A few years ago, a relative bought a new laptop that came with Windows Vista. She asked me for help putting her QuickBooks onto it.

Her version of QuickBooks simply wouldn't run on Vista. So I went to the store to buy an upgrade. I carefully studied the feature lists on the boxes for the various versions, trying to figure out which one she needed. For $100 I got some version ("Express" or "Starter" or something like that). It had all the features she needed and was $100 cheaper than the next version.

It turned out that it was missing one key feature: it didn't support upgrading! It would have been fine for her if she had started out with it, but because she was upgrading from an old version, she had to get the $200 QuickBooks. That's right, her reward for being a long-time customer was to pay $200 instead of $100 for a version that would run on Vista. (And it really didn't say on the box that upgrading wasn't supported. I had to figure it out... when I couldn't find an "import" dialog in the menus, I searched their web site; and I found a knowledge base article that plainly spelled out that importing was a feature reserved to the $200 and above versions.)

If I ever start a home business, I'll run it on some open source system. No Intuit products for me, not ever.

The Seahawks stadium is designed to be loud. It tends to focus noise rather than dissipate it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CenturyLink_Field#Home_field_advantage

http://www.businessinsider.com/seattle-seahawks-stadium-loud-2014-1

http://mynorthwest.com/25/702605/Why-NFLs-new-noise-rules-may-hurt-the-Seahawks

I guess the fans like to do loud things like stomping as well. So this really is the right place for this sort of experiment.

Is anyone here old enough to remember those languages . . . ?

For a brief period I worked with SNOBOL. I was reading old SNOBOL programs and re-writing them in AWK.

The AWK programs were smaller and simple to understand. The SNOBOL programs were hard to figure out... I would describe the process almost as "reverse-engineering".

SNOBOL's design dates back to the bad old days. It has "goto" hard-wired into the language; it has "fields" where you put certain things in certain places on the line, and then the control flow changes via goto branching. One field is the "goto on success" field, another is the "goto on failure" field. I didn't like this.

Even worse, the specific implementation of SNOBOL that we were using used simple recursion with backtracking for pattern matching, and it was possible for some patterns to consume unreasonable amounts of time. As a result, the SNOBOL contained a "heuristics" feature that would decide if a search seemed to be taking an unreasonable amount of time, and terminate the search early. Since there were valid patterns that could take that much time on valid inputs, there was also a global variable to switch the heuristics off, so you could force it to wait long enough to get a correct result if that occurred.

AWK, on the other hand, compiled regular expressions into a deterministic finite state automaton that would make one state transition per input character. It was so much faster than the SNOBOL programs.

So SNOBOL was hard to write, hard to understand, and had terrible performance. Other than that I guess it's okay.

http://everything2.com/title/SNOBOL

You might be happier if you pair your Pono with an O2 amp. The O2 was designed to be portable.

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/08/o2-details.html

If you like to solder you can build your own; the plans are open-source.

I don't like to solder and bought one pre-made from JDS Labs. I didn't care about portability and I wanted to use it with a computer so I bought the O2+ODAC all in one.

http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo/

You can spend more money, but you really can't beat the performance of an O2 and/or ODAC. You can spend less money but whatever you get won't be as good.

Certain instruments just don't encode very well.

True.

I used to work for James D. Johnston ("JJ") who was the co-inventor of MP3 while he was at Bell Labs. He told me that MP3 has a particular problem with reproducing the sound of a glockenspiel.

He was never happy with MP3. My understanding is that the standards process forced him to compromise the design in ways he didn't like, and later when he did AAC it was more like what he had wanted MP3 to be all along.

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2497684&cid=37865994

I think the thing being missed here is that people are in a hurry.

I think you didn't read TFA. Relevant:

The VIPs are leaving the carriers, driven away by the security annoyances and drawn by the convenience of much smaller jets that come when they call.

For rich people, time is the only thing money can't buy. A [hypersonic aircraft] flying between fixed hubs along pre-timed flight paths under conditions of high security is not convenient. A bizjet that flies at their beck and call is actually speedier across most intercontinental routes, unless the hypersonic route is serviced by multiple daily flights—which isn't going to happen unless the operating costs are comparable to a subsonic craft.

I know that if I had the money, I'd prefer to fly by bizjet. If I'm 5 minutes late it is still there waiting for me, and it flies from where I am directly to where I need to go... that's pretty hard to beat.

And he's right that governments will get really nervous about hypersonic craft. As he says in TFA, the hypersonic flight could stick to its planned flight path and then deviate only for the last 20 minutes, and still be able to hit an arbitrary target. With less time to react to the threat, government will try to preemptively secure each flight, which means the already-inconvenient airport security will get even more inconvenient.

Thus his point that even if hypersonic airplanes were available to them, rich people would rather fly a subsonic bizjet with minimal hassles (and with Internet available during the flight) rather than get to an airport on time, wait in the security holding pen with all the other common horde, undergo intrusive security procedures, fly really fast to whatever hub airport the hypersonic flight goes to, and then likely have to travel some more to get to the actually desired destination.

I just put Linux Mint 17.1 MATE 64-bit on a Lenovo IdeaPad S415. Everything just worked out of the box, and that includes both the multitouch touchpad and the touchscreen. Also the network, wifi, sound, and graphics. Everything.

http://notebookplanet.blogspot.com/2013/12/lenovo-ideapad-s415-specs.html

That IdeaPad is a year old. A year ago, no Linux that I tried worked out of the box with it; graphics didn't work. X always got confused by the fact that the machine has two graphics adapters (one built-in to the AMD APU chip, and a discrete one).

