Dolmot

Once I visited a national archiving centre, where their job is to store all sorts of information "forever". Interestingly, for all print-like material the solution was microfilming. Even digital newspapers were micro-printed into physical pages. Stored in a stable climate (like underground vaults), they may have a lifespan of 1000+ years. Furthermore, it's a fully analogue micro-sized reproduction so there's no doubt whatsoever how to read it. Just zoom in and you've got it. You could also use some kind of simple encoding to store audio data in print. However, I think they just used large HD arrays as a temporary solution for audio. It requires maintenance but it also means that the storage is always "alive" so people are actively monitoring that it can be read somehow. The format is wav as it's the most straightforward to interpret. Another point I learnt is that when they have piles of audio in different formats to digitise, cassettes have the highest priority because they'll degrade over time, no matter what. CDs may be the next due to rotting. Vinyl is almost "forever" as no micro-scale process is going to eat the groove if stored properly. The only major risk is from careless handling or large scale accidents. They're not hurrying with those. It's also damn difficult to get professional quality cassette decks these days. I think they were using a discontinued model with a large yet limited stash of spare parts...

The clear plastic layer on the underside is relatively thick. It's extremely unlikely that you could scrape through it by any means of cleaning. That would quite literally require sanding the whole disk into nothing. Meanwhile, the print side has the data fairly close to it but you shouldn't be doing anything to it anyway. The most likely direction for oxidisation is from the edges. I think I've managed to salvage one used CD with toothpaste. It had scratches on the clear side. However, problems with new CDs have always turned out to be errors in master production or pressing so there's probably nothing helpful you can do by scraping the clear side (or the print side, for that matter). I believe all my attempts on those have only resulted in the same or even more errors. For valuable used CDs with visible scratches you should probably try a professional resurfacing service. They're not that expensive and you should get much better results than by DIY. Of course, that won't help either if the data layer is bad for one reason or another.

Strangely enough, the easiest way to improve most darkpsy vastly would be stripping the random noise.

Yes it is.

+2 Especially as most "darkpsy" is really just Mickey Mouse FX sprinkled with a cat-on-a-keyboard algorithm over a zero effort bassline. Usually it turns from laughable to unfunny in 15 minutes. Why are all the night slots reserved for it, then? Well, the first reason is a simple connect-the-dots exercise. It has "dark" in its name so it must be played in the dark, right? The second is that in broad daylight everyone would realise the ridiculousness. I'd prefer good music at night time too. It's the only time when there may be more people dancing than videotaping and updating their online status...

Tengri is very nice. However, I don't get where the "goa" tag is coming from. It's very much a downtempo release. It hardly exceeds 110 BPM, possibly with the exception of Dance of the Crow whose breaky rhythm may count as 140 or so. No straight trance there anyway. But within its actual genre, it's one of the better releases this year - deep, shamanistic, sort of organic, doesn't try to jump too much on Shpongle or dubstep bandwagons or whatever. It's not exactly chillout either as it's more wilderness than Ibiza. Try the samples, at least. It delivers a solid album if you like the style.

If you can simply enjoy the food without boasting to everyone and their dog how many billion scovilles it contains, it's OK.

Definitely. I think I've seen more failed last tracks than others put together. I'm not sure about the ultimate reason and it may vary, but most likely it's related to the spiral being written outwards. Especially for "full" (or over-long) CDs, the last track is right next to the disc edge. Therefore it has the best chance to get damaged from handling. Also, if there are problems with sealing, the metal layer may become exposed and corroded, obviously from the edge. Data density and linear velocity should be equal for the whole disc so that shouldn't play a role. (Compare that to vinyl where the angular velocity is constant and the centre has a tighter packed groove, hence worse sound. That's among the reasons why they're carved inwards and the centre is left empty for shorter releases.)

The booklet says "This version of Ka.El.mono is a work session. Earlier than the version which was released in Paname Rec. . That is the reason why it sounds Unfinished." (Quotation attributed to Deflo.) My CD rip is also 6:05 so I guess that's all there is. In other news, looks like I got a read error on track 9. Anyone else or should I just try again?

Already representing a 3-dimensional object on a 2D surface involves projection, or "faking it". For example, multiple points at different depths may overlap in exactly the same 2D position. This may be problematic or amusing. See classics like Ames room or Satire on False Perspective. If you ignore the scaling from distance and use some kind of axonometric projection, effectively you're choosing two directions on the surface that represent two spatial dimensions. That's fine, invertible and unambiguous. What about the third one? Just pick another direction (typically diagonal) and represent depth along that direction. In a simple case, you plot a cube by drawing a square and then extending it diagonally. Now, if you manage to figure that out, it becomes almost trivial to add more dimensions. Just pick yet another direction on the surface and declare that depth in the fourth dimension is towards that. Technically speaking it's just as accurate as using some direction to fake 3D. Unfortunately, we're not used to seeing or understanding 4-dimensional objects. That's why it becomes extremely difficult to follow. Also, you'll have even more information packed into a 2-dimensional image with even more ambiguity from overlapping points etc. Interestingly, >3 dimensions are very simple if you just forget about the spatial interpretation. One of my teachers gave an amusing example of representing simple recipes in a 4-dimensional space consisting of flour, milk, sugar and eggs or something. If you have pure flour, it's along one of the main "axes". If you need all of them, it's in a point in a 4-dimensional space where all components are nonzero. If you want to bake two different things, your shopping list is a sum of two 4-dimensional vectors. Even fancier concepts of linear algebra can be illustrated with that, such as "angle" between two recipes. We're working on concepts like that all the time. They just don't have an intuitive visualisation beyond three dimensions.

