This one caught my eye in Bruce Sterling's State of the World discussion.

"The Globalisation of Balkanisation"

We're all in the Balkans now.

It seems like AllOfMp3 is having it's life blood cut off. The only ways to pay now are JB and Diners card with Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Xrost all gone. There have been sites that let you buy AllOfMp3 gift cards but I can't find any real ones any more.

So I guess that's it. With no way of taking money, they'll disappear. Unless of course they can sell the whole operation to Amazon.

I still think the AllOfMp3 model is the future of music distribution. They needed to find a real way of passing money back to the artists but the basic site, approach and price worked well.

So what now? Investigate their competitors or just switch back to the P2P networks?

Here's a brief summary after 10 days of playing. I'll add specific links later (maybe) but this will help for searching.

- The number one problem is fonts. I'll say that again, FONTS. Install the MS core fonts. Find a copy of Tahoma and install it. Add a ~/.fonts.conf file to turn off anti-aliasing for < 10 pt and enable antialiasing for bold. Go to the gnome font setup in Admin, preferences and set maximum hinting, sub-pixel anti-alias. set all fonts to tahoma 8 or 9. Install kcontrol. install GTK libraries, run kcontrol as user not root. Ignore the startup error messages. Set as for gnome.

- Firefox in Ubuntu edgy needs two tweaks. Set the keyboard handler to re-enable backspace=go back one page. Turn off the internal font engine by adding a ~/etc/mozilla/rc file that disables pango (sp?)

- The number one problem is fonts! It's irritating that Gnome and KDE have different font settings when they're both driven by X. You can run KDE apps under Gnome and vice versa but they don't pick up the font information and overrides from the same place.

- Open Office in Ubuntu Edgy is terminally borked. The fonts and font rendering generally are so bad as to make it unusable. This is an absolute show stopper if you're trying to impress people into making the switch and is unforgiveable. It was ok once but appears to have been broken for 6-9 months now. Did I say that the number one problem is fonts?

- There's some conflicting information about using Windows Shares. it's not clear if you should use smbfs or cifs and what code page to use so filenames look right. This is a key area to improve as so many Linux machines will be used in a windows environment with other windows machines surrounding it. smbfs really ought to be installed by the distro to start with.

- You absolutely will need all the proprietary codecs. In particular MP3 is the single most common format for almost anything. It's understandable but sad that it can't be installed by default. Look at EasyUbuntu and Automatix if you don't want to do this by hand.

- Amarok is an amazing app. But it has a serious problem importing large quantities of music into the collection. It has a tendency to be unable to cope with tags in certain files for no obvious reason. Get too many errors like this and it just gives up forgetting all the work it had done so far. This makes you realise just how good Winamp V5 is and its a real shame that there's no port of winamp to linux. Functionally Amarok is just about at the same level as winamp but it's not as polished. See fonts (again) you can change half the fonts in amarok's config but the other half come from KDE.

- Ubuntu does a pretty good job of finding and configuring all your hardware but it might not be perfect on old hardware. In my case the powernowd daemon needed turning off as it didn't work and was hurting performance and introducing mouse/keyboard glitches. After fonts this is the major area of tweaking with lots of fun to be had juggling ati/nvidia drivers, wifi drivers and so on. Ultimately it's up to the manufacturers to provide better linux drivers or to provide apis and specs that the community can work with but don't hold your breath.

- The number one problem is fonts. Or did I say that already? ;) You can have all the eye candy you want but if the text is unreadable you won't impress people. It's a damn shame MS don't include tahoma in their distributable pack but there's an awful lot of copies out there.

- Skype just plain didn't work. And the Skype-Linux release is now a long way behind XP/Mac. I don't have time to get to the bottom of this.

- And finally. Package, app and upgrade management is great. But it's surprisingly hard to uninstall major apps and install a later release than the one included. Upgrading OpenOffice to the latest release was a mission. As it turned out it didn't solve the OO font problem. Linux needs the functional equivalent of Installshield or Nullsoft installer so any old developer can package a new app with an install wizard.

So I think I can stop playing now. Ubuntu is not yet good enough for my needs. If and when I switch, I think I will have to have XP running in parallel either with vmware or parallels. And that probably means the next laptop replacement. So I'll come back to this in 6 months. But there is light on the horizon and the state of the art means that Ubuntu+XP+VM is very close to being an alternative to Vista or OSX for a computing professional. Ubuntu on it's own is generally slick enough, once tweaked, for most average users.

