. founded march 12, 1995 _| : _____ t r a x w e e k l y # 102 ______________ |___| _ _______/ /\___________________________ / ____________/ /\__\ _ _______/____/_____________________________ / / _________ \/__/ ______\ \_____________________________ / / / `_ . .~ \____\/ _ __ ___ / / / _____ . _ \ __ ___ _/__/\ / / / / /\ _ The Music Scene Newsletter __ __\__\/ _/__/ / ____/ /__\_________________________________ _____ ___ _ / /\/ /___ __________ _ ______ _ ___ \/ /\ / / /____/ \ \ / /\ / __/\ / /\ \ \ / \ /____/ / / \ / \/ /_ \___/___/ \ \_/___/ / \_/ / / \ ___\ / /_/ /______/\/ \ /______/\/ \ /_____/ // \ \ / / / \ / / \ \ \ \_\ \ \ \_\ \ //____/\____\/ / / / / / \______\/ \______\/ \_____\/ \ \ \ \ / / / / \____\/\____\ / / / / _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ / / / /__/ w /\___/ /\___/ e /\___/ /\__ / l /\___/ /\____/ / / __/____/____/____/____/____/____/____/____/____/____/____/________/ / __\ \____\ e \____\ \____\ k \ ___\ \____\ y \__________/ \____\/ \____\/ \____\/ \____\/ \____\/ \____\/WW ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | TraxWeekly Issue #102 | Release date: 20 Jun 1997 | Subscribers: 944 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- /-[Introduction]------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------/ It's been a hectic week. Let's get started. First off, let's talk about article submissions. I want to thank all of you who have generously spent your time writing something for this newsletter. I have recieved so much in the last week I couldn't run it all in this issue. Mucho gracias! Second, let's talk about formatting. Seventy-six columns, with a space preceding each line. Don't use tabs (eight space indenting is stupid). Try to keep an eye on grammar and spelling (I'll admit, I miss quite a bit myself). Tonight I spent a good half hour formatting an article. I don't enjoy doing things like that. If you want your article in quickly, please format it correctly. Thanks. Third, let's talk about articles. GD and Snowman have the official Hornet response to some of the allegations made in several letters in the last issue. Bojan Landekic has a general viewpoint on these matters as well. And aside from a huge article I'll discuss next, Behemoth has decided to elaborate a bit on the Navigator and Explorer question which was also raised in the last issue. Please welcome Andrew Bibby to our writing staff. He has an excellent article on chords in this week's issue, and I encourage you all to read it. It's almost thirty k in size, so I hope your thirst for knowledge is there. Ads: Hornet has begin a quarterly CD release project, entitled Hornet MODS. These CD's will contain *ALL* music uploaded to ftp.hornet.org's /incoming/music directory. Both DemoNews and TraxWeekly will carry info on its release and pricing in the near future. Be on the watch to own your very own piece of Hornet. =) BTW, if you haven't realized, Music Contest Five has begin. Visit http://www.hornet.org/ and click on the big letters that say "Music Contest Five" for more info. Also, Phoenix has released an IT to XM converter! You can get it on the Hornet archive. Search for it2xm10.zip. I don't remember where it is exactly. For the future: TraxWeekly's format is undergoing an overhaul. See you next week, friends. Gene Wie (Psibelius) TraxWeekly Publishing gwie@csusm.edu /-[Contents]---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------/ ________ _________________________________________________________________ / ____/_/ __/ \ __/ / _____/ \ __/ __/ ___/_ < \____\ \ \\ \ \\____ __/ __/_\ \ \\____ \_____ \__ \ \ \ \\ \ \ww\ \\ \\ \ \ \ \ \_ _\________\________\\___\____\ \_____\\_______\\___\____\ \_____\_______\ General Articles 1. Archiving Hornet..............................GD and Snowman 2. Navigator vs. Explorer........................Behemoth 3. Chords........................................Bibby 4. Martians are Coming...........................Bojan Landekic Closing Distribution Subscription/Contribution Information TraxWeekly Staff Sheet /-[General Articles]-------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------/ --[1. Archiving Hornet]-----------------------------------[GD and Snowman]-- :: GD / Hornet - gd@hornet.org :: Snowman / Hornet - r3cgm@hornet.org [This article is in response to a "letter" published in TraxWeekly last Thursday.] _____Introduction > The Hornet archive has gone steeply downhill since I've discovered it > (and that wasn't that long ago); The main thing I'm complaining about is > the childish additude of the