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JohnnyB

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Everything posted by JohnnyB

  1. Then, there was the final, inconsequential item of: we sucked. Still didn't dissuade other bands from wanting to borrow shit, though. You should have been grateful. At least they thought you were good for something.
  2. Do you mean 8-string guitars with a 4x2 headstock, 4+2 6-string guitars, or 4x2 8-string basses?
  3. Well, 41 pages isn't exactly 104, but it took the Boobies thread almost two years to get to page 41. This thread is only 3 months old (to the day!).
  4. 25 albums between 1978 and 2010, plus 6 film soundtracks. Plus a bit of talent discovery, producing, and a little bit of touring. His 1999 song and album had enough legs to get him on the Dec. 1999 covers of Guitar Player, Bass Player, and Keyboard simultaneously.
  5. Now we're onto something. Not for nothing, but that Roots dude is a fairly high profile Gibson endorser. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if that was a stunt. We're hoping, but the crazing on this headstock and the chipping of the gold figure in the middle looks more like vintage aging to me. I s'pose it could have gotten surface cracks that way from the fall.
  6. Let's get one thing straight: Gates changed the world, Jobs followed a distant second for decades. It is the 20 and 30-somethings that are too young to remember this fact and have held Jobs up to the God-like status he currently holds (even posthumously). It was Bill Gates' dream that everyone would have a computer in their homes at a time what this was simply ludicrous. This is what brought Internet into every home. You can debate that Jobs improved on Gates' ideas, but that's not the point. The reason we are all here discussing anything on a message board in the first place is because of Bill Gates. Jobs stole the computer mouse from xerox in or around 1976. Apple and Jobs created Apple I and II by 1977 and built the first GUI based interface for a computer some years later in 1983. The lisa was a colossal failure. Lisa failed in the marketplace, not because people didn't want it, but because it cost $10K. But it showed the way, and a year later the affordable Macintosh came out with a similar mouse-driven GUI. The Macintosh set the standard for GUI-based PCs for the rest of the '80s. One reason for this is that Apples were always based on graphics-friendly CPUs and were pretty responsive, while the Intel MPUs of the PCs and clones were largely designed with character-based interfaces in mind. Microsoft had been trying to crack the GUI market with Windows going back to the mid '80s, but the 80286 just barely had the horsepower to do it. It wasn't until the introduction of 80386-based MPUs and Windows 3.0 (and really, 3.1 and 3.11) before Windows as an OS really took off in the early '90s. Before that the PC hardware wasn't up to it. They also made a very bold move during this period when IBM recruited them to help create an official IBM-sanctioned GUI OS called OS/2. After futzing with it for awhile, MS had the balls to walk away from IBM to go their own way and create Windows instead. "IBM created the first [iBM PC] computer in 1981 running ms-dos created by Bill Gates." The DOS that became MS-DOS was created by Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft bought the rights to SCP's DOS operating system and ported it to the IBM PC just prior to the launch of the IBM PC. Before this very strategic move, Microsoft was mostly a maker of programming language compilers--BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, and Pascal. They had also created a version of Unix for the current crop of 8080/Z80 computers called Xenix, but the introduction of the IBM PC completely changed the market. At that time the major players in the 8080/Z80-based personal computers were MicroPro, makers of WordStar word processor, Software Arts' VisiCalc, a spreadsheet, and Digital Research (DR), makers of C/PM and M/PM, the overwhelmingly dominant operating system of the 8-bit personal computers. When the IBM PC came out, several operating systems were available for it. DR cut their own throats by charging over $200 for their C/PM-86 OS, while PC-DOS, whose interface and command set were very similar to C/PM, was only about $25. With that aggressive pricing, Microsoft gave up short-term profits for long-term market share. It was a brilliant move, but as with many of Microsoft's brilliant moves, it was more about leverage than innovation. http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft%5Fcompany.htm The next phase was the DOS era from 1981 to roughly 1991. During this time Microsoft expanded mightily thanks to being the 95+% OS of choice on all PCs and clones. But when it came to applications, other companies dominated: WordPerfect superseded WordStar in word processing (MS Word was available but the big WP players were Word Perfect and MultiMate), Lotus 1-2-3 superseded VisiCalc for spreadsheets, and Ashton-Tate dominated databases with DB III and variants. Once Windows really took off in the '90s, Microsoft once again leveraged its position to undercut the competition via bundling with the creation of Microsoft Office. Whereas Word Perfect was around $250 and so was Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft bundled Word, Excel Spreadsheet, and PowerPoint for around $200-250 total. It was THIS move that presented a no-brainer to corporate accounts, and MS strengthened their position over the years by bundling more things with Office. Pretty soon Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were irrelevant in the Windows world. They tried to partner up to offer their own bundle, but it was too little, too late. Again, this was a brilliant move, but it was more about bundling and leverage than innovation, though I gotta admit I was quite smitten by Word 2.0 for Windows 3.1. The novelty wore off for me over time as the initial bugs and limitations persisted through several major releases, but that's another story.
