The new EricMartindale.com is an experiment in data aggregation, and might have a few bugs. Feel free to explore, and then provide feedback directly to @martindale.
On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” — Kevin Mandia
The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.
Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4]. Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5].
These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins. You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9]. These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable. The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.
The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12]. These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” — +The New York Times
Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16]. The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.
While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale. I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].
Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms? Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” — Kevin Mandia
The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.
Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4]. Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5].
These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins. You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9]. These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable. The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.
The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12]. These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” — +The New York Times
Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16]. The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.
While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale. I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].
Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms? Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” — Kevin Mandia
The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.
Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4]. Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5].
These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins. You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9]. These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable. The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.
The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12]. These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” — +The New York Times
Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16]. The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.
While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale. I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].
Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms? Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].
“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.” — Kevin Mandia
The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.
Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4]. Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5].
These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins. You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9]. These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable. The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.
The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12]. These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” — +The New York Times
Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16]. The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.
While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale. I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].
Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms? Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
My list of entrepreneurial shortcomings includes Mirascape, which aspired to be a ubiquitous augmented reality (AR) operating system for the real world. The problems we were solving (and our packaged solution) would have been the backbone for all of the [imagined] technology you see in this Samsung promo video for a new tech they're excited about, transparent and flexible OLED displays. [1]
If you're not familiar with augmented reality; it is the visual overlay of otherwise hidden information on the real world, as you observe it.
While you can ogle over ostentatious technologies like the embedded-display contact lenses the University of Washington is so proud of [2], it's exciting to see companies like TDK [3] and Laster Technologies [4] bring these kinds of stepping stone technology to bear. We can all download and install the awkward and barely applicable consumer-level AR applications on our smartphones ([5], [6], and [7]), but they will all remain novelty applications until we see major innovation in the display space.
One of the more practical examples I've seen of augmented reality in the real world is WordLens [8] (sadly only available for iOS), which provides instantaneous video translation through your device. It's not hard to imagine a pair of Oakley glasses with this display technology built-in, providing you with always-on translation while in an unfamiliar foreign location. Or perhaps even displaying your friend's tweet as a speech bubble above their head for a few seconds -- imagine if it were built right, how amazing it could be.
I genuinely hope to see more of this transparent display technology built in to more consumer-level products, and eyewear in particular. We need a lot more developers playing with the practical applications of augmented reality, and not just displaying compass-aligned markers over a geotagged Wikipedia article or Flickr photo. The high-power hardware necessary to do real-time computer vision processing is coming, and the applied software world needs to be ready for it.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
My list of entrepreneurial shortcomings includes Mirascape, which aspired to be a ubiquitous augmented reality (AR) operating system for the real world. The problems we were solving (and our packaged solution) would have been the backbone for all of the [imagined] technology you see in this Samsung promo video for a new tech they're excited about, transparent and flexible OLED displays. [1]
If you're not familiar with augmented reality; it is the visual overlay of otherwise hidden information on the real world, as you observe it.
While you can ogle over ostentatious technologies like the embedded-display contact lenses the University of Washington is so proud of [2], it's exciting to see companies like TDK [3] and Laster Technologies [4] bring these kinds of stepping stone technology to bear. We can all download and install the awkward and barely applicable consumer-level AR applications on our smartphones ([5], [6], and [7]), but they will all remain novelty applications until we see major innovation in the display space.
One of the more practical examples I've seen of augmented reality in the real world is WordLens [8] (sadly only available for iOS), which provides instantaneous video translation through your device. It's not hard to imagine a pair of Oakley glasses with this display technology built-in, providing you with always-on translation while in an unfamiliar foreign location. Or perhaps even displaying your friend's tweet as a speech bubble above their head for a few seconds -- imagine if it were built right, how amazing it could be.
I genuinely hope to see more of this transparent display technology built in to more consumer-level products, and eyewear in particular. We need a lot more developers playing with the practical applications of augmented reality, and not just displaying compass-aligned markers over a geotagged Wikipedia article or Flickr photo. The high-power hardware necessary to do real-time computer vision processing is coming, and the applied software world needs to be ready for it.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
My list of entrepreneurial shortcomings includes Mirascape, which aspired to be a ubiquitous augmented reality (AR) operating system for the real world. The problems we were solving (and our packaged solution) would have been the backbone for all of the [imagined] technology you see in this Samsung promo video for a new tech they're excited about, transparent and flexible OLED displays. [1]
If you're not familiar with augmented reality; it is the visual overlay of otherwise hidden information on the real world, as you observe it.
While you can ogle over ostentatious technologies like the embedded-display contact lenses the University of Washington is so proud of [2], it's exciting to see companies like TDK [3] and Laster Technologies [4] bring these kinds of stepping stone technology to bear. We can all download and install the awkward and barely applicable consumer-level AR applications on our smartphones ([5], [6], and [7]), but they will all remain novelty applications until we see major innovation in the display space.
One of the more practical examples I've seen of augmented reality in the real world is WordLens [8] (sadly only available for iOS), which provides instantaneous video translation through your device. It's not hard to imagine a pair of Oakley glasses with this display technology built-in, providing you with always-on translation while in an unfamiliar foreign location. Or perhaps even displaying your friend's tweet as a speech bubble above their head for a few seconds -- imagine if it were built right, how amazing it could be.
I genuinely hope to see more of this transparent display technology built in to more consumer-level products, and eyewear in particular. We need a lot more developers playing with the practical applications of augmented reality, and not just displaying compass-aligned markers over a geotagged Wikipedia article or Flickr photo. The high-power hardware necessary to do real-time computer vision processing is coming, and the applied software world needs to be ready for it.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Warning: Strong nerdery follows. Please be cautious of your fragile mind.
Since late 1997, in all of my pre-teen glory, I have been involved with something my friends and I simply called roleplay in our own little vernacular. Of course I've since learned that roleplay doesn't only refer to the peer-driven world of online roleplay, it refers to all sorts of real-world tabletop games, live acting, and various amounts of storytelling, but this particular post is written with the word roleplay referring to the freeform online roleplaying that I have always been so close to.
Freeform roleplay, or the idea that there is no GM (game master) or storyteller (as in Vampire: The Masquerade), and is instead driven solely by the players, with no concrete rules for battle, statistics, or progression of the story. Rules and guidelines were driven by common expectation, which developed as a sort of social justice system that remains effective, even today.
The very roots of this sort of roleplay stem from early chat systems, where one could adopt a simple moniker and create a personality around the idea of an "avatar", which in most cases consisted only of this name. Players, without defining themselves as such, would interact in an imaginative world that coalesced out of their collaborative imagination. Each would react to the other characters' actions and dialogue in a fashion that suited their own character's theoretical personality, and this would create a constantly evolving story arc.
As the web (and the young teen's perception of the web) evolved and grew, so did the concept of roleplay. Online forums became an entirely new beast, allowing users to write more and more into their in character posts, instead of being limited to the single lines that chat provided (of course, some chats had enough space for people to post a full paragraph, or even two - but this was limited at the time), they were able to expound upon their writing and even proofread their copy before sending it across the web for the other players to view.
Freeform roleplay had also grown to be very competitive at this point, with groups of players forming groups known as clans, guilds, or otherwise, and expanded their IC competitions from chat to the forums and message boards now provided by a few enterprising organizations (or individuals). It was this competitive banter and challenge that defined what many now call the golden age of roleplay, which is what really drove the forefront of this gaming medium.
There were plenty of players who had entered their late teens (and some even were adults at this point, gasp!) who moved away from chat, and who moved away from the conflict-driven world of this type of roleplay. They went on to create storyline-oriented games, with a small and select number of players in more of a collaborative fiction setting. These players often went on to become writers and editors, being driven more by the literary aspect of relaying a fiction onto the internet, and often have their own private niche where they can continue to do this with their long-standing playergroup.
And... that's where we are today. The freeform roleplay community is growing and changing, barely 15 years old at this point. We have the chance to nurture it, just as we have the chance to neglect it. Those of us who've been involved since the beginning have the greatest opportunity to influence the course of growth, and that's exactly what I'm hoping to do.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
My list of entrepreneurial shortcomings includes Mirascape, which aspired to be a ubiquitous augmented reality (AR) operating system for the real world. The problems we were solving (and our packaged solution) would have been the backbone for all of the [imagined] technology you see in this Samsung promo video for a new tech they're excited about, transparent and flexible OLED displays. [1]
If you're not familiar with augmented reality; it is the visual overlay of otherwise hidden information on the real world, as you observe it.
While you can ogle over ostentatious technologies like the embedded-display contact lenses the University of Washington is so proud of [2], it's exciting to see companies like TDK [3] and Laster Technologies [4] bring these kinds of stepping stone technology to bear. We can all download and install the awkward and barely applicable consumer-level AR applications on our smartphones ([5], [6], and [7]), but they will all remain novelty applications until we see major innovation in the display space.
One of the more practical examples I've seen of augmented reality in the real world is WordLens [8] (sadly only available for iOS), which provides instantaneous video translation through your device. It's not hard to imagine a pair of Oakley glasses with this display technology built-in, providing you with always-on translation while in an unfamiliar foreign location. Or perhaps even displaying your friend's tweet as a speech bubble above their head for a few seconds -- imagine if it were built right, how amazing it could be.
I genuinely hope to see more of this transparent display technology built in to more consumer-level products, and eyewear in particular. We need a lot more developers playing with the practical applications of augmented reality, and not just displaying compass-aligned markers over a geotagged Wikipedia article or Flickr photo. The high-power hardware necessary to do real-time computer vision processing is coming, and the applied software world needs to be ready for it.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality +Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year. We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].
The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.
These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved. The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion. This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].
Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story. The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups". In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software. I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.
It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality +Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year. We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].
The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.
These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved. The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion. This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].
Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story. The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups". In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software. I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.
It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality +Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year. We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].
The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.
These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved. The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion. This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].
Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story. The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups". In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software. I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.
It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality +Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year. We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].
The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.
These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved. The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion. This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].
Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story. The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups". In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software. I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.
It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've always loved Eve Online. It's a space MMO, with ridiculous levels of immersion. They tout that it's the world's largest game universe, and let me tell you - it's absolutely huge.
Character journaling is a great way to extend the world of a game and add more depth to both the character and the plot. Be careful that you don't fall victim to the inactivity that often plagues real journaling! Stick to it, and you'll reap the benefits of fleshing out your character and having a solid history of the thought processes involved.
P.S.: Google Reader is an amazing tool that lets you follow your favorite sites and their content without ever checking the page. You can check out my shared items list to see what sort of things I follow, but check out the official Google Reader page for more information.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's those that don't follow the "world / crowd" that end up discovering new things that revolutionize the world and become leaders. The ones that follow, are the ones that are behind. --Me, an unreasonable man.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Hello World in Ada: ________________________ with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO; procedure Hello is begin Put_Line ("Hello, world!"); end Hello; __________________________.....
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's so incredibly painful to see someone who had so much more to give departing from this world. It's tragic that he won't be around to see the results, but his efforts had massive impact on both my personal perspectives and the conversation surrounding the freedom of information. The world has lost a truly great man; one who had the courage to act and the talent to execute.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
One of my goals for 2012 is to permanently commit more of myself to philanthropy. Late last year, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Lucas Johnson, and myself started a lending group for the Google+ Community using Kiva.org, a way of using microfinance to help eliminate poverty around the world by enabling you to provide very small loans ( $25 ) to projects of your choice. I strongly encourage everyone to join our group and make at least one loan!
