sata, but it spins and flashes and turns the fan on and stops.
it doesn't seem to matter what disc is put in...so that seems more like
firmware...
...but it powers up. neither floppy does.
i've
also determined that at least one of the floppies i was using is
unstable. i could have several bad floppies. the copy operation seems
fine for about ten minutes, then seems to evaporate. like, i'll do a
format /u and copy the rom over and three hours later will get read
errors on that disk in that drive.
it's tedious, and i don't
think it's the problem, but i have to determine the integrity of the
floppy disks before i give up on this approach.
i then have to try every cd-r/cable combo i have.
however, i am currently resigned to reprogramming the chip.
i mean, the light is on. and it spins. but it's not reading.
it's a better idea every single one than to short. so, here i go on that...
i mean, it seems like they're perfectly describing the situation....
yeah,
that still doesn't turn the power on the mobo on. i wasn't sure if usb
needed it the same way the older connections do. apparently, so.
i can't see how a drive would work where a hub doesn't. so, i'm leaning more and more towards shorting.
actually, my hub has a power in. i don't use it, but....hrmmn....let me test this, anyways, see if i learn anything from it.
precisely
whether the short works or not depends on if the information needed to
get power (rather than instructions) to the peripheral i/os on the board
is accessible somewhere outside the bios (proper), which the proposed
recovery process (through boot block) suggests is actually the case.
otherwise, i can short it all day without accessing the power info in
the bios that doesn't exist.
nope.
i'm
not getting any power to the board past a certain point, which is a
different problem than i dealt with the last time i did this. see, but
it's a bit deceptive, because the externals all take power from the psu.
so, the cd spins when you put something in it and the floppy lights up,
but neither are able to communicate with the cpu, so the emergency bit
doesn't come in.
one of the things that made me understand what's
happening a little bit better was plugging an mp3 player into usb. i
wasn't expecting power from the board, but i was hoping the power on the
key would be enough to get over the hurdle. unfortunately, the key is
programmed to turn off on the physical connection, rather than an
electronic one. so, no good.
that leaves me with three remaining options:
a) i can try and short the chip, but i think this is unlikely to work.
b)
a better idea is to try an externally powered usb connection. and,
thinking back, i think that might have been what i did last time, too. i
need an external usb drive for two other reasons now so it will be top
priority next monday...
c) i can try and use a jumper to replace
the bios. i'm going to have to wait until monday for this, too. it's an
excuse to get the soldering iron that i probably should have inherited
but, for whatever reason, didn't.
so, my gst money on the 5th is
basically going to computer repair. that's mildly irritating, but ok. i
don't budget that. it's all stuff i should have around, anyways.
i'm
not going to short the chip unless i can find a precise set of
instructions. see, i don't think the boot block isn't kicking in, i
think the board needs power to communicate with the devices. the short
might reset the power along with the force, which shouldn't be missing
in the first place, but it's not the intent of the process, so i'm a
little cautious about messing with it. as it is, i have no keyboard
commands, because there's no power. i have no video out because there's
no power. yet the fans are all spinning so it's clearly that the bios
crashed before that point...
if i can get some power to the
board, i think it should go into recovery and flash off of any media it
can read. but, i need to be careful with that.
i could do this
with a screwdriver, and conceivably have it up in a few hours. in the
back of my mind, though, i'm thinking that, if i wait, and the usb trick
works, it won't be necessary - and that the jumper is a safer way to
force it. it's simplicity v. safety...
if i can find exact instructions, i will do this. if not, i'll wait for at least the external usb.
there's always reading to catch up on.
actually, i'm realizing the emergency iso i downloaded doesn't have the right file. i have to try that...
yup. i've tried every possible combination and the boot block is just
not setting in like it should. i'm rather confused, though. that should
be there.
i'm going to have to wait a few days before i can get the materials for a jumper.
the floppy isn't doing what it's supposed to, and the cd isn't either. the flash shouldn't have fucked my boot block, but i'm not even getting beeps with no ram.
