firehose

We have the means to create a publicly owned search engine. Who will build it you ask? The NSA will.

BRISTOL, CT—Expressing their deepest most heartfelt sympathy, the American public announced Thursday that they feel really fucking terrible for the poor woman who sits between Skip Bayless and Stephen A.

Startups, pizza, ego, beer, filth. The collapse of a hacker house and the battle for Silicon Valley’s soul.

WASHINGTON—According to a new study published Monday by the Pew Research Center, Americans enjoy watching television and eating.

SUDBURY, MA—Sources confirmed Monday that the man seen parked on a residential street at 2:00 a.m.

By Meredith Artley, Managing Editor Of CNN.com

New York ad agency Barton F. Graf 9000 has turned its roguish attention to the issue of climate change.

Ever searched for a hashtag and been greeted with a "no tags found" message? Instagram may have been lying to you.

There've been rumblings about big changes for OMSI's Omnimax theater for a few months—I never heard anything quite solid enough to report, but they usually went along the lines of either (A) OMSI replacing their dome IMAX theater with a smaller, flat screen, or (B) OMSI going all-out and bringing an actual IMAX theater to Portland—unlike the expensive, IMAX-branded, and underwhelming "Liemax" screens at places like Lloyd Cinemas and Bridgeport Village. Rumor was that OMSI's would be like the IMAX at Seattle's Pacific Science Center, with a screen six stories tall.

I was pulling for (B), because a real IMAX would be rad to have in town—for both OMSI-friendly documentaries and big blockbusters, an actual IMAX would provide the motivation to see stuff in a theater that places like Lloyd Cinemas aren't currently offering. I'm also, to be fair, not a huge fan of the current theater at OMSI, as it's... well, kind of terrible? Domes might be great for plane-ariums planetariums, but when it comes to watching anything that contains, say, straight lines, or human faces, or normal day-to-day objects, there's pretty much no way for OMSI to project anything on a domed surface without a majority of the audience being subjected to a grossly distorted picture.

Following a post on Reddit Portland (and a subsequent online petition) about upcoming changes, OMSI spokesperson Amita Joshi sent out an email on Friday night confirming that... well, something is happening with the theater. Sounds like it won't be a real IMAX theater, though—those still require 70mm film, and whatever the Omnimax is turning into, it'll be digital, with 4K projection (the same that's used by chain multiplexes, including Regal) and Dolby Atmos sound. (As of now, the only theater near Portland offering Atmos is Cinetopia Vancouver Mall, which charges an extra $2.50 for the privilege.) OMSI will also be playing "more mainstream content during off-hours."

The full press release is below; once OMSI decides to talk more about what, exactly, their plan is with the Omnimax space, I'll post 'em. Here's hoping that in one way or another, it's something that isn't already offered by other theaters in town.

While our present large format film projection system continues to entertain visitors we, like many theaters across the country, are facing the inevitable demise of the film format. The transition to digital is a reality for everyone.

In order not just to keep up, but to thrive in the changing business of theaters, planned upgrades include the addition of a state-of-the-art Dolby Atmos audio system and the latest 4K digital projection technology. This means we'll soon be able to show more content, and in many forms, including live satellite feeds, Blu-ray material, and content from computers. Furthermore, the wealth of new opportunities will not be limited to expanded educational and documentary programming. The changes will also enable us to show more mainstream content during off-hours. Another very important advantage: we'll finally have the ability to offer assistance to hearing impaired visitors, an option that does not exist in our current set up.

We understand that the OMNIMAX theater is an important part of the history of both OMSI and Portland. We respect and honor that history.

We must also adapt to meet the times. This upgrade allows us to continue to operate and to do so with expanded educational content. We believe that to be critical in delivering upon our mission of science education.

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http://thevisualartofmetal.tumblr.com/

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1. Eric “Mean Melin” Melin (US)

The 2013 Air Guitar World Championships took place in Oulu, Finland at Rotuaari Square on Friday, August 23, 2013. American air guitarist and drummer Eric “Mean Melin” Melin won the event with his epic performance seen below.

The purpose of the Air Guitar World Championships is to promote world peace. According to the ideology of the Air Guitar, wars would end and all bad things would disappear, if all the people in the world played the Air Guitar. This is why the whole universe is invited to play the Air Guitar at the end of the competition.

