As all timelines exist simultaneously, Guillermo del Toro is currently caught between a dimension in which he’s creating a new adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five with Charlie Kaufman, and one in which he definitely isn’t. Del Toro explained the paradox to the Daily Telegraph (via The Playlist), saying he’s attached to make a new version of Vonnegut’s novel that George Roy Hill last adapted in 1972, and that he wants to explore its story of a fatalistic WWII soldier’s time travels with Kaufman, who spends most of his days brooding in the fourth dimension anyway. “Charlie and I talked for about an hour-and-a-half and came up with a perfect way of doing the book,” Del Toro said. ”I love the idea of the Trafalmadorians—to be 'unstuck in time,' where everything is happening at the same time. And that's what I want to do.”
NASA has released a new video made up of stills captured by its Curiosity Mars rover, showing the small moon Phobos climbing away from the horizon toward its zenith in the Martian sky. The moonrise, which takes 14 seconds in the video, was actually filmed one frame at a time over the course of 27 minutes on the evening of June 28, 2013.
Phobos is the larger of Mars' two moons, with a mean radius of about about 11.1 km. Its partner, Deimos, has a mean radius of 6.2 km and orbits quite a bit further out—about 23,000 km from Mars versus Phobos at 9,300 km. Both moons are likely captured asteroids, snared by Mars' gravity well at some point much earlier in the solar system's history.
According to CBS News, Curiosity is about to begin its first significant bit of travel on the Martian surface, traveling about 8 km away from its landing site to conduct experiments in the foothills of Aeolis Mons, also known as "Mount Sharp." Curiosity will take at least nine months to make the journey, with stops along the way to conduct observations and experiments.
Laughing Squid guest blogger Ed Hunsinger put a Fitbit One fitness tracker on his cat Bunki’s collar out of curiosity and to find out what she gets up to when he’s not at home. More information on the project can be found at Hunsinger’s blog.
Inside some of the major data hubs that control the flow of intercontinental internet traffic, the US government has required that special security teams are on staff to ensure that its surveillance requests are quickly fulfilled, reports The Washington Post. Even at hubs controlled by foreign companies and located abroad, these teams consist of American citizens carrying government security clearances. And in at least one instance, the data hub's foreign operator is required to maintain a remote operations base within the US that the federal government can access with only 30 minutes notice.
The security teams have been around for a decade
These security teams aren't new. The Post reports they've been publicly detailed since 2003, when they were first established as part of growing security efforts after 9/11 — but their existence helps to explain one of the ways that the government is able tap into internet traffic for surveillance. It was previously revealed that federal officials were recommended to use two separate forms of internet surveillance: direct forms of surveillance through the PRISM program, and broader "upstream" forms of surveillance through these direct taps into the cables that carry all forms of internet traffic.
According to the Post, officials with access to these cables are able to enter an email address into a specialized piece of software, and then pull out all traffic headed to and from that address. Britain's intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, has also been reported to use a similar method for directly tapping into the web. But while the US government can perform surveillance using its access to the fiber optic cable hubs, the agreements it holds with the hubs' operators aren't focused on it. Instead, the main intent is said to be securing US communications against foreign threats and spying.
The US government was apparently able to negotiate these agreements even with foreign entities by leveraging existing legal regulations. In some cases, officials held up proposed business dealings using the Federal Communications Commission's oversight of telecommunications. According to the Post, this helped government lawyers in persuading foreign companies to allow the US to maintain such extensive access. It's unclear just how many companies the US has made these deals with, and for now, the extent of the federal government's access remains classified.
"I was very careful how I built the movie. One of the other things I decided was that I wanted a female lead (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi) who has the equal force as the male leads. She’s not going to be a sex kitten, she’s not going to come out in cutoff shorts and a tank top, and it’s going to be a real earnestly drawn character...One of the decisions we made as we went along in the process of the movie was, let’s not have a love story. Let’s have a story about two people." Director Guillermo del Toro on how Pacific Rim deviates from typical summer blockbusters, and how Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi, will be a formidable, complex character.