so, it's looking like i'm going to have to jumper this. ugh.
it was indeed one bad bios, along with at least one drive of
questionable integrity, and i'm irritated i spent so much time with it.
there wasn't a way to reset the cmos, but a "set to default" got the
floppy working properly in freedos. sort of. it's still sketchy. i'm
going to have to flash...
first, to find a disk that i can actually format. i'm confident that this should get the main pc's bios in.
well, i found a bios, and i can't see how one version of dos is really better than the next...
there doesn't appear to be a way to clear the cmos, besides "shorting" it. like i want to do that...
so, dumbass move #2 this month was flashing my bios. i thought it would be a good idea, moving up to 64-bit. my recording machine has been unable to post since friday evening.
a stuck bios chip is not an irresolvable problem, in theory. these particular chips have something built into the firmware that checks the floppy drive. there's also a cd utility i've used before, but cannot locate right now. i'm hoping the floppy works.....
...but i've been having difficulty finding an operating system that will read a floppy drive. there's a known issue with xp (the workaround is to use server 2003, because home users shouldn't need floppies, apparently). my copy of 98 is broken, in general, and won't read it either. i've tried three specialized recovery linux live cds that won't mount...
so, i'm resorting to installing freedos. and then real dos, if that doesn't work.
worst case scenario, i'll have to go in with a parallel cable and reprogram it manually. so, there's a few more days lost....
i know the drive works and the discs are good, if for no other reason than that i just installed 98 with a boot floppy (even though the os won't read, and it won't read from funny windows 98 dos).
so, i either have two bad floppy cables, two bad floppy drives or one bad bios. i can't get the floppy to do anything at all on this backup motherboard.
the bios hasn't been flashed since 1999. i doubt it supports any method besides a floppy flash. ironically. nor do i suspect asus still has bioses for this thing around...
Friday, March 21, 2014
just to preemptively counter some textbooks that may be overly idealistic or flat-out out of date...
consider the following four combinations:
a) properly written kernel mode drivers written in an os with weak kernel mode security (xp, with most hardware combinations).
b)
kernel mode drivers written for an os with weak kernel mode security
being run in an os with strong kernel mode security, and that expects
almost all drivers to run in user mode. (vista/7/8, with some hardware
combinations)
c) badly written user-mode drivers written in an os
with strong kernel mode security, and that expects almost all drivers to
run in user mode. (vista/7/8, with some hardware combinations)
d)
correctly written user-mode drivers written in an os with strong kernel
mode security, and that expects almost all drivers to run in user mode.
(vista/7/8, by design)
the reality will agree with the
textbook in stating that a is faster than d, on the same hardware -
meaning xp is faster by design, but less secure (that's the trade-off).
again, windows 7 on faster hardware may seem faster than windows xp on
slower hardware but that's an apples and oranges comparison that reduces
to an actual comparison of the hardware.
but the
situation i'm talking about is with either b or c, which are both going
to be slow and buggy and which is still the reality with some hardware.
if you think back to '06, vista had a horrible reputation.
this is the actual root of the problem. microsoft understood it
perfectly well. it's support agents (one of whom was me) understood it
perfectly well. the hardware companies understood it perfectly well. but
part of my job was confusing people into blaming intel or nvidia
instead of microsoft. which isn't to say that they didn't share the
blame. but that was microsoft's official strategy - fuck the issue, lie
to the customers. they saw it as a pr game.
i can't
count the number of times where i nearly broke down and just leveled
with the poor bastard on the other side of the line. but, given that
everybody understood that the problem had no solution, my job was to
ensure that the person walked away from the conversation blaming the
person that made their board or chipset or video card, rather than the
company that made an operating system that changed all the industry
standards without proper documentation or sufficient warning.
again, though, it's eight years on, now. there's no excuse for it still being a problem.
so, that's actually something else to take away from this:
if support agents can solve your problem, they will. if they can't,
they will lie to you - and get promoted if they're really good at it.
