Markku.lempinen

Today, shortly after 1600 GMT, a historic event took place. The European Space Agency successfully landed a spacecraft on a comet. “We are there. We are sitting on the surface. Philae is talking to us, we are on the comet”, celebrated Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager. Víctor Martínez Nouvilas also celebrated the event by recreating the historic moment of touchdown. There were moments of uncertainty as it was not apparent if Philae’s harpoons had managed to anchor the spacecraft in place, but it appears that all is well. This marks an important milestone in the mission as the spacecraft was launched over a decade ago. Quite an exciting day! It will be fascinating to find out what kind of information Philae will send back to us as it explores it’s new home.

For those still mourning the end of Futurama — even if we can all acknowledge that the last few seasons were pretty weak — The Simpsons is finally doing its long-awaited crossover with Matt Groening's other show this Sunday. Here, after the writers make a subtle burn on themselves for running out of ideas, the Simpsons clan soon finds that their couch was replaced by Hedonismbot. Things get pretty awkward and sensual from there, but it's still a funny little preview for the episode to come. And hey, it can't be worse than the recent Family Guy crossover.

Continue reading…

Ilmaan videotykeillä tai vastaavanlaisilla laitteilla heijastettavassa videosisällössä ei sinänsä ole mitään uutta. Perinteisesti tekniikka vaatii jonkinlaisen valkokankaan, jotta kuva saadaan muodostumaan “keskelle” ilmaa. Tämä voi koostua läpinäkyvältä näyttävästä kankaasta tai sitten esimerkiksi koneellisesti tuotetusta sumusta. Aerial Burton on sen sijaan maailman ensimmäinen ilmaan kuvia heijastava systeemi, joka ei tarvitse tällaista erillistä taustaa projektiolleen.

Systeemi luo kuvia 1 kHz taajuudella värähtelevistä lasersäteistä, jotka välitetään ilmaan 3D-skannerin lävitse. Kyseinen vekotin saa lasersäteet tarkentumaan tiettyihin pisteisiin ilmassa. Näissä pisteissä säteet sitten ionisoivat ilmassa olevia molekyylejä ja saavat aikaan ilmiön joka luo hetken kestäviä välähdyksiä. Kun lasersäteitä syötetään jatkuvasti ilmaan, niin saadaan kuvatkin pysymään näkyvissä pidemmän ajan.

Tekniikan avulla voidaan myös esittää animoitua sisältöä ja koko laitteisto on kehitelty liikkuvaksi, jotta sen voisi esimerkiksi kuljettaa onnettomuuspaikoille ohjaamaan ihmisiä turvaan. Tällä hetkellä ilmaan luotujen kuvien sisältö koostuu lähinnä muutamista pisteistä, mutta kehittäjät pyrkivät seuraavaksi parantamaan juurikin systeemin resoluutiota.

Lähde

While this rendition isn’t going to get the same results as a real particle accelerator, I invite you to take a look at this fantastic LEGO version from Jason(JK Brickworks).

This “working” accelerator does in fact send a LEGO soccer ball around the track at 440 studs per second, or approximately 12.5 km/hr. Jason outlines some of the build in more detail on his blog.

I highly recommend checking out the video, too.

Frank Wu writes, "Brianna Wu, game developer behind Revolution 60, has been the epicenter of the #gamergate controversy recently. In this interview, she explains why, despite constant harassment and death threats, she stands up for the rights of women in technology." Read the rest

Evan and our very own Simon have revisited their childhoods and created a beautiful homage to what is possibly the best comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes.

Simon should have posted this himself but he’s too lazy. Feel free to tell him that in the comments.

I think if I embed a YouTube playlist, I can make this post always show the latest Heat Signature trailer even when I change it in future.

Sosiaalisesti rajoittuneet
Sosiaalisesti rajoittuneet - Nörttikulttuurin vankkumaton pää-äänenkannattaja jo vuodesta 2000.