But guys, come one. An unusable Office package is just not acceptable.

As George Bush heads into the last 2 years of his presidency, I have a modest proposal to help him make up for the mess of the last 6 years. He's finally got on the Global Warming bandwagon. He's talked about reducing the USA's dependence on terrorist oil. And he ought to know that US health care is a mess. So here's the proposal.

Increase petrol/oil tax to European levels. Plough the vast additional income into funding a European/Canadian state health system.

Now this is something that the Democrats cannot fight because it simultaneously targets their major issues. Tripling petrol prices will drive the market towards smaller more efficient cars. This will enable the USA to meet the Kyoto accord without having to actually enforce any reductions. And it will undermine the absurd health insurance crisis while improving the lot of the bottom 3rd of the society by enabling them to get real health care.

The one downside is of course that it will drive the economy into recession and high inflation. Oh well.

I know the Inspiron 4000 is old but it was lying around!

I've since discovered:-
- that the lost mouse movement is a known FAQ. A couple of other Inspiron 4000 users have the same problem.

- I've finally worked out the font issues. In XP I have cleartype turned off and font smoothing set to standard. On Arial it doesn't anti-alias below about 10pt normal. In Ubuntu I now have sub-pixel smoothing with max hinting. It's very close to being the same but is trying to anti-alias small fonts like 9pt when perhaps it shouldn't. It's a subtle difference but just enough to be distracting.

- For some reason, screen refresh such as scrolling in Firefox has improved. No idea why but I have been doing a lot of fiddling.

- Radio buttons in firefox are truly horrible. No sure if this is firefox, gnome or X

- Stuff keeps coming and going and I've no real idea why! For instance Restart and shutdown has just disappeared from the quit menu. hey ho.

Latest game was trying to persuade it to auto-mount a volume on a Linksys NSLU-2 that is shared over Samba. I can see it in the file manager but can't persuade it to mount. Perhaps I'm putting the wrong commands into fstab or it's permissions on the mount point or something. dmesg is not very helpful.

A lot of this stuff still feels surprisingly hard compared with XP.

Have you noticed how when you do a search for solutions you often pick up on fixes that were out of date 3 years ago? ;)

Later

As usual with the linux you can do anything with some command line work. I discovered that fonts.conf can be configured to disable anti-aliasing for small fonts. I set it to 10pt (is it pt or px?) so 9pt is displayed clean and it's worked a treat. Bizarrely Firefox has it's own anti-alias settings and doesn't take all of them from X. Still digging on that one.

The Samba problem was that the smbfs package wasn't loaded but smbclient was by default. So I could see the share, use "connect to server" to mount it but a mount in fstab didn't work. Now it's all peachy.

So now I have my 90Gb of music mounted. I pointed Amarok at it but it complained of too many tag errors. This is good because it will prompt me to fix the few remaining MP3 tag errors in the collection. but bad because Amarok should have completed it's scan regardless.

Hibernate stopped working. It will hibernate, it just won't restart.

Later still

Somewhere in trying the ATI screen drivers and installing XFC to try the Xubuntu variant, the login sessions and Quit dialog got badly screwed. There was no obvious way to turn the machine off as restart and Shutdown had disappeared! trying to resurrect it looked like too much work, so I gave up and re-installed. At which point I discovered the logic of having a /home partition.

Firefox anti-aliasing is curious. It takes some of it's setup from X but does some of it itself. There is a font.antialias.minimum setting in about:config but it doesn't appear to do anything in the Ubuntu build. This could be a distro bug rather than a firefox bug.

For some unknown reason backspace in Firefox doesn't do what you'd expect. But that's also fixable in about:config.

I tend to use mouse wheel click for doubleclick. I think there's a way of making this work involving the usual hacking of .conf files but I haven't attempted it yet.

There's something weird about Amarok. I think it's a KDE App running under Gnome and so it's using it's own font definitions for the gui. The font in the data content areas can be changed in Amarok configuration, but the dialog fonts can't and they look awful.