going back to the usb test, i should point out that my pc
actually has a faster processor, surprisingly, given that the chip is
from 2005. my pc is a pentium D @ 2x3.6. the laptop is an i5 @ 2x2.4.
the difference between ten minutes and 30 seconds is still incredible,
though, and can't be explained purely by the processor speed. especially
given what i know about the way the drivers work...
listen: i worked support for
microsoft. i'm telling you the story from the inside. from microsoft
training. from documents written by microsoft engineers. it might sound
incredible, but it's the actual, blunt truth.
i'm
transferring files around right now, and this is a good example. it took
almost ten minutes for me to transfer a few gb of files from my laptop
(which is running a 64 bit windows 7, with a core i5 and 4 gb of ram -
certainly better hardware specs on paper than my desktop) to a usb key.
it took 30 seconds to transfer the same data from the same usb to my
pc's hard drive, which is currently running an xp x64. if i were to do
that on a fully patched vista, it would take ten hours.
ten hours!? yes. ten hours.
...because
intel won't update the chipset to conform to the very different driver
signing standards. the way windows handles drivers was a huge update
from xp to vista.
i'm willing to accept that a lot of
hardware manufacturers initiallydidn't understand how to rewrite
their drivers for vista/7/etc. but, they did eventually figure it out.
and there's really no excuse for not doing so, other than driving the
hardware market.
all those answers are dead wrong. it's the change in driver framework.
(specifically, chipset drivers)
windows 98 is no longer useable for a number of reasons
(for me it's mostly sata drivers), but it would be way faster than xp,
too.
generally speaking, the older an operating system
is, the faster it is (when compared on the same hardware). of course,
it's going to have less functionality. it may be less safe to access the
internet with, in theory if not in practice.
this may
seem counter-intuitive, but it shouldn't. making something more complex
makes it work slower. what doesn't make any sense at all is the idea
that upgrading your os will make your machine run faster.
this is a brief explanation.
"If
we're only using two isolation rings, it's a bit unclear where device
drivers should go-- the code that allows us to use our video cards,
keyboards, mice, printers, and so forth. Do these drivers run in Kernel
mode, for maximum performance, or do they run in User mode, for maximum
stability? In Windows, at least, the answer is it depends. Device
drivers can run in either user or kernel mode. Most drivers are shunted
to the User side of the fence these days, with the notable exception of
video card drivers, which need bare-knuckle Kernel mode performance. But
even that is changing; in Windows Vista, video drivers are segmented
into User and Kernel sections. Perhaps that's why gamers complain that
Vista performs about 10 percent slower in games. "
this explains a bit about the actual problem, without
getting into it. i don't really want to spend any more time looking
around about this. it's something that nobody seems to want to be
published. i wouldn't know this if it weren't for reading internal
support memos that said DON'T TELL THE CUSTOMERS THIS all over them.
but,
as i've stated, this is irreversible on some hardware, without getting
the manufacturers to update their drivers. what's happening is that the
drivers are running in kernel mode, when microsoft wants them to run in
user mode. this is producing huge amounts of security checks (by design)
that slow the fuck out of the file operations. what intel needs to do
is rewrite their drivers to run in user mode, like microsoft wants them
to do. but they'd rather blame it on vista and tell people they have to
upgrade their hardware, as microsoft blames it on the hardware
manufacturers (at least internally).
the result is unusable hardware, on any windows version beyond and including vista.
but, the design changes in how vista uses drivers make xp faster (by design) anyways.
you can think of it as a trade-off between speed and
security. xp is all speed, weaker security. vista is all security. now
as the hardware has caught up, it's evened out (in terms of perception).
but xp remains inherently waaaaay faster.
i
mean, this isn't entirely microsoft's fault. it's as much on intel and
others (my problem is with intel, i don't know how much others have
caught up. initially, nvidia was dragging their feet on this a whole
lot.). but, what the hardware people were saying at the time was that
microsoft didn't give them enough warning. their engineers had to go
through a lengthy retraining process. it's apparently not the kind of
change you can gloss over in a weekend. the retraining required was
substantial.
