Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, Villa Borghese
via:

Beach Town

From one end of town to the other, one-pound bricks of butter melt slowly into metal crocks, thick layers of white froth gathering on the surface. In the bars, the seasonal visitors drink Heineken out of chilled bottles. The townies drink Bud Light.

The smell, when you walk down the street, is of French fries, cooked in the same hot grease as the clams—though clam strips is what it says on the #10 cans they come in. They are dunked into banks of deep-fryers by the same people who do the roofing and house painting in the spring. French fries and clam strips are joined in the bubbling oil by scallops and shrimp, flounder fillets, and rings of squid, all coated in the same universal breading. By the town pier there are funnel cakes and the fudge shop, adding a sickly sweet note to the airborne miasma of atomized fat. As you walk down Main Street after the dinner rush, past the Shell Shop, the Shirt Shop, the Dinghy Dock, Neptune Lounge, Olde Towne Tavern, Cap’n Barnes Galley Bar, Candles ’N’ Things, Reggie’s Pizza, and the Scupper, you hear the clatter of hundreds of lobster carcasses scraping against heavy Buffalo China plates.

Tomorrow morning, former cheerleaders from the local high school will cut lemons into wedges, fill bowls with pilot biscuits in little plastic wrappers, pluck sprigs of curly parsley to float in ice water. They’ll line up monkey dishes and ramekins, top off the ketchup bottles, restock the lobster bibs, fold napkins, and gather around garbage stockades in rear parking lots to smoke and gossip about last night.

I’m six years old, playing with molded plastic army men in the beach grass of the dunes. Here comes the truck that sprays insecticide in a huge, smoky cloud from its rear; I join the other children from the block, running in its wake. For dinner, there will be mussels and steamed lobster, corn on the cob, Jersey tomatoes.

I’m twelve years old, same dunes, smoking pilfered menthol cigarettes with some girls who are older. For dinner, there will be pan-fried tails of the blowfish I caught off the dock, or take-out pizza. Somebody’s dad will fire up the grill and cook hamburgers and hot dogs in a backyard of pebbles and crushed seashells. The adults will get tipsy and play charades or rummy or Mille Bornes or whatever game is popular that summer. The kids will slip off into the dark to build fires on the beach.

I’m seventeen years old, “wrapping the bakes” in the cellar of the Riptide Lounge—there’s a sinkful of potatoes I am detailed to seal in portion-controlled squares of tinfoil, which I’ll then pierce with a fork. After that, I’ll pull the muscles off a bushel of sticky sea scallops, wash the spinach and romaine, dodge the pots and pans the cooks throw into the pot sink next to me. Then it’s bust suds, dive for pearls (wash dishes) from five to midnight, mop the kitchen, strip the stove, drag the mats out into the parking lot to hose them down. Then it’s the glorious walk home. The town’s other restaurants are closing down too—dishwashers running their last loads, bar customers with raised voices laughing at unheard jokes, the clatter of plates loaded into trays, boat whistles, the occasional foghorn.

I’m eighteen years old and the menu is clam chowder, kale soup, shrimp cocktail, lobster salad, Caesar salad, oysters on the half, clams on the half, broiled fish, fried fish, fisherman’s platter, steamed cherrystones, squid stew, cioppino, steamed mussels in red sauce, steamed mussels in white wine, steamed lobster, broiled lobster, stuffed lobster, stuffed flounder, broiled bluefish, haddock amandine, New York strip, ribeye. I can cook the whole menu and think I’m fucking Escoffier.

by Anthony Bourdain, Lucky Peach |  Read more:

Image: Cari Vander Yacht

Wim Vandekeybus, What the Body Does Not Remember
via:

How To Get A Cheap Motorcycle And Not Crash It

The problem is, most things are Good in inverse proportion to the degree to which they’re Fun. Broccoli is Good; Bacon is Fun. Taxes are Good; Casinos are Fun. Gyms are Good; Bars are Fun. You get the picture. But assuming, as I do, that all of us must live at least a little, few things are less Good and more Fun than a motorcycle. And no motorcycle is less Good and more Fun than a cheap o
ne.

