Dolmot

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.

Usually it's brought up by people who want to brag about their 500e vinyl. Naming the hardest-to-get or the most obscure as a favourite is always a cool option. (Well, it is good but not the best in my book...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMPUhZUpc_0 (Drinking tea just now, of course.)

From that other topic... Are digital sales replacing CD sales or is the new buyer preference "not buying it at all"? I wouldn't even bother setting up digital distribution if it yielded a grand total of 50e.

I just listened to Connect.Ohm last night while buying E-Mantra from you. Got any more recommendations? And indeed, I bought Aes Dana too out of habit (and because missing it now could mean paying 40e next year) but it hasn't received that many plays yet. Maybe there are moments where it fits better...

OOOD, old and new?

Right now, Robert Rich - Nest with Echo of Small Things next on the playlist. I've listened to these a lot recently. I dig them out whenever I need to calm down and all other music has some aspect or another which manages to bother me. Here I just hit 'play' and everything is fine for two hours. At other times. piles of things from psydub and downbeat to dark and space...

Nice Toy, the ITR version. I've probably listened to that one more than all other Etnica tracks combined - and it still works. (But when did people start to ask 76e for that CD, exactly? )

Err...that's Burning Up which was released in 2000. Hardly a sign of a "new direction" if it dates back two years before Amen (which still contained fairly deep stuff, by some definition). I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from a one-minute clip of them playing a track from 2000. I believe it's been fairly common a number in their sets, after all.

The first track has similar style and even the same FX as Wrecked Machines - Four Walls (but it's not that one, I think). Then again, piles of tracks did in that era... Sounds more like early 00s, Etnicanet or something, to me. Sorry, I don't really know anything either...

Ah, another shipment with all the usual goodies and an extra thick bundle of cards and bookmark-ish smaller strips. That was new to me. And of course... (Not that album, just referring the title.) Still deserves a

I'll try my luck again... Saiko-Pod - Phutures and Options. Its last track "Tron" ends with a B5 sample "You can not run out of time, there is infinite time. You are finite, Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool." Nice album, BTW. When the goa heyday was over, some of its replacements were bad but this was both innovative and cool. I listened it through just a few days ago.

Have you tried the label site...

Any relation to Ed Cox? I have the album and I love it...

OK, let me throw in my wild guess. Last weekend I was browsing Psychlopedia's page on Discogs and pressed play in the youtube window (even though I have pretty much everything on vinyl AND as files...) Someone has uploaded this in 2009: It has elephants, although I don't think it's a cover of any relevant album. In any case, the track is well worth searching for or listening to even if it wasn't the correct one.