4. Justin “Nordic Thunder” Howard (US)

15. James “The Beast” Lowe (NL)

3. Thom “W!ld Th!ng 37″ Wilding (UK)

6. Mitsuaki “Inogami Koushou” Inoue (JP)

photos by Mauri Ratilainen

images and video via Air Guitar World Championships

via The Guardian

sihipop:

dandiki:

Kai Fagerström | The House in the Woods

More amazing photos can be found here!

Finnish photographer Kai Fagerström presents unique photo series, where he captures wild animals making themselves comfortable in abandoned houses in the woods of Finland. Titled The House in the Woods, the photo series is set in cottages near Kai’s summer house, which were abandoned by their tenants after the owner of the place died in a fire. Award-winning photographer noticed how the place was slowly being reclaimed by the nature, and what started as a few snapshots, ended up being a book, published in Finnish, German, and English.

“Deserted buildings are so full of contradictions,” says Kai. “I am fascinated by the way nature reclaims spaces that were, essentially, only ever on loan to humans.” Kai usually works with a clear image of what he wants to achieve in his head, although it make take some time for all elements to fall into place. The photographer has enough patience, however: “This is fine with me,” he says. “The journey is more important than the destination.“

Air vs. Water

djempirical

#selfshare

Want to have some fun? Read the comments on a Derek Bailey vid.

E.g.,



Go take a peek. Pretty great.

Edit: Chris Randall added this, which echos my views on this:

@djempirical It always amazes me that people that make music like 20 people dig are always the ones that people get the most butthurt about.
— Chris Randall (@Chris_Randall) August 26, 2013

@djempirical I just want to say "if you were in charge, the only music we'd have would be The Eagles."
— Chris Randall (@Chris_Randall) August 26, 2013

Original Source

Syfy's Heroes of Cosplay hasn't been winning over many hearts and minds, so far as I can tell, having never watched the show and having a limited window into the cosplay community itself. But now one photographer is trying to get the company to admit that they used his photos without permission and against copyright law.

I’m at my in-laws this week, and my brother-in-law is visiting from Seattle. He’s packing for Burning Man but has been lying to his parents and telling them he’s going camping in Yosemite instead. Except now that there are fires in Yosemite they are worried and want him to cancel his camping trip, and the lies are piling up and getting more complicated every hour.

Original Source

basilton:

In the early years of space flight, both Russians and Americans used pencils in space. Unfortunately, pencil lead is made of graphite, a highly conductive material. Snapped graphite leads and particles in zero gravity are hugely problematic, as they will get sucked into the air ventilation or electronic equipment, easily causing shorts or fires in the pure oxygen environment of a capsule.

After the fire in Apollo 1 which killed all the astronauts on board, NASA required a writing instrument that wasn’t a fire hazard. Fisher spent over a million dollars (of his own money) creating a pressurized ball point pen, which NASA bought at $2.95 each. The Russian space program also switched over from pencils shortly after.

40 years later snide morons on the internet still snigger about it, because snide morons on the internet never know what they are talking about.

Yep. But some of us do.

When Batman and Superman team up to fight evil, they are generally known as the World’s Finest. And yet just because they’re called that doesn’t mean that all their adventures are necessarily good — some are quite wretched, in fact. Here’s 15 tales from the original World’s Finest comics that never need to be retold.

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It’s possible, even likely, that Microsoft is about to enter the darkest period in the firm’s history. Darker, even, than July 2000, when it seemed the US government might dissolve the house that Bill built, and force the company to be split into two different companies.

The revenue Microsoft earned in the quarter ending in March 2013, $20.5 billion, probably represents a high water mark for the company, at least for the foreseeable future. In the most recent quarter, the company’s revenue missed expectations, which Microsoft blamed on ongoing weakness in the market for PCs. There is no sign that demand for PCs is going to pick up again—even Intel is projecting sales will be flat, at best—and plenty that the world’s demand for PCs, or at least the kind that run Microsoft Windows, is in terminal decline (1).

Microsoft’s problem can be distilled to this: Computing is no longer confined to personal computers, where even now Microsoft maintains a near monopoly. More than ever, people are hiring other devices to do the jobs that PCs once did: communication, entertainment, and some portion of their work. For a host of reasons, Microsoft failed to compete effectively in the two markets that are disrupting its core business: first, the mobile devices that are supplanting PCs, and second, the cloud computing resources that are essential to making those mobile devices more useful, in many cases, than PCs.

Microsoft does produce a valuable good: its operating system (2). But with the decline of the PC and the rise of the web, mobile devices, and cloud services, the company failed to anticipate or effectively dominate these alternate—and in many cases superior—means of getting computing done. We have reached out to Microsoft for comment and are awaiting response.

