That is truly terrifying. Among the many reasons why that's awful, this sounds like it would lead to lots of problems which could be difficult to notice until weeks or months after the fact (emphasis mine):
What Apple considers a "match" often isn't. That rare, early version of Fountains of Wayne's "I'll Do The Driving," labeled as such? Still had its same label, but was instead replaced by the later-released, more widely available version of the song. The piano demo of "Sister Jack" that I downloaded directly from Spoon's website ten years ago? Replaced with the alternate, more common demo version of the song. What this means, then, is that Apple is engineering a future in which rare, or varying, mixes and versions of songs won't exist unless Apple decides they do. Said alternate versions will be replaced by the most mainstream version, despite their original, at-one-time correct, titles, labels, and file contents.
That means that you might not be able to, for example, recover the file from a prior back-up -- if you have no idea when the original data was lost.
Well, that's terrible. OTOH her belief that she can't sue for this (or that there cannot be class actions over it because of some language buried in the T&C) is wrong.
This is why I'm letting iTunes bug me to log into iCloud and just ignoring it. I trust Apple with my digital data as much as I trust Steve Jobs' advice on cancer treatment.
How could they think that this wouldn't get them angrily sued within the first week? How long has this been a thing?
When this was on Twitter, someone said this is a configurable option and this person just doesn't know what he's doing.
someone said this is a configurable option
The second quote in the OP implies that, but it still doesn't make it okay. That's one heck of a pistol.
Some jackhole posted the link in 10 at the otherplace in response to my sharing the OP link. I could not help but notice that the response article is chock-a-block full of "shoulds" and "normallys" and that the author would appear to be pretty compromised by past dealings with the Gnomes of Cupertino.
8: It's your fault you got shat on by a shitty design is a popular defense in the software world.
Here's a fuller explanation.
Nobody reads the OP anymore . . .
Basically it's all the fault of the recording industry and how they treat time and space shifting of files. Just because I have the identical file locally doesn't mean Apple is allowed to stream me or let me download the same file unless it's a copy of the file I have, which is meaningless in the digital world anyway since if two files are identical how can you say if one is a copy of the other or not? For example I have 1) hundreds of songs I copied to my computer from CDs I bought 10-25 years ago, with the CDs piled in a box in the basement; 2) songs I purchased via iTunes; 3) music files I obtained through other methods. I can only play 2) on my other apple devices, and I can't play any of them on my Amazon devices and I'm sure as hell not buying them again just so my kids can play them on their kindles even though the RIAA would love that.
This is the part where Tigre calls me a fucking moron.
Or, not really. But this particular issue is mostly an Apple issue, not an RIAA issue. The RIAA is into letting you use the music you actually purchase all you want, as long as you're not doing so in a way that makes it extremely easy to distribute permanent copies of that music to other people for free, aka stealing. Apple wants you to only use Apple music and really doesn't want you to use Amazon. Who knows what Amazon wants except maybe that they want you to use them and not Apple. Etc. etc.
N yo u Tigre morin moonshot riaa ncaa doublequest deleted. O don't really think moron but even so French and ambivalence eventually will end all of us. Apple is only disrebrepgerberate. Sad!
even so French and ambivalence eventually will end all of us
Wasn't this basically the S/teven D/en B/este circa 2003 argument?
If you expanded it to 70,000 words, maybe.
The way the guy describes it, and the sort of suspicious responses he got from people explaining that it couldn't have happened, makes me think that it was a bug (but one that some of the people at Apple had already seen before). From what it sounds like the software was supposed to do that exact thing with some devices (including the ominous sounding "second computer") but wasn't supposed to do it on the main computer/source of the files. And he says he was running the software for months before it happened. So it's plausible to me that somewhere along the line the software misclassified the status of wherever those files were and cheerfully went through simplifying things (deleting them).