Pacific Rim continues to be compared to blockbusters like Transformers, but, if the focus on characters in the most recent commercials wasn't evidence enough, Guillermo del Toro has set the record strait in his interview with The Star. Pacific Rim is not a movie set to exploit its female lead or compromise her character any more than it will its male lead, and del Toro stresses that he made decisions at every turn to make sure his Kaiju versus Mecha movie didn't become just another summer movie. It's looking more and more like Pacific Rim will focus on adventure and interesting characters, without falling into the glorification of violence and two-dimensional characters that movies like Transformers lead us to expect in our giant-robot-filled summer films. Finally we can watch giant monsters fight Mecha and watch an interesting story unfold!
Infinity Blade II Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP Where's My Water? Badland Tiny Wings (iPhone / iPad) Traktor DJ (iPhone / iPad) Day One Over How to Cook Everything Barefoot World Atlas.
A host of highly regarded apps for iPhone and iPad have gone free today in what could be a major celebration to mark five years since Apple launched the App Store.
With dozens of pocket-sized ARM boards with HDMI popping up, we’re surprised we haven’t seen this before. [Elias] made a custom driver board that takes an HDMI input and displays it on a very tiny, high-resolution display from a cell phone.
The display used is the same as what comes stock in the HTC desire HD. With a resolution of 800×480, it’s more than enough for a basic desktop, and while it’s not a 1080p monster from a few flagship phones, it’s more than enough for most uses.
[Elias]‘ board consists of a Himax display driver and a TI DVI receiver. Included on the board is an MSP430 microcontroller used for initializing the driver and display. This build was originally intended for the Replicape, a 3D printer driver board for the Beaglebone, but because the only connections to this board are HDMI and an SPI to the ’430, this also works with the Raspberry Pi.
if the LED bar drains the battery in any significant way, they got other problems
Sony's upcoming DualShock 4 controller for PlayStation 4 is not designed with a switch to turn off the lightbar situated at the top of the controller, Sony boss Shuhei Yoshida confirmed on Twitter.
The lightbar is designed to be used with the PlayStation camera and helps in the detection of motion control, similar to Move controllers. It can be used by developers for new purposes altogether, like as a health bar in Killzone: Shadow Fall.
In response to a question on Twitter of whether the lightbar can be deactivated to conserve the controller's battery, Yoshida simply wrote "no."
We have contacted Sony for comment and will update with additional information.
Kingdom Hearts creator Tetsuya Nomura is keen to include Star Wars and Marvel-related content to the Kingdom Hearts franchise, he told Finaland during last week's Japan Expo in Paris.
But despite interest from the game's creator, restrictions in place by Disney are still a barrier to entry for any new franchise the team hopes to incorporate in the Kingdom Hearts universe. "Of course it would be great if we could add those licenses as well," said Nomura. "But there are lots of rules and restrictions by Disney so we can't actually put in everything people want.
"So it's a quite difficult decision but we're gonna prepare some surprises for you so, just wait for the information."
The Kingdom Hearts head also highlighted Final Fantasy developer Yoshinori Kitase's own interest in the potential cross-over, highlighting the significance of the recent acquisition of Star Wars by Disney. "We're not going to decide it whether Kitase-san likes Star Wars or not but we've been talking about Star Wars itself since it became Disney's content recently. When I heard the news I was like wow, wow'. Obviously it's gonna be great if we could add it," he commented.
The team is currently working on the development of Kingdom Hearts 3, slated to hit PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. The game will feature a mature Sora on new adventures with Mickey, Donald and Goofy. He will travel to all-new Disney-themed worlds previously unseen in the Kingdom Hearts franchise.
"In theory I could also use this approach to build a proxy that exposes Reader's API backed by (say) NewsBlur's, and thus keep using the Reader UI to read current feeds."
or, say, tOR
Having gotten all my data out of Google Reader, the next step was to do something with it. I wrote a simple tool to dump data given an item ID, which let me do spot checks that the archived data was complete. A more complete browsing UI was needed, but this proved to be slow going. It's not a hard task per se, but the idea of re-implementing something that I worked on for 5 years didn't seem that appealing.
