It would help if you specified exactly what you didn't like about them.
I use Apple Music, I use it because it's lossless and it's integrated in the Apple ecosystem. The UX of the actual Music app is... not great, but tolerable, better than the iTunes before it.
I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and I don't think I ever found something missing on it. YMMV.
Well I can tell you as a Spotify user that their random play is horrible. It's not truly random, which is extremely frustrating when you have 1000+ playlist and keep hearing the same 10 songs over and over.
The silly trick I found is to use Apple's Smart Playlists to help. I've been creating playlists like "Not heard since Jan 1, 2023". Songs drop out after they are played in a shuffle.
Plus this idea of "updating the book" makes it sound like this was some sort of experimental aircraft where they still have to finalize the manual. This is a production aircraft, over 1000 were built, it is deployed in 30+ countries.
Brian Kernighan is my favorite technical writer (alongside Doug McIlroy, but the latter didn't write any books, Research Unix manual pages are an art form in themselves). Basic books teach you the how, good books teach you the why, but the great books -- and Brian wrote some truly great ones -- teach you wisdom.
I read "Unix: A History and a Memoir", and it's a great book if you are into computer history, but it left me very sad. I don't know why, is it because Unix (in its philosophy) is dead? Is it because the people who help create and shape Unix are old and dying? I don't know. It's a great book but it left a void in my heart.
Read it too, and I had a similar feeling. To me it was the thought that we will probably never see a place like Bell labs -a temple to knowledge, to gather great minds and let them work on whatever they think might have interesting outcomes, no matter how long it takes to obtain results and without having to worry about short-term financial issues.
Now researchers -in my country anyways- are forced into mostly researching ways to obtain funding and doing a little bit of actual research, almost as a side gig.
Google had (has?) a similar platform, but it had nowhere near the same success as Bell Labs did. They did launch some products but a lot of them failed.
It's definitely a bit of a melancholy read. Some of the people who invented Unix are long gone, and we probably don't have a lot of time left with the people who are still with us. I'm glad Brian was able to tell the full story while there's still time left. We take Unix for granted, but its the basis of most of the modern operating system world.
Unix was the first accessible real computer system like we know it. I worked with AT&T and Bell Atlantic for a project, and they provided several 3B2 systems for the project and for us to work on them in ~1992. They were used internally for all sorts of business applications, and the interface was typically a green screen like a Televideo 9xx. The only other systems I found that accessible and easy to use were Sun-like CAD workstation knockoffs that ran BSD 4.3 Unix in ~1989. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3B_series_computers#3B2
I wanted to read "Unix: A History and a Memoir" but I couldn't find how to buy a DRM-free copy. It looks really good and I am glad to read that someone liked it.
Yeah, in many ways the concept of a group is far more natural to us than the concept of natural numbers. I don't know why people make such a big deal of this, and why it's so badly explained in school.
The definition of natural numbers used in any sort of formalized mathematics includes zero. Without zero, you don't have induction (and ℕ wouldn't form a monoid).
When you're selling bullshit advertised as advice, I guess anything will do for stock. It doesn't matter what example you use, it's just a delivery vehicle for your bullshit. It's just like being a religious preacher, really.
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