Pulling back the curtain on the rot in Redmond

Everything that follows is, necessarily, from anonymous sources, all of them veterans of Microsoft. Synthesizing their feedback with other publicly reported accounts yielded some valuable insights about what ails the company and how to address it.

All the reasons Steve Ballmer never should have become CEO in the first place

The timing of the handover of Microsoft from founder and technical genius Bill Gates to employee no. 30 and MBA dropout Steve Ballmer could hardly have been worse for Ballmer. On December 29, 1999, Microsoft’s stock price was at an all time high, and Microsoft was the most valuable company on earth. Then the stock began to fall. Seventeen days later, Steve Ballmer took over, the stock market crashed soon after, and Microsoft has never returned to its pre-bubble valuation.

In 1999, when Microsoft was a blue-chip company wringing a steady stream of income from the Windows monopoly, it might have made sense to put Ballmer, who was initially the company’s first business manager, in charge. But Microsoft remained a technology company, and having a non-technical CEO meant that Ballmer was ill-equipped to oversee the increasingly large and unwieldy development project that Windows had become.

There is copious evidence of Microsoft’s broken product pipeline, which stretches back a decade, at least: In 2004, Steve Jobs unveiled a version of Mac OS X that incorporated many of the features that Microsoft had promised in its “Longhorn” reboot of Windows, a project that became so snarled that Ballmer eventually had to decide to throw out all the work his engineers had done and start again, delaying the release of Windows Vista (which succeeded Longhorn) by at least two years.

More recently, Microsoft’s disastrous attempt to copy the iPad, the Surface RT, led to a $900 million write-down, and the company’s cloud services simply aren’t functioning as the “glue” that should connect the company’s online software together, says one veteran. That contrasts sharply with Google, which has made inroads against Microsoft by offering a tightly-integrated suite of “Google Apps” that include replacements for Office and Microsoft’s email system, as well as cloud storage for data.

But perhaps the most concrete demonstration of Ballmer’s failure to be a “product guy” as a CEO is the way the company has pushed touch-screen PCs and a touch-centric Windows interface onto a public that has been trained for decades not to leave smudges on our PC screens (in contrast to tablets and phones) by touching them. (Granted, Google has made the same mistake with its Chromebook Pixel.) Touch screen PCs and “convertibles”—heavy laptop/tablet hybrids—have both failed to sell as manufacturers had hoped, contributing to the overall slump in the PC industry.

Low morale and a destructive internal culture

What was at the root of Microsoft’s broken product pipeline? As outlined by Vanity Fair’s expose on Microsoft’s lost decade, Ballmer was a tone-deaf manager. Microsoft’s “stack ranking” system of management, in which employees were graded on a curve that meant that one in 10 members of a team always had to receive a rating of “poor” even if everyone in a group was an A player, pitted employees against one another, discouraged collaboration between and even within teams, and slowed Microsoft’s development process to a crawl.

In 2012, Ballmer’s rating among his own employees was just 46%, compared to Google CEO Larry Page’s 94% approval rating and Mark Zuckerberg’s 99%. Morale at the company is at an all-time low, says one source, and Microsoft has for years been losing its best executives and engineers to competitors like Google. Even when Microsoft hires talented employees, the most talented ones leave more quickly than the less talented ones, degrading the overall quality of Microsoft’s workers.

Microsoft has also for many years paid sub-par wages. This policy was born at a time when Microsoft could compensate employees with stock, but the company’s stock price has been flat for a decade. Meanwhile, companies like Google are paying employees up to 23% more than the industry average.

Shareholder constraints on innovation at Microsoft

Microsoft is a blue-chip stock with huge institutional investors that expect a dividend—which doesn’t jibe with a culture of risk-taking and innovation. As a result, the company tends to be more conservative in its decision-making, says a source. As a result, Microsoft’s last decade has been almost entirely reactive. The company launched its competitor to the iPod, the Zune, just before Apple rolled out the fifth generation of the iPod (as well as the iPod Mini and Nano) and eventually discontinued the Zune. Bing and Office 365, reactions to Google’s search and Apps, respectively, came late enough that they seem destined to forever remain niche products. (Bing’s market share is about 18% to Google’s 67%.)

Perhaps the only area where Microsoft has competed successfully in the past decade is gaming, with the Xbox, but shareholders were never happy with the billions the company sunk into the project, and analysts are now calling for Microsoft to sell that business entirely.