  7. You've heard of King Richard? Now there's Prince Dick.
  8. Agreed. Let's just dispel the notion that they were driven primarily by altruism. That doesn't mean they were necessarily driven by greed, either. I'm not out to deify anybody, but if somebody's going to be demonized it should be based on more than what a co-worker said someone said.
  9. The deification of Jobs over the years is off the charts, and your point above is just another example of it. He had to choose (according to you) "sending mfg to China (or Indonesia or Taiwan) or shutting down altogether." So, he had "the bitter choice" of shutting down (a multibillionaire) or sending manufacturing to these sweat shops whose labor tactics are just lateral step from slavery. These people are getting violently ill from the work environment, that is, if they don't kill themselves first. He had a choice and he chose money over humanity. And yes...Period. The mention of Jobs was in the context of entrepreneurs and various business models. The discussion of companies sending mfg to China was in a different post altogether and made no mention of Jobs.
  10. No, not "period." That's just the dogmatic opinion of a cynic. There are lots of entrepreneurs who've moved manufacturing to China because they can't stay in business otherwise. They aren't all greedy bastards. Some have to face the bitter choice of sending mfg to China (or Indonesia or Taiwan) or shutting down altogether. Nothing and no one is perfect, but not everyone and everything is driven by some seamy underbelly. And Leo most of all doesn't deserve the ripping he's getting in this thread based on the flimsiest of rumor and innuendo.
  11. That's a pretty lame basis to make such a sweeping judgment of a man and the company he founded. It could be an accurate judgment, considering it's the credo of damn near every businessperson who ever lived. It may be the credo of Anheuser-Busch, but not Anchor Steam...or Redhook, or Pyramid, Dogfish, etc. It may be the attitude of Microsoft, but it wasn't the philosophy of Steve Jobs--not by a long shot. There are plenty of people who started businesses to sincerely fill a need and do it well. Read the accounts by George Fullerton, Bill Carson, Dick Dale, and others who interacted with Leo in the early days. The Stratocaster is not only the first ergonomically designed electric guitar, it's probably the first ergonomically designed musical instrument. He came to the design through feedback from field-testing. He came up with the Showman amp to meet Dick Dale's need for high clean volume. A charlatan doesn't do that. The genius of Leo is that he introduced cost-effective manufacturing methods to make professional quality, long-lasting instruments for the gigging musicians of SoCal of the time. $37.89 to build a guitar in the mid-'50s? That's about right. The rule of thumb is that a manufactured product has to sell for 4-5 times the cost of manufacture to make it into the black. The cost per unit is usually based on parts and labor, but doesn't include rent or mortgage payments, taxes, utilities, or marketing. Markup also has to cover the cost of shipping, distribution, and has to have enough profit built in so the retailer can pay his taxes, utilities, payroll, rent, etc. besides the wholesale price of the guitar itself. Five times $37.89 is $189.45, which is what the instruments sold for then. In today's money, $37.89 is over $320, which is the manufacturing cost for a $1500 instrument. That's hardly crap. As for a lot of the "mojo" of the early instruments and parts, much of it was happy accidents. Leo may have chuckled, but he unknowingly was working in a perfect storm of parts and technology--scatter-wound pickups (lowers inductance), cloth-insulated wire (less capacitance), point-to-point wiring (durable and repairable), multi-ply amp cabinets (strong and light), US-made tubes and transformers (rugged, good-sounding), old growth wood, nitrocellulose lacquer, and hand finishing because there were no machines to work to that level of precision back then, no polyurethane finishes, no pickup winding machines, very little plastic insulation, no Chinese and Russian tubes. Leo may not have seen what the big deal was--he was just working with the available materials. But 60 years of hindsight says that these were great materials and methods to build electric guitars and amps.
  12. Again I never new Leo Fender. I was just repeating what I was told by a co-worker who was way more musically talented than myself and has more music experience then anyone I ever knew. I will say I tend to believe the statement more than I would dismiss it. The fact that Fender is dumping Hamer would also kind of support that idea in my mind. So more than 60 years after its founding, two changes in ownership, and 22 years after the founder's death, you give credence to a "coworker's" statement" based on what the current Fender company did with Hamer, a division that's been on life support for years?