As we've gone wildly off-genre already... http://sabaziusdoom.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/the-descent-of-man/ It's on Youtube. I listened to the first three hours or so on my first attempt but had to go to sleep then. I might try the whole thing on my holidays...

2004 called. It told me to listen to Dune.

New New South Wales

Do we have any acceptable samples? Amazon's five second bits or whatever definitely don't count.

Right now George Formby...

Currently Mint at home, CentOS and Scientific Linux at work. A few Solaris machines may linger but they're being phased out. Some thoughts: First, what is an OS? For a casual user, the most recognisable feature might be the look and feel of a windowing system. Surely it's important to an end user but from a technical point of view it's just minor decoration and easy to change. Bundled applications are even further down on that path. The real soul of an OS is how it handles users, processes, files and hardware access. Then there are drivers which ultimately provide the access to hardware. Again, those are technically easy to add but often a PITA due to business decisions. Considering the design, I'd say Unix systems have been superior for decades, providing excellent multi-user and network features, proper multitasking and powerful system management while Windows was just an ugly hack for single-user PCs. DOS/Windows shell was a total joke compared to *sh. The system tools that are taken for granted in Unix had to be bought, installed and maintained individually in Windows. It worked fine for home users as long as a PC was just a box sitting unconnected in a corner, but when the internet provided networking for everyone, the fundamental virtues of 'nix started to show again. Does anyone use Unix-based OSs, then? Let's see... A majority of internet infrastructure (servers, routers) does. Android, the most popular mobile OS is a Linux derivative so close that it is often considered another distro. OS X is derived from OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP/BSD so Apple users are effectively Unix users too. Out of world's top 500 supercomputers (at the moment of writing), 476 are running Linux, 16 Unix, 1 BSD, 4 mixed and exactly three Windows. (Those are at positions #187, #241 and #289. One of them is Microsoft's own cloud...) Cars, nuclear plants and other saftety-critical places are often running QNX or such. Definitely not Windows. And most recently, PlayStation 4 was found to use modified FreeBSD 9. So the Unix family can be found in small devices, huge clusters, consoles, critical systems and professional applications. That's because it really can operate a system. Windows is fine if you mainly want to launch Office on a single-user PC but in every other direction you'll find something else, for a good reason. The nifty thing is that I can run the very same OS on my home PC as on high-end supercomputing clusters. Everything works directly between them. Mint installation took maybe 20 minutes and now it boots in five seconds from an SSD. Most everyday software is included, the rest is behind a few clicks. No need for special anti-virus scanners, malware removal tools or "critical update" reboots every week. Full access to the whole system. No company dictating what I'm allowed to do on my own machine. If I want to change the distro, all my data and software config is at ~ and immediately ported. That's what counts as an operating system to me. It does what it's supposed to do (run stuff, access hardware/data) and stays out of the way for everything else. However, I don't care that much what people run on their own machines. It's a personal choice of a tool, and for an end user those "decorative" parts may be far more important than any virtues of the underlying OS itself. But I start to care when millions of PCs turn into botnet zombies due to fundamentally broken security. Also, please use open formats for sharing your data. That way other people are free to choose their platform too. If locked-in data forces you to buy a certain system, eventually everyone will be royally screwed. We've seen that too many times. Phew. Enough for now.

I guess I've been living in the future for a while with this Asus Transformer. However, I've disabled the trackpad as it's only on the way and the touchscreen is vastly superior for all purposes I'm using that machine for...

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. But seriously, I'd like to visit the country just for the experience, not for any assumption that it's particularly great or bad. The same for Goa.

Yep, let's discuss something relevant like Astral Projection's new album.

http://www.beatport.com/genre/psy-trance/13

Hehe, Radiomafia, the youth channel of Finnish national broadcaster Yle until 2003, when it was replaced by Ylex. They had some fairly good electronic music programmes at late hours (for a national broadcaster which is usually connected to grumpy pensioners). I remember recording one fairly rare live set in the 90s when mp3 sharing wasn't that commonplace yet. Then it suddenly resurfaced just a few years ago and started spreading through a bunch of forums. Odd stuff. They should have archives of a lot of stuff. However, it might be that they've only licenced this kind of sets for specific airwave broadcasting thus they can't hand out copies (which they would do for their own productions). I could ask, though. It's a free shot...

Hyperion - Sunflower?

(probably too)

A few bits from Denovali... Field Rotation - Fatalist Talvihorros - And It Was So

That track listing is quite confusing until you figure out that CD2 consists of different mixes.