Customer and organizational constraints on innovation at Microsoft

Imagine for a moment that Microsoft’s next CEO cleans house, and replaces almost the entirety of senior management (which in reality wouldn’t be possible given all the institutional knowledge that would be lost). But if it were possible, here’s the classic innovator’s dilemma Microsoft would face: Products that were sufficiently good copies of, say, competitors’ cloud services, would simply eradicate many of Microsoft’s core businesses all that much faster.

The software known as Microsoft Server is one example: Customers use it to run servers within their own data centers, whereas Amazon’s cloud services model is simply to sell you time on its servers. If Microsoft’s cloud services division were to copy Amazon Web Services, down to its hyper-competitive pricing, Microsoft’s sales force would revolt because Microsoft’s cloud services would cannibalize sales of Windows Server; middle men who resell Windows Server to businesses and make a living supporting it would be upset to lose those sales; and investors would be aghast at the hit Microsoft’s profits would take. That Amazon and Google might eventually eliminate this portion of Microsoft’s business in the absence of such a move hardly matters to shareholders whose focus is on the next quarter.

What’s a Microsoft to do?

Despite the myriad structural, historical and cultural constraints faced by Microsoft, there’s always an opportunity for a turnaround. That’s the subject of part two of this series, which will appear tomorrow: Steve Ballmer may have driven away Microsoft’s best and brightest, but here’s the five-point-plan that can save the company.

Footnotes

(1) There are many theories about why the world doesn’t want as many PCs as it once did: It’s the fault of Microsoft’s unfamiliar interface for Windows 8, or it’s simply that people are holding onto their PCs for longer. But the most compelling is this: Humans need access to computing, but increasingly, that access is provided by tablets, phones, and other mobile devices, and the computing itself is done in the cloud. Also, if a PC user accesses the internet as often for entertainment as for work, then the PC is competing with the increasing sophistication of set-top boxes, game consoles, hand-held gaming devices, and even e-book readers.

Even for businesses, which have long represented Microsoft’s primary cash cow, there are now more alternatives to the conventional PC than ever. Sales reps in the field are using iPads or tablets running Android, and Google’s email and productivity apps are luring large and small businesses into the primarily web browser-based Chrome OS. And the halo effect of a string of successful mobile devices has for years increased the market share of Apple’s OS X. Granted, businesses have invested enormous amounts of money and time into Microsoft’s products, and there are countless custom apps and services that will take decades to switch away from Windows. This momentum works in Microsoft’s favor, but it’s also possible that it has been masking weakness in demand for Microsoft’s products. That is, even business IT administrators who have wanted to shift away from Microsoft’s solutions have been unable to, shackled as they are to their own legacy systems. By necessity, large corporate IT infrastructures—and for different reasons, even those of small businesses—do not turn on a dime. [back]

(2) For years, there have been perfectly usable alternatives to Microsoft Windows that failed to gain any more than a niche market share, namely Linux-based desktop operating systems. It takes a sales infrastructure and a team of engineers dedicated to simplicity and ease of use to make an operating system successful. Arguably, open-source operating systems finally have that in Google, whose Android and Chrome OS are, after all, based on Linux. [back]

A Japanese school board has reversed its decision to restrict student access to Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa’s autobiographical story about a 6-year-old boy who survived the Hiroshima bombing. Although the manga’s removal from Matsue City elementary and middle-school library shelves had drawn widespread criticism, Reuters reports the board claims the policy change is because of [...]

a-bomb-and-a-heart:

lifehack: get a pet parrot, teach it to say this and only this

“We made a great album… but I do think we have benefited from being white and the media grabbing on to something. A song like ‘Thrift Shop’ was safe enough for the kids. It was like, ‘This is music that my mom likes and that I can like as a teenager,’ and even though I’m cussing my ass off in the song, the fact that I’m a white guy, parents feel safe. They let their six-year-olds listen to it. I mean it’s just … it’s different. And would that success have been the same if I would have been a black dude? I think the answer is no.”

It would be easy to dismiss 13th Age as another D20-based fantasy role-playing game, albeit one with gorgeous art. But underneath that deceptively simple surface there are elegant storytelling gears that move in surprising ways. We talked to the creators about how it works.

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hut - Magical Vacation (Brownie Brown - GBA - 2001)

requested by ratherhappygirl

You probably didn't realize how much CG animation there is in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — and not just in the big obvious scenes where stuff is vanishing. This VFX reel for Michel Gondry's masterpiece is an eye-opener.

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