  13. That's a pretty lame basis to make such a sweeping judgment of a man and the company he founded.
  14. Bocelli, Houston, Bryson, Braxton, Bolton, Dion vs. Coleman, Haden, Burton, Swallow, McBride, Hancock, Scofield, Corea? The difference in those artist lists speaks for itself.
  15. Oh my... no you didn't! Are you unaware of Metheny's complete and utter disdain for Kenny G? He has a real REAL problem with Kenny G and seems to share it any time he's given any sort of prompt. Just one e.g. Pray he doesn't read your comment. Totally get Hendrix, but I was a fan way before I played guitar - began in high school with second-hand bootlegs on eight-track given to me by an old stoner type I used to work with. I could listen to him all day, even now. Edited to add: Hendrix, not the aforementioned old stoner benefactor. Pat Metheny's discography numbers around 85, not counting compilations. His "breezy Brazilian" (i.e., easy listening) period spans around 6 of those 85 albums, about 7% of his total recorded output, all with the Pat Metheny Group of the '80s. Try listening to "Bright Size Life" or "Song X" and see if he's still a Kenny G to you. Do you really think Jaco Pastorius, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Ornette Coleman, Jack DeJohnette, Steve Swallow, Christian McBride, Jim Hall, Joni Mitchell, Lee Konitz, Josh Redman, Michael Brecker, Charlie Haden, Herbie Hancock, Roy Haynes, Brad Mehldau, David Bowie, John Scofield, and numerous others of that stature would line up to collaborate with him if he's nothing more than the Kenny G of guitar?
  16. Thankfully I didn't buy it, but I got an Eric Johnson CD from the library a few years ago; it may have been Live From Austin Tx but I'm not sure. Anyway, after about the 3rd cut my reaction was "It's still wank 'n' roll to me." Mindless putting notes together by a technical virtuoso. One that I did buy and wish I had my money back is "Larry and Lee" featuring Larry Carlton and Lee Ritenour. It's a 56-minute lesson that great session men usually: 1) Provide tasty licks for someone else's work and 2) Don't have enough original ideas to carry their own albums.
  17. Like I said, if you go with a Panasonic with Inverter Technology and Sensor Reheat, your nuked chicken will taste just like it came fresh out of the oven. It's the best of all three: energy efficient, fast, and good taste with no rubbery spots and cold spots. Uniformly heated throughout with no issues. I've owned microwaves for 28 years and this is the first time I've waxed poetic about one. It's truly different, better, and worth it.
  18. Thorn (the OP) never said anything about over-the-range. Hamerjunkie did, because Thorn mentioned a $400 replacement cost This Panasonic is worth replacing the over-the-range MW with a standard hood and putting the Panasonic on the counter or on a microwave cart.
  19. For Christmas my step-daughter and her husband gave us one of these, but it was more like $139 from Costco. Previously I would have agreed with everyone about the downsides of microwaves--the chewy bread, the inconsistent heating, the non-organic feel of the reheated food. But not anymore. These Panasonic Genius Inverter Technology microwaves rewrite the rules. If you put in some leftovers to reheat, press the "Sensor Reheat" button followed by "Start." In response this microwave monitors the heat and moisture coming off the food it's reheating and adjusts the output level and timing accordingly. When I put some leftover chicken in and reheat by this method, it comes out as though it was freshly baked or roasted in a conventional oven, heated through uniformly, no toughness, no cold spots, no shit. It also has separate buttons for popcorn, breakfast, lunch/snack, dinner, beverages, etc. It's almost worth it just for the popcorn--the bag is full to bursting with no uncooked kernels and no scorching. Imagine that! It uses the same logic control for defrosting (haven't tried it yet but looking forward to it), and you can use it as a reg'lar old microwave, setting the time and power level and doing it manually. Once you've tried Sensor Reheat you won't want to on most things. I do find that for reheating a hamburger or sandwich it works best to put it in a paper bag, roll it shut, and give it about 40 seconds on high. Perfect hamburger. Sunday night I put it through the acid test--reheating pizza on Sensor Reheat. It came out as though it had been wrapped in foil and placed in a conventional oven for 15-20 mins. For all this talk about energy consumption, how about consumption of my energy. Aren't labor-saving devices there to save me the labor? On that score this Panasonic rules!
  20. Packing peanuts are very handy for packing, a real bitch for unpacking and cleanup. But I'll take a styro peanut mess over shipping damage any day. I actually received a car part packed with REAL peanut shells. I wonder how long it took the boss to figure out his employees had no idea what packing peanuts were. ... or maybe they bought their packing materials from a "green" company. Styrofoam has a bad eco reputation.
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