It then occurred to me that Reader is a canonical single page application: once the initial HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. payload is delivered, all other data is loaded via relatively straightforward HTTP calls that return JSON (this made adding basic offline support relatively easy back in 2007). Therefore if I served the archived data in the same JSON format, then I should be able to browse it using Reader's own JavaScript and CSS. Thankfully this all occurred to me the day before the Reader shutdown, thus I had a chance to save a copy of Reader's JavaScript, CSS, images, and basic HTML scaffolding.
zombie_reader is the implementation of that idea. It's available as another tool in my readerisdead.com collection. Once pointed at a directory with an archive generated by reader_archive, it parses it and starts an HTTP server on port 8074. Beyond serving the static resources that were saved from Reader, the server uses web.py to implement a minimal (read-only) subset of Reader's API.
The tool required no modifications to Reader's JavaScript or CSS beyond fixing a few absolute paths1. Even the alternate header layout (without the Google+ notification bar) is something that was natively supported by Reader (for the cases where the shared notification code couldn't be loaded). It also only uses publicly-served (compressed/obfuscated) resources that had been sent to millions of users for the past 8 years. As the kids say these days, no copyright intended.
A side effect is that I now have a self-contained Reader installation that I'll be able to refer to years from now, when my son asks me how I spent my mid-20s. It also satisfies my own nostalgia kicks, like knowing what my first read item was. In theory I could also use this approach to build a proxy that exposes Reader's API backed by (say) NewsBlur's, and thus keep using the Reader UI to read current feeds. Beyond the technical issues (e.g. impedance mismatches, since NewsBlur doesn't store read or starred state as tags, or has per item tags in general) that seems like an overly backwards-facing option. NewsBlur has its own distinguishing features (e.g. training and "focus" mode)2, and forcing it into a semi-functional Reader UI would result in something that is worse than either product.
And changing the logo to make it more obvious that this isn't just a stale tab from last week. The font is called Demon Sker.
One of the reasons why I picked NewsBlur is that it has been around long enough to develop its own personality and divergent feature set. I'll be the first to admit that Reader had its faults, and it's nice to see a product that tries to remedy them.
I’m under the assumption that Scott Clark has never seen a real senior citizen.
The speech bubble is also wildly appropriate. No, really, dear, I can see why.
(From SPAWN/WILDC.A.T.S: Devil’s Day)
OH MY GOD. I didn’t even realize she was MEANT to be elderly until I wondered WTF was wrong with her face and then read your comment. And I didn’t know she was sitting either because of her super long pelvic bone. What the hell.
It scares me that Scott Clark can’t even imagine a woman looking like anything other than coming out of Maxim, that the only change he does for an elderly woman is put wrinkles on her face.
I’m afraid this needs more than an OUTFIT redesign…
"Our wedding was the antithesis of the technology-infested world we live in; a world that I have played a role in creating. It was an homage to the natural environment. It was also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to force 364 otherwise self-respecting adults to dress up in elaborate fantasy-inspired costumes, a feat of mischief that we were delighted to attempt."
This comic comes courtesy of Ribbon Black, warning players about the dangers of rumors going around town. This is why I tell my villagers to keep my name out they mouth.
The third panel is my favorite; it cracks me up to see Tabby’s tongue waggling with salacious scuttlebutt, blushing Doc’s cheeks. “holy shit r u 4 real"
ooh, Jeri Ellsworth's talking now which confirms that Valve is basically HubSpot, management-wise
Former Valve hardware developer Jeri Ellsworth says the company's "flat management" structure is not ideal and compares its hiring and firing process to high school cliques, according to an interview with The Grey Area.
Speaking on the podcast, Ellsworth, who was fired from Valve in February along with a handful of other employees, said a "hidden management" agenda resulted in a "witch hunt" in which Valve fired a group considered to be "trouble makers."
"Now we've all seen the Valve handbook, which offers a very idealized view," she said. "A lot of that is true. It is a pseudo-flat structure, where in small groups you are all peers and make decisions together.