I've really been enjoying Linux Mint 17.1; it seems to be a big improvement over Linux Mint 16. You can easily and non-destructively try it, just by booting from a USB flash drive that has Linux Mint on it. (You can use UNetBootIn to make the USB flash drive.)

While I can't guarantee that Linux Mint 17.1 will work on your hardware, it worked great on mine so I think it's worth your time to try it out.

The best trade-off I have found is a game with a little randomness but not too much

I concur.

I have played some games with very little randomness, and for me at least they become "brain-burners" where I try to think three or four moves ahead. When I tried Caragena I had this problem. If there is some randomness, I can relax until it's my turn.

Also, some games that seem to contain a whole lot of randomness can become statistically predictable. If a game has you rolling a set of dice a dozen times in your turn, each roll is random but over all the rolls it averages out. In games like Can't Stop there is an undeniable element of luck, but it's less than a game that puts a great deal of importance on a single toss of the dice.

If you accidentally build an overly reliable product, as Apple did with the original iPad, you can still sabotage it

Huh. Usually I see Apple owners posting happy comments about how well their ancient Apple devices still work and how they are really saving money if you look at the long life cycle.

My old Android devices are still useful. New apps still work on them and Google hasn't made any effort to sabotage them.

Would you consider these microsculptures works of art, or a craft?

Question for you: Would you consider photographs to be works of art, or a craft?

I think there is no serious disagreement that photographs can count as art, and these microsculptures were carefully planned and posed as art. If you are going to suggest that they may not clear the bar as art, then it seems to me that you would have to rule out photography as well.

We usually consider replication or fabrication of predefined forms (with challenging technique) a craft.

Are photos art because they are easier to make than microsculptures? I don't quite follow your emphasis on the technique needing to be challenging.

All a photo really is: the visual replication of whatever the camera was pointing at when the photographer activated the shutter release. Yet we consider there is art where the photographer chooses what to photograph, how to frame the photograph, and even things like what kind of film to use (black-and-white vs. color, grainy vs. smooth, etc.). It seems to me that similar dimensions of choice were in play when Jonty Hurwitz made the microsculptures: he chose what to reproduce as sculpture, what poses to use, what scale, what materials the sculptures were to be made from, etc.

Would your position on the microsculptures change if the Jonty Hurwitz had called them "3D photographs"?

P.S. While we are debating what is and is not art, do you take a position on the dadaist sculpture "Fountain"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

Personally, I think that there is artistic merit in taking a pre-made object and changing how one looks upon it (I doubt anyone had ever conflated a urinal and a fountain before this). However, while it was radical (even shocking) in 1917, anyone trying to do the same thing today is bringing little new to art. If I put an upside-down coffee maker on a pedestal and title this work "Brown Liquid Fountain" I doubt anyone would be very impressed.

If you reject "Fountain" as not art, you are in disagreement with very many people. If you accept "Fountain" as art, then why would you not accept the microsculptures as art?

And if pre-made art is only clever the first time it's done, Jonty Hurwitz is still on safe ground; I've never heard of anyone else doing this first.

If you really want cleaner air, the best thing to do would be to get as many old cars off the road as possible, so that people will be driving new cars. The new cars are so much cleaner than the old cars, it's amazing.

With the above in mind, I don't think the government should tighten up emissions standards even more. All the easy gains are gone, and now it takes engineering and expense to make cars pollute even less, which means that cars will be more expensive. If the government forces all the cars to be cleaner, all the cars get more expensive so it's fair as far as car makers go; but making new cars more expensive means people are more likely to keep driving dirty old cars.

There is a good discussion here: http://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/

Thus, while it may seem counter-intuitive, I believe the best way to get the air cleaner is to leave the standards right where they are and try to get the cost of a new car to drift downward.

The new cars are much safer than the really old cars also, so getting more people into new cars will also save more lives than making the crash standards tougher.

I think that within 20 to 30 years, the majority of vehicles will be electric anyway, and emissions will be very much reduced. (The reason I think that: improved solar technology and new storage technologies will bring down the cost of electricity; and battery costs will come down, especially due to the Tesla "giga-factory". I know I'd be happy with an electric vehicle, and rent a gas vehicle for my occasional long road trip.)

This example was about predatory journals. There are also predatory "vanity publishers" that convince aspiring authors to pay money to get their book published.

A group of science fiction authors put together a complete novel to sting one such vanity press. The result, Atlanta Nights, is a hoot!

In one chapter, Bruce Lucent is a young hotshot software developer; in another, he is an old, broken-down shell of a man. Some chapters have new characters that are never heard from again. Near the end of the book, the full text of the first chapter appears again as a new chapter. Also, someone wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream... and then the book continues for a few more chapters. And my favorite: the last chapter was written by feeding other chapters into a Markov Chain nonsense generator. Example: "Bruce Lucent walked around anymore."

Rather than using Simpsons names, they chose a fake name "Travis Tea" that sounds like the word "travesty".

Atlanta Nights was accepted for publication, but after the authors had their press release the publisher changed its mind.

http://www.sfwa.org/members/travistea/backstory.htm

They got a bunch of famous authors to give tongue-in-cheek blurbs about the book. Jerry Pournelle: "Don't fail to miss it if you can!"

By the way, the ChromeBook is easy to put into "developer mode" and then you can install non-Chrome software on it. I installed Crouton and a command-line Debian system. I have Bash, vim, Python, Debian build-essential, and gdb.