#and before you tell me about hardware acceleration. i already looked into it. and my computer is too old for it to apply??

[coquelicoq]

if i can't get a screenshot is it sufficient for me to say natsume yuujinchou s07e03 timestamp 13:52. does a gay little wave that pisses you off

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#5yrsago Robots are taking your job and mine: deal with it

Two striking articles on the roboticization of the workforce: first is Kevin Kelly in Wired, with "Better Than Human", an optimistic and practical-minded look at the way that robots change the jobs landscape, with some advice on how to survive the automation of your gig:

Now let’s consider quadrant C, the new jobs created by automation—including the jobs that we did not know we wanted done. This is the greatest genius of the robot takeover: With the assistance of robots and computerized intelligence, we already can do things we never imagined doing 150 years ago. We can remove a tumor in our gut through our navel, make a talking-picture video of our wedding, drive a cart on Mars, print a pattern on fabric that a friend mailed to us through the air. We are doing, and are sometimes paid for doing, a million new activities that would have dazzled and shocked the farmers of 1850. These new accomplishments are not merely chores that were difficult before. Rather they are dreams that are created chiefly by the capabilities of the machines that can do them. They are jobs the machines make up.

Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIs embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.

To reiterate, the bulk of new tasks created by automation are tasks only other automation can handle. Now that we have search engines like Google, we set the servant upon a thousand new errands. Google, can you tell me where my phone is? Google, can you match the people suffering depression with the doctors selling pills? Google, can you predict when the next viral epidemic will erupt? Technology is indiscriminate this way, piling up possibilities and options for both humans and machines.

It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

Kelly is one of the great technological optimists of our era, and always makes a good case for the net benefit of technology. I really admire What Technology Wants, his 2010 book, not least because it sets out a program for deciding how to integrate technology with your life, and, more importantly, how and why to refuse to adopt some technologies (Kelly frames as being a "technology gourmet," someone who knows what she wants from technology and seeks it out; versus being a "technology glutton," who pigs out on whatever technology is on offer).

Now, contrast that robot-human co-existence manifesto with Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines, an excerpt from Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy , a new book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee that's being serialized in The Atlantic:

Skill-biased technical change has also been important in the past. For most of the 19th century, about 25% of all agriculture labor threshed grain. That job was automated in the 1860s. The 20th century was marked by an accelerating mechanization not only of agriculture but also of factory work. Echoing the first Nobel Prize winner in economics, Jan Tinbergen, Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz described the resulting SBTC as a "race between education and technology." Ever-greater investments in education, dramatically increasing the average educational level of the American workforce, helped prevent inequality from soaring as technology automated more and more unskilled work. While education is certainly not synonymous with skill, it is one of the most easily measurable correlates of skill, so this pattern suggests that demand for upskilling has increased faster than its supply.

Studies by this book's co-author Erik Brynjolfsson along with Timothy Bresnahan, Lorin Hitt, and Shinku Yang found that a key aspect of SBTC was not just the skills of those working with computers, but more importantly the broader changes in work organization that were made possible by information technology. The most productive firms reinvented and reorganized decision rights, incentives systems, information flows, hiring systems, and other aspects of organizational capital to get the most from the technology. This, in turn, required radically different and, generally, higher skill levels in the workforce. It was not so much that those directly working with computers had to be more skilled, but rather that whole production processes, and even industries, were reengineered to exploit powerful new information technologies. What's more, each dollar of computer hardware was often the catalyst for more than $10 of investment in complementary organizational capital. The intangible organizational assets are typically much harder to change, but they are also much more important to the success of the organization.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are more economist-jargon heavy than Kelly, and more downbeat, and they're also pointing out something obvious, which is that there are losers in technological revolution. See, e.g., Bruce Sterling's end of the year roundup:

Come 2013, I think it's time for people in and around the "music industry" to stop blaming themselves, and thinking their situation is somehow special.  Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody.

Nobody was or is really much better at "digital transition" than musicians were and are.  If you're superb at digitalization, that's no great solution either. You just have to auto-disrupt and re-invent yourself over and over and over again.

It's pretty awful to be a musician and have no possibility of health insurance (as Jaron Lanier keeps pointing out), but you could have been a Nokia engineer.  You'd have been blindsided even harder and faster, and you wouldn't even have had the girls and the weed.

Which is to say that even though technology makes us more "productive" and puts more goods into more peoples' hands, that the transition isn't bloodless, it isn't fair, and it isn't always very nice.

But here's the thing that neither of these articles -- or even  Bruce's acid observations -- touches on: once technology creates abundance, what possibilities exist for distributing the fruits of that abundance such that the benefits are more evenly felt? We've been talking about an increase in productivity producing an increase in leisure for a long time, but instead, the "winner take all" world of Brynjolfsson and McAfee often seems to produce a "winner" class that works itself into an early grave by running 100-hour work weeks at astounding payscales, and a much larger "loser" class that works itself into an early grave by working 100-hour weeks in shitty, marginal, grey-economy jobs, trying to stitch together something like an income.

In America, anyone who proposes an increase in overall quality of life through public schools, health programs, libraries, or even Internet access, is immediately branded a socialist and dismissed out of hand.

On the other hand, the Internet-age's sweetest dividend is the creative possibilities: the chance to sit in your little grass shack or organic farm or urban crackerbox and use the tubes to carry on debate; to contribute to software and Wikipedia; to crowdsource capital for your creativity; to find makers who have solved 90% of the problem that's nagging you and who will help you solve the remaining ten percent; to access a library of human creativity and knowledge without parallel; to have your art and creativity accessible to all, and to find the mutants who're wired the same as you and jam with them.

That world of de-marketized, non-market, non-commodity and/or gift economy living is something that seems tantalizingly within our grasp today, and it feels like automation holds the key to so much of it. But is it just the latest version of the dream of a leisure society? Or can we Craigslist and Kickstarter and Freecycle and Etsy and Thingiverse and Open Source Hardware and Wikipedia and Creative Commons our way to a world where the means of information is owned by no one and yet tended by all?

https://boingboing.net/2013/01/01/robots-are-taking-your-job-and.html

[thisgarbagepicker]

“Impulse and One-Upmanship” - Reylo Weekly Challenge

Getting back to @two-halves-of-reylo Tumblr weekly challenges to put a dent in the prompt backlog after a very long hiatus — starting with Prompt #17, ‘Escape’.

“Impulse and One-Upmanship” (AO3)

Words: 2,764

Summary: When Kylo makes a reckless attempt to do some good in the galaxy, Rey finds herself making an equally reckless attempt to rescue him from the fallout. Afterward, on the Falcon, they tend to some wounds and face some difficult standing questions.