how much of that is an excuse, i don't
know. but there's a reason that microsoft is widely acknowledged as
incompetent. and the whole driver framework switch from xp to vista
really demonstrates it.
even so, there's no excuse for this still being an issue, 8 years later.
just a note that if you're still geek enough to be using xp (and i and others have very good reasons that will not change soon, if ever - i'm more likely to move to linux than a post-vista windows system, because they're really legitimately awful on a lot of levels) - support ends on april 8th. so, it's a good time to track down all the updates. if, for example, you've been relying on an sp2 disc and then running windows update whenever you reinstall, you won't be able to do that anymore.
somebody will no doubt do this and torrent it, but trusting them is another issue. better to do it yourself while you can.
there are hardware issues that jumped up in vista that never got solved. the only solution is to buy specific hardware. i mean, if you're running a pre-built system then you probably won't notice any of this. but, as deep and valid as the criticisms of apple are, you're better off with a mac than a dell or an hp....
there's a lot of fixes that don't work floating around. i actually worked support for vista and i will authoritatively tell you that microsoft's response is to blame it on the hardware.
yet, the same hardware works flawlessly with xp.
so, there's conspiracy theories floating around that probably have a lot of truth to them.
around '06, microsoft started loading it's operating systems up with meaningless services that are designed solely to require faster hardware. there's almost no functional use for any of this, except to coerce people into upgrading their systems. that much is really not debatable.
but you can turn that off. that's minor.
one of the bigger problems is with copy operations, and while it may be true that this is at it's core a problem with user-mode drivers (that is to say that the hardware people never made drivers that work properly with the security aspects of windows, post-vista), there's still this lingering question of whether the thing is by design.
what that means is that people with certain types of fairly modern hardware are stuck with xp, unless they want to upgrade central aspects of their system or deal with cripplingly bad file operations.
that's a very good reason to either stick with xp, or move to linux. microsoft isn't going to make an exception - they're going to blame it on the hardware manufacturers. and the hardware manufacturers are going to tell you to buy new hardware - and you'd better do the research to make sure the drivers work right.
for me, the precise issue is my board. but, i mean, it's a perfectly good asus with sata connectors that can handle up to 16 gb of ram. there's no good reason to upgrade this board. intel just won't fix the chipset drivers to work properly with the way windows does, post-vista.
but if i stick with xp, then i get full use of the board.
worse, the truth is that xp just performs better at core os functions for the simple reason that it's doing less things in the process. getting the drivers to work right will speed up file operations, but it will never be as fast as xp on the same hardware. that would defy basic logic; it would require doing more things in less time. nor does a home user need to care about the security functions that slow everything down...
so, again, it goes back to the conspiracy theory: were the security updates really necessary and were they really buckling to pressure to idiot-proof the os, or are they just driving the hardware market by literally introducing billions of empty cycles?
i'm hoping microsoft decides to do a final platform update or something that pulls everything together. that'll make life easier. but, i suspect that they won't. so...
april 8th.
i'm surprised that i was able to log into my school account, but i was. i was looking for a way to download 7, home premium due to the extra key i have. the links that are all over the internet are all corrupt. i've tried four times, and have given up.
they did, however, have a 64-bit xp, with key. well, that's the best option, really.
i should be able to reimage a 32-bit version based on an old compaq corporate image from about the year 2003. it's all patched up, and ready to be ripped apart.
so, i will come out of this with a 32/64 all-xp dual boot that i will plan to slowly transfer over to 64. first, i need to focus on replacing the dead hd. and i still need to know if i can get the script off.
getting a few more sticks of ram will help act as an incentive to the switch.
probably not today, but almost certainly tomorrow.
well, we can't be young and full of energy for our whole lives. aging isn't preventable or reversible. the interesting part is how we adjust.