This is all a geek's experiments. I want to see what the current state of desktop Linux is like. I'm quite happy to dig down in the process just as I did 4 years ago with XP. The only performance issue I have is hiccups in mouse, keyboard, scrolling and MP3 playing. And I'm mostly prepared to accept that I wouldn't see it with faster hardware even if I think it's still a bug.

And even later

The glitches in mouse movement were coming from powernowd which is supposed to handle CPU speed for power management. Turn it off in services and it's all smooth. The whole system is now the same or slightly faster than XP on the same machine as I expected.

I can't manage to get all the fonts to work right in all the Apps. The problem is Amarok and Firefox. which use KDE and GTK respectively. I've tried installing kcontrol and fonts with that are now the same as in Gnome but it's having no effect on Amarok. You can change the fonts in some of the windows from within Amarok configuration but the dialog and collection text come from KDE. I'm beginning to get pretty tired of this. This really needs sorting by the OSS community. Fonts are the one thing that you immediately see and compare and it ought to be possible to (perhaps with one click) set up a new Ubuntu install to look exactly like Windows. Why? Because it's one of the few things that MS is very very good at.

Amarok is repeatedly failing to collect tag info from my entire music collection. It fails with a bizarre error message after 30 minutes saying "too many errors. Maybe you've got an old taglib." Right. It really should just ignore errors and carry on.

The "ugly" proprietary drivers for MP3 et al installed ok. but until I rebooted, Rhythmbox played MP3s at double speed!

Even though mount on the SMB share works (see above) fstab won't mount it during startup. My guess is that it's timing out. Curiously browsing the share in nautilus also times out. The first time you try to open a folder or file it almost always fails. Try again and it just works. Maybe there's a samba config setting somewhere to tell it to just wait a little longer.

I tried loading Skype. It loads, starts logs in, gets most of the contact info and then fails spectacularly. The display is all over the place with text being shown on the screen well outside the window. resize the main window and it never manages to redraw it.

O I think I'm going to stop there and leave it all for a few months. My over all impression is that you can change everything which is good. but you have to change everything which is bad. It's made me rethink what I use every day and what I need to make it work. Key windows only programs are:-
- Winamp
- Skype
- Turnpike (really!)
- IE6/7 purely for checking web development, not to actually use.
Given enough time tweaking, everything else either has a direct port in Linux or a direct equivalent.

I think we stand at a crossroads. XP is good enough but it's not going to be around forever. Vista is expensive and scarily DRM riddled. MacOSX is neat but your exchanging an MS straitjacket for an Apple straitjacket. You gain some of that OSS goodness but also get more Apple lock-in and lose some programs that never get ported from windows. Go to Linux and you're into the OSS anarchy where nothing is clear and everything almost works.

In theory, given enough memory it's now possible to run VMware or Parallels to run two or more of these at the same time. I've been trying to find somebody who's actually run Skype under XP+OSX/Linux+Parallels/vmware but without success. Maybe it's possible. Not sure I want to try. And certainly not on this hardware.

One other thing thats a larf

I put up my original post on my own blog as well as here. Today I tried again to search google for things like "KDE font ubuntu gnome amarok". A large number of the front page results are either pointers to here and my own blog or to Linux community sites that have picked it up and commented on it. It's the downside of having lots of Google Fu. You frequently end up being the definitive statement of the problem. Which is a pain in the neck when you didn't find the answer and still haven't a month later when you go back and try again!

Centralize, De-Centralize, Centralize, De-Centralize. The pendulum swings. Back and forth, back and forth.

Well after Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Google, Amazon, eBay, it's time to swing back. Don't forget it's a World of Ends. Nobody owns it. Everyone can use it. And crucially; Anyone can improve it. And they can do that from any end (edge). It doesn't have to be improved from the center outwards.

Here's a good one. Last night I did a Skype chat interview with a Register (and Wired and AP) journalist about 419 scams on the Social Network where I'm CTO. I asked him "How do I know that I'm talking to the reporter you say you are". Especially when his Skype profile is empty and he has only 3 contacts in Skype. Proving Identity on a first meeting is remarkably difficult on the net. But then it's pretty hard in real life as well.

Then we hear of a Yahoo! AuthBB-OpenID mashup that lets you create an OpenID identity based on a Yahoo! account and using Yahoo!'s authentication. On one level this looks great because it potentially allows a very large number of people to have an instant OpenID identity. But of course that is also a curse. short term fake identities on Yahoo! are common. What are we actually proving here? That the person trying to log into your OpenID enabled system has a validated Yahoo! Account? So what?

OMG! WTF! It's a blog about all things "Hello Kitty".

I've recently liberated an old Inspiron 4000 laptop and turned it into a PC for the wife and others. It's a 700MHz Pentium 3 with 310Mb of memory. Just about everything in it is now outdated from USB 1.0 to ATI Mobility M3 graphics. The good bit is an 80Gb disk from when I upgraded it a year or so ago. However apart from programs being a bit slow to load it runs Windows XP fine and actually using it, it's pretty responsive. At least good enough for general web surfing and email along with background downloads using BitTorrent et al. It even runs Skype well and can handle voice calls. It's got a PCMIA ethernet card and a Buffalo Wifi card.

So after cleaning the disk it's got 15Gb or so used and plenty of free space. So it seemed like a perfect opportunity to try out Ubuntu and experiment to see how close Linux is to me being able to make the switch.

Loading Ubuntu
Downloading the latest Edgy Eft 6.10 was easy (and surprisingly quick). The Dell has a DVD player but can't write CDs but my other laptop made short work of burning the CD using Infra Recorder. So now the fun begins. Inevitably I wanted a bit of control over the partitioning so I didn't want to just accept the default settings. Lots of web searching led me to the following layout
1) Windows NTFS 20Gb
2) Shared EXT3 34Gb
3) Ubuntu Root EXT3 20Gb
4) Swap 1Gb
So we fire up the live CD, which takes a surprising amount of time. Everything including the wifi appears to work so hit the install button. Using GParted to set the partitions up was nerve racking. There's a point were the partitions are all defined but it's about to start. HDA1 (the Windows partition) is at the top with a checkbox unchecked for Reformat. I wasn't paying attention but Ubuntu stopped me from trying to reformat it. It wouldn't have done anyway which means the checkbox really should be disabled. I then got a failure message saying it had resized the windows partition but something had gone wrong. It was actually lying and telling it to redo the rest of the job worked.

30 minutes later and I have a dual boot XP-Ubuntu machine. Restart, check windows still works, then boot into Ubuntu. Everything appears fine but startup is pretty slow and some operations, like just starting a terminal session are also slow. The mouse is really jerky and scrolling around Firefox is jerky and slow with keystrokes getting missed. Much web surfing later, I discover that there is a small tweak possible. This involves editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changing the default color depth from 24 to 16. It seems the jerky mouse is a known bug. And the ATI proprietary drivers don't support the Mobility M3. Apparently I'm stuck with slow screen performance. The default drivers just don't seem that good with this hardware. There's a message in here which is *SAVE A COPY OF xorg.conf* When it all goes titsup and X won't start, you can boot into recovery mode and use the cp command to get back to where you were.

At one point I booted up a Knoppix 4 CD and confiormed it's using more or less the same driver and was similarly unreponsive. I didn't notice the jerky mouse but window refreshes and scrolls were similarly nasty.

Meanwhile the fonts are really ugly. So I installed msttcorefonts and changed everything I could to Arial, Courier New and Times Roman TTF. Things are a bit better. The next step was switching the aliasing around. Under XP I have cleartype turned off everywhere because it looks fuzzy to me. But under Ubuntu, the Truetype Arial is getting badly sized. Some sizes look like badly sized bitmap fonts and Bold really doesn't work. With aliasing set to LCD it's useable but not as clear as under XP.

I've also modifed Grub so that Windows is the top option and it defaults to the last used OS.

So after about 10 hours of work I've got a working dual boot system but frankly video performance under Ubuntu sucks. And the lost mouse movement and lost key strokes makes it impossible to work with and especially impossible to give to someone else.

Thoughts
There was still way too much need to get your hands dirty and use the command line. I'm used to command line Linux so it's not alien but it's too much for a newbie. Having X fail to start is worrying. Perhaps it should fire up a basic VGA driver if the full driver fails.

Firefox doesn't support backspace to go back a page only alt-left. Huh?

Partitioning didn't quite work as it should have done. In the end eveything was ok, but I can do without the racked nerves of spurious error messages.