I speak from experience. I bought my motorcycle some years ago for $500—nearly a week’s pay for a teenage booze-cruise deckhand. I proceeded to paint it, wrench it, crash it, fix it, and use it as my primary means of wheeled transport for about three years. I cannot think of money I have spent better. Today it sits in a garage in Vermont, a testament to phlegmy carbs and small-scale electrical fires, calling me back like Danny from The Shining.

There are many Good things a motorcycle cannot do. A motorcycle cannot haul useful quantities of anything. A motorcycle cannot be used to bring your friends to the movies. A motorcycle cannot keep you dry in the rain, or especially safe in any sort of impact. A motorcycle cannot play your favorite songs. Sure, with a little know-how, a motorcycle can do all these things, but once you’ve put the engineering in, all you’ve built is a Fiat 500, which is neither Good nor Fun.

What a motorcycle can do is much more interesting. Being atop your transportation, as opposed to inside it, forces a certain mental presence. Flying down the road on the back of an incredibly dumb robot encourages you to pay attention to your surroundings, lest you become violently embedded in them. But this connection pays dividends. Your commute becomes an activity, your vehicle an extension of yourself, your world a bit more playful. All of this is to say, if you ride a motorcycle down a good road on a green day, you will smile. You should try it.

Getting Started

The first thing you’ll need is a motorcycle permit. Most jurisdictions will require you to take a short test, and provide a study guide to help you do it. Read this, in full, several times. You are essentially sitting on a sawhorse and encouraging the world to attack you at 60 miles an hour; you should have a grasp on the basics. Once you’ve demonstrated your minimum proficiency at booklet retention, you can begin to shop.

Most modern motorcycles are designed around a purpose. Cruisers make you look like a Son of Anarchy. Touring bikes help you go to Alaska with, or away from, your wife. Dual-sports and enduros let you ride to nature, then through it. Sport bikes are for going very fast. Standards are kind of alright at everything.

What Your Money Will Buy You

$0-1,000: DEATHTRAPS

At this price range, you’re mostly looking at used Japanese Standards, low-displacement cruiser-style bikes, and sports bikes with problems. Actually, everything here is going to have problems. You’re going to see a lot of bikes that need new batteries and carburetor cleaning, which are buyer-beware bywords for bikes that have been sitting forever and weren’t maintained in the first place.

I bought a Yamaha XS400 from a dealer who was patient enough to answer my questions when I had to, say, push the non-running bike to the shop, yell a question, and then run two miles to work in boots and a leather jacket. When I returned, he had it running again out of pure sympathy. What I’m saying is that you can get a deal here, or a project, but I’d recommend a hard look from someone with mechanical expertise. The same electrical failures, steering lockups, and soft brakes that are inconvenient in cars can mean a trip to the hospital in a bike.

$1,000-3,000: KNOCKAROUNDS

Here, you’ll find decently maintained or rebuilt UJMs, used sport bikes that aren’t time bombs, and cruisers that are.

$3,000-6,000: RESPECTABLES

This is the sweet spot, or would be if you weren’t buying a toy that could kill you for the price of a European vacation. Used cruisers, sport bikes, and standards in good mechanical condition abound. If you’re no mechanic and want something you can ride every day and fix mostly with wrenches, this is the category for you.

$6,000-10,000: BRAND NEW

Here you can buy a new Sportster or Triumph or sport bike. They’re new. They will have fewer or no quirks. Google, ask the dealer a lot of questions, and shop around on price.

$10,000+: LOOK AT YOU!

At this point, you’re doing one of three things: track racing, taking a sabbatical ride around the world, or trying to reclaim your masculinity. I can’t help with the first two, and my rates for the third are unreasonable.

by Samuel Wadhams, Adequate Man | Read more:
Images: Jim Cooke and Getty

Your Backyard Is the Wild West for Drones

You may have caught the story last week about the Kentucky man who was arrested after shooting down a drone in his backyard. William Merideth said that the vehicle was hovering over his teenage daughter, who was sunbathing. Whatever your views on private ownership of firearms (to say nothing of their discharge for this purpose), the case reminds us that the increasing private use of unmanned aircraft raises yet-unresolved questions about privacy.