Sotaelokuvia on tehty lukematon määrä, mutta panssarivaunuihin keskittyviä taistelukuvauksia on nähty todella vähän. Ehkä vaadittava tekniikka ja ahtaassa tilaassa kuvaamisen klaustrofobia ovat ajaneet tekijät pois aiheen ääreltä. Joka tapauksessa David Ayerin ohjaama Fury on mannaa kaikille tankkisodankäynnistä kiinnostuneille. Se katsoo toisen maailmansodan loppua yhden Sherman-miehistön näkövinkkelistä.

Lähtökohtaisesti Fury noudattaa sotaelokuvien perinteitä: kokenut tankkimiehistö menettää kk-ampujansa ja saa korvaajaksi idealistisen märkäkorvan, joka ei ole koskaan edes nähnyt panssarivaunun sisäpuolta. Joukkoa johtaa kovakourainen, mutta salaa inhimillinen kersantti. Matkan varrella nuori tulokas joutuu kohtaamaan sodan todellisuuden ja kauhistumaan sitä, mihin hän pakon edessä pystyy. Kuin suoraan sotaelokuvien käsikirjoitusoppaasta revittyä, siis.

Fury kuitenkin kohoaa kuluneiden aloitusasetelmiensa yläpuolelle. Hahmoissa on riittävästi harmaita sävyjä, eikä elokuvassa ole selviä sankareita tai pahiksia. Oikeastaan vain keskiössä oleva, Logan Lermanin esittämä tulokas pystyy pitämään kiinni jonkinlaisesta moraalisesta ytimestään. Ja hänenkin kohdallaan käy hyvin selväksi, että kyse on vain ajasta. Etulinjassa kovinkin idealisti painaa jossain vaiheessa liipaisinta ja katsoo vasta jälkikäteen veren tahraamia käsiään.

Inhoarealistinen, paikoin eksistentialistinen tunnelma on kuin yhdistelmä Sam Peckinpahia ja Terrence Malickia, mutta vain vähemmällä määrällä hidastuksia ja haihattelevia monologeja. Periaatteessa tyyliä voisi kai kuvata realistiseksi, mutta alla piilevä viesti on vahvan pasifistinen ja inhimillinen. Sota tuo ihmisissä esiin pahimmat, mutta välillä myös parhaimmat puolet. Esimerkiksi aluksi hiukan turhalta vaikuttava kohtaus kahden saksalaisnaisen kodissa tiivistyy karun aidoksi ja koskettavaksi. Tunnelman luonnissa auttaa Steven Pricen maalailevan suurieleinen soundtrack, joka on hyvää kuunneltavaa yksinäänkin.

Vaikka vaunun ulkopuolella pyörivä draama toimii, loistaa Fury kirkkaimmillaan panssarisotaan keskittyessään. Jatkuva valppailla olo ja koska tahansa iskevä kuolema ovat läsnä joka kohtauksessa. Taistelut on kuvattu erinomaisesti riittävän kaukaa, mutta myös niin, että vaunun sisällä syliin kaatuvat seinät tuntuvat ahdistavilta. Kaltaiseni vaunufriikki voi kerrankin ihastella aidolta näyttäviä panssareita ja muita aseita, eikä Tiikerin torni ole tällä kertaa liian edessä. Kokonaisuuden viimeistelee komea äänidesign, joka pudottaa katsojan suoraan taistelun keskelle. Ympärillä viheltävät valojuovat, kimmokkeet ja jyrähtelevät tykit herättävät aitoa kunnioitusta.

Elokuvan huippukohta on neljän Shermanin ja yksinäisen Tiikerin kohtaaminen. Se on yksittäisenä taisteluna suurin piirtein parasta koskaan kuvattua tankkisotaa. Taktiikat ovat ainakin sinne päin ja kuvaus on kohdallaan. Näyttelijät eivät turhaan harjoitelleet tiiminä oikealla Shermanilla sotimista ennen kuvausten alkua.

Elokuvan kaksi ensimmäistä näytöstä ovat erinomaisia, mutta kokonaisuus hajoaa totaalisesti käsiin viimeisessä kolmanneksessaan. Romahdus on niin täydellinen, että loppu tuntuu tyysti eri tekijöiden työstämältä. Kaikki siihen asti noudatetut säännöt heitetään romukoppaan, hahmot alkavat käyttäytyä järjettömästi ja jopa kuvaus ja leikkaus huonontuvat. Ehkä liian tiukilla lähikuvilla ja pikaleikkauksella yritetään kuvastaa sodan hulluuden lopullista läpimurtoa, mutta ratkaisu ei toimi.

Asiassa ei auta sekään, että käsikirjoitus hylkää harmaan sävyt äkkiä kokonaan. Vastassa onkin ihmisten sijasta korkkareista tuttuja pahoja natseja, jotka unohtavat kaikki sodankäynnin perustaidot. Vai mikä muu voisi selittää sitä, että yksinäinen panssarivaunu muka pärjää useampaa sataa panssarinyrkeillä aseistettua SS-miestä vastaan? Koko kohtauksessa ei ole mitään järkeä ja se maistuu todella vahvasti väkisin väännetyltä huipentumalta. Hahmojen kohtalot eivät lopulta tunnu missään, koska ne tapahtuvat vain siksi, että käsikirjoitus sanoo niin. Elokuvan sisäisestä maailmasta ja logiikasta niille ei löydy perusteita.

Viimeisen näytöksen romahdus on harmittava takaisku, sillä sitä edeltävä reilu puolitoista tuntia on parasta koskaan filmille tallennettua panssarisodan kuvausta. Kaikki toimii, kunnes se ei enää äkkiä toimikaan. Tästä huolimatta Fury on ehdottomasti katsomisen arvoinen sotaelokuva. Se olisi vain voinut olla vielä niin paljon parempi ilman lopun kompurointia.

Arvosana: 3 out of 5 stars

Fury
Tapio Salminen

They want the term of copyright changed to life plus 70 years, instead of 2039 for unpublished works of uncertain date, a standard that makes it impossible to reproduce or display things like letters home from the front. Read the rest

The Trans Pacific Partnership is the latest in a series of secretly negotiated sweeping "trade deals" that allow companies to sue governments to repeal environmental and labor laws, expand Internet censorship and surveillance, and a host of other nasties. Read the rest

A TSA supervisor confiscated Sean Malone's toy ray gun belt buckle at the airport. Malone described the encounter:

"You understand that this is a belt buckle, right?

Read the rest

A gorgeous shot of a gorgeous piece of knitted art by Tracy Widdess, shared in our Flickr Pool.

When Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, the writing was on the wall for LucasArts. The company had been shuttering studios for years already, slimming down Disney Interactive piece by piece. LucasArts did die, but with the house's best years long...

After more than two years at WTF Inc., I thought I'd seen everything that could be done wrong actually done wrong in the worst possible way. Whether it was DBAs who wcouldn't administer a database if their lives depended upon it, managers who wcouldn't manage anything, or business people who simply could not understand the concept of save a dollar today, spend ten tomorrow to fix it.

After that dalliance, I'm back in my chosen field. While crazy things sometimes get done in insane ways, it's usually in the name of beating the competition to market, and (almost) always with the understanding that it will be fixed later - at a price.

However, this one struck me as sooo wtf that I'm not even going to try to anonymize it.

Every project from hello world on up has a source tree. It might be as simple as a single directory with one or more source files, or it could be an entire hierarchy of packages, common and external libraries, and so forth. The one thing they all have in common is that the one or more main programs in a project are all applications that pertain to that project. You never see two unrelated projects sharing the same source tree. They might share a common shared library, but not the same source tree. It just isn't done.

Or so I thought.

At my present firm, the culture specifies that for major architectural/code reviews, there must be one very senior member from an unrelated team/department present, and that individual has veto authority on anything that's said or presented. This is to allow an unbiased opinion to be offered without threat of reprisal by the manager.

As one of the more senior folks, I was volunteered for this task at a department that could only be linked back to me from five levels up. I didn't know any of these people, and so had no axe to grind. I went in with an open mind.