What other things can you come up with to help people in need, worldwide?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
One of my goals for 2012 is to permanently commit more of myself to philanthropy. Late last year, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Lucas Johnson, and myself started a lending group for the Google+ Community using Kiva.org, a way of using microfinance to help eliminate poverty around the world by enabling you to provide very small loans ( $25 ) to projects of your choice. I strongly encourage everyone to join our group and make at least one loan!
What other things can you come up with to help people in need, worldwide?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
One of my goals for 2012 is to permanently commit more of myself to philanthropy. Late last year, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Lucas Johnson, and myself started a lending group for the Google+ Community using Kiva.org, a way of using microfinance to help eliminate poverty around the world by enabling you to provide very small loans ( $25 ) to projects of your choice. I strongly encourage everyone to join our group and make at least one loan!
What other things can you come up with to help people in need, worldwide?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
One of my goals for 2012 is to permanently commit more of myself to philanthropy. Late last year, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Lucas Johnson, and myself started a lending group for the Google+ Community using Kiva.org, a way of using microfinance to help eliminate poverty around the world by enabling you to provide very small loans ( $25 ) to projects of your choice. I strongly encourage everyone to join our group and make at least one loan!
What other things can you come up with to help people in need, worldwide?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Absolutely fascinating. This has some pretty incredible implications. At least one of the Easter Island heads has been excavated by a private research group [1], and has been discovered to have a carved body.
Were the Easter Island heads originally on much lower ground? Or were they buried by the original creators?
Easter Island is an internationally recognized World Heritage Site [2] and is also considered to be the most remote inhabited island in the world [3]. Anyone interested in #Anthropology is probably very familiar with the (887) massive stone statues that are scattered around the island, and anyone would be intrigued by the mystery behind them. It falls right in line with the incredible puzzle ancient sites like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Machu Picchu provide (in terms of how exactly ancient people constructed them).
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Absolutely fascinating. This has some pretty incredible implications. At least one of the Easter Island heads has been excavated by a private research group [1], and has been discovered to have a carved body.
Were the Easter Island heads originally on much lower ground? Or were they buried by the original creators?
Easter Island is an internationally recognized World Heritage Site [2] and is also considered to be the most remote inhabited island in the world [3]. Anyone interested in #Anthropology is probably very familiar with the (887) massive stone statues that are scattered around the island, and anyone would be intrigued by the mystery behind them. It falls right in line with the incredible puzzle ancient sites like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Machu Picchu provide (in terms of how exactly ancient people constructed them).
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Absolutely fascinating. This has some pretty incredible implications. At least one of the Easter Island heads has been excavated by a private research group [1], and has been discovered to have a carved body.
Were the Easter Island heads originally on much lower ground? Or were they buried by the original creators?
Easter Island is an internationally recognized World Heritage Site [2] and is also considered to be the most remote inhabited island in the world [3]. Anyone interested in #Anthropology is probably very familiar with the (887) massive stone statues that are scattered around the island, and anyone would be intrigued by the mystery behind them. It falls right in line with the incredible puzzle ancient sites like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Machu Picchu provide (in terms of how exactly ancient people constructed them).
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Absolutely fascinating. This has some pretty incredible implications. At least one of the Easter Island heads has been excavated by a private research group [1], and has been discovered to have a carved body.
Were the Easter Island heads originally on much lower ground? Or were they buried by the original creators?
Easter Island is an internationally recognized World Heritage Site [2] and is also considered to be the most remote inhabited island in the world [3]. Anyone interested in #Anthropology is probably very familiar with the (887) massive stone statues that are scattered around the island, and anyone would be intrigued by the mystery behind them. It falls right in line with the incredible puzzle ancient sites like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and Machu Picchu provide (in terms of how exactly ancient people constructed them).
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
The Google+ Community on Kiva is 26% of the way to its first goal!
We're trying to raise funding for 250 distinct loans by March 1st. Fellow community members +Carmelyne Thompson and +Lucas Johnson helped me put this together at the end of last year, thinking it'd be a great way to help change the world for the better in 2012. We've raised $1,900 for 69 different loans so far, and hope you can do something to pitch in (with as little as $25)!
I'm confident that as much as Google+ has grown in recent months, we can blow this goal out of the water and effectuate great things for the world. Let's see how far we can take it. :)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
The Google+ Community on Kiva is 26% of the way to its first goal!
We're trying to raise funding for 250 distinct loans by March 1st. Fellow community members +Carmelyne Thompson and +Lucas Johnson helped me put this together at the end of last year, thinking it'd be a great way to help change the world for the better in 2012. We've raised $1,900 for 69 different loans so far, and hope you can do something to pitch in (with as little as $25)!
I'm confident that as much as Google+ has grown in recent months, we can blow this goal out of the water and effectuate great things for the world. Let's see how far we can take it. :)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
The Google+ Community on Kiva is 26% of the way to its first goal!
We're trying to raise funding for 250 distinct loans by March 1st. Fellow community members +Carmelyne Thompson and +Lucas Johnson helped me put this together at the end of last year, thinking it'd be a great way to help change the world for the better in 2012. We've raised $1,900 for 69 different loans so far, and hope you can do something to pitch in (with as little as $25)!
I'm confident that as much as Google+ has grown in recent months, we can blow this goal out of the water and effectuate great things for the world. Let's see how far we can take it. :)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
The Google+ Community on Kiva is 26% of the way to its first goal!
We're trying to raise funding for 250 distinct loans by March 1st. Fellow community members +Carmelyne Thompson and +Lucas Johnson helped me put this together at the end of last year, thinking it'd be a great way to help change the world for the better in 2012. We've raised $1,900 for 69 different loans so far, and hope you can do something to pitch in (with as little as $25)!
I'm confident that as much as Google+ has grown in recent months, we can blow this goal out of the water and effectuate great things for the world. Let's see how far we can take it. :)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
The idea that we're somehow disadvantaged should the entire system crash, compared to our parents or grandparents, is silly and myopic. Living off the land flat out wouldn't/couldn't happen. There's simply to many people for everyone to hunt. If everyone started hunting/fishing to get food a) we'd run out of space in the forest/river shores and be killing one another for a spot b) even if we remained civilized we'd kill off everything so fast it wouldn't matter. Do you seriously think we get all those burgers by people taking care of cows... we don't... we have a whole technological industry built up around shoving as many into a small area and keeping them alive long enough that we can eat them. Chickens? Ya same thing. If it REALLY got so bad that "the grid" collapsed you're no better off than anyone else.
I have no idea how this turned into an end of the world/I can survive without a computer thread. This article isn't stating that everyonehas to be in tech; only that going into tech/training/educating yourself for a world that is fully tech enabled is something you should do. He states in the second paragraph, "....and all the college kids wondering if a CS or engineering degree will pay off. To those readers: we might be in a bubble, but for you it doesn’t matter." Then in the fourth paragraph, "The truth is that the technology sector as a whole over any length of time is a positive-sum game even if the economy doesn’t grow at all..." In short, if you're looking to go into tech field you should still do it. Thanks for sharing this +Eric Martindale, good stuff!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Share if you oppose "Booberday," the G+ meme of sharing photographs of cleavage.
It's demeaning, and it is precisely the gateway to harassment that drives women away from online communities. We have a responsibility as early adopters to create a respectful, caring community where everyone feels welcome. If it is acceptable in a community to post a photograph of cleavage, it becomes okay to comment on it with sexual jokes, then to comment on a photograph of a woman in the G+ community with a sexual joke, and then with sexual comments that are not jokes. If left unchecked, an online community that tolerates harassment against women can become dangerous for women, professionally and physically: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging.
When I commented on +Robert Scoble's post disagreeing with his participation, there were two primary reponses: (1) telling me to relax because it was just a single post of a woman who consented and (2) explaining that the purpose is breast cancer awareness. I normally wouldn't get upset about a single poster, but when my stream went from a thoughtful, respectful community to 2/3 animated gifs of breasts, I think I have reason to warn people: this isolates women and will cause them to leave. And this is not about breast cancer awareness, this is an excuse to share photographs of breasts without being derided as a pervert; if there ever was a component related to breast cancer awareness, that was lost the moment that the photographs were directed to excitement, rather than to the collection of research dollars (immediately?).
+Robert Scoble, I expected more from a public figure than to join in with a concept that degrades the quality of this budding community. You have one of the highest follower counts here, so what you endorse can dramatically shift the nature of the community. As a result of your post, thousands of additional people will join in this meme next week. That participation will harm women.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Share if you oppose "Booberday," the G+ meme of sharing photographs of cleavage.
It's demeaning, and it is precisely the gateway to harassment that drives women away from online communities. We have a responsibility as early adopters to create a respectful, caring community where everyone feels welcome. If it is acceptable in a community to post a photograph of cleavage, it becomes okay to comment on it with sexual jokes, then to comment on a photograph of a woman in the G+ community with a sexual joke, and then with sexual comments that are not jokes. If left unchecked, an online community that tolerates harassment against women can become dangerous for women, professionally and physically: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging.
When I commented on +Robert Scoble's post disagreeing with his participation, there were two primary reponses: (1) telling me to relax because it was just a single post of a woman who consented and (2) explaining that the purpose is breast cancer awareness. I normally wouldn't get upset about a single poster, but when my stream went from a thoughtful, respectful community to 2/3 animated gifs of breasts, I think I have reason to warn people: this isolates women and will cause them to leave. And this is not about breast cancer awareness, this is an excuse to share photographs of breasts without being derided as a pervert; if there ever was a component related to breast cancer awareness, that was lost the moment that the photographs were directed to excitement, rather than to the collection of research dollars (immediately?).
+Robert Scoble, I expected more from a public figure than to join in with a concept that degrades the quality of this budding community. You have one of the highest follower counts here, so what you endorse can dramatically shift the nature of the community. As a result of your post, thousands of additional people will join in this meme next week. That participation will harm women.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Share if you oppose "Booberday," the G+ meme of sharing photographs of cleavage.
It's demeaning, and it is precisely the gateway to harassment that drives women away from online communities. We have a responsibility as early adopters to create a respectful, caring community where everyone feels welcome. If it is acceptable in a community to post a photograph of cleavage, it becomes okay to comment on it with sexual jokes, then to comment on a photograph of a woman in the G+ community with a sexual joke, and then with sexual comments that are not jokes. If left unchecked, an online community that tolerates harassment against women can become dangerous for women, professionally and physically: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging.
When I commented on +Robert Scoble's post disagreeing with his participation, there were two primary reponses: (1) telling me to relax because it was just a single post of a woman who consented and (2) explaining that the purpose is breast cancer awareness. I normally wouldn't get upset about a single poster, but when my stream went from a thoughtful, respectful community to 2/3 animated gifs of breasts, I think I have reason to warn people: this isolates women and will cause them to leave. And this is not about breast cancer awareness, this is an excuse to share photographs of breasts without being derided as a pervert; if there ever was a component related to breast cancer awareness, that was lost the moment that the photographs were directed to excitement, rather than to the collection of research dollars (immediately?).
+Robert Scoble, I expected more from a public figure than to join in with a concept that degrades the quality of this budding community. You have one of the highest follower counts here, so what you endorse can dramatically shift the nature of the community. As a result of your post, thousands of additional people will join in this meme next week. That participation will harm women.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Share if you oppose "Booberday," the G+ meme of sharing photographs of cleavage.