for the lyricist, it makes sense to move into more reflective, almost hip-hop type territory. yet, la dispute's strength (musically) has always been it's ability to cause a ruckus as the poetry climaxes. the notes didn't matter, it was all atmosphere. they couldn't be separated. as the lyricist softens, the band behind him simply isn't pulling off the shift to sounding like rem very well. the level of melodic introspection simply doesn't match the level of lyrical depth....
sometimes, age brings us closer to our friends as experiences solidify shared ideals and the depth of interests strengthen. other times, we outgrow our friends and move on. the future, of course, remains to be seen. yet, i can't help but think that the band would rather be rocking a little harder, and i'd definitely suggest that the lyricist could benefit from musicians that have a deeper sense of melody.
it's not ironic. it's universal. it's life.
i just discovered presonus, though, which is
the newish project by some of the guys from cubase. no dongles. no
virtual dongles. that sounds like it's worth checking out.
i also want to check out reaper. the install is less than 10 mb. i'm a fan of light software...
...but in the end, it's going to be the same old. hopefully, i'm reinstalled by tomorrow.
bad iso.
ugh.
i won't do this a third time.
i'm
going to end up mostly running 32 bit software. 32 bit software on a 64
bit os is a bad idea. i mean, it works, but it's pointless to upgrade
if your key programs are 32 bit.
i was going to maintain a dual
boot, anyways. but i'm thinking old xp - even broken - will still be
dominant for the near future.
i built that machine - and this was
many years ago now - to get up to 64 bit xp in time. expandable to 16 gb
on the board was pretty advanced at the time, although i've never put
in more than 4.
contrary to claims otherwise, moving to 64-bit from
32-bit with 4 gb of ram can get extra resources because 32-bit will
inevitably ignore one of your sticks to fit the total (including the ram
from your video card) under 4. it's not a max of 4 + bios + video +
whatever else. it's 4. max. total. so, if i upgrade then i get another
gb...
...but the reality is that setting the pagefile to 10 gb is
just as good. the system may have to dump stuff to the drive here and
there, but you never have to use more than 3 gb of ram all at the same
time and if you did your system would crash because it couldn't.
i'm
standing here all these years later and sort of laughing at myself.
64-bit is still a niche market. and i have to admit i don't see any real
reason to upgrade, either. there's nothing i can think of that will
work in 64 that doesn't in 32.
it's mostly the lack of
evaluation software. there's lots of software i could buy. i can't
afford to even think about that. so if i'm running everything in 32
anyways because it's all i can find then it's meaningless.
but it may be useful to have a non-broken system, from time to time.
yeah.
the
problem with running 32 in 64 is that you're constantly converting it.
what you're actually doing is running through a virtual machine. that's a
net loss in speed (it may not be measurable, but it's a downgrade).
considering the amount of drivers in use in sound production, that's bad
news waiting to happen.
i just realized i installed the wrong version of 7 on my laptop. it's a
home premium key on the back. i have a pro version i got from school,
that resulted from a wipe on the recovery console. i can't swap the keys
out without reinstalling, so i'm going to download home premium and try
that for my 64 bit escapade, instead.
it's what i should have done in the first place.
(i could call them, but it's not worth it. they never really fixed the copy issues in vista.)
a google search suggests it's still a problem with 7. well, i'll find out.
i highly doubt there are 32-bit linux drivers for my mixer, let alone 64-bit ones. it's not feasible.
currently reminding myself why vista is the wost operating system ever...
i mean, i can handle a little bit of performance degradation from an optimized xp to an out-of-the-box vista, at least for now. but my windows 98 computer (currently running xp) can transfer files faster. it's preposterously slow.
i don't have the interest in stripping it down the way i stripped down xp, but i'm going to try to vlite it before i essentially give up and stick with what is a half-broken xp. the cd install is the broken part. the scripts i lost in the hard drive crash were what fixed them...
....and then this no good, third rate os has the nerve to reject my perfectly valid product key. fuckers...
you are SO getting formatted, windows vista.
i actually worked vista support for a while, believe it or not. i wrote some of those kb articles. it was a fun job with good pay, even. canadian labour can't compete with labour in the philippines, though. and alas...