When they described their project, for the most part, their approach, level of scalability and parallelism, use of database, messaging and services, etc. made sense. Then they showed me their repository tree. It did not make sense. There were thirteen different (unrelated) projects in there. Together:

	MasterRepository
	  |
	  |-- classes
	  |-- srcproject1
	  |    |-- com
	  |         |
	  |         |-- company
	  |               |-- business
	  |               |-- comm
	  |               |-- gui
	  |               |-- services
	  |               |-- util
	  |-- srcproject2
	  |    |-- com
	  |         |
	  |         |-- company
	  |               |-- business
	  |               |-- comm
	  |               |-- gui
	  |               |-- services
	  |               |-- util
	  | ...
	  |-- srcproject13
	  |    |-- com
	  |         |
	  |         |-- company
	  |               |-- business
	  |               |-- comm
	  |               |-- gui
	  |               |-- services
	  |               |-- util

Naturally I queried why all the other projects were in there together, and why all of their source directories were configured as source directories in this project, I was told that they were told that it's easier this way.

Though I began to shudder, I just had to know, so I looked into the source trees. There were numerous classes with the same names and implementing the same interface at the same package path but in multiple source trees. Thus, auto-complete could pick any one of them because they all had the same signature, albeit subtly different implementations. As you might imagine, this led to all sorts of debugging fun at run time.If they were lucky, something would be null and it would dump the stack. If they were less than angelic, it wouldn't perform the calculation in quite the right way. If they had been particularly bad, if wouldn't perform the calculation in quite the right way only some of the time.

As if this wasn't far enough off the beaten path, I noticed that they were all using the same build/package/deploy mechanism, but at seemingly random intervals. It turns out that to prevent each of the teams from blocking any of the other teams from doing a deployment-at-will, all of the units of work were designed to be less than one day. That is, you had one day to design, code and test your work before committing. Thus, if the other team needed to deploy, they could grab the entire tree - including all of the tiny units of work done by the other teams - that compiled but didn't necessarily accomplish anything useful - package it up and deploy it.

Of course, if someone happened to be changing some piece of functionality that was shared, but hadn't yet made all of the one-day-of-work units that comprised the larger logical change, it was possible to get a melange of code that could best be described as: it might work.

Needless to say, the entire department was experiencing very high levels of instability, blocking deployment collisions when some piece of code absolutely could not be deployed without the rest of the related changes - without breaking the other projects.

When I pointed out the folly of all of this, they told me that the boss four levels up had experienced massive problems with multiple projects under his control, and decided that a single source tree would only need to be fixed once and would thus improve throughput. I told them that all of the projects had to be liberated separated into individual project source trees. Anything that was common would need to be its own project and released on its own schedule. When they were informed that this had to be done, they said they were under a mandate from four levels up. I went to the common manager five levels up, explained the situation, and that this was the reason for all the red on the dashboard.

The order to break it all apart was given.

Komeahko aamurusko kuvattuna työpaikan pihamaalta.

Hikers exploring England’s Derbyshire Peak District earlier this week stumbled onto a rare phenomenon caused by extreme winds. The River Downfall, a 30-meter (98 foot) waterfall was blown back almost vertically by a powerful updraft, making it seem as if the waterfall was simply flowing into nothing. Very cool. (via Twisted Sifter)

Once-defunct publisher 3D Realms has re-opened its doors, releasing a 32-game compilation and promising a slate of upcoming releases from a newly-assembled staff. The 3D Realms Anthology, available for $19.99 from the publisher's website, collects...

"How can you be sure [the patient wasn't alive] Doctor?" "Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar." Read the rest

[ Drifting Over the Ether ]

From Alana Jones-Mann, a baker, culinary artist and DIY enthusiast in Brooklyn, cupcakes that look like miniature cacti. They're so cute, they're even planted in crushed graham cracker soil.

Read the rest

When you bought your Wii U, it came with one set of terms-of-service; now they've changed, and if you don't accept the changes, your Wii seizes up and won't work. That's not exactly what we think of when we hear the word "agreement." Read the rest

Swestar has released a new mech into the wild. It answers to the name “Guardian” and it’s pretty dang cool. But I especially love the atmosphere he has going on in the base/hanger in which he introduces the Mech. The presentation is just about perfect.

