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Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is "atrocious," and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc.
"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
Dylan, who released eight studio albums in the past two decades, returns with his first recording in five years, Modern Times, next Tuesday.
Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."
"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."
Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it's a losing battle.
"Even these songs probably sounded 10 times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it."
"Effective August 26, Verizon will charge a Supplier Surcharge for all DSL customers. The surcharge helps offset costs we incur from our network supplier. The Supplier Surcharge will be $1.20/month for 768Kbps service customers and $2.70/month for higher DSL speeds.What happened here? They instituted some made up cost they have been 'absorbing for some time' to match the drop in price. They also, of course, neglected to detail what this extra cost was (other than: we're losing money in our landline phone business.. doh.. you and the rest of the world).
Verizon Online will cease charging an FUSF recovery fee, beginning August 14, 2006. The impact of the elimination of the FUSF fee is for DSL customers up to 768Kbps, fee eliminated is $1.25.month; for DSL customers of up to 1.5Mbps and 3Mbps services, the fee eliminated is $2.83/month. On balance your total bill will remain about the same as it has been or slightly lower."
Verizon Adds New DSL Surcharge
By AMY SCHATZ and DIONNE SEARCEY
August 21, 2006 4:09 p.m.For Verizon Communications Inc.'s Internet customers, monthly bills won't be dropping after all.
Last year, the government changed the rules so DSL subscribers would no longer have to pay into a federal fund which subsidizes phone services in rural areas and for low-income consumers. That promised to shave a dollar or two off a typical DSL Internet bill -- $1.25 a month for Verizon's slower DSL service and $2.834 a month for its faster service.
But Verizon recently emailed subscribers, announcing that it will drop the universal service surcharge as of Aug. 14 and impose a new "supplier surcharge" beginning August 26. The new fee -- $1.20 a month for slower service customers and $2.70 a month for faster ones -- is almost exactly what consumers would have saved with the government's change. Essentially customers' bills won't fall at all.
It appears that Verizon is essentially pocketing the money that consumers would have gotten back, although the company disputes that notion. It says it will eventually impose the fee on all of its six million or so DSL customers because of increased costs of providing stand-alone Internet service, which is purchased at a premium by consumers who don't subscribe to its phone service.
"We have a cost that we have been absorbing for a long time. We're not going to absorb it anymore," said Bobbi Henson, a Verizon spokeswoman. The new charge will not apply to subscribers with annual Internet contracts until those agreements expire.
It's not clear how many other phone companies will use the change to impose new charges on consumers.
Last year, the Federal Communications Commission changed rules that govern DSL Internet lines and dropped the obligation to pay into the $7.3-billion Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes phone services in rural areas and for low-income consumers. That change takes effect this month for all DSL Internet providers.
Welcome to the Windows Live Writer team blog! We are excited to announce that the Beta version of Windows Live Writer is available for download today.
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Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone.
I just traded in my Mini Cooper for a 2007 Yaris. It's weird, As I get older, I'm finding I like simpler, and friendlier to the world I live in.
By ScuttleMonkey on on-the-road-again Today Apple announced a few expanded open source efforts. First, beginning with Mac OS X 10.4.7, the Darwin/Mac OS X kernel, known as "xnu", is again available as buildable source for the Intel platform, including EFI utilities. Second, iCal Server, Bonjour, and launchd are moving to Apache 2.0 licensing. And finally, Mac OS Forge has been launched, as the successor to OpenDarwin as a conduit for hosting projects such as WebKit that were formerly hosted by the OpenDarwin project's servers, such as WebKit. Mac OS Forge is sponsored by Apple. DarwinPorts has already moved to its own servers. Update: 08/08 01:43 GMT by J : The official Apple announcement is now out. Other fun news: Leopard will ship with Ruby on Rails.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/2359256&from=rss
OpenDarwin Shutting Down
OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering a system to host other people's projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark.
Project admins for all active projects have been notified, and we will be working with them to provide as seamless a transition to their new homes as possible. We don't want to boot anyone off, we will be operating the machines as usual for several months, until everyone has had a chance to move elsewhere.
We will continue to provide email and dns redirection after the machines go dark. We'll be looking at what other redirection services are needed and can be provided after hosting has ceased.
The OpenDarwin team would like to thank everyone who did contribute to the project, and our apologies to active, loyal projects that have to move.
Thanks,
- OpenDarwin Core Team and Administrators
So I've got to wonder if this most recent attempt by Apple isn't something along the same lines. What's different here? By what I can see, not much. Same people at Apple. The likely result: Same indifference. Apple is, by nature, a closed ecosystem. Look at the Mac. Even more so.. look at the iPod/iTunes juggernaut. If there's one thing that goes against all things Apple, it's the concept of OpenSource (unless, of course, it benefits Apple in a way that lets them take, but not give back).
Mainstream Media Meltdown III
A couple times a year, I take a statistical look at mainstream en
tertainment and media in decline. All figures are year-on-year comparisons unless otherwise noted. (The last version of this, from November, is here).
Down:
- TV: netwo rk TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
- Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms.
- Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
- DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
- Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.
Mixed:
- Magazines: ad revenues are up 3.7% although the total number of ad pages is flat (they're charging more per page). Newsstand sales are at an all-time low, while total circulation was down 0.3% last year.
- Books: up slightly so far this year (but still lagging behind overall retail growth).
Up:
- Box Office: is up by 5.8% so far this year (but still down 4.2% from 2004).
- Videogames: The long slump caused by the next-gen hardware transition (Xbox-to-Xbox 360 and PS2-to-forthcoming-PS3) seems to have finally ended. June sales were up 25%.
- Internet advertising: is on pace to grow by 21% this year. Google's revenues grew by 77% in the most recent quarter.