The automatic updates work well. App install works well. The Synaptics package manager is a good solution. Perhaps universe and multiverse should enabled by default.

The documentation on the Ubuntu site is pretty good though it suffers from the usual wiki problem of being a bit unorganised. It sometimes hard to find your way back to a page you knew you'd seen before.

As I used Ubuntu, I could feel myself getting dismayed by just how much work I'd have to put in to get it "just right" for me. But then my XP setup has taken several years to get right, so expecting to get to the same point in a few hours is unreasonable.

So all in all I can imagine using this day to day. It's not quite ready for prime time as a direct replacement for XP but it's damn close. However trying to run it on 5 year old hardware is not really on. This is disappointing as I expected it to be at least as responsive as XP and hopefully better since the underlying OS is better architected. Something not exactly surprising was the font problem as I've heard of similar stories before and screen driver problem. It's a testament to how much work Microsoft have done, both themselves and with their partners that Windows screen and font control is excellent. It's only when you see another system fail that you appreciate it. This is perhaps the biggest issue that Linux has to solve before it can become truly mainstream. And I get the impression that this is down to the X code and not any one distro as they mostly seem to use the same underlying system. It's just possible that Kubuntu and Xubuntu (and hence KDE and Xfc) work better but I think the problem is actually below these in X.

Shuzak.com | Anatomy of a Successful Social Network : Ads, ads everywhere

One thing I particularly dislike about Web 2.0 startups is their Web 1.0 approach towards displaying advertisements. It shouldn't take an Einstein to realize where Google ads are appropriate and where they are not. For instance, after I click on "My Friends" tab in Hi5, I am displayed an ad of "Become a nutritionist" and "Should the government regulate gas prices?". These ads are absolutely irrelevant to my interests, and there is no way in hell that I am going to click on them. Simply put, they are pointless and annoying. Note that there is nothing wrong with displaying ads as long as it makes sense to do so. If you have no ads on your site, you will not make money off of it. If you have too many ads on your site, nobody is going to click on them.

Yet another example that AdSense sucks. There's something deeply wrong in Advertising land. Whenever you see people talking about it, it's always from the point of view of the advertiser or the Ad Agency. Nobody ever talks about the publisher. And I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that that's because context sensitive Ads only work where the Agency is also the Publisher. And that's on the search engines themselves.

Which makes life tough for those of us involved in web properties that depend on monetizing traffic via advertising.

But then I run Firefox with Adblock. So even though the Ads on our sites are increasingly annoying I never get to see them.

Apparently the DTD for RSS 0.91 has gone missing. Again.

Woah! What just happened? Did we just slip through a time warp back to April 2001?

We had an outage on Friday evening. This was caused by a loss of power to the database server. It took some time to bring the server back up and it's clock was then set back to 2002. All of that has now been sorted. No data has been lost but there may be some records with invalid timestamps which we will attempt to rectify.

While the clock was out a number of background tasks will have sent out emails incorrectly.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Another hero bites the dust. Robert Anton Wilson has passed away.

Fnord

Marc's Voice » Blog Archive » Blogging away the Midnight Oil

Re Toyota: One area that the internets are bad at right now is supporting small groups of people talking about niche subjects. The Few-To-Few communication paradigm. We used to use usenet, then mailing lists (yahoogroups) but these are currently broken with spam, Outlook users and a general loss of netiquette. For real time comms in these groups we used to use IRC and now Skype Public Chat but it's hard keeping these going. On the web we used BBS systems like phpBB but they don't go far enough and the UI for all these discussion forums is clunky. Blogs have enabled an outpouring of verbiage but it's One-To-Many publishing not Few-To-Few discussion. Even with blog search tools its almost impossible to follow a 10 person discussion conducted via blog postings. Blog comments are fundamentally broken as well for this as the discussion is taking place in multiple places and troubled by spam.

And as you point out, supporting a niche group is more than just the comms. There's feedback, marketplaces, meetings, subscription management and many other functions needed t do it well.

I reckon in 2007 somebody's going to do "Discussion Groups 2.0" directly aimed at supporting millions of 150 person groups. It's an area ripe for re-invention and for a player to knock Yahoogroups off it's perch.