If your phone is designed to be secure against thieves, voyeurs, and hackers, it'll also stop spies and cops. So the FBI has demanded that device makers redesign their products so that they -- and anyone who can impersonate them -- can break into them at will. Read the rest

The company expanded the "ex parte temporary restraining order" so it could stage one-sided, sealed proceedings to take away rival businesses' domains, sometimes knocking thousands of legit servers offline. Read the rest

So here are some harsh figures that will make you cancel your ad spending for your indie game.

In the last 8 days my figures show me this…

For every 100 visits to my index page for D3, 48 people will proceed to the register page. Of those, 11 will hit the buy button, of those roughly 1 will buy the game. That earns me about $22.

so the maximum cost per click that makes sense is $0.22, or £0.13, which is practically unachievable.

So how can ads make sense?

The beauty of ads is that the person who comes and buys the click is just one factor in the equation. There are many other factors, and the problem is they are hard to quantify.  Here are the ones I think matter and the rough guesses.

• The life time value (LTV) of the customer has to include every other game they buy, including DLC. Assume D3’s DLC adds 10% to total income, and assume a 20% chance of buying another positech game eventually  so LTV factor is 0.3.
• The virality of the customer has to include friends that he persuades to buy the game. This is hard to tell, but lets say it’s pitched at roughly 20%. So one in five people will eventually lead to another sale, either directly or indirectly through a forum post or tweet about the game, so this includes people they have never met. So this is 0.2
• The untracked sale. This includes people who visit the buy page at work/school, then buy at home, or view it on mobile but buy on desktop. I suspect that is around 10% so another 0.1.
• The delayed / wishlist/ bargain hunter. I crunched the numbers once for Democracy 2 and found roughly 33% of revenue was from sales, so thats 33% of income not being tracked here, or earned here, but stored for later, so lets say 0.33.
•  The impression that wasn’t a sale. This is a big thing. Some people used to say you needed to see an ad 5 times before it worked. Other research claims even 1 impression has an impact, and >5 can still help. Because click-through rates are pretty low, we are totally disregarding the impact on brand awareness. Essentially you visually prime a customer with your logo to ensure subconscious recollection when viewing a review, portal listing or whatever else. Personally I think this is a big factor, lets say at least 25% to be cautious.

So if we add that up, we get 0.3 + 0.2 + 0.1 + 0.33 + 0.25 = 1.18, so an extra 118% of income generated by that sale. In other words our 0.22 is really 0.48. That *is achievable, although still not easy. What should be immediately obvious is that we have a LOT of fuzzy numbers and guesses in here that really cannot be tracked. Putting hard numbers to some of them would help a lot.

Looking at it the other way, we have to take into account the fact that a big chunk of site visitors are not ad related but coming from reviews, portal links, tweets etc. Ideally I need to deduct that traffic to get a better picture (which would make my figures much worse).

So for now, lets assumed that we break even at $0.48 per click, what are the possibilities for making an ad-based strategy work?

• Target traffic more cleverly so the people who arrive are more suited to purchasing. That would push up that 48% who go to the register page.
• Increase the lifetime value of the customer. More games. Cross-promotion. Maybe more DLC, or sequels, there are various strategies here, but I’m already doing most of them
• Reduce leakage points. Find out why people don’t hit the buy button, or then hit the actual order form buy button. A/B testing to improve both stages.
• An ad that more clearly prevents non-buyers from clicking, and thus targets better. I don’t want people who expect a free game, or a mobile game. Luckily adwords lets you analyze each ads performance. I should do this…

Fun fun fun…

 

 

 

The Bus by Paul Kirchner Title: J.G. Ballard Atley

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic.

More detail today, I wanted to show the little known or portrayed life raft stowage compartment, so I have cut out the access door and scratch built the interior, I will add the liferaft at some point.

Michał Kaźmierczak has built several large dioramas, and they all keep getting bigger and better. His epic rendition of the volcanic world of Mustafar from Star Wars captures the fiery landscape and the realistic texture of the lava. The diorama rests on a footprint of 35 large gray baseplates. Here is a photo with the builder for perspective.

The microscale imperial shuttle in this photo really shows off the scale of this massive display.