maintainers of this archive. Welcome to the demo scene! We are glad you have decided to become a part of our (for the most part) secretive activities. I've been in the scene for a few years and it can be a lot of fun at times. You will meet many people, "cool" and "not cool," that you can talk to at all hours of the day. Demos sometimes have a bizarre thing about them: they don't like to work properly on all machines. My good friend Phoenix has a Cyrix 6x86 150mhz processor in his computer. He ran a demo on it that should be run on a P166 (according to the demo's documentation). Know what? He was getting only *2fps* for some effects! Two-eff-pee-ess! I mean, gawd-damn. That's slow. Anyway, you have stumbled upon an important characteristic of the scene. Not every component will work well together; not all hardware handles all software. The web has grown from a desolate tangle of dull text to a thriving graphics-oriented worldwide business frontier. Likewise, the components of graphics, text, HTML tags, and program code that make up a web page are complex. _____Aye, That's The Rub Perhaps you're not satisfied with this answer. I apologize. I can't run a lot of today's demos on my meek 486 though, so I can sympathize with your plight. I mean, go tell Jmagic to code a demo for 286, and you know what he'll give you? Either a very dirty look, or a shadebob-and-copper-bar demo (hold the scrollers!) > He failes to mention that most people do use Windows for most Internet > access and that there are many people that are interested in tracked > music that are not in the scene. Please note that the Hornet Archive is a primarily a demo archive, not a music archive. We have music too, but the focus of our archive always has been and always will be demos. Have you noticed that we don't take the time to rate music uploads anymore? It became too much work, and through that we were losing our focus. Now, things are back on track somewhat. Additionally, Snowman is not anti-Windows in his interface to the Hornet Archive. He is anti-Internet Explorer. He recently told me "I understand that no matter how lame I think Win95 may be, that the majority of the world is using it and will not change." He is pro-Netscape and pro-lynx, two browsers which can easily be used under Windows. _____No Taxpayers By the way, have you ever taken the time to calculate the amount of money needed to keep the Hornet Archive online for one day? I mean, the main server has three massive T3 lines running into it. The Hornet Archive averages 1.2 million hits and 185 gigs downloaded each month. Bandwidth ain't cheap. Neither is it the most profitable thing for Walnut Creek CDROM to let us use a 9 gig drive that could otherwise hold more profitable CDROM-making archives. Next question: do you know who pays for this? Nobody does. You certainly don't, which in many contexts is grounds for dismissal of your comments. But I chose to respond, because I feel that you can learn from this experience. Snowman, Phoenix and I work on the archive at all hours of the day and night and the only recompense for our efforts are occasional friendly emails and the satisfaction that people enjoy using the archive. We are not paid. We do this voluntarily. As such, we deserve a fair amount of flexibility when it comes to structuring the archive and implementing the interface. As the archive's primary care-givers, do we not have the right to treat the archive as we feel it should be treated? We have no stockholders to report to. We have no "bottom line" that determines the success or failure of our work. We spend our free time working on this archive making it what it is. Surely not everyone will appreciate the results of our work. They may email us, tell us that we suck, and proceed to send flame mail once a minute for a week straight. But you know what? We keep on working. Have you made the terrible mistake of witnessing one aspect of the web page's functionality (the search, that is), then declare that the entire archive has gone "steeply downhill" when said aspect changes? I think you have! But alas. You were not around in the day when the archive was FTP-only. Those were good days, my friend. Not many worries of net-congestion in those times. No heavy-duty bandwidth-killing web surfing was going on back then. _____About IE (from Snowman) I am very good about addressing reasonable complaints from people. Just ask the dozen or so people who mail me every day to make a minor change to a description here, report a problem with one of our mirrors here, ask why their file