If that's what it was it sounds like exactly the kind of whoopsy I'd expect to see happening occasionally with the kind of system Apple is trying to build. It also sounds potentially disastrous, but that's just a good reason not to use that kind of system in the first place. "All your stuff is now on someone else's harddrive!" has never made sense to me as a selling point, but that's the way of the future, or at least a whole bunch of companies are really betting hard on it.
This kind of thing is why I don't trust Apple products, and stick with MP3 players/etc. that don't require fancy iTunes-y proprietary software.
Does 18 look like that to everyone or just me?
Today I stole one of my own papers. I don't even feel a little bit bad.
(Tenure committee wants the actual journal version. The content is, of course, available for free online. But in this case I needed the version with the journal logo and our university only has a print subscription which takes several days to get and then some admin spending a while scanning.)
22: Yep. Simultaneously worried/LMAO.
OT: Do we have a large enough Minneapolis crew to justify a meetup? It looks like I'll be stuck there with a free night on 5/23.
Do we have a large enough Minneapolis crew to justify a meetup?
Yes, but you're not going to like who it consists of.
I could be up for something that night. Where in town will you be?
Choosing to ignore Teo's hurtful words.
I don't know exactly yet, but somewhere downtown.
Are you a beer guy, cocktails, interested in a particular type of food?
What I really want is some kind of old school midwest vibe, like maybe polka music. But anyplace with alcohol will do.
The polka place just closed
Let me noodle a bit. Or the others can jump in.
In spite of the character I play on TV I'm actually super easygoing. Anyplace that sounds fun to you is totally fine.
Your timing is just a little off - if you were here on the 21st you could have gone to the St. Paul Grill's meat raffle.
Apple is incredibly careless with users' files. They recently got around to removing every music file from my phone and replacing them all with a single U2 album, which I thought I'd avoided last year. I didn't have access to my computer for a couple of days after that, which was great, and even when I did, it took several hours to move the thousands of files back onto the phone (including the time it took to register that I wanted iTunes to do that. Along with inexplicably hidden, tiny buttons and constant, baffling changes to UI, synching is really one of iTunes' major weak points).
I also enjoyed it when iBooks took my library of books with filenames of the form "author - title" and put them all in a hidden folder instead, giving them filenames of the form "he#%4fkllph3kw£".
The occasional popup saying something like "hey, your files are all here at the moment - [apple software] would like to delete them all with no option of recovery; except for any porn, which will be emailed to your elderly relatives. Is that something you would like to do?" would be courteous. I really wonder whether they think that asking a user to resolve an ambiguity is somehow bad practice. I deleted some obsolete apps from my phone the other day - because they may have been preventing it from backing up, another story - and of course iTunes promptly reinstalled them.
28: Sorry! I was thinking of MHPH and Natilo rather than you.
Not sure what the meat raffle is but will reimburse anyone who buys me a ticket
Not sure what the meat raffle is but will reimburse anyone who buys me a ticket
Of the 16 weekly meat raffles I found listed, none of them are are on Monday nights, so RT is SOL.
It's like a raffle where every prize is meat. They're super traditional here, for whatever reason. You could almost certainly find somewhere that's having one.
Relevant to the OP, on how to ditch iTunes entirely. I am ever-tempted.
8/11: some people really have Stockholm syndrome with apple. Even reading the user forums is infuriating, because someone will post a perfectly reasonable problem, and then a fanboy* will appear and airily dismiss it, without making any attempt to understand the problem, normally arguing that a) that can't happen, it's impossible and furthermore b) it's the fault of the user. Then they stick around the thread to continue doing that, even while others are chiming in to say that it's also happening to them, or to post solutions, etc. It's bizarre behaviour, but AFAICT it's not intentional trolling.
*sorry but in this case I think it's justified
Via Sifu's 43, apple music decided to add six million copies of the same Lorde song to somebody's playlist.
