Since I listen to A LOT of music, I think a lot about formats and such. This (www.angrymetalguy.com) is a pretty great summary of mp3's. I might start cataloging my favorites in a lossless format after all, even if mp3's are mostly okay ;)
BUT STILL NO PONO FOR ME
Heard a story on this paper on NPR: http://papers.ssrn....bstract_id=2466040 (papers.ssrn.com)
From the abstract:
Research shows that evidence-based algorithms more accurately predict the future than do human forecasters. Yet, when forecasters are deciding whether to use a human forecaster or a statistical algorithm, they often choose the human forecaster. This phenomenon, which we call algorithm aversion, is costly, and it is important to understand its causes. We show that people are especially averse to algorithmic forecasters after seeing them perform, even when they see them outperform a human forecaster. This is because people more quickly lose confidence in algorithmic than human forecasters after seeing them make the same mistake. In five studies, participants either saw an algorithm make forecasts, a human make forecasts, both, or neither. They then decided whether to tie their incentives to the future predictions of the algorithm or the human. Participants who saw the algorithm perform were less confident in it, and less likely to choose it over an inferior human forecaster. This was true even among those who saw the algorithm outperform the human.
Is SimCity homelessness a bug or a feature? In which some people take their video game WAY too seriously. This is an article about a guys 700 page book about this.
Also read the comments. The guy in the first few comments is a master level troll.
http://motherboard...-a-bug-or-a-feature (motherboard.vice.com)
This pretty much just made my day at work. Except our lame IT lady just told me I can't download and play while I'm actually at work, on my actual work computer.
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games/v2 (archive.org)
Have you seen this insane spaceship this guy built for his children? Between us we have the ability to do this. Dave has the woodworking stuff. Josh can program stuff. Who has a soddering iron and welding abilities? Also who has four spare months to do this?
You don't get to be on my phone anymore, Facebook: Why Does Facebook Need to Read My Text Messages? (yro.slashdot.org)
Google Hangout: You stay signed out until I need you. Which might be never.
SPDCA: What I do in my free time (stackoverflow.com), or, giving myself Internet high-fives.
A fun read if you're into Git, or caching, or what I have to do in order to get web pages to process in less than 200ms.
The 416d65726963612043616e20436f646520 Act of 2013 (cardenas.house.gov).
Classifies programming languages as "critical foreign languages," that would "create a competitive matching grant program for schools, particularly those in low-income areas, to create new ways to teach computer science and engineering, in tandem with universities and non-profits."
Did you know a Last of Us graphic novel is coming out?
I know because I just got a suggest a purchase request for it, so I'll be ordering it for the library.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Us-American-Dreams/dp/1616552123/ (www.amazon.com)
Faith Erin Hicks is one of my favorite graphic novel artists. I have an autographed copy of Friends With Boys by her.
10,000-year clock http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/ (www.wired.com)
I know this story is a couple years old but I am just finding it.
The thing about this clock that raises the hair on the back of my neck is the potential for some future archaeologist or paleontologist (terrestrial or extraterrestrial) finding this clock, examining it, and discovering that, yes, it ran for 10,000 years (or even longer) and has stopped working at some point.
At my previous job, the ancient version of Firefox we used had become sort of a joke. It would constantly render incorrectly such that I was always chasing down formatting/styling bugs that had long since been fixed. Or, it would incur miserable slowdowns on Javascript-heavy client applications (of which we had many). Add to that, almost every site we visited claimed that we needed to "upgrade our browser to a more secure version," and some would even refuse to function based on that alone. I would have to get a plugin to falsely report my version in order to gain access to some sites.
At one point, I tried to take it upon my self to upgrade my workstation's Firefox. I downloaded the source code, and did the usual ritual to get it configured and compiled. However, about halfway through the compilation, it would come back with memory errors, claiming the compiler (a relatively small, concise program) had ran out of memory in trying to compile the pieces of Firefox together.
Turns out, even though Firefox itself will run on a machine with less than 4GB of RAM, you will still need at least 4GB of RAM (developer.mozilla.org) in order for it to compile correctly. Add to that the fact that Firefox eventually outgrew being able to compile on 32-bit Windows systems (developers.slashdot.org), such that you would need a 64-bit machine with 4GB+ memory in order to even build a 32-bit Firefox. That is to say: Firefox, though perhaps only a "simple" web browser, is a large project, both in scope, breadth, and the number of people involved with its development.
That said, Firefox releases are estimated to weigh in at ~2.9 million lines of source code.
Which is why I laugh when I hear size estimates of HealthCare.Gov to be in the 500 million lines of source code. (www.alexmarchant.com)
This implies to me that that number is one or more of the following:
First I laugh, then I get a little sad. I used to work at a place like CGI Federal doing government contracting. How the government wants to build software is a bad way to build software. Having one big thing that solves all problems is a near-impossible task. Having dozens of different contractors working on one big thing without clear leadership makes it worse. Having a "tech surge" at the end of a project is, in the software engineering world, a well-documented way to kill a project and/or prolong its maintenance in perpetuity.
Much as I like to have software engineering in the news, I'd prefer it to not be like this.
From the LibreDWG project page:
LibreDWG is based on LibDWG (http://libdwg.sourceforge.net (libdwg.sourceforge.net)), which is written with variable names, documentation and comments in Esperanto.
Goddamn hilarious.
And then Steve said, 'Let There Be an iPhone' (www.nytimes.com)
By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”
I'm sure you have already all seen this, but this is a pretty nice chart with size comparisons of every sci fi starship ever.
http://kotaku.com/every-sci-fi-starship-ever-in-one-mindblowing-comparis-1391608737 (kotaku.com)
The scene that should have been in Star Trek: Nemesis: http://www.youtube...;v=Vxyd7L-2YuQ#t=99 (www.youtube.com)
I'm going to go cry while brushing my teeth before work.
Interesting video about the UTF-8 encoding scheme, which more or less makes the Internet go 'round these days: https://www.youtub...watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4 (www.youtube.com)