got deleted in /incoming, etc. I am extremely responsive to comments about the archive. And after putting in all those hours and addressing the comments/compliments/complaints, I feel more than entitled to shape the archive a little bit around who I am. You mentioned that Netscape doesn't show graphics until the entire page is loaded. This may occur other places, but it does not occur on the Hornet Archive. Why? Because Snowman actually puts SIZE and WIDTH values in most of his textXM conversion bit. And again I saw those Martians, except they weren't from New York, and they weren't Martians anymore. It was a bug in a persian rug who could only see it's problems because it couldn't see above them. The bug was in the most beautifull carpet in the entire world, it lived and died in beaty but all it saw was problems. This BUG is the music scene. Impulse Tracker, FastTracker, ScreamTracker, etc, they are all free. Some people do Petitions to get the author of FT2 to support Interwave cards. Somebody in TraxWeekly complained that this shouldn't be done. I say do your petitions people. But I also tell the authors to not give a rat's ass and to simply _D_elete the e-mail they aren't interested in. I mean, you have that option, so why not use it? If I get mail and it's bitching at me to do something I'll delete it. On the other hand, if I get mail politely asking me to do something, and offering help and/or advice, I will leap from my e-mail program and code it in right away. In conclusion, don't be a bug. Look at all the good things you have and stop picking on the little things. You are given the right to live your life any way you choose, if that's not enough, you are also given a right to create music without paying any money. If this isn't good enough for you, I hereby publicly suggest to you to commit suicide by yourself. Peace! Oh and one more little note. Just because Pulse isn't making Impulse Tracker publicly available, it doesn't mean we have to stop using it. Who said people stopped using Scream Tracker just because it's not developed anymore? Stick to what you like until you yourself find something better. Don't even bother with those trying to change you, as those telling others what to do cannot do anything themselves (and I am telling you what to do because I never do anything myself). Adios amigos, Bojan Landekic (XCEL/DJ Bland/ScavengerS) (fire@globalserve.net) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- /-[Closing]----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------/ TraxWeekly is available via FTP from: ftp.hornet.org /incoming/info/ (new issues) ftp.hornet.org /info/traxweek/1995/ (back issues) /info/traxweek/1996/ /info/traxweek/1997/ TraxWeekly is available via WWW from: www.hornet.org, under section "Information" and subsection "TraxWeekly." To subscribe, send mail to: listserver@unseen.aztec.co.za and put in the message body: subscribe trax-weekly [yourname NOT address] To unsubscribe, mail same and: unsubscribe trax-weekly (in message body) Contributions for TraxWeekly must be formatted for *76* columns, must have a space preceding each line, and have some measure of journalistic value. Please try to avoid the use of high ascii characters, profanity, and above all: use your common sense. Contributions should be mailed as plain ascii text or filemailed to: gwie@csusm.edu before 11:00pm PST every Wednesday. TraxWeekly is usually released over the listserver and ftp.cdrom.com every Thursday or Friday between 12:00am-11:59pm PST. TraxWeekly does not discriminate based on age, gender, race, political, or religious views. The staff can be reached at the following: Editor: Psibelius (Gene Wie)..............gwie@csusm.edu Writers: Atlantic (Barry Freeman)..........as566@torfree.net Bibby (Andrew Bibby)..............bibby@juno.com Mage (Glen Dwayne Warner).........gdwarner@ricochet.net Zinc (Justin Ray).................rays@direct.ca ascii graphic contributors: Cruel Creator, Stezotehic, Squidgalator2, White Wizard TraxWeekly is a HORNET affiliation. Copyright (c)1995,1996,1997 - TraxWeekly Publishing, All Rights Reserved. /-[END]--------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------/ :: ::: : . ..... ..............................:::.................:.... ::: : :::: : .::::. .:::::.:::. ..:::: :::: : :: :: ::: .:: :: :: WW:::: : ::. :: ::: .:: :: .:: :::: : :::.::. ::: .:: .:: .:::::... :: :::.. ... ..: ... ..:::::::::::::::: .:: .::::::: :::::::: ::::::.. ::: ::: ::: : until next week! =) .. ... .. ....... ............... .................:..... .. . :