I'm a couple weeks behind in noticing the announcement by eMusic of their subscription plans and the imminent arrival of the Sony Music back catalog and its promised roster of vapid radio detritus. The cost, apparently, is that they're raising prices by 50% across the board (or more like 100% for the longtime members with grandfathered subscription plans from the early days of the service), to roughly $0.40 per song. I've been a devoted customer of eMusic for several years now, eagerly burning through 200 downloads at a time on one of the $50/month "Connoisseur" plans for much of that time, yet I thought their prices were already too high. This latest move is too much for me to bear, and I immediately used my remaining downloads and cancelled my subscription.

Perhaps eMusic feels that access to the wider catalog of music will offset the increased cost. If they think their existing subscribers will understand, they are gravely mistaken. Given the option, I'd rather Sony Music go out of business, their back catalog be destroyed in a fire, and their CEO choke to death on his breakfast. This article puts it nicely:

Most eMusic fans I've heard from are real music nuts, and are there to sample a wide range of music from relatively unknown cutting-edge acts, not to download music they could find anywhere. Imagine the clerks in High Fidelity suddenly being told that their favorite mail-order distributor is raising prices, but in exchange will now let them order ABBA and Chili Peppers records just like the chain stores in the mall.

In my brief investigations so far, I haven't found another music service that is competitive with eMusic, even (perhaps) at their new price point. I don't consider that an argument for staying with eMusic rather than defecting to another service, though. Given that I consider $0.40/song roughly twice what I'd call a reasonable price, I instead take it as an argument for not buying music online at all. It isn't like there aren't alternatives.

..is a disaster. If the ALSA developers had any honor, they'd fall on their swords, or hurl themselves from the nearest bridge / tall building. dmix is broken and apparently it's never going to get fixed, which leaves us the alternatives of either using crappy fly-by-night sound servers to hide the problem, or accepting that more than one application playing sound at a time is just too difficult for Linux in 2009. Nevermind that a few years ago, when I used OSS and the emu10k driver for an SB Live (that is, before the Linux kernel developers deprecated OSS), mixing was happily handled by the driver behind the scenes without the quirks or insanely high (and unpredictable) CPU usage that dmix entails, I wasn't forced to run half my software though the "aoss" wrapper, and games like Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein actually worked with sound. Simultaneously, dmix seems the only way to coax sound out of ALSA that isn't a complete pain in the ass, but the illusion of workingness is soon shattered the first time you catch it spending 40% CPU to (purportedly) resample from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz. There's surely a bug here, as the CPU usage is completely unpredictable, and repeatedly opening/closing the device will yield wildly varying results.

I hate it. All I wanted to do was write a simple goddamn music player.

What's the Federal Reserve's solution to stimulating the economy? My two interpretations (and I Am Not An Economist), each more or less malicious, and both probably inevitable regardless of which (if either) is intended, are as follows:

Plan A: Inject massive amounts of money with the aim of creating a new bubble, letting us coast by with another five or six years of illusory prosperity before it all blows up again in an even bigger and more spectacular fashion, leaving it to the next guy to sort out the mess, just like Alan Greenspan did to Bernanke.

Plan B: Destroy the currency! Massive inflation! Double, even triple the price of every imported good. What better way to get more people working than to force them to get second jobs (or first jobs, if they're wealthy or retired). Let the proles claw their way out of the pit while politicians fight to take credit for "solving the crisis," and Bernanke rests on the seventh day after reaffirming that his powers of economic destruction are not completely impotent.


Barring some miracle of science, like the invention of cheap and bountiful fusion power, I don't forsee a economic recovery for the United States. The collusion of corporate interests and a reckless and parasitic government is finally going to kill the host. At best, I can imagine stagnation in the near term. After that, a long and unpleasant decline, punctuated by occasional collapses in the house of cards constructed by government and financial interests, as the delusiion of perpetual exponential growth steadily erodes and eats alive both the financial system and (with its impossibly large debts) the US government. All the while, dwindling supplies of petroleum and nuclear fuel will push the chances of recovery and growth further and further out of reach, until civilization as we know it cracks under the pressure and dissolves. For extra fun, toss in the wild card of destructive climate change, if you believe in that sort of thing.

This scenario is horrifying, so convince me otherwise. Central bankers and politicians are playing god, and every move they make seems destined to trade the future for their own short term gain. It isn't necessarily maliciousness, just stupidity, desperation, and shortsightedness. Our leaders are going out screaming and flailing -- in quicksand.

