Actually, one of our customers started writing "Thank you!" e-mails one or two weeks ago. I guess my boss managed to convince her that twenty hours of support per day is not the norm.
I don't find HN's font too small, but I usually have Firefox set up with a readable minimum font size in the first place to evade that problem. This breaks a few sites' designs, but that is rare (and the "victims" are most of the time guilty of other design mistakes, too).
ACK. Additionally, FLAC is perfect for future-proof archiving. MP3 is already declining (thanks to Apple) and while you will probably still be able to play MP3 files in twenty years, it will hopefully not be the format of choice. Other formats are superior to MP3 even today -- not only in sound quality, but in other areas like gapless playback and metadata capabilities as well.
How do you know that? And what format is supposed to be replacing mp3? It's the only audio format I run into on the Web (but then I don't use Apple products to play music).
I don't use Apple products either but I know that they sell tracks AAC encoded. And that's exactly why I see MP3 declining: before iTunes, there was no serious competitor for it.[1] But now the biggest online retailer of music uses an alternative. MP3's "market share" may only have gone down by a few percent. But thanks to iTunes, AAC songs can now be played almost anywhere. Since most people couldn't care less about the format of theit digital music collection, as long as they can play it, MP3 has lost a lot of its relevance. It will probably survive as a household term for digital music, irrespective of the actual encoder, though.
[1] Yes, I do know Ogg Vorbis. It is even my lossy format of choice. But it's never been a threat to MP3.
[Disclaimer: I am a big fan of Radiohead and at the same time listen to music almost exclusively album-for-album. No shuffle play for me, thanks.]
I seriously hope that they at least always release a couple of tracks together. Whether they call that an "album" doesn't matter to me.
I fail to imagine myself to buy a new song every couple of weeks and listen to each of them separately. Am I supposed to listen to new music for just four minutes and then skip to something else?
Complex, good music (which, for me, includes that of Radiohead) deserves attention. You cannot build up attention in such a short amount of time. An album is more tan a collection of songs. Every song not only stands for itself but also serves as a frame for all other songs.
If I had a short attention span, I would listen to the radio. (Ok, I actually do have a short attention span, but well...)
Many of Charles Dickens's books were originally released one chapter at a time just because Radiohead releases songs as singletons doesn't mean you can't put them together to make something greater than the parts.
That's not the question; the question is whether those parts will form a greater whole.
I'm not the original poster, so I speak only for myself. Some of my "albums" (read: CDs) are just collections of songs, and that's fine. But some of the albums have coherency, stylistic similarities that don't just come from the artist (as other albums from the same artist will have different stylistic similarities in those songs), and other things that make these albums a bit more than just the sum of their parts. This doesn't just include the "concept albums", but even things that may sound like "just a collection of songs" at first but turn out to have a flow and coherency once you think about it.
If nothing else, there's an art to album arrangement. Like good editing, it might be easier to see if I gave an example of a very degenerate case than if I try to say what's good: If you release 6 happy songs and 6 sad songs, you don't want them to show up in that order, as that makes for a terrible break in the flow (it'll feel like two albums glued together); you want to mix them together, and even with the same 12 songs, the tone of the album can be somewhat manipulated just by the order of the songs. (Start and end on happy? Start and end on sad? etc.)
It's not just a matter of "my choice"; there's a matter of the artist's choice as well. This is a very fuzzy thing and it is perfectly possible to create a "mix album" with a bit of work that is itself a bit more than the sum of its parts, but there's still something to be said for an artist doing this deliberately.
(Besides, call me old-fashioned but I think that there's still a place for the concept album. The short form gets mined out easily, especially in the context of a single artist; giving a bigger canvas to a skilled artist can produce something genuinely different.)
I hope that people continue to produce albums and not just single, isolated tracks. (Of course, albums too could be serialized. And maybe that's all you meant, but I still wanted to point out this could be a problem in this bright new era. I'm not prone to complaining about new media but this is one place we could genuinely lose an entire art form, not just be quibbling about the smell of the book or something else that nobody under the age of 10 will ever miss in the future (my personal metric of fuddy-duddy-ness when it comes to complaining about new media).)
I couldn't agree with you anymore. I fit your description perfectly too. Albums are a group of songs put together for a reason. They flow, have beginnings and endings. The progression of songs tells a story, it makes sense. I would hate to see this disappear.
I guess I should note that this isn't true for all artists, but for artists like Radiohead, buying a single off one of their albums would only tell a small part of a grand story.
I guess I always knew the day would come where Radiohead stop producing albums, I had just hoped it would be a lot further away.
In case you need examples to back up your view of albums, take a look at Adversus' or Eisregens early albums, for example. Adversus' albums are like a depressing hour-long story of a sad love. Eisregen had some really nice 4-song-cycles (FF - like "color darkness" about an evil darkness from the underworld, wiping out humanity, and the Pest-zyklus - like "pestilence cycle", which is a sad, rough tale about abuse of people during the time of pestilence, people going crazy and such.).
But I guess such albums are too complicated for todays everyday market and will stay rare. :(
I agree. And it's not that Python strictly needed the "@"-syntax in the first place. They just implemented ("hardcoded", as the article calls it) it to make it obvious what is happening.
I always just "(Dis)allow pages using their own fonts" + a readable minimum font size. That makes browsing much more comfortable for me and doesn't break too many sites (only very rigid table layouts, most of the time crappy online shops).
A completely different approach to the problem is to minimize the number of necessary distance computation in the first place. There are various indexing algorithms which make finding nearest neighbours feasible in large datasets. Incidentally, I implemented two of them. :)
For real usage, you would probably want to reimplement them with performance in mind (and in a different language), though. My implementation is dog slow. But on the plus side, it is very readable and heavily documented.