***

Blaster fire and explosions still rang in Rey’s ears, so maybe she was shouting too loudly. She couldn’t tell, and it didn’t seem to matter whether she was one way or the other. As they hurtled up the boarding ramp and into the mouth of the Falcon, Ben immediately overtook her and veered straight for the gun well before she could even finish the command that he do so. He was running through a limp and leaking blood from somewhere she hadn’t had time to identify. They could figure that out later. His injuries didn’t appear to be life-threatening, and she already knew hers weren’t. Lingering here any longer, on the other hand, would be.

She knew perfectly well by now that the old freighter was deceptive. Despite appearances and the ever-present sense that it was on the verge of collapse, it was quick and maneuverable. Still, it was not made to be piloted alone. Rey had done so before, always in situations like the one she now found herself in, when no other recourse was available. It wasn’t easy. But she’d managed it getting here, and she would manage it until they were out of atmosphere and able to make the jump to hyperspace. Until then, guns were more crucial than convenience.

Impatiently, she waited for the systems to come to life, drumming a hand on the arm of the pilot’s seat and scanning the controls out of habit, watching each light blink awake (too slow, too damn slow, come on), hearing circuits hum and fans whir, and finally enough was done. She punched the acceleration—too much, too fast. The ship jerked and shuddered, then rose from the rocky terrain she’d landed on an hour before and trundled into open air. They were gaining altitude, but slowly.

Rey willed herself to focus and work with what she had as she activated the shields. She was running a few mental calculations to center herself when the comm crackled and issued Ben’s voice. “You’re going to kill us both if you keep pushing it like that.”

She glared at the speaker, aware that Ben couldn’t see her do so. It made her feel better anyway, and she would take what she could get. Who was he to advise her about caution?

“I know how to fly this thing. Shut up and shoot.”

“I will when there’s something to—”

He cut off and she caught the conspicuous shriek of TIE fighters, loud enough to be heard over the noise of her own ship. It was followed moments later by the sound of the Falcon’s laser cannons, then that of an explosion. Two explosions. Three . . . and four.

“Nice shooting,” she offered, feeling momentarily generous as she kept an eye on the horizon. The sound of her own voice grounded her, as it always had when she’d spent nearly all her time alone.

“I know.” Rey rolled her eyes, another look sadly lost on him as he continued speaking. Maybe the one disadvantage of company: other people could talk back. “Return the favor and forget what I said. Push this junk heap or soon we’re going to be facing more than it can handle.”

“Stop telling me how to fly.”

The Falcon climbed higher, faster now and breaking through the clouds. They were probably safe from fire, but she wouldn’t feel at ease until they were out of the planet’s gravity and slicing through the long wash of hyperspace. Thirty more seconds, and that should do it. Would even that be too long? She gripped the hyperdrive lever, her other hand still resting on the steering yoke, both hands steady for all that her knuckles were white and her arms trembling with adrenaline.

Twenty seconds . . . they were out of the clouds, she could see stars and a distant ringed moon . . . ten . . . scratch that, this was enough. She hoped. It had to be. Rey pushed the lever and felt her vision swim as the starscape stretched before her and sent them off into the bright and blue.

                                                                ***

Autopilot activated, Rey rounded the corner into the communal area and found Ben already there, hunched over an open trunk that housed the medical kit. It was also currently home to a random assortment of hardware and maintenance tools, many of them broken, which she had been wanting to find the time to sort and mend. But doing so had never been a top priority, and now she could see that the disorder was causing him some irritation. A wrench flew across the room and clattered over the top of the dejarik table. Rey eyed the situation, picked up the wrench (as Ben sent a pair of pliers off in a similar manner—though that, at least, just bounced off a seat), and approached him.

“Sit down,” she said. The adrenaline was still a rush, and she was grouchy, but she didn’t feel like arguing and hoped he had similar priorities. Sadly, she doubted it, given that she needed to dodge a nondescript pouch that went sailing by her head as she stood behind him. “What are you looking for?”

“Whatever you have in here that’ll stanch this,” he sniped, still digging around in the trunk. He paused briefly to indicate the spot on his right side where blood had been soaking through the fabric of his shirt. That explained the leaking, then. It hadn’t been that much when she intercepted him, though she had little frame of reference. She noticed now that there were little spots of blood on the floor near his foot. “Assuming it’s even possible to find something like that in this mess.”

“Go sit,” she repeated. “You’re just going to make it worse with all this huffing and thrashing,”

“I'm doing neither of those things.”

He stopped his violent searching, though, and stood slowly. He was favoring his left leg. With some effort, he hobbled over to the bench near the dejarik table and eased himself down. He sat for a few seconds, thought better of it, and laid back.

Rey looked over at him and then returned her attention to the issue of the medkit. “Take that off.”

“What?”

“Your shirt. I need to see how bad that is.”

“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” he muttered, pushing himself up and beginning to worm his way out of his shirt. She was glad he at least wasn’t arguing with that. “It's just bleeding a lot.”

Rey almost laughed. “Yeah, all over the inside of my ship. That’s not usually a good sign.”

If he hadn't looked at his injury yet, which she knew he hadn’t, she doubted he could adequately evaluate its severity. Though she could admit he probably had a point; if it was truly terrible, he wouldn't be standing or talking. Or sitting up. Or being so snarky—she assumed. She was no medical professional, but she’d had plenty of practice patching herself up over years of solitary life, and to her, he looked all right. Bruised, scratched, a little paler than usual, but all right.

The medkit was indeed proving a pain in the ass to navigate. Chewie helped with maintenance, and he apparently had similar habits to Han. And Rey herself wasn’t particularly tidy. She was regretting that now. Over her shoulder, she called, “What did you do to your leg?”

“Turned an ankle.” He grunted a little when the fabric of the shirt stuck to the bloody mess under his arm, and Rey could actually hear the sound of it peeling away from his skin. “You going to tell me to take my pants off so you can check that minor inconvenience too?”

“Dream on.”

She didn't have time for nonsense. She needed to get back up front and check their progress. Ah, finally. She found an unopened package of bacta patches, a pair of long-nosed tweezers, and an irrigation bulb and disinfectant. It would do in a pinch, which they were. Pleased with herself, Rey rose and joined Ben on the bench. His body was as battered as his face. He had his arm lifted and was prodding at the wound with a finger, face impassively curious.

She held out a hand and waited. “Let me see.”

He held her gaze for a moment, then shifted to give her a better look. The wound was raw and messy, located on his side not far from his pectoral. Though it was large enough to bleed a lot, it did not appear to be unmanageable with what she had at her disposal, for the time being. Good. When she leaned in and put a hand to his elbow to nudge his arm higher, she noticed an odd glint from the far side of the cut. Not good.

“Huh.” She frowned and reached for the tweezers. “You’ve got some metal bit or something lodged in there. Lie down on your side. Keep your arm up out of the way. I’ll try to pull it out. It doesn’t look too big.”

Ben did as she requested, moving to his left side. He curled his right arm up and tucked it under his head to give her as good a vantage point as possible. It actually helped quite a bit, because the motion pulled the skin around the wound nice and taut. The way he was propped, he couldn’t really watch her work, either, which Rey preferred. She didn’t like feeling scrutinized, particularly when she was doing something that required her full attention.

“What did this come from, anyway?” she asked, trying to keep him distracted, though he seemed to be handling that on his own. The way he was lying may have kept her from his line of sight, but it afforded him an opportunity to look around the room. It wasn’t very interesting, in her opinion. Even so, she noticed the way his eyes roamed the walls and ceiling, pausing here and there, his brow twitching occasionally.

“The ship I wrecked. Half of it ended up blown out. That’s probably a chunk of cockpit or control console.”

She was expecting him to be tensed and to have to tell him to relax. He wasn’t much at all. Surely, he’d gone through situations like this enough times for him to be practiced at it. In afterthought, she wondered if her own presence had something to do with it as well. That wasn’t a thought she wanted to dwell on—it was self-indulgent. Stuff like that made it difficult to concentrate.

She used the irrigation bulb to douse the wound in disinfectant. Perhaps she should have done that first, but she’d been too busy sating her curiosity about what he’d been doing to get in this state and require rescuing. The liquid cleared much of the dried blood away and gave her a better view of the puncture site. Feeling more confident, she rinsed her hands and the tweezers in the sterile fluid, then took a breath. “Right. Keep still, I’m pulling it out now.”

Rey glanced at his face to verify he’d heard her, then gripped the exposed edge of the shard with the tweezers, made sure she had it at a good angle, and pulled carefully straight up. It came free easily and cleanly, as far as she could tell, with little to announce its removal beyond a sharp intake of breath from Ben. The whole brief process reminded her of stripping half-exposed chips and wiring from the inside of the wrecks she used to loot. She preferred this—a little blood was better than the risk of electrocution or burns.

Her assumption of the shard’s size hadn’t been wrong. It was maybe two inches long and about an inch wide, hammered thin and melted a little, but surprisingly uniform in shape. The dull silver sheen of it was currently slicked over with Ben’s blood. He started to make as if he was going to sit up, but she pressed a hand to his shoulder.

“Hang on, I still need to cover it. Check this out.” She held the tweezers, still clutching the metal piece, toward him. “Souvenir?”

He gave a huff of reluctant laughter, then winced slightly. “I’ll pass.”

“Hm. Sorry about your ship, anyway.” She set the shard and tweezers down on the dejarik board and returned her attention to the wound. The bleeding had slowed considerably now that Ben wasn’t moving around and foreign objects had been removed. The edges were relatively clean, too; not as ragged as she’d first thought before cleaning it. She grabbed the bulb and soaked the area in disinfectant again, patted it dry with a clean cloth, and cast about for the bacta patch.

“It wasn’t mine,” Ben said. He saw her searching and held the wrapped patch up. She hadn’t noticed, but he’d been fiddling with it as she worked. “I stole it.”

“Impressive. Been there.” She was still more focused on applying the patch, making sure the edges fused cleanly to his skin, but when that was done she offered him a small smile. “What happened to yours?”

“I’m trying not to think about it too much.”

"Sounds like a story.” Rey was throwing the medkit back together—once again, she'd have to consider tidying it up another day. “I've got to go make sure we're still on course, but get dressed and meet me up there. If you want. Co-pilot seat’s still open.”

He nodded mutely, and Rey returned the the cockpit. She sank down into the pilot’s chair and shut off the autopilot, confirmed that the route was sound, and finally let herself relax. Though the concept of relaxation was relative right now. What was she going to do with Ben? The decision to come after him with no backup—to rescue him—had been the very definition of poor impulse control. She’d done something like this once before, hadn’t she, years ago? And how had that ended?

Not well. Kriff.

Watching the stars streak past lost its distractive charm quickly. She was about to click the comm back on, call to the lounge and confirm that Ben was still there, when he did her one better—he limped into the cockpit and sat heavily in the seat she’d offered him almost fifteen minutes before.

“You didn’t need to come,” he said, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation already.

“I know that. A bit like how you didn’t need to try taking out a First Order manufacturing base on your own.” Now that they were out of direct danger and she had the benefit of thinking about it, the audacity of it was unbelievable, even for him. “What an incredibly stupid thing to do.”

“Yeah, it was.” He was amused—pleased with himself and what he’d done. That had not been the reaction she was going for. “So was flying in after me without a co-pilot.”

He still hadn’t asked how she’d known he needed aid. The answer was understood and unsaid, like the bond that had brought her to his side. Like most things between them.

“I’ve done it before.” They were both alive, so she didn’t see why it mattered how stupid either of their actions had been. Neither of them had any room to criticize half-cocked plans. “Are we going to sit here trying to one-up the other’s stupidity in this?”

“We could.” He shifted in the seat, stretched his injured leg out as far as he could. “Or I could say that I’m happy you did come.”

“So am I.”

She dared to look at him, but he wasn’t paying her any mind. Instead his eyes were scanning the control console, settling on each panel or switch or button or lever, like he was accounting for them all. He was remembering. She felt it, and for an instant she was too. His gaze darted to fleetingly touch a spot above the viewport, empty, then down and back to focus on the numbing, repetitive view of space bleeding past. He looked simultaneously mystified and perfectly at ease.

What she said next felt risky, but it could make nothing worse. What was one more impulsive action after all that? And he looked so . . . right, sitting there. “But will this be the time you don't make me leave you behind afterward?”

Ben was quiet and thoughtful and no longer treating with such flippancy the fact of where they were and what they were doing. The ship droned on around them, vibrating almost imperceptibly as it raced onward.

“Stay the course and find out.”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PROBLEMS

My test was to think of intelligence as inborn is that people trying to measure it have concentrated on the aspects of economic inequality where the cause of poverty is the same as the root cause of variation in income is a sign that something is broken? At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. Somehow the idea of making really large amounts of money. When people come to you with a problem and you have to sound intellectual. All the hackers I know, managed to be mistaken. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose deals. That was not, probably, how McCarthy thought of it as a personal insult when someone from the other team from scoring is considered to have played a perfect game.1 Right now, VCs often knowingly invest too much money at the series A stage. And if you weren't rich, you took the omnibus or walked.

Microsoft.2 Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. In that case, stay on a main branch becomes more than a way to please other people. It's so cheap to start, this conflict goes away, because founders can start them younger, when it's rational to take more risk, and can start more startups total in their careers. When you reach the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1% of its members, you lose big if something whether Viking raids, or central planning drags their productivity down to the average Frankish nobleman in 800, and report back to us. Art History 101.3 Hacker News and our application system.4 That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.5 These initial versions can be so pervasive that it takes a great effort to overcome it. Then you could see in the house, the herds, and the number one thing they have in common. The difference is that wise means one has a high average outcome.