"But the one thing I found out the hard way is that there is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company," she added. "And it felt a lot like high school. There are popular kids that have acquired power, then there's the trouble makers and then everyone in between. Everyone in between is OK, but the trouble makers are the ones trying to make a difference."
Ellsworth described a "weird paranoia in the company that their culture would be contaminated," and after her termination she left the company — along with other high-ranking staff members including former director of business Jason Holtman — feeling "stabbed in the back." She said she had a rough time building up her hardware team because longtime staff members would reject possible new hires "for not fitting in to the [office] culture," and her termination was likely a result of friction caused by her being vocal about the difficulties.
She was also careful to note that her experience and views are not shared by all of Valve's employees.
"I should frame all of this with I have a lot of friends at Valve and there are lots of great people there," she explained. "The hardware team was very close-knit [and we worked long hours together]. I'm going to try and be careful about what I say, because my view is not 100 percent true for all the different groups in there.
"If I sound bitter, it's because I am," she said. "I am really, really bitter. Because they promised me the world and then stabbed me in the back."
A full transcription of Ellsworth's interview with The Grey Area is available on Develop.
Former Microsoft executive Don Mattrick was reportedly interested in Zynga many moons ago, not as a company to join but as one to buy. That's according to Bloomberg sources "with knowledge of the matter," who said Mattrick negotiated in 2010 to purchase the then-booming Zynga with the aim of adding social games to Microsoft's Xbox roster.
Bloomberg said its sources asked to remain anonymous because the talks in question, which "ultimately fell apart," were private. Bloomberg also noted Zynga spokesperson Dani Dudeck declined to comment on the matter.
Weeks after unveiling the Xbox One to the world, Mattrick left his position as president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business to become Zynga's CEO. If Mattrick chose an intense time to leave Microsoft, times are no less intense at Zynga. The company's endured a year of high-level departures and plenty of layoffs.
New research by two Yale University psychologists details how the sight of something cute brings out our aggressive side. Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon investigated “cute aggression” by showing study participants slide shows of either cute, funny or normal animal photographs. As they watched, the participants held bubble wrap. The researchers, attempting to mimic the common desire to squeeze cute things, told subjects to pop as many or as few bubbles as they wished. People watching the cute slide show popped significantly more bubbles than those viewing the funny or control pictures, according to results presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting in New Orleans. “Some things are so cute that we just can't stand it,” Dyer concludes.
hodad
"I was very careful how I built the movie. One of the other things I decided was that I wanted a female lead (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi) who has the equal force as the male leads. She’s not going to be a sex kitten, she’s not going to come out in cutoff shorts and a tank top, and it’s going to be a real earnestly drawn character...One of the decisions we made as we went along in the process of the movie was, let’s not have a love story. Let’s have a story about two people." Director Guillermo del Toro on how Pacific Rim deviates from typical summer blockbusters, and how Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi, will be a formidable, complex character.
Pacific Rim continues to be compared to blockbusters like Transformers, but, if the focus on characters in the most recent commercials wasn't evidence enough, Guillermo del Toro has set the record strait in his interview with The Star. Pacific Rim is not a movie set to exploit its female lead or compromise her character any more than it will its male lead, and del Toro stresses that he made decisions at every turn to make sure his Kaiju versus Mecha movie didn't become just another summer movie. It's looking more and more like Pacific Rim will focus on adventure and interesting characters, without falling into the glorification of violence and two-dimensional characters that movies like Transformers lead us to expect in our giant-robot-filled summer films. Finally we can watch giant monsters fight Mecha and watch an interesting story unfold!
Former Microsoft executive Don Mattrick was reportedly interested in Zynga many moons ago, not as a company to join but as one to buy. That's according to Bloomberg sources "with knowledge of the matter," who said Mattrick negotiated in 2010 to purchase the then-booming Zynga with the aim of adding social games to Microsoft's Xbox roster.
Report: Mattrick tried to buy Zynga while at Microsoft originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Jul 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
