firehose

Boston Globe Media Partners (BGMP) is seeking a Director of UX and Design to own all strategic and operational elements of the visual experience associated with several of its primary digital properties (<a href="http://Boston.com" rel="nofollow">Boston.com</a>, <a href="http://BostonDeals.com" rel="nofollow">BostonDeals.com</a>, <a href="http://RadioBDC.com" rel="nofollow">RadioBDC.com</a>, our Classified sites, and others). The Director will construct and manage a collaborative studio environment that encourages idea exploration through rapid prototyping and experimentation.

This role will be responsible for UX throughout the entire development life cycle, providing creative leadership, from art direction to information architecture to UX development best practices. He/she will manage a team of visual designers and UX specialists, operating from a data-driven usability framework to design highly functional web products and create style guides across diverse BGMP digital brand.

The Director will serve as BGMP’s in-house evangelist and champion for the value of UX and the UX process, working to create a bridge that connects user experience to both business and technology disciplines. He/she will lead a group that drives all vision, budgets, and timelines on the visual side of a growing digital operation.

The New York Police Department attempted to harness Twitter to drum up support today, but things haven't exactly gone as planned. Earlier today, the official NYPD Twitter account asked followers to tweet photos of themselves with NYC police officers under the hashtag #myNYPD — but so far, many users have jumped on that hashtag to flood it with images of police aggressively apprehending apparent suspects. So far, these are hardly the friendly images the NYPD was hoping for.

While it's hard to say if the force used in many of the pictures tagged with the #myNYPD hashtag is justified or not, the overall sentiment is clearly one in defensive of citizens against an overly brutal police presence. Either way, there's little doubt that the anti-police co-opting of the #myNYPD hashtag is picking up mainstream attention — it's one of the top trending items on Twitter right now. It's a lesson in social media that the department is likely not to forget anytime soon.

Apple is suddenly taking a much more open approach to testing its desktop operating system. For the first time in years, the company is inviting regular consumers to help test upcoming software updates before they're distributed publicly. Apple says the OS X Beta Seed Program will allow anyone to "test-drive beta software and provide quality and usability feedback that will help make OS X even better."

To enroll, you'll need to sign a fairly serious confidentiality agreement that likely forbids you from spilling details on new features early. From there, it's as simple as downloading a small tool that will tell the Mac App Store that your Mac is eligible to receive the pre-release software. A new utility called "Feedback Assistant" is also included, which is where you'll put your thoughts on features being tested or any bugs you come across. Apple also encourages all users to make a backup before downloading beta updates — just in case things take a bad turn.

The big question is whether Beta Seed Program participaints will gain early access to the next full-fledged revision of OS X, which will likely debut at this summer's WWDC conference. It remains to be seen how far Apple will open the doors with the new beta program, but it's good to see the company taking a big step beginning today.

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Acquiring the source code to virtually every coin-op game Atari made when it dominated the early 1980s arcade scene — Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede — would seem to be enough of a coup. Yet for Jeremy Saucier, the most intimate contact with that era comes in the thousands and thousands of pages of paperwork, much of it routine.

Test-market reports. Focus group results. Written intel on what someone at Atari, for example, thought of Williams' Joust, how that was going to do as a competitor, and what Atari should do in reply.

"You see how this critical company worked at a critical time," Jeremy Saucier, assistant director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG), told Polygon, "and how they saw the industry."

ICHEG and its home, the Strong National Museum of Play, today announced the acquisition of what is practically the corporate archive for Atari Games' coin-operated division: Twenty-two palettes' worth of material, bought some 15 years ago by a collector in California, and trucked to Rochester, N.Y.

The obvious jewels — including the code and original cabinet silkscreens for a test game that only produced two units — will likely go on display in some form. The bulk of what was acquired may have little impact as an exhibition but should provide critical context to researchers studying the advent of video games in the 1970s and 1980s.

The fact a company hung on to these kinds of workaday documents, and someone saw fit to buy it all up as an historical record, is a lucky break for researchers, said Jon-Paul Dyson, ICHEG's director and the vice president for exhibits at The Strong.

"The video game industry has always moved so fast, it's always forward-looking — 'What is the next game? What do we do for the next quarter?'" Dyson said. "But I think Atari, because it is the company that more or less founded the industry, it had this interest, in how it operated, in this preservation of its legacy."

All of this stuff was bought up when Midway Games, after acquiring Atari Games (the coin-op division spun off from the main company after the mid-1980s home console crash) shut it down in 2003. A man named Scott Evans, who worked in electronics recycling and salvaging, bought the material from a liquidation sale. "He recognized the importance of it all when he saw people were tossing out this stuff," Saucier said.

Evans kept the material in storage for years. He'd made donations to ICHEG before, and that relationship led to a long conversation that culminated with today's donation.

One of the specimens included is Maze Invaders, an unreleased Atari coin-op game from 1981 heavily inspired by Namco's Pac-Man and Stern Electronics' Berzerk. Ed Logg, the programmer of Asteroids and, later, Gauntlet, was assigned to build it. "They put it on a test program and it didn't do well," Dyson said. "It only produced a couple of units. You can see how it took tons of games to get to an Asteroids, and how one of the most successful designers of the 20th century, even he had his failures."