Civilian drones have been shot down before. Other means, too, have been employed against them. In June, firefighters used a hose to blast a drone that was recording a house fire. After the Los Angeles Kings won the Stanley Cup in 2014, ecstatic fans used a T-shirt to knock a drone from the sky (I'm still trying to picture this), then continued their celebration by pounding it with a skateboard. Evidently, few of us are comfortable at the thought that another person might be watching from above.

Certainly Merideth didn't like the idea. "It was hovering," he told Ars Technica. "I would never have shot it if it was flying. When he came down with a video camera right over my back deck, that's not going to work. I know they're neat little vehicles, but one of those uses shouldn't be flying into people's yards and videotaping."

Most of us would worry about other people using technology to peek in our windows or hover over our yards. But mounting concerns about drones and privacy have so far received little official response, as government agencies have instead prioritized their own operations.

So have the many companies eagerly awaiting the opportunity to exploit drone technology. The Federal Aviation Administration has estimated that by 2030, there will be more than 30,000 private unmanned vehicles competing for U.S. airspace. As it happens, NASA last week hosted the initial Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management Convention in Mountain View, California. In remarks to the meeting, Gur Kimchi, vice president of Amazon Prime Air, proposed dividing Class G airspace -- that is, the space below 500 feet, the usual beginning of navigable airspace -- into three zones. From the ground up to 200 feet would be reserved for hobbyists, 200 to 400 feet would constitute a high-speed zone for commercial use, and the space between 400 and 500 feet would remain a buffer, as now.

Notice that this division would not solve the problem of drones hovering over presumably private spaces in backyards -- the concern that led Merideth to take up arms. Nor is the FAA, which regulates the nation's airspace, likely to be of much assistance. Under the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, the agency is required to issue regulations for private drone use. The rules, now expected in 2016, will likely to be generous to both commercial operators and hobbyists.

But the FAA's proposed regulations deal with such matters as the qualifications for operators and the precise systems for keeping track of the unmanned vehicles in flight. Although the agency "notes that privacy concerns have been raised about unmanned aircraft operation," it hastens to add that the privacy question is "beyond the scope of the rulemaking." Not to worry, though. The FAA assures us that there's a "multi-stakeholder engagement process" for that.

In other words, the FAA plans to kick the privacy issue down the road, licensing the use of drones without regard to sunbathing teenagers, or others who might just want to be left alone. The agency suggests that the privacy question be determined under state law.

But nobody knows where state law stands. Some argue that low-flying drones are trespassers. A telephone wire strung across my property without consent violates my property rights. Why not an aircraft? From the late 16th century, the common law took the position that property ownership extended infinitely into the heavens. The era of aviation put an end to that maxim. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1946 decision in U.S. v. Causby, it has been generally accepted that the property rights of a homeowner end 83 feet above the ground. That's awfully close to the ground. Never mind peeking in apartment windows; recording high definition video from 100 feet up doesn't present any sort of challenge.

by Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Martin Divisek

Giorgio de Chirico - Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits 1916
via:

Jethro Tull (Ian Anderson)

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

[ed. See also: This excerpt - Off Diamond Head]

There’s a passage near the beginning of Middlemarch in which the narrator describes the view out of a carriage window that depicts, better than anything I’ve ever read, the pleasure of knowing a place intimately. “Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood,” George Eliot writes. She goes on to cite a list of beloved natural features: trees that lean in a certain way, abrupt slopes, a bald spot in a pasture.

These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to [the area’s] souls—the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart standing between their father’s knees while he drove leisurely.

This capacity for geographical familiarity—knowing exactly where the neighbor’s fence warps slightly—is a visceral kind of knowledge, gained organically, and it atrophies as we age. Learning a place by heart is a luxury rarely afforded to adults, and unless absolutely forced to, one seldom even notices that the ability has been lost.

In his new book, the New Yorker staff writer and veteran war reporter William Finnegan demonstrates the advantages of keeping meticulous mental maps. For him, memorizing a place is a matter of nostalgia, of metaphysical well-being, but also of life and death. Finnegan’s memoir is not about his professional life reporting on blood-soaked Sudan or Bosnia or Nicaragua; it’s about the “disabling enchantment” that is his lifelong hobby.