I think the VFW on Lyndale sometimes has meat raffles on Mondays, so it might not be impossible to find one. That's not especially close to downtown though. I suppose the public bikes are out by now, though, and there's no DUI on a bike so that's always an option for an interesting evening.
there's no DUI on a bike
That sounds like a challenger.
I am OK with iTunes because I haven't updated it in five years, but I need a replacement for the iPod, since they stopped making iPods that hold large amounts of music and/or have actual buttons to push. I see that there are new things called "Sony Walkmen". Is that what I should get?
48: I have one somewhere. The only thing it has on it is Aimee Mann and Roxy Music. I never figured out how to put other things on it.
It turns out that both of those suck for jogging to.
46/47: When living in Switzerland I was breathalyzed, fined and banned from cycling a pushbike for a month. I was apparently lucky not to lose my car license as a result.
I still get about 50% of the music I listen to from FM radio and about 45% from juke boxes (that I don't pick the songs on).
I have an old 60GB iPod that I use in the car, I had a line adapter installed. But I haven't put any new music on it in three years because I'm afraid if I plug it into iTunes these days it will say, "This device is too old. It will self destruct in five seconds."
For a while my iTunes library was messed up and the iPod held the only copy of a lot of my music and when I plugged it in iTunes kept trying to delete it. I eventually bough Setuni so I could copy the music back to the computer because Apple software refused to do so.
52: the cycling ban worked on the honour system and - as a reckless foreign hooligan - I chose to flout it from the moment that I wheeled my bike out of sight of the police. (I also never paid the fine.)
55: If ever Seeds falls silent we'll know which country he carelessly entered.
lurid's dad had an iTunes installation that went kooky with play history and started claiming that he had listened to "Wrong 'Em Boyo" by The Clash something upward of a thousand times, which he denied.
Yes! The count was at 1515 when he sent an email to the Younger Generation asking whether someone had possibly logged onto his computer in order to listen to "Wrong 'Em Boyo" fifteen hundred times. I may not have replied with professional tact.
Oh dear god I have grossly misunderestimated how long it takes to edit each chapter for a book, somehow I assumed it was roughly the same amount of time it takes to read such a chapter in a completed book. If I ever have an idea like this again, punch me in the face.
Please add pause/play marks to comment 59.
It's possible that I may have listened to "Wrong 'Em Boyo" a few hundred times in my lifetime but that's just extreme.
The Apple fanboys in that second link are hilarious.
Hey, Barry, as the blog's leading film dork (sorry, bob), can you recommend any flix by Hong Sang-soo, whose Right Now Wrong Then I just saw?
56: I flew back into ZH airport a year after leaving the country and was actually quite nervous about receiving the "kindly step into this windowless room" treatment. I still avoid transiting through Switzerland whenever I can.
Last comment posted anonymously in case any agents of the Swiss state are monitoring the blog
62 boarded and about to take off so excuse the absence of italics (and I've yet to see Right now wrong then), The Virgin stripped bare by her bachelors is very good. And I've heard really good things about his debut The day a pig fell in a well (I think) but haven't caught it yet. Hes one of those id basically try to see anything I can by him.
I am an agent of the Swiss state, but I won't turn you in.
63 and in that windowless room a single clock upon the wall. The hour approaches nigh.
The explanation in the linked post seems to be saying:
1. Apple couldn't have messed with they guy's original, self-created music because Apple uploads your unique music as-is. Except for when it doesn't (because it doesn't support the format).
2. Apple won't delete your files, except for under conditions where it will move them to the Trash. It's not clear if you're not consciously prompted to declare a master library on a primary computer how you even know what's going on.
Even if the primary/secondary distinction works as advertised, I can see a simple way where files end up being deleted anyway. Say you have one non-Apple syncing service syncing your primary and secondary computers so each one has the same music library. Now you sign up for Apple music. Apple music designates one of those computers secondary and at some point starts applying deletions to the secondary one. The other service syncs these changes back to the primary computer.