The code is stored on 8-inch floppy disks — when floppy really meant floppy. Saucier and Dyson said they are confident that they will have "a high rate of success" recovering that code to more stable media. "Some of it will be a challenge to get at," Saucier said, "but I know the collector [Evans] has read some of the discs."

Just as critical to the understanding of these games' development are the numerous binders charting their development, Saucier said. The one for Asteroids, for example, begins with Logg's handwritten notes on the control setup (Asteroids was a button-only game) and the sound effects. "These binders include production schedules, what will be done at what time, cost estimates," Saucier said.

It's like 'if we were able to get Gutenberg's business records, and tell how he was able to create the printing press.'

"It may be like, if we were able to get Gutenberg's business records, and tell completely how he was able to create the printing press," Dyson explained. "Coin-op is what launched the video game industry, and it still has reverberations to this day."

Other materials acquired include 2,800 videos on a number of formats of the day — Betamax and VHS, for example — showing things from focus group reactions, to game demonstrations, Atari's participation in industry expos, and even office parties.

"I don't know what those will look like," joked Saucier, "but we'll let you know."

Saucier said even with many of the specimens identified and their importance well known, it will take some time to catalog everything and curate an exhibit for the public. Much, much more will be held in an archive for researchers to access.

The Strong recently acquired the games collection and business records of Broderbund Software, the publisher of Myst and the original publisher of Prince of Persia. And last year, it exhibited "Atari By Design," which showcased concept documents of several Atari games next to playable versions. Some 50 Atari cabinets already are in The Strong's collection of arcade pinball and video games.

So it's not necessarily the games, but maybe something more mundane, that makes this acquisition so valuable.

"It's the kind of thing that is very ephemeral," Saucier said. "It's hard to find this sort of thing in an archive. The things you see here are actual field reports from field tests. There are reports coming back, saying how Asteroids did when it was on its first field tests. There are reports where Atari representatives went to a game show, and they're writing a report on what they think of Joust, and what they think it's going to do.

"It's a body of information not just about Atari, but about the industry as well."

AT&T and an investment group run by former Fox President Peter Chernin announced today that they have created a $500 million venture "to acquire, invest in and launch over-the-top (OTT) video services." This venture "creates the opportunity for us to develop a compelling offering in the OTT space," AT&T Chief Strategy Officer John Stankey said in the announcement.

OTT services provide video programming over an Internet connection, one that may come across the same wires as a separate cable TV service. AT&T hasn't been a fan of OTT provider Netflix. It's still haggling with the company over how much money the video service should pay for a direct connection to the TV and Internet provider's network. Netflix was able to strike a deal with Comcast, improving video quality for Comcast subscribers; Netflix quality on AT&T has remained substandard.

AT&T's new venture is with the Chernin Group, which Peter Chernin founded in 2009. "This alliance positions AT&T and The Chernin Group to take advantage of the rapid growth of online video and OTT video services, with each party bringing significant and complementary strengths. The strategic goal of this initiative will be to invest in advertising and subscription VOD channels as well as streaming services," the companies said.

Peter Miller

OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has created a fork of OpenSSL, the widely used open source cryptographic software library that contained the notorious Heartbleed security vulnerability.

OpenSSL has suffered from a lack of funding and code contributions despite being used in websites and products by many of the world's biggest and richest corporations.The decision to fork OpenSSL is bound to be controversial given that OpenSSL powers hundreds of thousands of Web servers. When asked why he wanted to start over instead of helping to make OpenSSL better, de Raadt said the existing code is too much of a mess.

"Our group removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week. It was discarded leftovers," de Raadt told Ars in an e-mail. "The Open Source model depends [on] people being able to read the code. It depends on clarity. That is not a clear code base, because their community does not appear to care about clarity. Obviously, when such cruft builds up, there is a cultural gap. I did not make this decision... in our larger development group, it made itself."

I am completely unfamiliar with Lincoln Pierce‘s Big Nate, owing mostly to the fact that it is a newspaper strip that is not rooted in complete and utter soul-crushing despair, but the one thing I know about it is that it lives up to its name. It is certainly a big comic. So big, in fact, that this month, it broke the world record for “Longest Cartoon Strip Created By A Team” with a group effort spearheaded by pierce and chronicled on The Today Show in front of a smiling, benevolent Al Roker.

The strip, recreated from Pierce’s artwork by volunteers from schools across the world, clocks in at 3,923 feet and two inches, officially netting the world record and dethroning the previous record set by French schoolchildren in 2000. So suck on that, French children! USA! USA! USA!

The strip, which follows the adventures of an 11 year-old and which was created by a man who is super into Cheetos, was laid out at New York City’s 30 Rockefeller Center, covering the ice skating rink and a good portion of the surrounding streets for the official presentation on The Today Show. Young fans in various countries were encouraged to project individual panels from Pierce’s newspaper strip onto posterboard and then send them to Pierce for the full, completed strip, though one assumes that there weren’t a lot of takers in France.

As for why Guinness refers to this as a “cartoon strip” and not a “comic strip,” well, your guess is as good as mine, but I’m guessing it has a lot to do with the folks at Guinness coming up with these categories while imbibing a little too much of their own namesake product. For more information, check out the official Big Nate website.

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Opens Awesome ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ Exhibit

[Via The Daily Cartoonist]