It's demeaning, and it is precisely the gateway to harassment that drives women away from online communities. We have a responsibility as early adopters to create a respectful, caring community where everyone feels welcome. If it is acceptable in a community to post a photograph of cleavage, it becomes okay to comment on it with sexual jokes, then to comment on a photograph of a woman in the G+ community with a sexual joke, and then with sexual comments that are not jokes. If left unchecked, an online community that tolerates harassment against women can become dangerous for women, professionally and physically: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/06/gender.blogging.
When I commented on +Robert Scoble's post disagreeing with his participation, there were two primary reponses: (1) telling me to relax because it was just a single post of a woman who consented and (2) explaining that the purpose is breast cancer awareness. I normally wouldn't get upset about a single poster, but when my stream went from a thoughtful, respectful community to 2/3 animated gifs of breasts, I think I have reason to warn people: this isolates women and will cause them to leave. And this is not about breast cancer awareness, this is an excuse to share photographs of breasts without being derided as a pervert; if there ever was a component related to breast cancer awareness, that was lost the moment that the photographs were directed to excitement, rather than to the collection of research dollars (immediately?).
+Robert Scoble, I expected more from a public figure than to join in with a concept that degrades the quality of this budding community. You have one of the highest follower counts here, so what you endorse can dramatically shift the nature of the community. As a result of your post, thousands of additional people will join in this meme next week. That participation will harm women.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Of Space, War, and Virtual Reality +CCP Games has always been on the right track with their most successful project, the single-server, fully persistent world of +EVE Online. Having launched +DUST 514 as an extension that exists within the same game world, CCP has raised the bar of innovation already, and continues to carve out territory with the announcement of +EVE: Valkyrie.
Valkyrie is a virtual reality game originally designed for +Oculus VR [1]. If you're not familiar with Oculus, they're the makers of the Oculus Rift. The Rift is a 3D display device that you wear like a pair of glasses, and literally move your head to look around the space. This interaction makes it feel like you are actually in the virtual space, and represents a huge step forward in immersion.
What interests me most about EVE is the fact that it's a truly alternative reality; a simulated universe, of which only one exists, and to which there will never be a sequel or a "version 2". CCP has committed to simply improve the game over time rather than ever introduce an "EVE 2", building the universe iteratively over the past 10 years. This means that the time you invest in the alternative reality has a degree of permanence and importance, rather than the transience and fragmentation of other sharded universes.
Let's hope this integrates directly into the EVE Universe, in the capacity of participating in actual fights, and not just "conquer this asteroid field to make it available to EVE players". Anything less would be a grave disappointment and moreover, a potentially critical business mistake as the two games, EVE Online and Valkyrie, operate in the same space.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Of Space, War, and Virtual Reality +CCP Games has always been on the right track with their most successful project, the single-server, fully persistent world of +EVE Online. Having launched +DUST 514 as an extension that exists within the same game world, CCP has raised the bar of innovation already, and continues to carve out territory with the announcement of +EVE: Valkyrie.
Valkyrie is a virtual reality game originally designed for +Oculus VR [1]. If you're not familiar with Oculus, they're the makers of the Oculus Rift. The Rift is a 3D display device that you wear like a pair of glasses, and literally move your head to look around the space. This interaction makes it feel like you are actually in the virtual space, and represents a huge step forward in immersion.
What interests me most about EVE is the fact that it's a truly alternative reality; a simulated universe, of which only one exists, and to which there will never be a sequel or a "version 2". CCP has committed to simply improve the game over time rather than ever introduce an "EVE 2", building the universe iteratively over the past 10 years. This means that the time you invest in the alternative reality has a degree of permanence and importance, rather than the transience and fragmentation of other sharded universes.
Let's hope this integrates directly into the EVE Universe, in the capacity of participating in actual fights, and not just "conquer this asteroid field to make it available to EVE players". Anything less would be a grave disappointment and moreover, a potentially critical business mistake as the two games, EVE Online and Valkyrie, operate in the same space.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Of Space, War, and Virtual Reality +CCP Games has always been on the right track with their most successful project, the single-server, fully persistent world of +EVE Online. Having launched +DUST 514 as an extension that exists within the same game world, CCP has raised the bar of innovation already, and continues to carve out territory with the announcement of +EVE: Valkyrie.
Valkyrie is a virtual reality game originally designed for +Oculus VR [1]. If you're not familiar with Oculus, they're the makers of the Oculus Rift. The Rift is a 3D display device that you wear like a pair of glasses, and literally move your head to look around the space. This interaction makes it feel like you are actually in the virtual space, and represents a huge step forward in immersion.
What interests me most about EVE is the fact that it's a truly alternative reality; a simulated universe, of which only one exists, and to which there will never be a sequel or a "version 2". CCP has committed to simply improve the game over time rather than ever introduce an "EVE 2", building the universe iteratively over the past 10 years. This means that the time you invest in the alternative reality has a degree of permanence and importance, rather than the transience and fragmentation of other sharded universes.
Let's hope this integrates directly into the EVE Universe, in the capacity of participating in actual fights, and not just "conquer this asteroid field to make it available to EVE players". Anything less would be a grave disappointment and moreover, a potentially critical business mistake as the two games, EVE Online and Valkyrie, operate in the same space.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Of Space, War, and Virtual Reality +CCP Games has always been on the right track with their most successful project, the single-server, fully persistent world of +EVE Online. Having launched +DUST 514 as an extension that exists within the same game world, CCP has raised the bar of innovation already, and continues to carve out territory with the announcement of +EVE: Valkyrie.
Valkyrie is a virtual reality game originally designed for +Oculus VR [1]. If you're not familiar with Oculus, they're the makers of the Oculus Rift. The Rift is a 3D display device that you wear like a pair of glasses, and literally move your head to look around the space. This interaction makes it feel like you are actually in the virtual space, and represents a huge step forward in immersion.
What interests me most about EVE is the fact that it's a truly alternative reality; a simulated universe, of which only one exists, and to which there will never be a sequel or a "version 2". CCP has committed to simply improve the game over time rather than ever introduce an "EVE 2", building the universe iteratively over the past 10 years. This means that the time you invest in the alternative reality has a degree of permanence and importance, rather than the transience and fragmentation of other sharded universes.
Let's hope this integrates directly into the EVE Universe, in the capacity of participating in actual fights, and not just "conquer this asteroid field to make it available to EVE players". Anything less would be a grave disappointment and moreover, a potentially critical business mistake as the two games, EVE Online and Valkyrie, operate in the same space.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Yes, we're expanding. While +Wells Fargo [1] and +Wikipedia [2] start exploring #cryptofinance, we're also moving full steam ahead towards getting every company in the world to accept #bitcoin as a payment option.
Not only have we hired the best from companies like +Red Hat, +IBM, and Visa into our senior leadership, but we've established a firm position in the marketplace–we're now performing over $1,000,000 per day in transactions with Bitcoin, and there are now over 1,000 new businesses accepting Bitcoin every week. Now, we're hiring to support this investment in the community.
If you're interested in building anything related to #cryptofinance, give me a shout. We're extremely focused on #OpenSource and #cryptography , and will be spending a lot of our time [3] participating in the support of developers building applications in the space. If you want to build something that will shape the future of the world, #cryptofinance is the right space to be in.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's been a crazy past couple weeks for me. I've been training up for my next fight (AFL 1, May 17, 2008 Elizabeth City, NC) and staying pretty busy at work. In other news, The Grand Tournament 2008 invitations were sent out, and RolePlayGateway will be hosting the event. I had a blast at the SEO - What You Need To Know Meetup in Raleigh, and met some great people (hi Ashley!), and got connected with the upcoming Advanced SEO Meetup (which I'm really looking forward to, Brian - sorry I missed the first one!).
Two of my friends passed away this past week, Brittany Custer and Chelsea Johnson, in two separate events. It's so sad - both of these girls had an entire life ahead of them.
A few of my friends have also had recent losses, all very devastating in their own way. I don't think you can possible hope to truly offer solace during times like these, but that is no reason to attempt to provide support and care for their loss.
It's a very polarizing view compared to what we often feel - especially looking at the age at which people pass away. With Cyclone Nargis and the China Earthquakes, there's a lot of pain in the world right now. It really makes you wake up out of whatever jaded state you're in and realize that hey, you're human. You're in this with the rest of us, regardless of how much hate you think you have.
I'm not participating in the elections this year. Full stop.
It's not that I don't feel like I can make a difference - it's that I refuse to be involved in what's going to happen next. I'll make my mark in my own way, this year. And hey, on a semi-related note, let me introduce you to an independent documentary (which means do your research to verify any of this) that I thoroughly recommend you sit down for 2 hours and watch. Two hours, give it your full attention.
All of that aside, let's all remember that we're in this together, like I said before. We need to be loving and supporting each other, through all of our trying times. Grow roots so that you might be able to nourish and feed others in their times of need, as we must do this in favor of our own health. (See The Golden Rule, figure 1.1)
For everyone who has lost someone, remember that everything has a cause and effect. You are still here and play a part in the effect of your loss - it is up to you to determine how you learn from and use the experiences you shared with this person. Be joyous and put these experiences to positive use, sharing and growing in their spirit.
Take refuge amongst your own family and friends - just as you have been there for them, they will be there for you.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
BitPay Expands, Fueled By Bitcoin Demand Yes, we're expanding. While +Wells Fargo [1] and +Wikipedia [2] start exploring #cryptofinance , we're also moving full steam ahead towards getting every company in the world to accept #bitcoin as a payment option.
Not only have we hired the best from companies like +Red Hat, +IBM, and Visa into our senior leadership, but we've established a firm position in the marketplace–we're now performing over $1,000,000 per day in transactions with Bitcoin, and there are now over 1,000 new businesses accepting Bitcoin every week. Now, we're hiring to support this investment in the community.
If you're interested in building anything related to #cryptofinance , give me a shout. We're extremely focused on #OpenSource and #cryptography , and will be spending a lot of our time [3] participating in the support of developers building applications in the space. If you want to build something that will shape the future of the world, #cryptofinance is the right space to be in.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
BitPay Expands, Fueled By Bitcoin Demand Yes, we're expanding. While +Wells Fargo [1] and +Wikipedia [2] start exploring #cryptofinance , we're also moving full steam ahead towards getting every company in the world to accept #bitcoin as a payment option.
Not only have we hired the best from companies like +Red Hat, +IBM, and Visa into our senior leadership, but we've established a firm position in the marketplace–we're now performing over $1,000,000 per day in transactions with Bitcoin, and there are now over 1,000 new businesses accepting Bitcoin every week. Now, we're hiring to support this investment in the community.
If you're interested in building anything related to #cryptofinance , give me a shout. We're extremely focused on #OpenSource and #cryptography , and will be spending a lot of our time [3] participating in the support of developers building applications in the space. If you want to build something that will shape the future of the world, #cryptofinance is the right space to be in.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
BitPay Expands, Fueled By Bitcoin Demand Yes, we're expanding. While +Wells Fargo [1] and +Wikipedia [2] start exploring #cryptofinance , we're also moving full steam ahead towards getting every company in the world to accept #bitcoin as a payment option.
Not only have we hired the best from companies like +Red Hat, +IBM, and Visa into our senior leadership, but we've established a firm position in the marketplace–we're now performing over $1,000,000 per day in transactions with Bitcoin, and there are now over 1,000 new businesses accepting Bitcoin every week. Now, we're hiring to support this investment in the community.
If you're interested in building anything related to #cryptofinance , give me a shout. We're extremely focused on #OpenSource and #cryptography , and will be spending a lot of our time [3] participating in the support of developers building applications in the space. If you want to build something that will shape the future of the world, #cryptofinance is the right space to be in.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've just learned of a virus that was launched against the U.S. Drone Fleet. See the attached article from Wired.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon recently concluded that digital attacks such as this can constitute an act of war [1]. This one doesn't [yet] seem as sophisticated as last year's attack on Iran's nuclear reactors by Stuxnet [2], but it continues to show how important and integral our computer systems are in this rapidly changing world. Security professionals +Alex Levinson, +Jerome Radcliffe, and +Scott Hanselman surely have some great insight here, I highly recommend you go take a look at some of the things they've written.
In 2009, a very sophisticated [and successful] cyber-attack was launched from inside China that targeted the United States through Google and Adobe [3] that caused surprisingly few stirs within our government, especially after NATO was sent in to assist in the defense of Estonia's computer systems during the 2007 attacks [4]. Not long after this, the widely-used and [formerly] explicitly trusted RSA security mechanism, used in a large number major institutions around the world. was completely and entirely broken [5] by an embarrassingly simple hack [6].
Aside: We can look back at some of the things actual software engineers like +Ryan Dahl [7] and +Zack Morris [8] have been saying lately and quickly conclude that there's something fundamentally broken with the whole system. If you've ever worked on or with a large software project, you can see evidence of negligence and ignorance alike embedded at every level. It certainly contributes to if not causes these types of security concerns.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've just learned of a virus that was launched against the U.S. Drone Fleet. See the attached article from Wired.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon recently concluded that digital attacks such as this can constitute an act of war [1]. This one doesn't [yet] seem as sophisticated as last year's attack on Iran's nuclear reactors by Stuxnet [2], but it continues to show how important and integral our computer systems are in this rapidly changing world. Security professionals +Alex Levinson, +Jerome Radcliffe, and +Scott Hanselman surely have some great insight here, I highly recommend you go take a look at some of the things they've written.
In 2009, a very sophisticated [and successful] cyber-attack was launched from inside China that targeted the United States through Google and Adobe [3] that caused surprisingly few stirs within our government, especially after NATO was sent in to assist in the defense of Estonia's computer systems during the 2007 attacks [4]. Not long after this, the widely-used and [formerly] explicitly trusted RSA security mechanism, used in a large number major institutions around the world. was completely and entirely broken [5] by an embarrassingly simple hack [6].
Aside: We can look back at some of the things actual software engineers like +Ryan Dahl [7] and +Zack Morris [8] have been saying lately and quickly conclude that there's something fundamentally broken with the whole system. If you've ever worked on or with a large software project, you can see evidence of negligence and ignorance alike embedded at every level. It certainly contributes to if not causes these types of security concerns.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've just learned of a virus that was launched against the U.S. Drone Fleet. See the attached article from Wired.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon recently concluded that digital attacks such as this can constitute an act of war [1]. This one doesn't [yet] seem as sophisticated as last year's attack on Iran's nuclear reactors by Stuxnet [2], but it continues to show how important and integral our computer systems are in this rapidly changing world. Security professionals +Alex Levinson, +Jerome Radcliffe, and +Scott Hanselman surely have some great insight here, I highly recommend you go take a look at some of the things they've written.
In 2009, a very sophisticated [and successful] cyber-attack was launched from inside China that targeted the United States through Google and Adobe [3] that caused surprisingly few stirs within our government, especially after NATO was sent in to assist in the defense of Estonia's computer systems during the 2007 attacks [4]. Not long after this, the widely-used and [formerly] explicitly trusted RSA security mechanism, used in a large number major institutions around the world. was completely and entirely broken [5] by an embarrassingly simple hack [6].
Aside: We can look back at some of the things actual software engineers like +Ryan Dahl [7] and +Zack Morris [8] have been saying lately and quickly conclude that there's something fundamentally broken with the whole system. If you've ever worked on or with a large software project, you can see evidence of negligence and ignorance alike embedded at every level. It certainly contributes to if not causes these types of security concerns.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've been relying heavily on node.js this past year to provide a robust set of tools to solve the problems I encounter on a daily basis. I was pleased to see honorCipherOrder was added to node's TLS library in node.js v0.7.6, and released with node.js v0.8.0.
Late last year, security researcher Juliano Rizzo announced a new attack against the AES encryption used in the SSL/TLS transaction he dubbed BEAST. The details are interesting to those who care, but it turns out that we can mitigate this attack in node.js by enforcing honorCipherOrder on the server. Let's take a look.
If you have an HTTPS server that looks like this:
var https = require('https');
var fs = require('fs');
var options = {
key: fs.readFileSync('key.pem'),
cert: fs.readFileSync('cert.pem')
};
https.createServer(options, function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200);
res.end("hello world\n");
}).listen(443);
...you can now manage the cipher order by using the ciphers option. In the following code snippet we're going set the options for the above server to use Steve Caligo's cipher order, which prefers TLS 1.2 ciphers (which are not vulnerable to the BEAST attack) for clients that support TLS 1.2 but falls back to the RC4 ciphers on TLS 1.0 clients.[...]
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've just learned of a virus that was launched against the U.S. Drone Fleet. See the attached article from Wired.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon recently concluded that digital attacks such as this can constitute an act of war [1]. This one doesn't [yet] seem as sophisticated as last year's attack on Iran's nuclear reactors by Stuxnet [2], but it continues to show how important and integral our computer systems are in this rapidly changing world. Security professionals +Alex Levinson, +Jerome Radcliffe, and +Scott Hanselman surely have some great insight here, I highly recommend you go take a look at some of the things they've written.
In 2009, a very sophisticated [and successful] cyber-attack was launched from inside China that targeted the United States through Google and Adobe [3] that caused surprisingly few stirs within our government, especially after NATO was sent in to assist in the defense of Estonia's computer systems during the 2007 attacks [4]. Not long after this, the widely-used and [formerly] explicitly trusted RSA security mechanism, used in a large number major institutions around the world. was completely and entirely broken [5] by an embarrassingly simple hack [6].
Aside: We can look back at some of the things actual software engineers like +Ryan Dahl [7] and +Zack Morris [8] have been saying lately and quickly conclude that there's something fundamentally broken with the whole system. If you've ever worked on or with a large software project, you can see evidence of negligence and ignorance alike embedded at every level. It certainly contributes to if not causes these types of security concerns.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth. This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.
Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.
Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4]. As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].
Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment. It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.
After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks. Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry. My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!
Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways. Now let's go make the world a better place.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
(the reason I ask is that this particular conference was mostly about quantum physics, and it could be said to be scientists adapting to the world as it is instead of the opposite, therefore making the picture represent the exact opposite of the text :p )
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
This event represent clear evidence of the value proposition bitcoin represents to the world as supported by the effort of the U.S. Marshalls. Join Texas Coinitiative and participate in educational activities at the Texas Bitcoin Embassy in Houston Texas
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I like to take a balanced approach, if everyone went with the way the world was turning then we wouldn't be where we are as race today. "Push the envelope and blaze a new path to your destination and along the way you find the treasures that life has hidden away for just such a person."
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's possible that I got the pop-up because I'm a registered Facebook developer already. Time will tell. There is a huge potential for people to publicly tell the world everything about themselves, when, where, with whom married, kids, DOB's, etc, etc, which is quite scary.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Triangle Startup Weekend put on an amazing education-oriented hackathon this weekend, and my team won with our project, Coursefork. Would you believe we built our entire functional prototype, from nothing to MVP, in 53 hours? I'm proud to have been a part of such an amazing team, and am excited to realize the potential of this world-changing idea.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Interesting, certainly a relevant application for tourists and museum visitors. I look forward to a slightly more immersive experience, where for instance ruins are overlaid with an image of what they used to look like. Also, I want to wear google glasses while I bike/run/walk and play a video game at the same time, so I'm exercising outside and experiencing a "new world" at the same time. When is that coming?? ;)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Of course it doesn't tell you who wrote Flame. The NYT article tells you that. But how is that relevant? The cryptography aspect of it is part and parcel of the whole program. Without it, the operation could not have succeeded. Tell me, what rogue hacker has the capacity to develop his own collision attack cryptography--never before seen anywhere else--to conduct this operation. Mind you one that has specific interests in Iran. No matter how you twist it, you're still being delusional dude.
Given the number of classified patents the US publishes, especially in the field of cryptography, the most likely culprit is the NSA, the largest employer of mathematicians in the world.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
+Audra Distefano yep, so far so good! +Mary Bedard and I did the CNN Center Tour after she finished her presentation earlier today, and went to the World of Coca-Cola and the Atlanta aquarium on Thursday. We're going to try the Zoo and Stone Mountain tomorrow before we head back to North Carolina. :)
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I think that +Ibraahin Maxamed was trying to say, "With due respect. I want you to patiently read this offer. I Mahmadou Issa (Jr.), son of the late former head of the delegation of the World Bank in Libya. My father was in the linkman between the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries - OPEC and the oil sector in the country of North Africa. He also attended OPEC meetings constantly in Geneva before his death crises caused by Muammar Gaddafi, the killing of my father in our house in the cold-blooded."
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding toasts, given tours of their home cities in distant lands, crowd-sourced dating advice, music hangouts, concerts, art hangouts, hangouts with news people while they were live on air, or just a casual hangout where we decided to toss back a couple beers and put on silly hats and talk about random things going on in the world.” -- +Brett Bjornsen, talking about Google+ Hangouts.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding toasts, given tours of their home cities in distant lands, crowd-sourced dating advice, music hangouts, concerts, art hangouts, hangouts with news people while they were live on air, or just a casual hangout where we decided to toss back a couple beers and put on silly hats and talk about random things going on in the world.” -- +Brett Bjornsen, talking about Google+ Hangouts.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding toasts, given tours of their home cities in distant lands, crowd-sourced dating advice, music hangouts, concerts, art hangouts, hangouts with news people while they were live on air, or just a casual hangout where we decided to toss back a couple beers and put on silly hats and talk about random things going on in the world.” -- +Brett Bjornsen, talking about Google+ Hangouts.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding toasts, given tours of their home cities in distant lands, crowd-sourced dating advice, music hangouts, concerts, art hangouts, hangouts with news people while they were live on air, or just a casual hangout where we decided to toss back a couple beers and put on silly hats and talk about random things going on in the world.” -- +Brett Bjornsen, talking about Google+ Hangouts.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Yes I read that +Micah Chiri and it just say that cryptographic algorithm used is one that could be only wrote by a world class crypto programmer. But tell me how that tell you who made the "flame". Btw to underline the best programmers never work for any state. That is why I think and beside a size of worm is not a actually a top class programmer size. Worms tend to be small so that they can unnoticed upload itself on machine "flame" have 20000kb and that is too big also is written in Lua and top class programmers dont use Lua they use C and C++.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Today is Programmers' Day, the 256th day of the year. Russia may be the only country in the world that officially recognizes it, but here's an appropriate early-morning post commemorating all of the hard-working code weavers in the software industry.
Take a moment today and thank your programmer friends for bringing you all kinds of things, from the timer on your microwave to the beautiful filters you have in Photoshop. From the comfortable air conditioning you're enjoying right now, to the wide array of social media sites that you use to share mundane and intellectual topics alike; virtually every industry on Earth is made possible today thanks to programmers of many different types.
So here's to you, [late night] Programmer. Enjoy your day!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Today is Programmers' Day, the 256th day of the year. Russia may be the only country in the world that officially recognizes it, but here's an appropriate early-morning post commemorating all of the hard-working code weavers in the software industry.
Take a moment today and thank your programmer friends for bringing you all kinds of things, from the timer on your microwave to the beautiful filters you have in Photoshop. From the comfortable air conditioning you're enjoying right now, to the wide array of social media sites that you use to share mundane and intellectual topics alike; virtually every industry on Earth is made possible today thanks to programmers of many different types.
So here's to you, [late night] Programmer. Enjoy your day!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Today is Programmers' Day, the 256th day of the year. Russia may be the only country in the world that officially recognizes it, but here's an appropriate early-morning post commemorating all of the hard-working code weavers in the software industry.
Take a moment today and thank your programmer friends for bringing you all kinds of things, from the timer on your microwave to the beautiful filters you have in Photoshop. From the comfortable air conditioning you're enjoying right now, to the wide array of social media sites that you use to share mundane and intellectual topics alike; virtually every industry on Earth is made possible today thanks to programmers of many different types.
So here's to you, [late night] Programmer. Enjoy your day!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Today is Programmers' Day, the 256th day of the year. Russia may be the only country in the world that officially recognizes it, but here's an appropriate early-morning post commemorating all of the hard-working code weavers in the software industry.
Take a moment today and thank your programmer friends for bringing you all kinds of things, from the timer on your microwave to the beautiful filters you have in Photoshop. From the comfortable air conditioning you're enjoying right now, to the wide array of social media sites that you use to share mundane and intellectual topics alike; virtually every industry on Earth is made possible today thanks to programmers of many different types.
So here's to you, [late night] Programmer. Enjoy your day!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I think we're well on the way already, +Olrik Lenstra, but we're only hitting the low-hanging fruit so far. Among the other challenges include getting the remaining 4.5 billion people [1] in the world access to computers and more importantly, the Internet.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
David, that is an excellent example. But the real problem as I see it is this device is converting apples to oranges, and that's hard/impossible to do well & consistently & for everyone. What you see with your eyes and interpret into your own internal thought process, and what you read from a description written by a program (and influenced by that programmers perspective and interpretation of the world as he perceives it) are very different things. One person will emphasize the color hue and saturation over the geometry and spatial composition of the image. Others will focus on details like what brand names are on the shirts, what landmarks are visible or implied, etc. The descriptions look pretty sterilized and minimal, but once again...where is the real value. I'm willing to concede that this has value for the visually impaired to some degree, but I don't see it as a revolutionary advance. It's more like a neat gimmick than the next big thing.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“Programming is, without a doubt, the most mentally rewarding thing I've ever done.” -- +Randall Degges
You should learn to write code. It is the new language of this information age, in which our systems of commerce become increasingly focused on trading information, buying and selling it with ease thanks to our burgeoning ability to transmit and receive this information.
As with all increases in the available bandwidth of communication throughout human history, it is a time for change and innovation. Just as with the telegraph and Gutenberg's printing press before it, we are undergoing a revolution in the way we live, the way we work, and the way we love. You have two options; become literate and help shape the world, or stand by and be content with letting others define it for you.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“Programming is, without a doubt, the most mentally rewarding thing I've ever done.” -- +Randall Degges
You should learn to write code. It is the new language of this information age, in which our systems of commerce become increasingly focused on trading information, buying and selling it with ease thanks to our burgeoning ability to transmit and receive this information.
As with all increases in the available bandwidth of communication throughout human history, it is a time for change and innovation. Just as with the telegraph and Gutenberg's printing press before it, we are undergoing a revolution in the way we live, the way we work, and the way we love. You have two options; become literate and help shape the world, or stand by and be content with letting others define it for you.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“Programming is, without a doubt, the most mentally rewarding thing I've ever done.” -- +Randall Degges
You should learn to write code. It is the new language of this information age, in which our systems of commerce become increasingly focused on trading information, buying and selling it with ease thanks to our burgeoning ability to transmit and receive this information.
As with all increases in the available bandwidth of communication throughout human history, it is a time for change and innovation. Just as with the telegraph and Gutenberg's printing press before it, we are undergoing a revolution in the way we live, the way we work, and the way we love. You have two options; become literate and help shape the world, or stand by and be content with letting others define it for you.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
“Programming is, without a doubt, the most mentally rewarding thing I've ever done.” -- +Randall Degges
You should learn to write code. It is the new language of this information age, in which our systems of commerce become increasingly focused on trading information, buying and selling it with ease thanks to our burgeoning ability to transmit and receive this information.
As with all increases in the available bandwidth of communication throughout human history, it is a time for change and innovation. Just as with the telegraph and Gutenberg's printing press before it, we are undergoing a revolution in the way we live, the way we work, and the way we love. You have two options; become literate and help shape the world, or stand by and be content with letting others define it for you.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I'm growing weary of the community that thrives on IRC, particularly of the fighter portion. (When I say fighting, I refer to a sport called text-fighting.) Andrew describes them quite eloquently: arrogant. They seem to believe that the IRC world is all there is, and that it is necessary to determine which channel, and perhaps even network, is better through means of blind hatred and ignorance.
Take, for example, this Animelab and SurrealChat thing. The GWing chat is hosted on SurrealChat. We often get users from Animelab telling GWingers that they suck and should die, in much more vibrant color, because SurrealChat is stupid, and they hate SurrealChat. Granted, this conflict has died down, but it does seem to be an epidemic.
I love when a conversation of these IRC nerds proceeds as follows.
"I'm the best roleplayer on this server." "No, you're not." "Yes, I am." "How about a hybrid match to determine that, then?" "Okay. Stance up."
Does my point need to be exemplified any more clearly?
Fighting a hybrid match is NOT ROLEPLAYING. Morons.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
While hiring the first five engineers here at +LocalSense, we've never looked at someone's résumé. Not even once. One of the greatest things about the business world today compared to a decade ago (or even a couple years back!) is that you can directly qualify someone's past work through, at least for software engineers, tools such as GitHub [1]. The best measure of a potential hire's impact is going to be direct observation of their past work, and not a page or two of biography on the individual and their credentials.
Now, this approach remains difficult for more traditional careers in fields like academia and publishing, which simply don't have the agility necessary for something like GitHub or Dribbble [2] to make the impact they have. They have an existing [rigid] infrastructure that places the barrier to entry of any disruptive technology prohibitively high. The most established sectors will struggle the hardest, and perhaps fail the most spectacularly.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
While hiring the first five engineers here at +LocalSense, we've never looked at someone's résumé. Not even once. One of the greatest things about the business world today compared to a decade ago (or even a couple years back!) is that you can directly qualify someone's past work through, at least for software engineers, tools such as GitHub [1]. The best measure of a potential hire's impact is going to be direct observation of their past work, and not a page or two of biography on the individual and their credentials.
Now, this approach remains difficult for more traditional careers in fields like academia and publishing, which simply don't have the agility necessary for something like GitHub or Dribbble [2] to make the impact they have. They have an existing [rigid] infrastructure that places the barrier to entry of any disruptive technology prohibitively high. The most established sectors will struggle the hardest, and perhaps fail the most spectacularly.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
While hiring the first five engineers here at +LocalSense, we've never looked at someone's résumé. Not even once. One of the greatest things about the business world today compared to a decade ago (or even a couple years back!) is that you can directly qualify someone's past work through, at least for software engineers, tools such as GitHub [1]. The best measure of a potential hire's impact is going to be direct observation of their past work, and not a page or two of biography on the individual and their credentials.
Now, this approach remains difficult for more traditional careers in fields like academia and publishing, which simply don't have the agility necessary for something like GitHub or Dribbble [2] to make the impact they have. They have an existing [rigid] infrastructure that places the barrier to entry of any disruptive technology prohibitively high. The most established sectors will struggle the hardest, and perhaps fail the most spectacularly.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
While hiring the first five engineers here at +LocalSense, we've never looked at someone's résumé. Not even once. One of the greatest things about the business world today compared to a decade ago (or even a couple years back!) is that you can directly qualify someone's past work through, at least for software engineers, tools such as GitHub [1]. The best measure of a potential hire's impact is going to be direct observation of their past work, and not a page or two of biography on the individual and their credentials.
Now, this approach remains difficult for more traditional careers in fields like academia and publishing, which simply don't have the agility necessary for something like GitHub or Dribbble [2] to make the impact they have. They have an existing [rigid] infrastructure that places the barrier to entry of any disruptive technology prohibitively high. The most established sectors will struggle the hardest, and perhaps fail the most spectacularly.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub. With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .
+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.
Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub. With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .
+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.
Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub. With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .
+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.
Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub. With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .
+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.
Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
How would you behave in a world with no anonymity?
Researchers from +Yuriy Zubovski's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, raise a few troubling questions about identity and privacy in a paper released at BlackHat in August [1]. They show results from a facial recognition study and hit some points about how it relates to Augmented Reality (AR), right up +Robert Rice's alley.
One of the authors, Alessandro Acquisti, also gave a talk at USENIX shortly after the release, of which there is video [2]. He explores some fascinating examples of how the images and videos that people have posted online can be utilized for tracking identity, even in cases where you explicitly "untag" yourself, which may people simply do not consider.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
How would you behave in a world with no anonymity?
Researchers from +Yuriy Zubovski's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, raise a few troubling questions about identity and privacy in a paper released at BlackHat in August [1]. They show results from a facial recognition study and hit some points about how it relates to Augmented Reality (AR), right up +Robert Rice's alley.
One of the authors, Alessandro Acquisti, also gave a talk at USENIX shortly after the release, of which there is video [2]. He explores some fascinating examples of how the images and videos that people have posted online can be utilized for tracking identity, even in cases where you explicitly "untag" yourself, which may people simply do not consider.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
How would you behave in a world with no anonymity?
Researchers from +Yuriy Zubovski's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, raise a few troubling questions about identity and privacy in a paper released at BlackHat in August [1]. They show results from a facial recognition study and hit some points about how it relates to Augmented Reality (AR), right up +Robert Rice's alley.
One of the authors, Alessandro Acquisti, also gave a talk at USENIX shortly after the release, of which there is video [2]. He explores some fascinating examples of how the images and videos that people have posted online can be utilized for tracking identity, even in cases where you explicitly "untag" yourself, which may people simply do not consider.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I think I'm sick or getting sick from the weekend, which was awesome all in itself. Rode over to Ian's on Saturday, enjoyed a good night with some new friends, playing Unreal Tournament (the original, what else?) until somewhere around 3AM. Ah, good times. I woke up the next day in time to give Amber a call before she left for work. We got to gaming shortly after lunch, and for once, our ship didn't esplode! (partly because we left it behind for the majority of the game...)
Sunday we relaxed and watched football, both American and World. Poor poor Chelsea! I ended up rolling in at about 4PM, and proceeded to put together some home cooking for when Amber got off work. Unfortunately, my plans were foiled by her work schedule, and she got off at six instead of the planned five, denying us the opportunity of going to the park to eat while the sun set. We enjoyed ourselves nonetheless, and had a good cuddly evening.
Work today was a pain, though. Internet was out, and Bellsouth took until 5PM to bring us a mediocre solution. One of our major clients was having email problems, which I couldn't troubleshoot until the internet was up. Pity.
And, now I come home, GWing is having some people problems, and the GT League is bumbling along as usual. Now, about that roleplaying social reform...
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
How would you behave in a world with no anonymity?
Researchers from +Yuriy Zubovski's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, raise a few troubling questions about identity and privacy in a paper released at BlackHat in August [1]. They show results from a facial recognition study and hit some points about how it relates to Augmented Reality (AR), right up +Robert Rice's alley.
One of the authors, Alessandro Acquisti, also gave a talk at USENIX shortly after the release, of which there is video [2]. He explores some fascinating examples of how the images and videos that people have posted online can be utilized for tracking identity, even in cases where you explicitly "untag" yourself, which may people simply do not consider.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's nothing new to realize that tech companies have tried to mimic Steve Jobs' presentation style. Some fail miserably (I'm looking at you +Mark Zuckerberg .) Others do a pretty good job, like Jeff Bezos when he presented the new Kindle lineup from Amazon. The trend has me wondering two things, though:
1) How much strategy goes into timing these announcements, particularly when rumors of other announcements are floating around? For example, is there a reason Amazon went just a week before Apple? If so, what was it? Just how much research goes into target dates and announcement dates when considering competitors' release schedules (or rumored release schedules?) It seems like an super-intense game of chess (or Starcraft.)
and 2) What style will Tim Cook adopt next week? Now that Steve Jobs has handed over the reins to the new CEO, will he ape Jobs' style, or will he innovate a bit? How much of Apple really is Steve Jobs, and how much can Cook make his own? Are we about to head into a new era of tech presentations? Straying from a successful formula could be dangerous, but is it necessary so that Cook can show the world that although he is not Steve Jobs, he is still the right man to carry the torch?
I'm excited to see what's in store for tech in the years to come. So many great announcements have come out this Summer/Fall. What do you expect to see from the evolution of these tech presentations?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's nothing new to realize that tech companies have tried to mimic Steve Jobs' presentation style. Some fail miserably (I'm looking at you +Mark Zuckerberg .) Others do a pretty good job, like Jeff Bezos when he presented the new Kindle lineup from Amazon. The trend has me wondering two things, though:
1) How much strategy goes into timing these announcements, particularly when rumors of other announcements are floating around? For example, is there a reason Amazon went just a week before Apple? If so, what was it? Just how much research goes into target dates and announcement dates when considering competitors' release schedules (or rumored release schedules?) It seems like an super-intense game of chess (or Starcraft.)
and 2) What style will Tim Cook adopt next week? Now that Steve Jobs has handed over the reins to the new CEO, will he ape Jobs' style, or will he innovate a bit? How much of Apple really is Steve Jobs, and how much can Cook make his own? Are we about to head into a new era of tech presentations? Straying from a successful formula could be dangerous, but is it necessary so that Cook can show the world that although he is not Steve Jobs, he is still the right man to carry the torch?
I'm excited to see what's in store for tech in the years to come. So many great announcements have come out this Summer/Fall. What do you expect to see from the evolution of these tech presentations?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's nothing new to realize that tech companies have tried to mimic Steve Jobs' presentation style. Some fail miserably (I'm looking at you +Mark Zuckerberg .) Others do a pretty good job, like Jeff Bezos when he presented the new Kindle lineup from Amazon. The trend has me wondering two things, though:
1) How much strategy goes into timing these announcements, particularly when rumors of other announcements are floating around? For example, is there a reason Amazon went just a week before Apple? If so, what was it? Just how much research goes into target dates and announcement dates when considering competitors' release schedules (or rumored release schedules?) It seems like an super-intense game of chess (or Starcraft.)
and 2) What style will Tim Cook adopt next week? Now that Steve Jobs has handed over the reins to the new CEO, will he ape Jobs' style, or will he innovate a bit? How much of Apple really is Steve Jobs, and how much can Cook make his own? Are we about to head into a new era of tech presentations? Straying from a successful formula could be dangerous, but is it necessary so that Cook can show the world that although he is not Steve Jobs, he is still the right man to carry the torch?
I'm excited to see what's in store for tech in the years to come. So many great announcements have come out this Summer/Fall. What do you expect to see from the evolution of these tech presentations?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
It's nothing new to realize that tech companies have tried to mimic Steve Jobs' presentation style. Some fail miserably (I'm looking at you +Mark Zuckerberg .) Others do a pretty good job, like Jeff Bezos when he presented the new Kindle lineup from Amazon. The trend has me wondering two things, though:
1) How much strategy goes into timing these announcements, particularly when rumors of other announcements are floating around? For example, is there a reason Amazon went just a week before Apple? If so, what was it? Just how much research goes into target dates and announcement dates when considering competitors' release schedules (or rumored release schedules?) It seems like an super-intense game of chess (or Starcraft.)
and 2) What style will Tim Cook adopt next week? Now that Steve Jobs has handed over the reins to the new CEO, will he ape Jobs' style, or will he innovate a bit? How much of Apple really is Steve Jobs, and how much can Cook make his own? Are we about to head into a new era of tech presentations? Straying from a successful formula could be dangerous, but is it necessary so that Cook can show the world that although he is not Steve Jobs, he is still the right man to carry the torch?
I'm excited to see what's in store for tech in the years to come. So many great announcements have come out this Summer/Fall. What do you expect to see from the evolution of these tech presentations?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Nicole Lee writes, "...while I understand that all people have their moments, the above photo is what gets to me. People who don ’t care about anyone at all, or are so absorbed in their own worlds that they forget that other people, and other people’s property exists as well. So, I left a friendly reminder..."
Oh yes, Cole. This is golden.
This has been done before, but it is NONETHELESS a very loser-ish thing to do. It truly is not that difficult to put the car in reverse and give it another shot - you are NOT beautiful and unique snowflake. No matter how awesome your car is.
There is no excuse for this douchbaggery. You should've done more.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've been seriously slacking in getting RPGateway's blog up and running, but I've finally gotten around to re-posting the files and re-connecting Wordpress to the database. Now all I've got to do is to get a couple of our admins (and hopefully, one of our loverly owners) to start posting and managing it.
The idea here is to create a single update page where watchers who don't want to be involved in the site can still read updates from the staff. A buzz can be established, and hopefully, some real momentum can be generated with content that is updated daily. The so-called 'blogosphere' (I cringe too, relax.) is a very powerful force in the tubes today, and I think it's important to at least begin to establish some sort of presence here.
I was recently pointed to Trevor Somerville's 30 days to success, and I'm only reminded that articles are the Queen in a world where daily updates are King. Good luck to Trevor, I'll probably swing by once or twice to check up on his progress and see if he has any useful tips.
I started fiddling with some new posting options again, in particular the email posting. Blogger lets you set up a secret email to which you can send blog posts, at which point they'll automatically be added to your blog. I had a contact set up in my Gmail as of (insert long period of time) ago, and I sent a post to it, but I haven't seen anything of it. It looks like the same email, but... apparently not. I guess I'll be reconfiguring this later.
I've been having great experiences with SEO and RolePlay Gateway, we're rising in rankings rather quickly, even after the domain migration. Many thanks to the folks over at DigitalPoint for my education over the past few months. I'm sure I'll be telling these success stories soon, but right now I have to head off to Winston to run a few service calls.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
In 2011, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) released a paper [1] presenting a model for understanding (and ultimately predicting) the social unrest that rocked countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2]. Of the data analyzed, the principal factor influencing said unrest was determined to be the food price index.
That's a pretty simple concept. If one of your most basic needs was threatened, what would you do? To quote the MIT Technology Review's explanation of the paper [3], “This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.”
These models have other complex implications around the world, such as in the financial markets. Another paper from 2010, titled “Predicting economic market crises using measures of collective panic” [4], shows that the economic crisis (and other singe-day panics in the market) in the United States were predictable events that relied on the relatively volatile sociological phenomenon of uncertainty and nervousness -- which makes some of the original paper's assertions even more interesting. Most notably:
“Both factors in food prices can be linked directly to recent US governmental actions. Speculator activity has been enhanced by deregulation of the commodities markets that exempted dealers from trading limits, and subsidies and other policies have been central to the growth of ethanol conversion.”
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
In 2011, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) released a paper [1] presenting a model for understanding (and ultimately predicting) the social unrest that rocked countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2]. Of the data analyzed, the principal factor influencing said unrest was determined to be the food price index.
That's a pretty simple concept. If one of your most basic needs was threatened, what would you do? To quote the MIT Technology Review's explanation of the paper [3], “This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.”
These models have other complex implications around the world, such as in the financial markets. Another paper from 2010, titled “Predicting economic market crises using measures of collective panic” [4], shows that the economic crisis (and other singe-day panics in the market) in the United States were predictable events that relied on the relatively volatile sociological phenomenon of uncertainty and nervousness -- which makes some of the original paper's assertions even more interesting. Most notably:
“Both factors in food prices can be linked directly to recent US governmental actions. Speculator activity has been enhanced by deregulation of the commodities markets that exempted dealers from trading limits, and subsidies and other policies have been central to the growth of ethanol conversion.”
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
In 2011, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) released a paper [1] presenting a model for understanding (and ultimately predicting) the social unrest that rocked countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2]. Of the data analyzed, the principal factor influencing said unrest was determined to be the food price index.
That's a pretty simple concept. If one of your most basic needs was threatened, what would you do? To quote the MIT Technology Review's explanation of the paper [3], “This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.”
These models have other complex implications around the world, such as in the financial markets. Another paper from 2010, titled “Predicting economic market crises using measures of collective panic” [4], shows that the economic crisis (and other singe-day panics in the market) in the United States were predictable events that relied on the relatively volatile sociological phenomenon of uncertainty and nervousness -- which makes some of the original paper's assertions even more interesting. Most notably:
“Both factors in food prices can be linked directly to recent US governmental actions. Speculator activity has been enhanced by deregulation of the commodities markets that exempted dealers from trading limits, and subsidies and other policies have been central to the growth of ethanol conversion.”
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
In 2011, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute (CSI) released a paper [1] presenting a model for understanding (and ultimately predicting) the social unrest that rocked countries such as Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt [2]. Of the data analyzed, the principal factor influencing said unrest was determined to be the food price index.
That's a pretty simple concept. If one of your most basic needs was threatened, what would you do? To quote the MIT Technology Review's explanation of the paper [3], “This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.”
These models have other complex implications around the world, such as in the financial markets. Another paper from 2010, titled “Predicting economic market crises using measures of collective panic” [4], shows that the economic crisis (and other singe-day panics in the market) in the United States were predictable events that relied on the relatively volatile sociological phenomenon of uncertainty and nervousness -- which makes some of the original paper's assertions even more interesting. Most notably:
“Both factors in food prices can be linked directly to recent US governmental actions. Speculator activity has been enhanced by deregulation of the commodities markets that exempted dealers from trading limits, and subsidies and other policies have been central to the growth of ethanol conversion.”
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time. While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].
It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate. It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.
Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.
One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education. I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time. While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].
It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate. It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.
Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.
One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education. I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time. While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].
It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate. It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.
Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.
One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education. I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time. While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].
It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate. It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.
Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.
One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education. I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
After the usual late-nighter, I went out to grab some coffee somewhere north of 6:30 this morning. The young woman behind the counter asked in a surprisingly enthusiastic tone, perhaps recognizing me from a certain coffee adventure prior.
"What're you doing up so early!?"
I started to reply with a nondescript "Eh, work.", but what words actually slipped out of my mouth turned out to be more inquisitive.
"Well, have you ever heard of Google Plus?" I ventured, fully expecting a blank stare with that ever so vague hint of condescension. Perhaps I was too exhausted to consider how much buzz Google+ had generated, or to remember that it went public no less than a day prior. Whatever the case, her reply jarred me for a moment.
"Yeah, I've heard of it! Isn't it that new Google social network?" she asked.
I briefly explained how I'd met a handful of incredible people through Google Hangouts, and that we were all working on a side project outside of our normal jobs, and for fun no less. It might well have been my sleepless stupor again, but the ensuing conversation led me to believe she was absolutely fascinated with the idea of meeting and collaborating with people from around the world.
I grabbed my coffee and headed back to work, my enthusiasm bolstered by exchange.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
After the usual late-nighter, I went out to grab some coffee somewhere north of 6:30 this morning. The young woman behind the counter asked in a surprisingly enthusiastic tone, perhaps recognizing me from a certain coffee adventure prior.
"What're you doing up so early!?"
I started to reply with a nondescript "Eh, work.", but what words actually slipped out of my mouth turned out to be more inquisitive.
"Well, have you ever heard of Google Plus?" I ventured, fully expecting a blank stare with that ever so vague hint of condescension. Perhaps I was too exhausted to consider how much buzz Google+ had generated, or to remember that it went public no less than a day prior. Whatever the case, her reply jarred me for a moment.
"Yeah, I've heard of it! Isn't it that new Google social network?" she asked.
I briefly explained how I'd met a handful of incredible people through Google Hangouts, and that we were all working on a side project outside of our normal jobs, and for fun no less. It might well have been my sleepless stupor again, but the ensuing conversation led me to believe she was absolutely fascinated with the idea of meeting and collaborating with people from around the world.
I grabbed my coffee and headed back to work, my enthusiasm bolstered by exchange.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
After the usual late-nighter, I went out to grab some coffee somewhere north of 6:30 this morning. The young woman behind the counter asked in a surprisingly enthusiastic tone, perhaps recognizing me from a certain coffee adventure prior.
"What're you doing up so early!?"
I started to reply with a nondescript "Eh, work.", but what words actually slipped out of my mouth turned out to be more inquisitive.
"Well, have you ever heard of Google Plus?" I ventured, fully expecting a blank stare with that ever so vague hint of condescension. Perhaps I was too exhausted to consider how much buzz Google+ had generated, or to remember that it went public no less than a day prior. Whatever the case, her reply jarred me for a moment.
"Yeah, I've heard of it! Isn't it that new Google social network?" she asked.
I briefly explained how I'd met a handful of incredible people through Google Hangouts, and that we were all working on a side project outside of our normal jobs, and for fun no less. It might well have been my sleepless stupor again, but the ensuing conversation led me to believe she was absolutely fascinated with the idea of meeting and collaborating with people from around the world.
I grabbed my coffee and headed back to work, my enthusiasm bolstered by exchange.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
After the usual late-nighter, I went out to grab some coffee somewhere north of 6:30 this morning. The young woman behind the counter asked in a surprisingly enthusiastic tone, perhaps recognizing me from a certain coffee adventure prior.
"What're you doing up so early!?"
I started to reply with a nondescript "Eh, work.", but what words actually slipped out of my mouth turned out to be more inquisitive.
"Well, have you ever heard of Google Plus?" I ventured, fully expecting a blank stare with that ever so vague hint of condescension. Perhaps I was too exhausted to consider how much buzz Google+ had generated, or to remember that it went public no less than a day prior. Whatever the case, her reply jarred me for a moment.
"Yeah, I've heard of it! Isn't it that new Google social network?" she asked.
I briefly explained how I'd met a handful of incredible people through Google Hangouts, and that we were all working on a side project outside of our normal jobs, and for fun no less. It might well have been my sleepless stupor again, but the ensuing conversation led me to believe she was absolutely fascinated with the idea of meeting and collaborating with people from around the world.
I grabbed my coffee and headed back to work, my enthusiasm bolstered by exchange.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
A big subject of contention in my life is my job. I work 60 hours a week, for less than minimum wage. I deal with clueless customers who are often surprised by my perfect greeting, as I am often complimented, sometimes chastised, on my well-rehearsed voice. Sometimes I think we lose call volume because I sound like an answering machine. Hah! It shall be no more, tonight was a successful night of Trixbox PBX goodness, our entire system is on the first run using the IVR answering. I digress.
My job sucks. I earn $5/hr, working what is supposed to be 60 hours a week, but is slowly dwindling downward. The stress of paying rent, utilities, and heaven forbid taxes on such a budget is indomitable: I can't imagine adding insurance and gas to this, when I get a car up and running. The love of my life chastises me for it, and I can't tell her enough how much I really do hate it. I do not have a working car, and I do not yet have insurance to provide the DMV with proof that I do have insurance, so I don't have a license. There are fast food places within walking distance, surely. Ideally, if I had a car, I could be an on-call Engineer and earn maybe an extra hundred bucks a week. Sure, I earn $33/hr as a consultant, but when business is the equivalent of dysentery on a hot summer day, I earn jack for nothing. Of course, in this scenario, it is difficult to find the finances to afford a car to begin with.
It's hard in these circumstances to even consider such things as school, a degree, or better living conditions. It's devastating to me, my life, my relationships, and everything that cascades on from such. It doesn't help when the doors in my house are left open, dissipating what little heat I've trapped in the kitchen into the other frozen rooms of my apartment. Piles of dirty dishes plague the sink, and I'm never home to wash them. Wait, remind me again why I'm washing someone else's dirty dishes? Oh, that's right - my apartment would be even dirtier if it weren't for the thirty minutes a night I spend after getting home from spending the remainder of my free time with Amber. Of course, directly after, shower and bed. Only to wake in the morning for work at 0800. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday.
If only people were patient, if only I could let them into my world. Unfortunately, I'm expecting a box to be placed on my doorstep any day now, with all of the various items I've gifted out over the past year and a half. There's nothing I can do to stop it, as far as I can tell, except to go work at Subway. I wish I could tell her that it'd be by the grace of God if I got out of that position, once I went there. No, it's not understood. It can't be understood. How long can one love without being loved in return? The sad thing is, it is in both ways. How sick and maniacally twisted is that?
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
As a corporate business insider I can offer a perspective from the "enemy's" den. Many people agree that this movement has gained momentum and has the potential to become as big or bigger than the Tea Party Movement. I grew up in the same generation as many of those protesting today and I understand the innuendo behind Anonymous, I understand point being made by the zombies, and I understand what general sense of anger is meant for. However, keep in mind that you are generally a younger generation trying to speak to an industry dominated mostly by an older generation of people. To these people this movement appears random, chaotic, and annoying simply because they don't even know what this movement's demands or goals are. Indeed for almost all of September I don't think Wall Street even understood exactly what they were protesting, and just recently have they gotten some kind of vague idea as to what these people want done. Most people relate these types of sit-in's to hippies from their generation and view them as more of an unorganized annoyance. To my friends who I work with in NYC, comments I hear from them are to this effect (I am summarizing several people's opinions as one): "It's just stupid, they block traffic and cause trouble nearby. We have to exit buildings from completely the opposite side now just to avoid them if we're wearing a suit regardless of our purpose. No one is there during the day but all of a sudden they pop up during rush hour. They wreck local businesses and drive customers away. The corporations they protest are unaffected but the small businesses nearby are the ones they are actually hurting. We don't even know what they want."
My bosses have gone to meetings with Bernanke and Geithner it is unclear still whether these protests will actually have any influence over policy. At an executive level they still appear confused as to how to handle situation, mostly because they do not understand it. But understand this, from their perspective they have changed the following: In terms of big banks, their balance sheets have been improved light years beyond where they were in 2008 with more liquidity and more capital on hand to prevent these types of shocks to the system. They have repaid any tax dollars received and are often significantly more efficient at implementing change than the government is in making up it's mind on what to do. The majority of issues occurs because of the indecisiveness in Washington. Think about these issues: 12 people are tasked with cutting $1.7 Trillion in the next 5 weeks -- The only way that is going to happen is if they cut large dollar programs. That means Healthcare, medicare, social security, and of course military but that is even less politically viable than the other three. There is also gridlock on what will happen with the tax system in the future. Those main issues where indecisiveness has been are also some of the largest possible expenses a corporation could have. How do plan for variable expenses that could go up or down by 50% in EITHER direction? Corporations have no idea how to plan for healthcare, medicare, or social security plans for their employees because there is no decisiveness on what will occur in the future. They do not want to hire people that they cannot afford to keep a year later because of law changes. So even if they have the money for it now (which they do), they are unable to hire because of the risk of causing liquidity issues later and the massive negative PR associated with hiring and then firing. These banks also receive criticism for not lending money out, but this is not their fault. They ARE lending money out, but there is no demand. It is not supply side issues, there is plenty of money out there to be had. You can get a loan today no problem, don't believe me? Go try it at any bank you want. There is just no one who wants to take a loan. So all that free capital that we spent 3 years trying to push into banks is now stuck there.
This issue is not business related anymore. It is purely political. My above statements are not to absolve corporations of responsibility in 2008, but they are more to explain the current situation here and now. Europe is a whole other book to write about another time.
In a world where politicians and talking heads can call the greatest capitalist of our time Warren Buffett a socialist, and get away with it as "news" is the real issue at hand.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
Hello there, adoring internet-stalkers! (I'm kidding. ~_~) You may have noticed (if you were loyal, that is ;)) that my Feedburner-powered RSS Feed has been lacking in activity lately. There's a reason for that.
Recently, I got rid of WordPress and Sweetcron in favor of a new CMS platform, Chyrp. I had been running Wordpress for a long time, using it to share my thoughts with the general internet populace. However, it had become a bit of a chore to maintain, and it really felt like duplicate work on top of all the other content-generation I was already performing (i.e., forum posts, blog comments, Last.fm "Loved" Tracks, Google Reader shared items, etc.), so I began to look for a way to aggregate this content into a central place.
For a while, FriendFeed served this purpose well, but I didn't like the lack of control I had over the source. Facebook also filled part of this gap (and it still does, to a point), and they've even purchased FriendFeed, but I was looking for something quite a bit more customizable and self-hosted. Through various referrals, I came across Yongfook's Sweetcron project which was a new platform designed specifically for this new thing they called, le gasp, "Lifestreaming".
However, after fighting with Sweetcron and its aggregation methods, particularly its lack of support for various service feed formats; I decided to look into something else. Initial searches landed me upon Tumblr, who had conveniently announced a feature that syncs comments across multiple services (or aggregates). Sadly, I didn't want to get back into a world where all my code was hosted by someone else, and I had no control over it. I kept Sweetcron running on my site under lifestream/, but I continued searching for a better solution.
I then stumbled across Bazooka, which was billed as "the first free PHP tumblelog engine". Thanks to Bazooka developer Evan Walsh, who alerted me to a more up-to-date and current replacement called Chyrp. And I was sold. I immediately spent a few hours converting my existing content from WordPress and SweetCron over to a test installation of Chyrp, and then took the next night changing my site structure and 301'd all my old links to the new URLs.
That's where EricMartindale.com stands today. I've spent a few weeks getting my stream set up the way I want it, and I'm turning the RSS feed back on. Posts should begin flowing into your RSS reader very shortly. Post comments, feedback, and questions here!
Edit 10:13 PM EST: It looks like Feedburner is having some trouble parsing my new RSS content. You can subscribe to my direct feed and it will always work.
Edit 10:58 PM EST: I've fixed the problem and committed the patch to GitHub.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
In liturgical Islam texts, we are called Masihi (مسيحي), or "Followers of the Messiah". In Chinese, we are 基督徒 - a literal "Christ follower". Regardless of what you call us, I feel that who is defined as a "Christian" has deviated far from what has been laid out by Christ and his closest disciples.
On a daily basis, I am faced with the bitter disgust incited by the dogma surrounding the "Christian" faith. A growing number of intellectuals shun Christianity as a result of its hypocrisy; all too common is the known Christian who is seen lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise sinning--directly in opposition to the perception of the Church to be wholly condescending upon sinners and their deeds. The view of Christian doctrine that enforces a "fire and brimstone" doom upon those who do not repent from their sinful ways is one that is misunderstood and misinterpreted, turning people away from the true nature of Christianity before a full understanding is given.
In 1st John, John writes (and I promise to keep my number of Bible references to a minimum):
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
1st John 1:8
It is the very nature of the Christian faith to recognize that we sin: this is the whole premise of following the figure that our faith is named after. We are sinners, and we do participate in activities and perform activities that are duly defiant of the damnation that is preached from some pulpits. It is our aspiration to emulate the figurehead by admitting our sins and providing unconditional love to everyone and everything we come into contact with that is supposed to set us apart from nonbelievers.
However, it is unfortunate that most "Christians" have lost sight of our true nature (that is, to love and care for all of God's creation) and are not the loving and caring role models that our faith demands. John continues in chapter 4:
7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
1st John 4:7-12
As the passage exemplifies, God is embodied in our capacity to love; it is the command of love that we must maintain first and foremost. If we do not have love, we have nothing. (See "All You Need Is Love")
I fully agree with the perception that Christians today are too righteous: we are commanded to be humble. It is for this reason, among others, that I most frequently choose to be called (...) a "follower of Christ" as opposed to a "Christian" (which ironically enough, was used as a condemning phrase). Christians have no right to tout their holiness as a indicator of superiority over anyone.
We must love everyone; Muslims, Jews, the poor, the sick, the needy... people of all races, faiths, nationalities and conditions; all are included in the Christian's domain of unconditional love and tolerance, no matter what their actions. As the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said:
Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I often get asked for my Skype address, sometimes in relation to business or casual conversation. I politely decline with some degree of hand-waving about my reasons, and suggest an alternative form of communication (typically either Google Talk or Google Hangouts, depending on the context—both are built right in to Gmail!). I'd like to outline some of the reasons why I've made the decision to avoid Skype, primarily so I have something to link to when someone asks me about it.
First and foremost, we don't really know what Skype actually does. The binary (the actual program you run on your computer) is obfuscated, so attempts at disassembling it [PDF] to verify some of its strange behavior and the information it is transmitting have so far come up with very little. This is an issue, because Skype produces encrypted traffic even when you are not actively using Skype. This means we can only speculate on what information Skype is collecting about you after you've so graciously chosen to install it, and perhaps more importantly who it is sending that information to.
When a Skype client is not in a call and is running on a machine with public IP address, it has on the average 4-8 active TCP connections and atleast one UDP connection.
While connecting to external IP addresses is normal for a server/client architecture and necessary for receiving notifications, the volume of traffic and number of connections is concerning, considering the compounding issues between Skype's peer-to-peer architecture [PDF] and the "reasonable level of detection accuracy" in snooping on voice calls in Skype [PDF], despite the [purportedly] encrypted nature of the Skype protocol.
Speaking in general terms, Skype is "black box" software which has undergone no public review despite very concerning observed behavior. When new Skype malware (like Skype IMBot, of which an analysis is available, or the more recent Skype account hijacking) is released, there are very few options to protect ourselves if we've got Skype installed. On Linux, tools like AppArmor and TOMOYO exist, but without the ability to easily view the source and understand the attack (per perhaps even fix it proactively, before it occurs) we are at the mercy of Skype's new maintainers to provide a timely resolution in a reactive approach.
If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.
— Richard Stallman
In conclusion, while Skype may be convenient, it presents a series of questions that must be asked and implications to be considered before choosing it over other chat, VoIP, and video chat solutions. I can only hope that more people consider these things before doing so.
Asides
Some of the other things I found interesting, more recently than the research I've linked in this post, include Skype's role in the Syrian conflict, in which a claim was made as follows:
A media activist in Idlib named Mohamed said a rebel informant working for the government was killed in Damascus six months ago after sending warnings to the Free Syrian Army on Skype.
“I saw this incident right in front of my eyes,” Mohamed said. “We put his info on Skype so he was arrested and killed.”
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I've been using Twitter since pretty early on (and long before @oprah), and I've found it to be a superbly convenient communication tool and notification service. Even though it's still very young on the web (Twitter was founded in March of 2006) It's been the home to great ideas like the #twitterdata proposal and the publicdomain book-via-tweets project. It's also an awesome reputation management platform, and can be used to both to provide effective customer service and help distribute news and updates about your business or product, which is exactly how I use it for my online roleplaying project.
But as with the rest of the social media world, Twitter can become very complex very quickly (but I still contend that there is no social media overload) and as a result, can be difficult to manage. As a result, I use several third-party tools to help me manage and gather information that helps me do my Twitter job much more efficiently and effectively.
Splitweet
[caption id="attachment_196" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Splitweet allows you to post and monitor multiple Twitter accounts and brands."][/caption]
For those of us with multiple Twitter accounts (like some people who create a Twitter account for each roleplaying character they use), Splitweet is an absolute savior. This service allows you to tweet to multiple accounts at the same time, as well as combining the "stream" from each account into one page. A lot of desktop Twitter clients offer this kind of functionality, but where Splitweet truly excels is in its ability to track what it calls "brands" (more reputation management terms here): you can specify keywords and phrases that will appear in a separate feed, even if you do not follow those users. This gets us around the disastrous changes Twitter made to the @replies, and helps us keep up to date on any mentions of our site's name and any tweets relating to what it is that we do.
Sherflock
[caption id="attachment_195" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Sherflock provides detailed statistics and summaries of Twitter users you are associated with."][/caption]
Sherflock is an absolutely awesome stat tracking machine that helps weed out the waves of spam that have been coming in since Twitter has gone mainstream. Sherflock gives a large number of statistics about each every account the either follows you or that you are following, and lets you sort and filter users based on these statistics.
Twitterfall
[caption id="attachment_194" align="alignnone" width="217" caption="Twitterfall offers a live stream of twitter updates on keywords that you specify."][/caption]
This tool allows you to specify any number of keywords that you wish to view on a live, moving stream of tweets. This is very useful if you are using a computer that allows you to "pin" a window on top (like Ubuntu Linux), or if you have a multiple-monitor rig, or even if you use multiple computers using the input-sharing app Synergy. You'll get a live feed of updates on any topic of your choice, which can even be updated and changed in real-time.
Using these three tools will help you maximize you Twitter performance and make the most of an already awesome service, preventing you from being inundated with the massive stream of messages that you're surely going to subscribe to.
What are your top three Twitter tools? Feel free to make a comment or write your own post, and I'll gladly append a link to this post to help everyone out!
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
RPGChat is one of the other large roleplaying forums out there, and they've been around since about May, 2001. Since then, RPGChat has gone through many evolutions, and has expanded rapidly - they started with a forum, grew into a decent sized roleplaying chat, and finally removed the chat and went back to forums.
You'll immediately notice the large number of forums, which for most boards isn't an issue. In today's roleplaying world, RPGChat's index fits right in.
They've got four basic navigation options at the top of the page, which are images instead of text, which isn't very good for SEO. The four menu options are Home, Forums, Chat, and Rules. I gave each of them a shot, but it looks like only the "Home" and "Rules" link work.
I'm going to take a look at their code, because using images for links isn't horrible if you specify the right attributes. Let's have a glance:<a href="http://forums.rpgchat.com/index.php">
<img src="header/but_home.jpg" border="0">
</a>
Yikes! Not only does the anchor not have a title attribute, but the image doesn't have an alt attribute! Search engines won't be able to understand the context of these links, and the flow of link juice to the two working links won't be very beneficial.
I participated on these forums for a few months as the username Alighieri, for that period, I became the single most active user in their welcome forum. I posted in several other topics, but got pretty frustrated with the limitation on the length of a post (20,000 characters).
When attempting to post a profile for one of my characters, I was immediately snubbed by the limitation. This makes well-researched posts difficult to make, specifically with the citations that must be put in place for accurate references. Ultimately, I was forced to cut out portions of my character's history to fit it into the post.
After posting for a few weeks nonstop in the Welcome Forum, I headed off to the The Arena area, where turn-based fighting is largely popular. I opened a topic with a list of the top turn based fighters, placed into a neat little image and posted right into the topic. It took a few days to get any response at all, (save for a few people who contacted me over AIM) and when I did get a response, I logged in to RPGChat to find that I had been banned for "advertising on multiple occasions", much to my surprise.
However, while my visit was cut short, I met some good friends, and had some great discussions. Unfortunately, the forum does not allow any links to external sites of any kind, and also does not allow signatures, which makes it very difficult to spread the word about the topics you start there. This isn't very good for encouraging member interaction, and makes it very difficult for momentum of any sort to be gained within the community.
After speaking with someone who had messaged me on AIM prior to my banning, I confirmed my worst fears - RPGChat is a closed community, and is not very open to outside communities or positive interaction with those communities. This is the number one concern mentioned to me about RPGChat and their future, and there is ongoing fear of the community continuing to stagnate without any growth other than direct referral.
I sent a request via the site's contact form, as listed at the bottom every page, which merely opened a new email to their support address, forums@rpgchat.com - I sent a couple questions in my email, and I identified who I was, but I haven't yet received a response. It'd be great if we could get an interview with an admin from RPGChat on the history of the site!
In terms of organic visitors, a search for pages on RPGChat has about 16,200 results. When digging through the pages, I noticed that only 477 pages were in the primary index, with the remainder in the supplemental index. That's scary!
Let's take a look at their search results:
As you can see from the above search, we can confirm that there is some duplicate content problems. However, from what we've seen - most of RPGChat's traffic is a result of direct referral. We can identify with the importance of defensible traffic, but organic traffic is also a high-quality method of driving laser-targeted traffic to your site, and it looks like RPGChat is seriously missing out on this.
RPGChat has a relatively active forum; 63,708 threads, 1,925,709 posts, and 59,352 "active" members. While that's only an average of about 30 posts per thread and only about 32 posts per user, they do have some great quality and style elements in their posts that you simply don't see in many other places in roleplaying forums these days. I think it would be a great move for them to deactivate a lot of their older and inactive members, and send out reminders to these users to come back and join in on the fun.
It also seemed like a consensus that the single best area on RPGChat was the Clans & Guilds forum, which most users simply called "C/G" for short. It looks like most other forums' version of a multiverse, where roleplay is freeform, and most action is player-driven with rules being defined by the status quo.
Lack of availability aside, RPGChat leaves a pretty strong impression, and if you're careful to follow their 500 wordlist of rules, you can likely make some friends and enjoy some great high-quality roleplay. The administration needs to do some overhauling if they're going to keep the community healthy, but for the time being - RPGChat makes for a great roleplaying destination.
Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.
I often get asked for my Skype address, sometimes in relation to business or casual conversation. I politely decline with some degree of hand-waving about my reasons, and suggest an alternative form of communication (typically either 
[/caption]
[/caption]
[/caption]