If that's what happened, even I would agree that Apple isn't responsible for what another service does. But they're still responsible for warning you about deleting on the secondary device.
I've also avoided paying a Swiss police fine (riding bus without bus pass) now for over 20 years. They're pretty organized in that country though and I'm scared to ever go back.
That was meant as a fist bump/chest bump to Seeds
Apple did so well for so long avoiding all the "music that goes away when you walk under a bridge" crap and selling devices with honking great local storage, I don't really understand why they've suddenly got religion about teh cloudz. Especially as they plainly don't have anything like the chops they have about hardware, manufacturing, UX, chip design, or operating systems when they do infrastructure.
66: Appreciate it, thanks Walt.
67: I have the tingly sense of missing a reference here...
69: Probably for the best. I think that they just keep adding money, and they're not afriad to levy large fines on individuals... (Disappointingly, he only had to pay $300,000 or so in the end.)
Oh plus I didn't pay a previous fine while living there and some months later got a panicked call from my girlfriend while I was out at the bar, telling me that the police were at my door. I had to call a number, where a very nice reasonable man told me that I had to pay up immediately, or go to jail for one day.
[I was going to chose jail, because 1) probably nicer than my apartment; 2) never been to jail and 3) you can choose a day that suits you, but Swiss friends pointed out that I would never get a job or apartment in Switzerland ever again, ever. So I paid up. I had to go to the jail to pay the fine.]
Further speeding ticket schadenfreude here. Enlightened topless areas of Europe feature heavily, as they tend to do means-tested fines.
68.1/2 seems to be the line, and it's inexcusable. This is why I always back up to an external hard drive and fuck the cloud. Also why I never touch Apple products hard or soft without disinfecting my hands and wearing latex gloves.
45 is the best argument in favour of capital punishment I've seen yet.
62: Freed loves everything
I guess I am middle period Hong Sang-soo:Day He Arrives, HaHaHa, Kangwon Province.
Nice comfortable and fun watching, but a newish category called "puzzle pictures" with intersecting plots themes and characters that need analyzing and likely a rewatch*. Probably not worth it. The naturalism is nice, but residual Korean sexism annoying.
*"The woman across the street in the phone booth was the lead's mother he talks about in act one, you can tell by the dress" tricks and games
72:The 37-year-old, who has not been named, was clocked driving his Mercedes sports car at 170km/h over the limit.
Sweet merciful Jesus. That sounds less like "time for a fine" and much more like "welcome to prison".
At the bottom of each director's page at IMDB you will often find a thread titled Rate Hong's Films which if you can aggregate opinions, is recall useful
The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996): 7.5/10
The Power of Kangwon Province (1998): 8/10
Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000): 9/10
On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002): 9/10
Woman is the Future of Man (2004): 7/10
Tale of Cinema (2005): 6.5/10
Woman on the Beach (2006): 9/10
Night and Day (2008): 8.5/10
Like You Know It All (2009): 8/10
Lost in the Montains (2009): 7.5/10
Hahaha (2010): 8/10
Oki's Movie (2010): 7.5/10
In Another Country (2012): 8/10
Nobody's Daughter Hae-Won (2013): 7/10
72.2 oh just some silliness about Switzerland interrogation room with a cuckoo clock on the wall. But of course there are no clocks in those rooms.
77.1 Is not true at all. I just don't tend to talk much about things I don't like.
As a young teacher, ms bill worked one summer in a foyer (hostel) in Geneva and somehow ran afoul of the Swiss immigration laws. Her boss paid the fine - the alternative would have been ms bill being deported back to the hellhole of Newton, MA.
41 et cetera - in New England, they have lobster raffles.
I once avoided being fined for having the wrong ticket on a streetcar in Zurich. The ticket checker made it sound like the Helvetic Confederation would collapse because I thought the tickets were one way/round-trip/day pass not short-trip/longer-trip/day pass. I'd have paid the fine, but I was just happy to not vomit between where I was staying and the only pharmacy I could find open on Sunday.