“The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell…is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break,” he writes in Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Surfers, like children, naturally develop sensory affinity for their surroundings: they can detect minor changes in the smell of the sea, track daily the rise and fall of sandbars, are grateful for particularly sturdy roots onto which they can grab when scurrying down bluffs. The environment becomes an almost anatomical extension of them, mostly because it has to.

Unlike football or baseball or even boxing, surfing is a literarily impoverished sport. The reasons for this are practical. It’s not a spectator sport: it is hard to see surfers from the shore. That the best waves are seldom anywhere near civilization makes it an activity especially resistant to journalism, and first-rate writing by surfers is also rare: the impulse to surf—a “special brand of monomania,” Finnegan calls it—is at direct odds with the indoor obligations of writing.

In many ways this is true for any athletic activity—that its very best practitioners will very seldom be the same people who document it—but it’s particularly true of surfing, which demands more traveling, logistical planning, and waiting around than any other athletic endeavor. Even when surfers are not surfing, they’re thinking about it: listening to buoy reports, peering off cliffs with binoculars, preventing themselves from buying new boards.

Though middle school students have worn surfwear-branded clothing for decades now and surfing has become increasingly popular among the billionaires of Santa Clara County, it remains an elusive pastime in the minds of most everyone who has never done it. The reasons for this too are practical. Appropriate beaches are rare; high schools don’t have teams; and while not as prohibitively expensive as skiing, surfing requires roughly the same amount of cumbersome gear and is, if possible, even more physically uncomfortable. There are the damp, mildewed wetsuits; the feet cut by coral; the sunburns and the salt-stung eyes. Pair all this with the specter of Jeff Spicoli (the surfer and pot smoker played by Sean Penn in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the easy-to-imitate accent, and you have a hobby that is easy to mock, if not ignore. It’s certainly not a pastime anyone associates with ambition or mental agility.

Which is precisely what makes the propulsive precision of Finnegan’s writing so surprising and revelatory. For over half a century at this point, readers have taken it as a given (and writers as a professional prerogative) that lowbrow culture is deserving of bookish analysis. But unlike so many writhing attempts to extort meaning from topics that seem intellectually bankrupt, Finnegan’s treatment of surfing never feels like performance. Through the sheer intensity of his descriptive powers and the undeniable ways in which surfing has shaped his life, Barbarian Days is an utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing.

“Getting a spot wired—truly understanding it—can take years,” Finnegan writes, continuing, later, to say that “all surfers are oceanographers.” Over the course of a life spent in and out of the water, he has amassed a truly staggering amount of applied knowledge, of marine biology and carpentry and cartography. Surfing requires kinetic intuition, physical fitness, and courage in the face of an indifferent force, but it also demands the sort of mental work we don’t typically associate with extreme sports. Any good writing about an underexamined way of life must be, at least at times, expository, and Finnegan is lucid when it comes to the necessary task of explaining to the uninitiated some of the most basic tenets of surfing: why waves break where they do; how it’s possible to stand on a floating piece of fiberglass, go into a moving tube of water, and emerge looking just as you did upon entry. But despite all this, surfing, as Finnegan renders it, is more than just a fun physical activity: it’s a way of being in the world, with its own private politics and etiquette and benchmarks of success.

by Alice Gregory, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Josh Humbert/National Geographic Creative

Ralph Steadman, Gregorian Thwacksplat
via:

Yuta Onoda
via:

Joni Mitchell

[ed. Best wishes for a complete and speedy recovery.]

The Raise that Roared

There are times when Dan Price feels as if he stumbled into the middle of the street with a flag and found himself at the head of a parade.

Three months ago, Mr. Price, 31, announced he was setting a new minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle credit card processing firm, Gravity Payments, and slashing his own million-dollar pay package to do it. He wasn’t thinking about the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor, he said. He was just thinking of the 120 people who worked for him and, let’s be honest, a bit of free publicity. The idea struck him when a friend shared her worries about paying both her rent and student loans on a $40,000 salary. He realized a lot of his own employees earned that or less.

