Posts by Moz
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For us in forn parts the transaction costs on a subscription can get quite out of hand. I pay something like $2.50 in fees every time I spend foreign currency, so a one-off makes more sense. But yes, fair value received.
FWIW, Capture doesn't interest me even slightly, I've skimmed a couple of posts but I assume it's popular with others. But other things grab me. More Emma and Jolisa :)
Patreon, unfortunately, seem to be functionally illiterate (or perhaps that's their target market). Is there some kind of explanation of what they do that doesn't involve YouTube?
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Hard News: What Hekia Parata actually said, in reply to Matthew Poole,
By law they cannot increase the rent for the term of the lease. Given current crazy rent prices in some markets that may be a good thing, if the term is actually of such length as to buffer
I thought they could build in regular annual increases? Although in my experience that has never been an issue as a lease longer than a year hasn't been available. The better landlords have been the ones who come round every year or so to negotiate an increase in the month-by-month lease but obviously operate on the "a tenant in the house beats two at the inspection" principle.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to BenWilson,
But my point is that in a battle of ideologies, stalemate is the likely outcome.
Not in a democracy. Look at Australia, where the new federal government has an agressive program of undoing everything that the previous government did that they disagree with. That's a battle of ideologies, but it's not a stalemate. This electoral cycle one side has a one-vote advantage in parliament so they can do whatever they like. and they are.
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Public Address, ironically, is more like the newspapers than those blogs. When we could afford to buy the Nielsen surveys, Public Address consistently topped rankings for time spent on site and on each page, and, mostly notably, engagement as measured by active contributions to the site. It's a precious thing.
And it's the engagement that matters. There are scaling issues, comment threads at the guardian are just too busy to work for me, I just vote on comments. But here works.
Also I find it interesting that you make PA work where sites like Larvatus Prodeo fell apart, mostly over the difficulty of finding the time/money to keep the site running.
Also, to my amusement I got abused not so long ago for commenting that the ads on a site were not annoying enough to have made it into the ad-blocking tools. The site owner was distressed to hear that for some reason. I can't imagine you ever complaining about it :)
Read a podcast on tipping the other day (yes, I spent 5 minutes reading the transcript of a 30 minute podcast, I know it's weird but I value my time more than I love the melifluous sound of an american accent). Anyway, one of the podcastrati had an idiosyncratic approach. With one service he used frequently he didn't tip, he just sent a decent sum of money to the organiser once, to be distributed to the employees.
I appear to have a similar deal with Elefant Trax, having just bought my second "whatever you released in the last 12 months" dump. Yay! I wonder if Flying Nun would do that. Hmm. More seriously, I think I might make a list this year of the sites I particularly value and see if I can donate, say, $50 to each of them.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Keir Leslie,
And assessment should be integral to learning processes — thinking of it as something [unrelated] that comes after learning is absurd. Students should, ideally, be thinking about how they will be assessed, what the assessments are, what the learning outcomes are. It is part of learning, and learning to learn.
I had this idea that "learning to learn" was about discovering the joy in knowledge, and the pleasure of learning to do new things. I find it quite sad that your idea of learning is purely about external assessment. Perhaps that's just me, I have had a number of people remark that my approach to learning is idiosyncratic.
I think training people to obey, and to think ahead to work out what the authority figure is likely to want so they can do it without being asked is scary. Where does thinking for themselves come into your picture of learning? Is there any place for a student to say "no, that's wrong" to the teacher? Either because the science has moved on, or because the instruction is dangerous or illegal?
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Russell Brown,
Life inside the exam factory - why British teachers are quitting in droves
That is f'ing scary, as they say in the profession. Make me very glad I don't have kids, and even more glad that, unpleasant as my schooling was at times, it was not like that.
That sort of nonsense is absolutely apalling training for later in life, because it actively discourages "do your best" in favour of "do what gets the appropriate marks". The more you punish the top scoring students the more all the bright students will decide not to inflict that on themselves.
In those places I suspect I would have not coped very well. As it was I took a few days a year off through either stress leave or psychosomatic illnesses, depending on which side of that particular fence you sit on. Which I suspect I got away with because my marks were at the high end of acceptable.
As it was I vigorously rejected the pressure to perform, deciding after a disastrous 4th form prize giving that I would not win any more academic prizes, ever. Which worked for me, but made some people unhappy. Fortunately I had some co-operative teachers, or I would have failed to hand in a lot more papers at "mock exams" (as it was I found that if I stared at answers too long I'd get confused between what was correct, what we'd been taught, and what was likely to be marked correct, so I'd often leave early).
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The backstory for us is slightly amusing. I bought $500 headphones ($500 in a sale!) and my partner made the usual scoffing noises that people do when they see audiophile prices. Being a bit of a bastard, I let her use them for a couple of weeks, hooked up to the DAC and playing my FLAC rather than her "whatever I found on PirateBay" mp3s through the earbuds that came with her phone.
When I took them away we discovered that she could hear the difference, and it did matter to her.
So I bought a couple of sets of cheaper headphones ($200 each), one for me at work and one for her at home. Which has worked out nicely, partly because she already had a half-decent phone (in terms of sound quality), so adding a 64GB uSD card let her copy my ogg music files on and she was away.
The real problem is that now I get given lists of random pop albums that she wants in FLAC, and no amount of "it's k-pop, nothing will make it sound decent" stops the whining.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Peter Johnston,
Man, so many responses about the format and so few on the music! At a certain age, does one start meaning more than the other?
Why complain that people are discussing the major selling point of something?
Sure, you may buy a Lambourghini for the great resale value and Penthouse for the articles, but the other 99% buy them because they're fast.
If we're lucky what we'll get is the choice to buy decent quality recordings from more artists online, rather than having to buy more plastic crap, ship it round the world, then bin it. Hooray for the consumer society! At the extreme, we might even see this become a standard option from some of their competition - that's where having some big names involved might make all the difference.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Russell Brown,
The difference between lossless and lossy? I've never done a side-by-side comparison so I could be just imagining it ..
I've done a bit, and specifically the bit where I encoded at 3 different settings and ABX'd them before settling on a value that was "sometimes I can tell", on the basis that my phone doesn't produce great audio and I'd rather have more music than very slightly better audio. The good news is that with a modern desktop you can transcode very quickly (overnight for my collection - 600GB/10 weeks) so getting it wrong is not a disaster. Transcoding, BTW, is always from FLAC, not between lossy formats.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to JonathanM,
Sidenote: Does it annoy anyone else when kickstarter is co-opted as an advertising medium where the people behind the products already have plenty of funds to make it happen?
Yes. Especially when, as here, the "kickstarter" is selling the product for more than RRP. The signature of some random numpty on the side of a bit of consumer electronics doesn't change the value for me.
Also, WTF not supporting 128GB uSD cards? That strongly suggests that within 12 months there will be a version two that has more storage. In my phone I have 16GB + 64GB card, and after a week I transcoded all my FLAC to ogg and now I have ~half my collection on my phone (it drops over time as I delete tracks to free up space for apps and photos... and buy more music). I don't expect the full 600GB to fit on the phone, but 64GB is not a lot of FLAC (hours, certainly, but not "I fell like a bit of JPSE... no, NZSO... hmm, Lorde?" type skipping around)