I don't know about anyone else, but I find this bailout business equal parts infuriating, terrifying, and absurd. Their soiution to the popping of an economic bubble is to create a new one using more pretend money? When the bailout money dries up in a couple years, what happens when we discover that the current "downturn" is really a return to normalcy, and they just pissed all that money down the toilet? That malignant tumor centered in Washington, DC, the ultimate single point of failure, will run this country into the ground sooner rather than later. If I had any idea what to do with my modest USD savings, I'd cash out in a hurry.

Economic stimulus? It's a shell game.

Update 2/10/09: I think the stock market agrees with me!

I've just discovered the Linux Hater's Blog. I love it. It gives me enormous peace of mind to know that someone is already out there complaining not only about all the same stuff that drives me up the wall, but also various topics I think I hate but can't be troubled to confirm (Fedora, KDE), and all kinds of exciting new stuff I never realized I need to be pissed off about (PulseAudio? What the fuck is PulseAudio?). Linux Hater puts the fun back into Linux.

Why does it take so long to resize a window using OpenGL with NVIDIA's linux drivers? It's always been sluggish, but with the current drivers it's out of hand. Freezes X for a second or more whenever a window is mapped, unmapped, or resized. Annoying as hell.

I've just spent something like the last 45 minutes attempting to watch the "Simon Peyton-Jones - A Taste of Haskell" videos. It is hosted on the site "blip.tv", using your typical flash video player setup. Every attempt to watch it has been foiled by the inexplicable brokenness of the Flash Player, which would buffer several minutes ahead in the video then (as revealed in wireshark) closing the connection, simply spinning as though it were buffer without making any effort to create a new connection once I reached the end of the buffered extent, with the result that I could never watch more than the first ten minutes of the video. After screwing with it for a bit, I think there must be logic in flash player with the intent of not buffering excessively far ahead, but for some reason it fails to even attempt to reconnect when the buffer must be extended. As a workaround, I realized I can simply skip through the video in advance until I've forced it to buffer the whole thing, but this is very tedious. The same stupid crap happens with Youtube and probably every other site that uses flash for video, and has for ages.

Naturally I didn't notice the "download" link for the video until just a few minutes ago, but by now I'm so sick of rewatching the first ten minutes that I don't care.

"Below is a list of books you've purchased from Amazon.com that you may upgrade to read online. Select the titles you wish to upgrade, and the total price appears automatically at the bottom."

Of the four books I'd already purchased which were eligible, the prices ranged from $7.99 to $13.99. Amazon is on drugs if they think anyone is going to pay that much on top of what was already paid for the physical book, for the privilege of reading in a web browser while online. At 2/3 that price, and if I could download a regular PDF which I could read offline and with the software of my choice, I'd purchase without a second thought.

Bah. Totally clueless, not unlike selling music online five years ago.

If I had a time machine, I'd travel back ten or twelve years, find whatever ass invented the "Windows Key", and bludgeon him repeatedly until he repented. I would then let a pack of hungry wolves loose upon the first worthless shit who thought putting an "Fn" key to the right of "Control" was a really neat idea. Thanks to these twin assholes, I'm increasingly convinced that can't you buy a new laptop with a keyboard layout suitable for serious development, at any price. Tolerable laptop options for the near future appear to consist of pre-Lenovo Thinkpads.

As my contribution to a better future for us all, I present the following hard and fast rules for laptop keyboard layouts. Violation of these rules warrants electrocution.

1. The correct order of the left modifier row is Control, Windows, Alt. The Windows key is optional. No additional key  may appear between these keys, as this would disrupt the order. Rationale: Consistency with desktop keyboards.
   
2. There are to be no more than three keys present to the left of the space bar. Rationale: Ergonomics, consistency with desktop keyboards.
3. Both Alt and Control must also appear to the right of the space bar. Rationale: Ergonomics.

For extra credit, consider the following:

• The "Fn" key has no business in the lower left modifier row. This key is seldom used and does not deserve this premium real estate. For consistency with Rule #2, I'd gladly move my Fn key in exchange for a Windows key, as a dedicated WM shortcut key is a genuinely useful thing, even if Microsoft largely missed the point in their own OS.
• If Alt-F / Alt-B (or Windows-F / Windows-B if you have a Windows key) are not comfortable to press using the left pink and middle finger, you have lost.
• If you've squeezed in an extra key between Shift and Z, I will kill you in your sleep.
• While I'm on the subject, glossy screens are the worst idea since cancer.

If you disagree with any of the above, you probably don't use your modifier keys intensively enough to care so passionately, and ought to roll with the punches. Now, dear laptop designers: stop fucking up the keyboards, so I can spend my money on your product. Any product. Please?