Yet almost overnight, a decision by one small-business man in the northwestern corner of the country became a swashbuckling blow against income inequality.

The move drew attention from around the world — including from some outspoken skeptics and conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, who smelled a socialist agenda — but most were enthusiastic. Talk show hosts lined up to interview Mr. Price. Job seekers by the thousands sent in résumés. He was called a “thought leader.” Harvard business professors flew out to conduct a case study. Third graders wrote him thank-you notes. Single women wanted to date him.

What few outsiders realized, however, was how much turmoil all the hoopla was causing at the company itself. To begin with, Gravity was simply unprepared for the onslaught of emails, Facebook posts and phone calls. The attention was thrilling, but it was also exhausting and distracting. And with so many eyes focused on the firm, some hoping to witness failure, the pressure has been intense.

More troubling, a few customers, dismayed by what they viewed as a political statement, withdrew their business. Others, anticipating a fee increase — despite repeated assurances to the contrary — also left. While dozens of new clients, inspired by Mr. Price’s announcement, were signing up, those accounts will not start paying off for at least another year. To handle the flood, he has already had to hire a dozen additional employees — now at a significantly higher cost — and is struggling to figure out whether more are needed without knowing for certain how long the bonanza will last.

Two of Mr. Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises. Some friends and associates in Seattle’s close-knit entrepreneurial network were also piqued that Mr. Price’s action made them look stingy in front of their own employees.

Then potentially the worst blow of all: Less than two weeks after the announcement, Mr. Price’s older brother and Gravity co-founder, Lucas Price, citing longstanding differences, filed a lawsuit that potentially threatened the company’s very existence. With legal bills quickly mounting and most of his own paycheck and last year’s $2.2 million in profits plowed into the salary increases, Dan Price said, “We don’t have a margin of error to pay those legal fees.”

As Mr. Price spoke in the Gravity conference room, he could see a handful of employees setting up beach chairs in the parking lot for an impromptu meeting. The office is in Ballard, a fast-gentrifying neighborhood of Seattle that reflects the wealth gap that Mr. Price says he wants to address. Downstairs is a yoga studio, and across the street is a coffee bar where customers can sip velvet soy lattes on Adirondack-style chairs. But around the corner, beneath the elevated roadway, a homeless woman silently appeals to drivers stopped at the red light with a cardboard sign: “Plz Help.”

In his own way, Mr. Price is trying to respond to that request.

“Income inequality has been racing in the wrong direction,” he said. “I want to fight for the idea that if someone is intelligent, hard-working and does a good job, then they are entitled to live a middle-class lifestyle.”

The reaction to his salary pledge has led him to think that if his business continues to prosper, his actions could have far-reaching consequences. “The cause has expanded,” he said. “Whether I like it or not, the stakes are higher.”

by Patricia Cohen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times 

Georgia O’Keeffe, Tan Clam Shell with Seaweed. 1926
via:

Dynasty Trusts: The Permanently Wealthy

It’s a common-sense notion that society’s wealth shouldn’t be governed by ghosts. “Our Creator made the earth for the use of the living and not of the dead,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. (Also: “One generation of men cannot foreclose or burthen its use to another.”) But in our new age of inequality—the top 10 percent now own nearly 80 percent of all wealth—old concerns about wealth and inheritance are coming back from the dead.

Americans have, historically, had a simple approach to dealing with wealth after its holder dies: You can do whatever you want with your property, but not for very long. Rich people can disinherit children. They can put extreme conditions on how their successors can inherit, like requiring marriage. They can build monuments to themselves or give everything to their pets. But they can only do it so long. Eventually, time catches up with them and their estates dissolve.

Or at least that’s how it used to be. Remember that the dead can’t actually do any of this themselves because they are, in fact, dead. Instead, a trust is empowered to carry out the last wishes of the deceased. A trust is simply a legal entity that contains property; people tell a trust what they want to do, and the trust acts like a ghost, enforcing their wishes beyond the grave. But there’s a safeguard built in to prevent abuses: Trusts have been governed by something called the rule against perpetuities, which places a roughly 100-year limit on how long they can exist. This prevents people with no connection to the living world from putting restrictions on our country’s wealth.