Back to Toyota. Who's going to do the job of moderating? it's a horrible, painful task where everyone hates the moderator. But for a corporate forum it's absolutely vital. No corporate is going accept flame wars, teen-stalking or porn spam. There's a business there outsourcing moderation for corporates.

Duke Listens! : Weblog : So from my own perspective, it seems like Google is not just ignoring its mission to organize the world's information when it comes to music. It seems like Google is actively trying not to do music. I haven't the faintest clue why.

Put these together
- Music is one of the most searched items on Google
- Google knows about a lot of MP3s on the nets
- Google knows how to read the ID3 tags in MP3s
So Google could index all those MP3s and allow you to search on things like bitrate.

Now I can think of all sorts of reasons why Google doesn't currently do that. But somebody could. In fact somebody should.

Next stop, metadata in video leading to better video search. A which point I realized I have no idea what metadata standards there are for embedding information in anything apart from MP3. You would expect that WMA, AAC, MP4, etc etc would have a similar scheme to ID3.

There's a few private sharing systems appearing as plug ins for Skype such as Pando and SkySpace. These things allow a small group of people to share privately among themselves. What's missing in these is the ability to search for a specific file or group of files. And that's a key feature for P2P systems. It's why Soulseek works so well. It's not enough to just find a copy of John Martyn's "Sundays Child" You need to know that it's encoded with LAME -presetstandard at 192Kb VBR before knowing if it's worth downloading.

Beyond the Beyond : Cory: Well, America has lots of weird consumption inefficiencies, especially away from the coastal cities where we're encouraged to own a lot more house, car and material goods than we need. I'd be more interested in how much it would take to provide every person in the world the kind of life they enjoy in one of the moderate-priced European "B" cities like Florence. Walkable places with incredible food, design, manufacturing, schools, racial diversity, etc. Places with great public transit AND a high level of private vehicle ownership, as well as universal health-care, cheap or free universities, and refreshing absence of paranoid security theater aimed at eliminating abstract nouns like "terror."

The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (just listened to a Stanford lecture about the American Couple that cited a study that determined that the single biggest predictor of long-term marital happiness is whether both partners have health care), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that's straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don't think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.

America has lots going for it -- innovation, the Bill of Rights, a willingness to let its language mutate in exciting and interesting ways, but the standard of living is not America's signal virtue.

Hear, Hear.

This dropped across my desk today. The phrase is allegedly some of Saddam's last words.

"Is this your manhood?" « Fundamentalist Druid : The other explanation is that they actually have no fucking clue about any of this stuff, and it's simply a side-effect of staging a bit of a circus for some of their Iraqi puppets with old grudges and for their remaining drool-case supporters in the US, by demonstrating their arbitary power of life and death over uppity foreigners, just like Caligula did by throwing them to the lions.

At the end of the day though, it's certainly a great advert for the 'freedom and democracy' that Bush and Blair (don't forget our dear Prime Minister) promised to bring to Iraq isn't it?

That's the government that we invaded Iraq in order to install? That mob of guys in black balaclavas waving a noose?

That's what 'bringing freedom and democracy' to a country looks like these days?

That's what Bush and Blair lied so much and killed so many thousands of people to achieve?

Grainy footage of a chanting mob of hooded fanatics stringing up an (embarrassingly brave) old man, in what appears to be an abandoned garage?

God help us.

You know it's time to get a new laptop when the battery life drops to below one hour.

Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » The Man From Google Returns : Turns out search for a record PEAKS upon single release. Yup, that's the HIGHEST INTEREST EVER, when the track is first heard. But as you well know, almost always, YOU CAN'T BUY THE TRACK AT ANY PRICE! CERTAINLY NOT THE ALBUM!

3 or 4 years ago (you know, a lifetime in internet time) back when I last used to buy CDs in an actual record store, I remember being infuriated because the brilliant review in Saturday's Times was for a CD that wasn't available for another month. At the time it seemed seriously stupid. By the time the CD was released and available to actually buy, I'd completely forgotten about it.

Now the record store has shut. It's companion store in the next town has also shut. The Virgin and HMV record stores in the nearest towns with a mall have shut as well. The only place within 20 miles that actually sells CDs is Tesco and Woolworths and they only carry 30 titles. Even the WH Smiths has shut it's music area and only sells movie DVDs.

And they wonder why the traditional music biz is dying?