I feel vindicated now that I never got one of those new-fangled mp3 devices. I suppose I'm committed to being a technology or two behind in music. In the 90s I had vinyl and cassette tapes. When I moved in with my wife in 2001 she convinced me to give up my records (no room!) and I switched to cds. I wonder if I'll ever switch formats again.
Repeat I find it interesting.
Apparently the people who contribute to those IMDB threads have seen many more movies than I, and are more discriminating. I won't assume about Freed. They are "experts"
So what does it say that even neb relies on the opinions of friends instead of searching out expertise? One thing it shows me is that certain forms of sociality are intrinsically anti-intellectual and foster irrationalism and tribal closure, and these are very far from limited to Republicans.
There are other modes of social interaction, like relying on the expertise of strangers, cosmopolitanism that are disinterested and works under a kind of veil of ignorance and is if anything anti-tribal, but they likely have their own costs.
86. If you get one of the more generic mp3s, you can just upload your own files to it like any other device and the only multinational corporation that's involved at any stage is the one that manufactured it.
88: You laugh, but the friendship of Brad Delong, Krugman, Robert Waldmann, Eichengreen, and Bernanke (who was BdL's college roommate) and others (Romers at Berkeley) has had serious consequences for US economic discourse and policy. The reasons heterodox ideas don't get fair hearings have less to do with their evidence and arguments than the affective tribalism of mainstream economists.
More generally the insularity of Ivy League and Oxbridge graduates is a huge problem.
90: Or you can just get Spotify, pay $10 a month (far below my previous monthly music budget) and have 95% of the music you could want to listen to available at any time, downloadable for offline listening. I only dig into my archived music files when I want to listen to some obscure local indie band that never made it onto Spotify. (Get on the stick, Caroline Records.)
Fine. Barry, if Brad asks you for a movie recommendation, tell him the future of American depends on him looking up the IMDB recommendation instead.
But, since I went to state schools, I think it is still fine if you all watch Tremors on my recommendation.
Or, if you like, what does it say about me that it is utterly inconceivable that I might ask y'all about Lisandro Alonso best movie or Goffman's best book.
We have a fucking web now.
Or, you know, we have a better idea if our friends' tastes line up with ours than we do about random people on IMDB.
IMDB is great. I use it to get sure I've got the wording right when quoting Airplane.
94: You think of the people who comment here as your friends?
94.1: I think it says that you don't like or respect us.
98: Pwned by 97? 98 does have a bonus hurt pout.
Beaten to it by 97.
"Would you describe the accused as a friend?"
"No, I'd describe the accused as a git."
"Who would you say, then, is the person who thinks of him most fondly?
"...I do."
"And there are no others who've shared moments of intimacy with him?"
"Only one. But she's got a puncture."
86/90: I eventually got a Sandisk one after a succession of iPod nanos turned out to have an average lifespan of about a year and a half. (Which, to be fair I guess, had a lot to do with the fact that I mostly used them for listening to music while using the bike path, in winter. But still.) It's been pretty good to me, and has outlasted anything else I've ever used while being cheaper and a lot more straightforward. (You just plug it into a usb slot and move files around as if it were any other storage device.)
101: Red Dwarf. Rimmer on trial for manslaughter (a series high point).
All you British people sound the same.
Let's source film recommendations from YouTube comments. Seriously. I would and will say more but I'm out and about having fun. Later.
Fake. Gay. Sucks. Lame. Fake. Sucks.
What I really want is some kind of old school midwest vibe, like maybe polka music. But anyplace with alcohol will do.
When I went to LA with Airedale, Tigre and Tweety had talked up some amazing LA restaurant that would be absolutely perfect. It was indeed a great restaurant, full of heavy 70s wrought iron/wood/olive green which is a design aesthetic I enjoy. But it was also kind of funny to see them fetishize regular old flyover country restaurants.
To be fair, Chris Barrie did show up in Blackadder. But he wasn't playing a British person.
One of the IMDB reviewers of Pi claimed it was the best of a group of movies where someone drills a hole into their head. If that isn't expertise I don't know what is.
Well, certainly if you devalue accumulated knowledge and expertise in favor of tribalism and intimate acquaintance you are very unlikely to be any good at assessing the value of outside opinions or engaging in critical thinking.
All internet opinions have the same value, none, from academic blogs to youtube comments. Only the people I drink with are worth listening to.
Of course this is where it ends up.
When I first hit the blogosphere, I was astonished about how many academics say things like "Learned everything I know from my first professor X". All academic thought is cultish allegiance to interpersonal relationships, with a dollop of authoritarianism? Your teachers should be irrelevant to your judgements.
94: You think of the people who comment here as your friends?
私がモテないのはどう考えてもお前らが悪い!
I don't normally think of you as a 私 kind of guy, Bob.
(Oh, I see).
113: No, it is much more than that.
The outsider does not define the community or its boundaries, and inclusion requires a painful or disruptive outreach that places norms in question.
All I meant was "Oh, I see where you copied and pasted that anime title from, and why you used a feminine/polite masculine term for 'I' that really doesn't fit your online persona."
Sorry, Ume 115 was to 114. My mistake.
I have said before it is a wonderful and profound anime, partly because the main character has hostile thoughts to the community (though doesn't behave with overt hostility, rather a social paralysis) and the community while remarkably kind when interacting mostly ignores her.
Which raises questions about how much pro-active aggressive inclusion is morally required.
While searching the internet for informations pertaining to new film star crush Kim Min-hee I learned that Park Chan-wook is making/has made a movie adaptation of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith (the only novel of hers I've read!), which is intriguing.
Andrei Schleifer was one of DeLong's freshman roommates. Bob's probably misremembering that.
Waldman(n) can't be bothered, was the roommate, mentioned in an article about Bernanke. A mistake was made.
This absolutely proves Bernanke and DeLong have no personal relationship, affinity, mutual fucking protection society. And as long as Bernanke waved his hands in favor of fiscal stimulus, DeLong defended him.
"The Tragedy of Ben Bernanke" Nov 2015 only came to light after his retirement and memoirs. It is unclear if DeLong has a sad for Ben or the rest of us.
I am finding it difficult to read. I am finding it hard to read as other than a tragedy. It is the story of a man who found himself in a job for which he may well have been the best-prepared person in the world. Yet he soon found himself overmastered by the situation. And he fell and stayed well behind the curve in understanding what was going on.
Well, a little clear. I teared up myself reading the piece, but a few of Ben's millions would help.
77 - 122: Another thread about apple products descends into acrimony
That's always a sign of having taste.
I came here to eat bagels and kick ass and I've got plenty of bagels.
Ehh, okay I guess. I don't have any bagels either. But I'm not planning to kick ass, so I guess all is well.
No bagels, no bugles, no buttered pecans.
Slate article following up on the one in the original post, from someone saying roughly that he's had problems with Apple Music, which are probably his own problems in dealing with the interface, but as a result he's lost track of ever listening to his own collection of weird music.
124 is a great relief to me. Not liking Tremors would be a sign that something was gravely amiss somewhere.
Or an understandable aversion to sandworms.
Assume a series of alluvial boulders.
132: When Apple first came out with the cloud option for iTunes, my library was 3-4 times larger than the 25K track limit (and for obvious reasons, I am also unwilling to let a third party catalog my library), so I never enabled it and have just manually moved music on and off my devices every so often. That seems to be all for the best now.
Relentless opposition to anything apple related and blanket opposition to streaming services have worked a treat keeping our music free from mucking up by anyone but us. Losing your filing system is a non trivial problem once you have a critical mass of recordings, it becomes functionally impossible to find anything, whether physically or digitally.