In recent years, the safeguard of time has been eroded. As the tax expert Ray D. Madoff documents in her 2010 book Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead, we are experiencing a rapid rise of dynasty trusts, which massively expand the power of the dead over the wealth of the living.

To take advantage of a change made to the tax code in the 1980s, states started to radically diminish or outright remove the rule against perpetuities in the 1990s. This resulted in a race to the bottom, with states competing to see which could most effectively restructure their laws to benefit the rich. By 2003, states weakening these rules received an estimated $100 billion in additional trust business. Now, 28 states allow trusts to live indefinitely, or nearly so, creating what are called perpetual dynasty trusts.

Since they’re designed to live forever, dynasty trusts can engage in more controlling long-term activities than normal trusts, which are designed to have an end. Dynasty trusts can also avoid taxes for the term of the trust. A generous multimillion-dollar tax exemption for trusts that skip a generation can be leveraged aggressively. And since the eventual death of the trust isn’t built in, a dynasty trust can buy houses and assets that are retained for descendants, tax-free, by the trust indefinitely. The wealthy can tie up their money, outside of any public obligation or scrutiny, forever.

by Mike Konczal, The Nation | Read more:
Image: Tracy Loeffelholz Dunn

Chambers Bay

[ed. Site of this year's US Open. Way more stunning in person than on tv -- including greens fees starting at $215/round. And no, I didn't pay that, but I did buy a hat.]
images: markk

Seattle's $87.6 Million Dollar Man

[ed. I love Russell Wilson, but... wow. I hope this doesn't compromise contract negotiations for any of the other great players on the team.]

It took until almost the 11th — or should that be the 12th? — hour.

But the Seahawks have reached an agreement on a contract extension with quarterback Russell Wilson this morning, shortly before the team is to begin training camp at the VMAC in Renton, preparing for the 2015 season — and when Wilson’s side had set a deadline to get the deal done or play the season without an extension. Wilson confirmed the news via Twitter.

The contract is said to be a four-year extension worth $87.6 million, according to Peter King of Sports Illustrated, who first had the news.

It is said to include a $31 million signing bonus with $60 million guaranteed. The guaranteed money had been regarded as one of the prime sticking points in the negotiations. That is more than the $54 million guaranteed of Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers, whose contract is for $22 million a year, a little more than the $21.9 million of Wilson.

While the average per year is about what it had been said Wilson had been offered all along, the guarantee is higher than a source said the team had initially been offering, and it was that increase that appears to have allowed the deal to get done.

Wilson was entering the final season of his initial four-year rookie contract which would have paid him $1.52 million in 2015.

by Bob Condotta, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

Power in Numbers

The best historical analogy for the ‘‘hackathon’’ might be the 18th-­century custom of the barn-­raising. Despite the technological abyss separating the two rituals, they are structurally akin: Each is a social observance in which a lot of people focus their collective will on an undertaking too great for any individual to carry out alone. Though the informal practice of hackathons arose slightly earlier, the first use of the portmanteau name dates to 1999, when Sun Microsystems and the freeware operating system OpenBSD each staged events under that banner to write very specialized pieces of software very quickly.

Over time, the sense of the term has expanded; one count estimates that in 2015 there will be more than 1,500 gatherings branded as hackathons, with this summer alone offering events designed to plan for Australia’s aging population, conserve water in India and streamline the resale of tickets at Wimbledon. There are hackathons for television technologies, life sciences and political causes — the term these days is used anywhere people congregate with the expectation of getting something vaguely machine-­oriented done in one big room.

The world’s largest recurring convention of people and their machines is DreamHack, a 72-hour rally that takes place twice a year in the convention center in Jonkoping, Sweden, a lake city about 200 miles southwest of Stockholm. The most recent jamboree hosted more than 23,000 people from at least 55 nations and every inhabited continent; on their 9,500 computers (as well as 14,000 other network-­connected devices), the attendees made up what organizers believe to be the largest impromptu LAN, or local area network, assembled anywhere.

