As far as I'm concerned, Winamp is still the best music player on Windows. With the Moon Glade skin, mine lives as an always-on-top bar at the top-center of my screen and expands into a playlist when I hover over it. The plugin system decodes every music file I know of and - this is huge for me - it can apply VST filters to the audio output. This is important to me because I play my music through Bose 901 (v6) speakers, which are designed to require a custom Bose equalizer to sound decent. Because I'm running audio into my receiver digitally, I can't use this analog equalizer, so I rely on a chain of VST plugins to mimic (and actually improve on) its functionality. I don't know of another media player that can use VST plugins for sound shaping. Then again, I haven't been looking, because I'm pretty satisfied with Winamp. If anyone knows other media players with VST functionality I would appreciate the info.

When someone states two factual sentences next to each other, it is not always right to interpret the second sentence as giving the causal explanation of the first. That's not a question of scientific method or intellectual skepticism (though it's related). It's a question of competent reading.

Wait, this is real?

Of course every thermometer, in every circumstance, measures its own temperature. But what is that temperature going to be? Even in a vacuum, it's absorbing and radiating photons, which are constantly swishing around. If it's in a perfect vacuum chamber, the walls are emitting photons, and these get absorbed by the thermometer until it emits them just as often as it absorbs them. This is how an object in a vacuum chamber comes into thermal equilibrium with the walls. Electromagnetic radiation does not need a medium in order to propagate.

That's about what I expected. I haven't seen them since the "No Prayer" tour in 1990, which was merely an OK show - a letdown, given how good they are. I'm kind of amazed that they're still pulling in such serious money each year, given that they've basically coasted on 80's material for a quarter century now. But boy, that was some strong material, and they are amazing musicians who have actually managed to keep it real despite all their wealth and fame. If that's what's ultimately making their money, then yes, this is a heartwarming success story.

You make a good point, but then again, if the passing rates were that low in college-style courses, why would we think that the Udacity system will do any better with vocational education? I don't think the change of direction happened only because of the numbers. But one possibility that I didn't consider earlier is that Thrun may have pivoted to vocational education because there, nobody is really looking over your shoulder and checking if your product is any good. So if your educational product sucks, take it to vocational education, where there is no quality control and lots of adult students eager to pay. I've never taken part in anything like vocational education, but I wouldn't be surprised if the typical course quality was very low.

Fortunately, there are already many specific well-recognized accreditation exams in the vocational education world. Many more are bound to spring up in the future, since they probably generate more money than the cost of administration. Once these accreditation exams become recognized within the industry as trustworthy, they will not need the blessing of some accreditation agency.

So let's say that you've developed a rigorous certification exam in some advanced Python programming techniques. Every additional person that takes your exam makes you money, because most of your expenses were sunk into the cost of developing the exam, which is already done. Administering and grading an extra test costs you far less than what the test-taker pays. So it's in your interest to have as many people as possible take your test. You make money and network effects work in your favor. That gives you some great incentive to encourage people to take your test, and the best way to do that is to put out a high-quality, free course on advanced python programming. Many people will learn from it and not pay you. But there will be others who learn from it, really get good, and decide that they want a certification which documents just how good they got. This person will be your customer. This kind of "everybody wins" educational scenario doesn't have to be a pipe dream, and it doesn't have to come from inside the entrenched educational system.

I looked through the links now and I'm getting this subtext that Thun is sick of dealing with the bullshit that comes from trying to work within the framework of established universities and their entrenched faculties. The idea of moving into vocational education and forgetting the whole "get college credit" model really might be more dangerous to the educational establishment, and Thun really does seem to be hoping for their demise. (I'm guessing he sat through some rather ugly meetings with department heads and university administrators.) But I'm disappointed by this. If the way that university education dies is by vocational courses cutting off their air (=money) supply, something of great value will be lost, something that could have been transitioned without too much violence into a MOOC-style model. Because let's face it, vocational courses can help you in your job, but they don't exactly fill you with wonder and culture and insight, the way that well-crafted university courses can. Well, probably, "proper" college courses are bound to become MOOCs anyway, even if Thun won't be the one to do it. And if this is done right, the wonder, culture and insight that these courses can bestow will reach far more people than they reach now. But I don't think that there is any guarantee that this will be done right. It can also turn out canned, contrived, shallow, proprietary and generic. Insofar as I thought that Thun was trying to do it right, I consider this a victory for the bastards.

You might be right. Actually, that makes sense.

You're right that motherboards won't post without memory sticks, but I don't see a good technical reason about why that should be. UEFI could be written so that it posts by using only the resources of the processor and its cache, if it detects no usable memory. I mean, never mind 128MB of L4. Even the 6MB of L3 that modern processors have is larger than the entire system memory of our parents' first computers. It should be more than enough to run something as simple as UEFI.

It would also be rather useful. Instead of issuing you beeps as it fails to boot, a motherboard with a correctly written UEFI implementation could post without working ram and run diagnostics on exactly which systems are working and which are not, and what exactly is going wrong. I really think this would increase everyone's system-building confidence and give the manufacturers who make it happen a leg up in the market.

I agree. This is what I would recommend if I worked for them: Make the "frame" of the controller standard, allow adjustment maybe in one or two directions, but then make it possible to replace the moldings with custom parts of different shapes and materials. Fancy people could even buy surfaces with natural materials like ebony, leather, silk and wool. Because, you know, sometimes you get bored of the tactile experience of plastic. I actually use my dremel tool to make custom wooden moldings for my mouse. I have large hands and love the satisfaction of making the geometry exactly match what my hand naturally wants to do.

I am not a business type, but if I was, here is one thing I would consider: Allow people to make a model of their perfect mouse, or perfect game controller, out of play-doh. Then have them take photos of it from all angles, enough so that software can reconstruct the 3D shape. Send those pictures to some new business with standard parts, 3D printing tech and a CNC machine, who could just print them out a mouse from whatever material they like. It wouldn't have to be cheap. The world has plenty of rich people who are being underserved in the tech-for-the-super-rich market. For example, very rich people typically use an iPhone 5s, but so do many ordinary folks that ride with me on the bus. Very rich people tend to use some normal Logitech or Razer mouse, just like me. And they use the standard Playstation controllers. There is no Aston Martin or Maseratti option for the tech devices that they (like the rest of us) probably interact with most often. That seems like a market gap waiting to be filled.

I think it would be pretty cool, and possibly not that difficult, if gamers could discover some of these Smithsonian objects in the dungeons of RPGs. That really could add immersion and, well... a bit of reality!

If we traveled at 10% the speed of light (fast but not requiring a breakthrough in fundamental physics), and built new exploration ships at each destination we colonize, it would only take a half a million years to colonize every single star in the Milky Way (source). That's an absolute eyeblink in comparison to the age of our galaxy. I don't think it will be long before we can launch ships that could reproduce themselves and keep colonizing. Our children's generation will be investing serious research money in AI robotic systems that do asteroid mining, smelting and refining of ores. Once we get a workable .1c spaceship design, I'm sure we'll have robots that could build the things in space, from materials harvested in space. I don't think we're talking about some sci-fi fantasy land. I think we're talking about the foreseeable future. And all this invites the question: if we're so far along the process to colonizing the galaxy, why haven't one of the countless probable civilizations beaten us to it? Or if they had, why is there no trace of their colonies? That's at the core of the Fermi paradox.

I love this idea, because it reminds me of the most energy efficient signal processing tool in the known universe, the human brain. Give Ken Jennings a granola bar, and he'll seriously challenge Watson, who will be needing several kilowatt-hours to do the same job. Plus, Ken Jennings is a lot more flexible. He can carry on conversations, tie shoes, etc. This is because his central processing unit basically relies on some sort of fault-tolerant software. I think that there will be a lot more applications of a fault-tolerant, energy efficient software strategy, beyond just media decoding. When we get around to asking computers to be creative and apply variously-weighted "rules of thumb", I expect that those operations will run best on systems that sacrifice calculation accuracy for speed and energy efficiency. You gain almost nothing when you apply rough heuristic rules precisely. Let's allow the computers to apply rough rules imprecisely, and reap the speed and energy benefits of the trade.

I agree, but consider also how impossible it now becomes for MS to make money from Office on portable devices. Sure, it isn't (yet) very relevant to sales on PCs and full notebooks, but that's not exactly the growth segment in the computer market. And when you consider that the typical young person has an Android phone before they ever get a PC. When they get around to buying one, you can sort of imagine that a future, better version of Quickoffice on the PC might feel to them like the document editor to try first.