Meanwhile... you apparently can't buy this thing anywhere.

I do think we benefit from competition. I also have a Moto Droid and it was OK, but there was some janky UI. And the noises... talk about infuriating. The phone was always making noises with no indication as to WTF was making them or what they meant.

Really depressing design dereliction and/or incompetence.

The question is what's going on with the mass "re-mastering" of entire back catalogs. I very much doubt that labels are going back to source material and crafting a judicious result. Aren't they, in most cases, just running their previously-released material through a compressor and barfing it out?

Did I miss it, or were there no other parts to this settlement mentioned?

In other words: no punishment at all.

When I was a little kid, I'd ride my bike to the record store and buy my two or three favorite current songs on 45. I noticed that they didn't sound as "fat" as they did on the radio. So I got an equalizer. But that of course wasn't the answer.

Over time I realized that I liked the sound of the records better. They were more fun to turn up loud. Likewise I realized that the oddly-quiet station on my FM dial (WXRT in Chicago) sounded the best. All because it, like the records, was less dynamically compressed than the other stations.

A huge number of people alive today have never heard good-sounding pop music, which is disgraceful. Near-perfect sound reproduction is within everyone's reach now, but the recordings themselves are ruined before we get them.

It's all even more stupid when you consider that compression could have been (and was) done ON THE PLAYBACK DEVICE. My 1996 Ford CD player has a button on it labeled "Compress."

Duh. People aren't getting smarter.

Listen to the original pressings of songs like "Creep." That guitar noise punched through because there were still dynamics back then. Music was fun to listen to, especially with headphones. The soundscape of an album sometimes led me to give music a second chance that I might not have bothered with if it didn't sound so good.

Now, even very catchy music is tiresome and quickly abandoned because of dynamic compression. It's fatiguing (if not grating) to listen to. Yes, there are a few exceptions here and there. "Gives You Hell" by the All-American Rejects comes to mind. But in general music sounds like ass now. Take Coldplay... regardless of what you think of the content, this music should sound great. But it's sonically dull trash.

I think 25 or even 50 years is more defensible. But 100? Nah.

But the crushing problem today for many of us here is SOFTWARE PATENTS. These should never have been allowed in the first place; and until their scourge is abolished, everyone is at risk for having his work stolen with one.

But sadly today most popular music is ruined beyond repair with dynamic compression, not data compression. The craven stupidity of the loudness war may be unequaled in the history of art, and yet even the artists often don't seem to understand what the problem is. You see legendary artists complaining about modern sound quality (Dylan, Neil Young, and so forth) but then cheerleading for absurd sampling rates and bit depth. NO. That isn't the problem. I have 45-RPM records that sound better than their "lossless," "remastered" incarnations on streaming services.

The biggest problem in popular music (and I would say this probably pervades everything but classical at this point) is dynamic compression.

1. Restores minimized apps when you tab to them (Apple leaves them minimized, defeating the whole purpose of the hotkey)

2. Creates a new window if the app you're tabbing to lacks one (primarily Finder; the developer added this at my request)

Any similar utility that doesn't do the above two things has pretty much missed the boat.

Alt-Tab is one of the first things I install on a new Mac OS installation. The other is Karabiner, so I can add a real Delete key to my keyboard (fixing another irritating Apple omission).