DreamHack began in 1994, in the basement of a nearby elementary school, as a small, local subvariant of what was then called a ‘‘copy­party’’ — pre-­broadband occasions to share software or demonstrate flashy off-­label uses of early home computers. As the event has grown, its enormous ad hoc network has been given over largely to gaming; for far-flung clans of four or five teammates, this can be the only chance they get all year to palaver in person. But participants also use the LAN to collaborate on all manner of projects, from songs to films to digital artworks, all of which are presented to the crowd.

by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Franck Bohbot

Windows 10 is the Best Version Yet—Once the Bugs Get Fixed

I'm more conflicted about Windows 10 than I have been about any previous version of Windows. In some ways, the operating system is extremely ambitious; in others, it represents a great loss of ambition. The new release tries to walk an unsteady path between being Microsoft's most progressive, forward-looking release and simultaneously appealing to Windows' most conservative users.

And it mostly succeeds, making this the best version of Windows yet—once everything's working. In its current form, the operating system doesn't feel quite finished, and I'd wait a few weeks before making the leap.

Windows 7 was a straightforward proposition, a testament to the power of a new name. Windows Vista may have had a poor reputation, but it was a solid operating system. Give hardware and software vendors three years to develop drivers, come to grips with security changes, fix a few bugs, and freeze the hardware requirements, and the result was Windows 7—an operating system that worked with almost any hardware, almost any software. It was comfortable and familiar. Add some small but desirable enhancements to window management and the task bar, and the result was a hugely popular operating system, the high point of the entire Windows family's development.

Windows 8 was similarly easy to understand. With it, Microsoft wanted to make Windows work well on tablets while also wanting an operating system that continued to support the enormous legacy of Win32 applications.

Windows 8 did both of these things—just not at the same time. It contained the basics of a very competent tablet platform, with particularly strong handling of multitasking. It also contained, in most regards, a solid desktop operating system that was very similar to Windows 7. Some things it even made a little better; in Windows 8, for instance, the taskbar finally became multi-monitor aware, ending the need for various third-party hacks.

But these worlds collided in an ugly fashion. The tablet part was never self-contained, with touch users forced to visit finger-unfriendly desktop apps to access a full range of system settings, manage files, and so on. And many desktop users resented being forced to use a full-screen application launcher that, while perfectly functional, was clearly designed for touch users first.

This operating system showcased some of Microsoft's worst habits. Windows has always been a frustratingly inconsistent platform, sporting a mix not just of visual styles but also of user interface elements. It contains, for example, multiple different styles of "menu." While these all do roughly the same thing, they differ both in how they look and in some of the finer points of their behavior. Windows 8 introduced yet another new and very different appearance and set of interface elements to Windows, with no effort to unify and integrate. (...)

Since Windows 8's launch, touch PCs have proliferated, and while there was some initially awkward experimentation, manufacturers today have a decent idea of how to do touch systems. While there's still some skepticism about the value of touch on a desktop PC, on laptops it's an attractive feature, especially when paired with perhaps the best form factor innovation that has come from the Windows 8 experimentation: the 360-degree hinge. As an occasional business traveler sitting in misery in cattle class, the ability to use a laptop in "stand" mode or "tent" mode for watching movies is genuinely useful. Touch makes it practical.

Similarly, devices such as Microsoft's own Surface Pro 3 have found a small but growing audience. Its combination of touch, pen, and keyboard has won plaudits, and, while it's still early days, it looks as if Microsoft is starting to build a small but credible PC hardware business.

Which all means that Microsoft's broad desire with Windows 8 was perhaps not entirely off-base. Touch systems are not some discrete category entirely disjointed from more traditional machines. Rather, there's a continuum of devices, ranging from the dedicated mouse-and-keyboard machine through to the tablet that may occasionally be paired with a Bluetooth keyboard and all the way on to the smartphone, which will almost never use anything but touch. Microsoft continues to want to make Windows an operating system that works across this spectrum—and the dream lives on in Windows 10.

by Peter Bright, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Cunningham

via:

Mississippi Fred McDowell, 1965
via: