Windows 10 has been released now, and on the whole, I have been enjoying it since its first public release; and I still do.

But there are still a few kinks to iron out:

It is July 7, and I have already run out of my monthly Comcast data allocation. I get friendly e-mails every few hours telling me this. It will now cost me $10 for every 20 GB I use. 

I decided that I have had it with Sprint.  They just do not have any service despite their claims. I never get more than 1 bar of signal, and have never even gotten a 1 Mbps data transfer rate.

I do not recommend this router. After 18 months of frustration, I replaced this router with the Linksys AC5400, and my problems disappeared. Specifically, even after 3 firmware updates, the DIR-890L still drops internal connections. For example, I am hard-wired (via the router) from the chat server on my Dell OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 machine to Adium on my Mac. I keep disconnecting from the group chats every 20 minutes or so. My Squeezebox music clients also lose their connections to the Squeezebox server on the same Dell machine.

In a previous blog I discussed audio formats, and decided that I definitely prefer high-resolution audio. SACD disallows ripping, so it is not a useful format. But Blue Ray music DVDs offer a good path to hi-res audio. I bought a set of Blu Ray DVDs of Gergiev doing all of the Shostakovich symphonies and concertos, and I really wanted to stream them to my hi-hi system. So I figured out how to extract the audio in a lossless manner.

[video:https://youtu.be/688ckw09NKQ]

I can now hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio. But what is the difference between 16 and 24 bits?

In the early 1980s, George Kelley and I were working in the Fusion Energy Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was an experimentalist, and i was a theorist. IBM PCs had just come out, but we felt that their graphics resolution was too low for scientific use.  So we both bought "high-resolution" (640 x 480) Corona PCs. Alas, there was no software available to actually use this resolution, so we decided to create our own.

This is a copy of my e-mail to we_can_help@cable.Comcast.com:

I have been a music lover all my life, preferring classical and a little folk, bluegrass, and Jazz. I have a huge collection of LPs and CDs that have been accumulating since the 1950s. I bought my first "real" HiFi system in the early 1980s. It consisted of a Pioneer SX-1980 receiver (the best and most powerful receiver ever made), Magnepan MG-1 speakers (in black), A Phase Linear Turntable, and a Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder. I also invested in DBX (a linear expander/compressor) to improve the tape quality. I still have all these components 30 years later.

I worked doing computer security at a large national laboratory (ORNL) and in a nationwide network of supercomputers (Teragrid). I keep scratching my head when I read about the security breaches at companies such as Sony, Target, Home Depot, ...