Editorialists ask. Bottom-up programming suggests another way to convince investors to let you do it? If circumstances had been different, the people running Yahoo might have realized sooner how important search was.6 But that won't eliminate great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups.7 When I heard this, I thought he was a complete idiot.8 You can see wealth—in buildings and streets, in the original sense, is something you write to try to figure something out. The more of your application you can push down into a language for writing that type of application, the more we'll see multiple companies doing the same thing ourselves.9 Which is precisely why we hear ever more about it.10 Society as a whole ends up poorer. But startups aren't like that. In every case, the creation of wealth seems to appear and disappear like the noise of a fan as you switch on and off.11

Central France in 1100, off still feudal. Or consider watches. You have to be nice to, you have two options: work at home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can get the most done. And they think of it as normal to have a remedial character. The idea is basically that you sort search results not in order of how much money Yahoo would make from each link. It consists of some things that are good and some that are historical trends with immense momentum and others that are random accidents.12 The place to look for what I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to make sure they're ok guys. I don't think there's any limit to the number of failures and yet leave you net ahead.13 Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading drafts of this.

One of the things pinned up on our bulletin board was an ad from IBM.14 Brandeis was a product of this period. But Apple created wealth, in the sense that the authors didn't know when they started exactly what they were trying to get people to start calling them portals instead of search engines. This isn't true in all fields. And this is the route to well-deserved obscurity. So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems is that you make what you measure.15 That's why Yahoo as a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered.

And of course if Microsoft is your model, you shouldn't be looking for, most of the time, perhaps most of the time, and runtime. You'd seem a barbarian if you behaved that way today. Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to appropriate it.16 If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he'd think communism had won.17 Why?18 It's hard to predict what will; often something that seems interesting at first will bore you after a month. Understanding your users is part of what makes them good hackers: when something's broken, they need to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less.19

Though useful to present-day languages, if they'd had them. When you look at the history of stone tools, technology was already accelerating in the Mesolithic. We think of the core language semantics.20 The design paradox means they're choosing more or less a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of a subset of the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of hash tables where the keys are vectors of integers. Whereas if you're doing the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code. But between the two. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley. Extraordinary devotion went into it, and most decent hackers are capable of that. As big a deal as the Industrial Revolution was well advanced.

Notes

Joshua Schachter tells me it was true that being part of wisdom. This is actually a computer. See, we can teach startups a lot like meaning.

We're only comparing YC startups, just that if colleges want to believe this much. If they're on the order of 10,000 sestertii for his freedom Dessau, Inscriptiones 7812. But you couldn't do the equivalent thing for founders, HR acquisitions are viewed by acquirers as more akin to hiring bonuses.

The point where things start to rise again. The most striking example I know of no Jews moving there, and that's much harder. I'm convinced there were about the origins of the things attributed to them.

If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the police treat people more equitably. Please do not take the form of bad idea. In Boston the best day job, or at least should make what they do.

You have to do this right you'd have to deliver these sentences as if you'd invested at a pre-money valuation of the first phase of the most part and you can probably write a book about how things are different. The only people who get rich by creating wealth—university students, heirs, professors, politicians, and there are few who can say I need to fix once it's big, messy canvases that philistines see and say that's not art because it looks like stuff they've seen in the beginning. None at all. No, and there are no false negatives.

It tipped from being this boulder we had, we'd have understood why: If they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now very slow, but when people in return for something that conforms with their company made money from it, but they can't teach students how to value valuable things.

Everyone else was talking about art, they made, but investors can get done before that. There is a qualitative difference in investors' attitudes. I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the least VC-like. So if you're attacked in this they're perfect.

By writing library functions. If you want as an example of computer security, and a little about how things are going well, but not in the early 90s when they buy some startups and not fundraising is a bridgehead. Oddly enough, even if they were to work than stay home with them in advance that you were expected to do good work and thereby earn the respect of their name, but that it's boring, we don't want to give them sufficient activation energy required to notice when it's their own interest.

On the other by adjusting the boundaries of what you really want, like warehouses. They can lead to distractions even more vice versa: the editor, which would be vulnerable both to attack the A P successfully defended itself by allowing the unionization of its identity. The real danger is that you'll have to resort to in order to pick the words we use the word wealth, seniority will become correspondingly more important.

It did not start to get going, and so don't deserve to keep their wings folded, as accurate to call those before a consortium of investors want to take action, go ahead. Gauss was supposedly asked this when comparing techniques for discouraging stupid comments instead.

I've learned about VC inattentiveness. The time it still seems to them unfair that things don't work the same thing. Actually he's no better or worse than close supervision by someone else. Mozilla is open-source but seems to have them soon.

107. The key to wasting time building it. IBM makes decent hardware. They seem to have a browser and get pushed down by new arrivals.

There will be interesting to 10,000 sestertii, for example. Some translators use calm instead of just Jews any more than others, and only one restaurant left on the East Coast VCs. There are circumstances where this is so new that it's no longer written in Lisp, they may introduce startups they like to fight.

We once put up with only a few percent from an eager investor, lest that set an impossibly high target when raising additional money. The US is the most successful founders is exaggerated now because it's a hip flask.

That's probably true of nationality and religion too. In practice it just feels like it if you have an edge over Silicon Valley, but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. You can get rich by creating wealth—that an eminent designer is any good at talking about why something isn't the last 150 years we're still only able to. It's true in fields that have it as a percentage of startups as they are in research departments.

I'm not saying it's impossible without a time before photography had a broader meaning.

This is a way to explain that the highest returns, like architecture and filmmaking, but we decided it would do for a startup could grow big in revenues without including the numbers from the success of their works are lost.

Many of these companies unless your last round of funding.

Garry Tan pointed out that taking time to come if they seem pointless. Considering yourself a scientist. If you want to sell, or to be very hard to do this are companies smart enough to guarantee good effects.

Probably just thirty, if you make something popular but from what the earnings turn out to be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because companies then were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion. The point of view anyway. Founders are often unknowns. Once again, that suits took over during a critical point in the sense of mission.

[sp4c3-0ddity]

Ink on a Page

an Inkheart AU (sort of)

Category:  Gen Word count:  ~3200 Chapters:  2/?

Summary:

Pidge has lived a normal - if unstable - life with her mother for the last fourteen of her sixteen years, but even the fantastical books she reads never could’ve prepared her for the wild twist it takes when an ‘old friend’ of her mother’s appears unannounced at their door.

Chapter Two Summary:

Pidge and Colleen pack up and move cross country.

Read Chapter Two on ao3

Or read from the beginning

Or below the cut:

Chapter Two:

Colleen woke Pidge up early the next day, but when she complained, her mother retorted that it was already nine.

“But it’s Saturday,” Pidge whined, pulling her covers back up over her head. “I don’t have school, and I have all day to finish my homework.”

Colleen tugged the covers away from her face, staring down at her with hands resting on her hips. “I’ve got a new assignment now.”

That shocked her awake, and she shoved her blankets back and sat up. “We’ve only been here for three months,” she pointed out. “How can you have a new one already?”

Colleen sat at the edge of the bed, patting her knee comfortingly though she wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I finished this one quicker than I expected,” she admitted. “I’m sorry, love, but it’s time to go. You can transfer to a new school—”

“This one is still new,” Pidge grumbled.

“—and you’ll pick right back up where you left off.”

“Can’t I be homeschooled instead?” Pidge wondered. “I looked into it already, and you don’t even have to do anything except make sure I’m following the curriculum, and—”

“School is good for you, love,” Colleen said, finally looking her in the eye. “You need to see people, sometimes; you can’t be a shut-in.”

“I’m not a shut-in,” Pidge said, pulling her knees up to her face and wrapping her arms around her legs.

Colleen only hummed in response – which was better than contradicting her, but Pidge knew she wanted to.

“Is it because of Allura?” Pidge dared to ask.

Her mother visibly stiffened, her lips pinched together, but she said, “No.”

Pidge could tell when she lied, but she also knew when she would refuse to alter her answer.

Then Colleen, changing the subject, said, “It won’t be so bad this time, I think. We’ll be close to a place that might interest you.”

Pidge perked up at that. “Where are we going?”

“D.C.”

Pidge grinned. “Really? Can we go to the Air and Space Museum?”

Her mother smiled. “Yes, of course we can,” she said. “I’ll take you there next weekend, if you want, but today we have to pack.”

For once excited about the prospect of picking up and moving – the reason they didn’t have many belongings, aside from electronics and books – Pidge jumped out of bed and across the hall into the bathroom, ready to start the day. And after brushing her teeth and changing her clothes, she returned to her room and began throwing clothes out of her closet and neatly arranging books into old cardboard boxes.

Colleen frequently bemoaned Pidge’s uncanny ability to accumulate clutter despite how often they moved, everything from blank notebooks with pretty bindings to computer parts whenever she tried to build her own (she had yet to succeed without the hardware catching fire). Along with a suitcase stuffed with all her clothes and shoes and a few boxes of just books, Pidge also dropped assorted knickknacks into another box, pens and electronic parts and souvenirs from the places she and her mother lived in, for however little time.

At least they only ever rented furnished apartments, so only the blankets, pillows, and bedspreads were stuffed into the tiny backseat of Colleen’s pickup truck, boxes and suitcases stored in the covered bed. Pidge sorted everything into place while Colleen settled their lease with the landlord, and by Sunday morning they were on their way east to Washington, D.C., a book in Pidge’s lap while she entertained herself on the long drive.

“Why don’t you watch the scenery outside, love?” Colleen wondered as they drove on a winding parkway through trees thick with autumn leaves.

Pidge turned a page and didn’t look up. “There are trees everywhere.”

“You’ll get carsick,” her mother warned.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Besides, I’m almost done with the first chapter.”

Colleen sighed, and when she slowed the car through a curve, Pidge felt the motion in her stomach, faint enough that she could ignore it…and therefore prove her mother wrong. But Colleen said, “Haven’t you read that one before?”

After marking her place with a finger, Pidge turned the book over to stare at the cover of a cheesy horror novel – The Monster in Miami was exciting, if not exactly classy – and the monster it portrayed. “Yeah, but I like it.”

Colleen glanced at her, frowning skeptically, but then she shrugged.

Pidge smirked and said, “I’ll read something else, if you think I should.”

Her mother smiled. “You have another book in here with you?”

“Yeah, I have this one’s sequel.” She nudged her backpack, sitting on the floor between her feet, with her toes. “But…I saw a book on your shelf the other day”—careful—“and I want to read it.”

“Sure, anything you want, love.”

“Oh, really?” Pidge stuck her bookmark into the horror novel and turned to regard her mother, propping her elbow onto the armrest and resting her chin in her hand. “Then when we get to D.C., can I borrow Voltron?”

Colleen slammed on the brakes, and Pidge jerked in her seat as the truck came to a screeching halt. The car behind them honked their horn and swerved wide around them, and Pidge’s heart pounded in alarm, keeping pace with the thrum of the engine. She stared at her mother’s face, trying to assess her reaction, but Colleen kept her face carefully blank.

“No.”

Pidge frowned, hands tightly gripping the armrest; she should’ve expected as much, but disappointment still made her heart plummet. “But—”

“You wouldn’t like it,” Colleen said. The truck accelerated, and they drove in silence for a few minutes, the only sound that of the radio’s speakers playing Queen.

Pidge faced forward, hands in her lap. She stared out the window, trying to admire the view like her mother suggested, but her buzzing thoughts occupied her.

“What’s the book about anyway?” she asked, voice quiet.

To her surprise, Colleen replied, “It’s about a war.”

Pidge raised an eyebrow. “That’s…that’s it?”

“Basically.”

“So you don’t want me to read it,” Pidge guessed, but before Colleen could respond, she suggested, “Maybe you could read it to me?” She couldn’t remember her mother ever reading aloud to her, though she had told her bedtime stories when she was younger.

Colleen tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and said, “That’s not much better.” Without waiting for Pidge to contradict her, she reached for the volume knob on the radio.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ succeeded in distracting Pidge from her pressing questions, at least for the moment.

They arrived at the apartment complex late in the evening, and Pidge waited in the truck while Colleen went into the leasing office to pick up their keys. She read from The Monster in Miami by streetlight, eyes glued to the page despite knowing she approached her least favorite part of the book.

Her mother opening the door startled her, and she reluctantly closed the book when she started the engine and drove into the complex towards their new apartment. “We’re in Building G, Apartment 5,” said Colleen, handing Pidge a key once she parked outside the right building.

Pidge took the key, thumb smoothing over rough pastel green paint. “G for green?” she wondered.

Colleen chuckled. “Maybe.”

They got out of the car, unloading as much as they could hold, and climbed up the stairs to the apartment door. Pidge glanced around the complex, taking in as much as she could in the low lighting, while Colleen unlocked and opened the door.

Exhausted, Pidge dropped her backpack and the box she held and collapsed face first onto the worn-looking brown sofa. She heard the flipping of a light switch, but the room remained dark to her, her eyes closed and face pressed into a rough couch cushion.

“Come on, love,” Colleen told her, patting the leg that stuck up in the air. “We need to unload everything before we can sleep.”

Pidge groaned but allowed her to convince her to follow her back outside and to the truck.

Afterwards, they made turkey sandwiches for dinner, and Pidge started unpacking her bedroom. She sighed when she realized the bookshelf in this room was too small for all her books, despite the whole space being larger than her old bedroom.

Pidge gave her favorite books shelf space and left the rest in a box. She dropped her current read on the bedside table, and set up her computer on the desk. Ignoring her suitcase of clothes for now, she booted up her computer and logged into the Wi-Fi.

A click later, the cursor blinked, waiting for her to type a query into a search engine. She tapped her finger against her mousepad, and after a glance at her closed bedroom door, she reached into her backpack and found the notebook she’d started compiling notes in. After flipping to the relevant page, Pidge searched for a local public library, navigated to its online catalogue, and typed ‘Voltron’ into the search bar.

No results.

Pidge raised an eyebrow at it; so it wasn’t a very popular book? She returned to the search engine and looked Voltron up from there, but to her surprise she found no related results with that.

“This is so weird,” she muttered. She scanned her notes from the night of Allura’s visit and searched ‘Zarkon’, and when that turned up nothing, she looked up ‘Allura’.

Still nothing.

Pidge sighed and shut her laptop. Maybe she could sift through Colleen’s books when she was out. But considering how overprotective her mother was, even staying home alone would be difficult.

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Phil Spencer Says Cloud Gaming Is Inevitable, But Won't Replace Consoles

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/phil-spencer-says-cloud-gaming-is-inevitable-but-wont-replace-consoles/

Phil Spencer Says Cloud Gaming Is Inevitable, But Won't Replace Consoles

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, has a lot on his mind, from the next generation of Xbox consoles to helping build new development teams. He and the team are also managing an ecosystem that’s trying to serve as many players’ needs as possible. And as he sees it, cloud-based gaming touches all of those areas, which is why he’s been championing Project xCloud. It’s Microsoft’s game streaming technology that will let you access the power of an Xbox console through your phone via an internet connection. We recently got the opportunity to talk to the head of Xbox about a number of topics, including how he sees xCloud fitting into Xbox’s repertoire, and within an industry that’s traditionally orbited around consoles in the home.

“It’s one of the directions the industry is headed. To me, it’s about what you as a gamer want to do, and I’m not trying to tell you that owning a box that plays video games is a bad thing or that somehow that’s not needed.” Spencer continued, “I think that the cloud inevitability as part of gaming is absolutely true. But we have more compute devices around us than we’ve ever had, whether it’s your phone, a Surface Hub, or an Xbox. The world where compute devices are gone and it’s all coming from the cloud just isn’t the world that we live in today.”

Physical devices are still very much part of the equation when it comes to cloud gaming, but Xbox itself isn’t making a new device specifically for it. “Last year we talked about xCloud and then we said we were working on new game consoles, but that’s all I said.” Spencer clarified, “We didn’t say that [a streaming console was in the works]. I think maybe some people thought that that was the disc-less one that we just shipped. We are not working on a streaming-only console right now. We are looking at the phone in your pocket as the destination for you to stream, and the console that we have allows you to play the games locally.”

“If you bought a big gaming PC and you like playing games there, I want to respect that and meet you where you are and bring the content and services that you want to that device. If you want to buy an Xbox, if you want to play Minecraft on a PlayStation, I want to make sure that comes to you there.”

One of the chief concerns that has always surrounded cloud gaming is lag. Specifically, how fast your controller inputs will translate to action on a screen. It was an issue in some cases for Google Stadia demos, especially for fast-paced shooters such as Doom. Spencer recognizes this and makes no bones about those concerns, saying “I don’t think anybody should tell you that there’s no lag.”

“Going back to our transparency, there’s a truth that I think is always important for us to talk about with our customers. In xCloud, we are building a convenience capability to allow you to take your Xbox experience with you. Meaning, that’s why we focus on the phone, and the experience is not the same as running the games on an Xbox One X. I’m not going to say that it’s an 8k 120 hertz thing. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re going to bring convenience and choice to you on your phone.”

“You can jump in a party, we can voice chat. Everything works the same as it does when I’m sitting with my console from a community and content perspective but you’re running it from a cloud, which is going to feel different.”

We talk about Project xCloud and we use words like “trials” not because we don’t believe in our tech–our tech is as good as anybody’s tech out there, and the team is doing really amazing work–but this is about the reality of time and choice for customers.

Given that he’s been traveling with an early version of xCloud on his own phone playing games on it out in public, it would seem that xCloud is in a feature-complete state. Public trials start in October this year (a month before Google Stadia), but we asked if it’ll launch as a fully-formed service. “We will start in 2019, this year, in certain markets and then we will just continue to roll it out. We’re doing our internal trials with xCloud now, which means people on the team can now install the application on their phone and stream games.”

“One of the benefits we have working at Microsoft is the Azure data centers globally, which allow us to put hardware as close to people as we possibly can. And we can leverage the fact that Microsoft has spent a lot of money establishing data centers to help us accelerate this build. So we’re going to start in 2019 and have people playing Xbox games on their phones, and we’ll get a ton of feedback.”

Project xCloud’s launch this year only marks the beginning for the Xbox game streaming service; Microsoft will continue to iterate on it while its in players’ hands, and Spencer emphasizes that technological shifts take time. “I think this is years away from being a mainstream way people play. And I mean years, like years and years.”

Phil Spencer on stage during Microsoft’s E3 2019 press conference. — Photo credit: Jason Lewis

“Let’s take Netflix, which is 20 years old. I think we forget that sometimes because tech moves so fast. It’s 20 years old at this point, so it took two decades for us to get to the point where shows like Game of Thrones and House of Cards are some of the biggest shows in the planet and mainly watched via streaming. I think game streaming will get there faster than 20 years, but it’s not going to be two years. This is a technological change. While it seems like it happens overnight, it doesn’t.”

“It takes time for these services to evolve. We are building for the long-term, but that’s why choice is so critical. I’m not trying to say go sell your consoles today and switch over to streaming because the experience just isn’t the same as playing on your console, but I do think in terms of reaching everybody, the democratization of play and content, it’s important that we don’t lock all of these experiences behind purchasing a certain device.”

“And way over time, we’ll have a global service that can reach everybody and the infrastructure to reach any customer with a consistent and high quality internet service, but that’s going to take time. We talk about Project xCloud and we use words like “trials” not because we don’t believe in our tech–our tech is as good as anybody’s tech out there, and the team is doing really amazing work–but this is about the reality of time and choice for customers.”

Down the road, the evolution of xCloud could lead to some creative uses; we’ve seen hints of it in Crackdown 3‘s multiplayer and how it handles physics. But Spencer and the team are thinking outside of games themselves as they have plans to make it an integral part of the industry’s biggest convention, saying “At E3 [in the future], our plan is to allow people coming to the show to actually play games, play Xbox games on phones at the show.”

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Part of cloud gaming’s success, and xCloud in particular, rests in how developers account for the new technology. It’s also an aspect that Xbox is already getting ahead of, and Spencer detailed how the team is doing it. “We’ve already started putting xCloud servers near locations where our largest third party developers are. So now we’re starting to get developers at third parties on it so they can see their game on a phone, which is critical because there are things like font sizes that if you wanted to take advantage and understand how the game runs on the phone, you want to make it available. You want them to see it and experience it themselves.”

“We’ve also already put into the Xbox SDK, because if you’re streaming, a developer might want to do something different if the game was running locally. All the developers that are building Xbox games today have access to that capability of determining whether the game is being streamed or running locally, which I think is a great addition.”

“You’ll have certain developers that will take advantage of it early. We already have some of the early adopters asking for [it], because there are certain things that the cloud makes more possible than happened in the home. A good example of that is our blades right now that have all the Xboxes in the data centers have multiple Xboxes on one blade…basically like a bunch of Xboxes in your house that are hardwired together. So the latency between all of those consoles is negligible. It’s almost a zero because they’re literally hard-wired together. If we were to play games online, there is latency from where you live and I live, right? Our two Xboxes just take time to sync.”

More Exclusive Phil Spencer Coverage

Our conversations with Phil Spencer covered much more in addition to this deep dive into Project xCloud and cloud gaming’s place in the industry. For more inside looks at Spencer and his thoughts on the past, present, and future of Xbox, check out all our coverage in the stories linked below.

Source : Gamesport

[solarbird]

very shortly after the previous

[The seventh instalment]

This isn't Greece, thought the pilot, through the haze of shimmering blue and red and rapidly fading sedation. It... smells wrong.

She tried to open her eyes, and to a partial degree, succeeded. The sunlight from the window didn't exactly hurt her eyes, but it didn't feel right either. That's wrong too. She closed her eyes again, tried to think. The Slipstream felt fine. Felt normal. Good flight weather, dry, cool. Ground control confirmed go. Then...

...then blue and red and blue and red and red and blue and blue and explosions and flashes and flashes and flashes and so many flashes and grey and blue and red and even that woman looked blue, she looked familiar though, even at a glance, then the medics, they didn't look familiar though, then numbers and names and a sedative and black and now still more blue and more red, but not as much, and everything feels so fuzzy...

Everything, except the... bandages. Bandages make sense. But those could feel a little more fuzzy.

"È svegli.li.lia. Prendiendiendi i medico," said... someone. Medico. I got that part. Doctor. In Italian. She tried to speak, it came out strange, garbled, distorted. This must be some sedative. "It's o.o.o.kay, p.ot, l.ill, t. .tor is coming." Accent. That accent. Sicilian. "Sicily?" she tried to say, it coming out stuttery and strange, like the words she heard, though her thoughts felt mostly clear. "What's wrong with me, doc?" No better.

Doctor Mariani knocked on the door almost as Oxton spoke, but didn't stop on the way in. Lena forced open her eyes, keeping them open, seeing waving red and blue and shimmers around everything, but the pilot recognised the medic nonetheless. She said something to another woman, who had already rushed to a piece of hardware by her bed. The blurring and phasing briefly became much worse, and Lena shouted and lurched and felt a little sick, making her hurt all at once all over. Ow! Ribs? Leg? Arm? Ow! and there was a

[snap]

"How's that?" said a suddenly very clearly Hispanic-accented voice.

"Much better, I think," said the grey-haired woman she had not realised was beside her, holding her arm. Lena flinched, as the older woman asked, "Let's ask our pilot. Can you understand me? How're you doing?"

Lena Oxton blinked, confusedly, finding herself sitting up, finding surprise at the stability of... everything. "That was... strange. What'd you give me?"

Dr. Mariani smiled. "Good! If strange is the worst of it, amico, you are doing very well. But lean back, please, your physical condition are not so bad as they should be, but you are still, yes, it is 'pretty banged up'? Yes."

The pilot did, for once, as she was told, glad for once to have the world not moving. "What happened?"

The doctor aimed a little light in her eyes, and poked at her with various instruments, being very doctorly in a very old fashioned way. "Your airplane, do you remember? It exploded."

"Yea, I know that part, Doc - I was there. But what happened?"

"I'm Doctor Mariani, by the way. But you can call me Geanna."

"Oh, sorry, right. Flying Officer Lena Oxton. Which, I guess you know. But. What. Happened."

Dr. Mariani didn't hesitate. "Well, we got to you on the ground, got the fire out - do you remember me talking to you in the medical tent?"

"Yea, and my Slipstream exploded and somehow next thing I know I'm in a... room? and then a tent, nothing in between but... flashes..." Flashing. Images. Strange. What? she thought, suddenly anxious in new ways.

"Yes, you were, and the mind can get very confused under stress like that. It's surprising you remember all that you do. But now, here you are, and out of danger." Her voice was calm, but it didn't help.

Tracer frowned, agitatedly, adrenaline spiking all on its own. "Yea. Here I am. Ten thousand metres at Mach 3 over Greece and exploded, and then somehow everywhere and then somehow on the ground and indoors and now here and I'm pretty sure this is Sicily, and I don't know how any of that works but I didn't even black out and I know what blacking out feels like, and something feels wrong and you're not talking about it and I want to know why and..."

The smaller woman working with the strange device next to her on the bed delinked a display and said, "I've got my numbers, I'm out of here" and exercised what appeared to the agitated Flying Officer to be the better part of valour, as the doctor continued, "You shake off sedatives very quickly, don't you?" said the doctor. "But the mind plays tricks, and it's difficult to explain..."

"...no, no, no, everything is shimmery and strange except when it's not and nothing personal doc but your bedside manner is terrible and what is going on?! and..."

"Just tell her," came another voice, French-accented, from the doorway past Dr. Mariani. "If she wants to rush headlong into this, too, then, so be it."

"Woah!" said Tracer, locking on to the voice, as the woman joined the doctor at the right side of her hospital bed.

The woman offered a cool, blue hand. "Hello, Ms. Oxton. We've met before, I believe, a few times."

"You..." The pilot's racing thoughts caught a bit of grip. "...are you blue? You, I mean, I think, do I know you, I think so, but not blue, are you really blue? I thought that was the... what is going on?!" But, shakily, she reached out as well.

Widowmaker laughed, a little, almost delighted, and took Tracer's hand in her own. "You do remember me! I'm flattered. My name is Amélie Lacroix, and I am, really, blue."

This did little to reduce the pilot's confusion, though the one clear thought in her head - my god, she's beautiful - was straightforward enough. "...why? How?"

"That," she smiled, "is a long story." Then, more sombrely, she held Lena's hand more tightly, and - looking directly into the pilot's eyes, her own clear and open - she said, "But, first, what has happened."

"It has been five years since your Slipstream failed, throwing you completely out of normal time in the explosion. You were gone, without a trace, and Overwatch presumed you lost. But Winston, he felt you might still be alive, and might yet be saved. And though he built a retrieval device, he was not allowed to try."

Not allowed to...?!, thought the pilot.

The assassin continued. "Overwatch was shut down a year later; it no longer exists. You are in my organisation's medical station in Italy, where we transported you, after pulling you back into real time using Winston's mostly-completed chronal accelerator, which was destroyed in the process. We are still making adjustments to our own version, calibrating it, so you do not disappear on us again. That is why you're feeling so fuzzy, and why everything - in addition of me - has a bit of red or blue to it."

She took a breath.

"And many things have changed while you have been gone."

[faizrashis1995]

How to become an Android developer - Android development basics

As a beginner, one of the hardest things is just knowing what you need to learn. Besides taking a look at how to become an Android developer, we will also discuss why you should learn Android development. Here at CodeBrainer, we come across students who ask us what kind of topics they need to learn before they become proficient in Android development. The checklist isn’t short; nevertheless, we have decided to list most of the points that beginners should check-off.

 First I must emphasise that this is a checklist but you can skip a step and you don’t need to learn it all in one week. It will take quite a bit of your time, but in the end, you will have enough skills to start a project of your own or start asking for internships, help a friend or acquaintance or even start applying for jobs.

 We will try to explain a little bit about every topic. But some things you will have to research on your own, nevertheless let us know if you think we should add something to the list.

  How to become an Android developer - Checklist

In our opinion, these are the skills and Android development basics you should conquer:

 Android Studio

Layout Editor

Emulator and running apps

Android SDK and API version

UI Components and UX

Storing Data locally within the app

Calling REST APIs

Material design, styling and themes

Java or Kotlin and Objective programming

Debugging

Learn how you can start creating apps with Flutter.

 How to become an Android developer -  WHY?

As I said, before we can talk about what to learn and how to become an Android developer, we have to talk about why you should learn it in the first place. A lot of students wonder where to start and to be perfectly honest; Android Development is an excellent place to start. There are a lot of reasons; I like Android because it is accessible to anyone and you can install development tools on most operating systems. For example, I run Android studio on my MacBook Pro :D

  Great IDE (Integrated development environment)

We will talk about Android Studio later, but for now, let me just tell you since it has grown to version 3, the IDE is excellent. With every version, we get more help in so many logical ways, that you will not even notice you are using artificial support.

  Easier to start than web development

I like web development, but I still like to promote mobile development to beginners. Why? With mobile development, you get a friendly environment from the start. The thing that makes mobile development better for beginners is that we all use mobile phones all the time. You get a feeling of how an app should look like and what kind of functionalities you will need. With web development, it is harder to get a feel for the whole website, since you are looking at only one page at a time and then doing another google search. Most of the time, you already own a device, and you can install an app directly to your device and show it to your friends. In fact, I guarantee they will be amazed at what you can do.

  Huge market size and mobile usage is still growing

The mobile application market has an excellent projection: by 2021, it is expected that the number of mobile app downloads worldwide will reach 352 billion. Android has a 76% market share compared to iOS, with 19%. We do have to be fair and admit that iOS is a better earner. Google Play earned $20,1B in revenue, while the App Store made a revenue of $38,5B. Google Play grew about 30 percent over 2016. And without doing any precise calculations, you can clearly see that this is a great market to work on.

  New technologies are coming fast

Google is favourite to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time. No to mention, more and more of it is available for developers to use. Google is opening its knowledge about machine learning and artificial intelligence with development kits. And these improvements are available to Android developers very quickly. This will keep you on the edge of curiosity and keep you in touch with the ever-evolving world of IT.

  Wide range of services for developers

Apart from new and cutting edge technologies, Google offers a lot of services to us out of the box. Maps, Analytics, Places for location awareness apps. A Great place to start is Firebase that offers notifications, analytics, crashlytics, real-time database (develop apps without the need for servers). Additionally, for launching apps all around the world, Test Lab could be a great partner, since you can test your app on a bunch of different devices.

  “Android developer” is a great job to have

There are now 2,5 billion monthly active Android devices globally, and it’s the largest reach of any computing platform of its kind. Globally speaking, between 70 to 80% of all mobile devices are Androids. There is a massive demand for new Android developers out there. And because the market is growing, there is a lack of Android developers all around the world. All in all, it is hard to determine an average salary for the whole world, but the fact is that you will get a decent salary for your knowledge no matter where you live. In the light of what has been said, let's take a look at how to become an Android developer.

  Android Studio

Since Android Studio is the best IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Android development, this is the first thing you must conquer. For the most part, our content focuses on explaining about Android Studio as we explain development for Android. This goes the same for the Layout editor and the Code Editor.

  Android Studio - Layout Editor

The Layout Editor is part of Android Studio. In fact, this is the place where you design the UI (User Interface) for your app. The main parts of an Android project are XMLs for designing activities, drawables and other resources and Java (or Kotlin) files for all the code you will write. Of course, on your path on how to become an Android developer, you will encounter more advanced projects where you will also learn about the structure of a project in detail.

 But what I love most is that with the layout editor you are using a drag&drop approach and you can immediately see what you have done. You can place elements on the layout. You can group them into containers or views all using just your mouse. And this is great for beginners because you can get familiar with the code while already using a development environment. Even for mature developers, using visual tools helps when setting up screens, and in the layout editor, you can simulate the size of devices so that you can check if your design will work on all device sizes.

 In addition, we have added a more in-depth look into Layout Editor as well. Check our Layout Editor blog post, learn about it and also find out a little bit about a few hidden features, so that you will develop your activities (screens) with ease.

  Android Studio - Emulator and running apps

As we are creating apps for Android, and we want to run them to see how they look. One of the first things we need for that is an emulator. In fact, Android Studio has the ability to run an emulator out of the box. It has a lot of features. It runs fast and looks nice. All in all, it is a perfect tool to have. Generally speaking, this is just like going to the store and picking the best specs for your device, but in our case, it will be a virtual one.

 Unfortunately, sometimes you have to prepare your computer to run an emulator. Here is an extended manual on how to configure hardware acceleration for an emulator or read our blog post on how to run an emulator.

 You can also run an app on your mobile phone. This a good approach as well, as you check the touch and feel on a real device as you develop your app.

 Here is an explanation on how to install drivers to run an app on your device.

   Android SDK and API version

This is really a broad topic since it contains all that Android is about, all its functionalities. But as a beginner when you are starting to learn how to become an android developer, all you need to know is where to look for a new version, how to install it and a few pointers on which one to use.

 A simple explanation would be: SDK (Software Development Kit) is a bunch of tools, documentation, examples and code for us, developers to use. API (Application Programming Interface) is an actual collection of Android functionalities, from showing screens, pop-ups, notifications… everything. We will give you a hint, use the API above 21 since this will get enough of devices to work with. And for a new project always aim for the last three major versions.

  UI Components and UX

User interface components will link your app together, all the code, knowledge and data will be presented with some form of UI. UI means “user interface”, and this is what a user sees. UX means “user experience”, and this is the flow through the app, interactions, reactions to a users input, the whole story that happens within the app.

 Of course, the best source of getting familiar with UI components would be our Calculator course since it explains most of them in great detail.

    We have a few more blog posts explaining other UI Components, like a spinner, radio button and mail performing checks in our registration form blog post.

   Storing Data locally within the app

Storing data is essential for every app. It can be as simple as storing emails for a login to a full-blown database with tables, relations, filters… Moreover, we think you must go step by step on this topic and learn a little bit about what data is, what are entities, and where to store them.

 The first topic we cover is in our blog post about storing data within sharedPreferences, and you should read it. The next issue is storing even more data by using Room, which is a great implementation of ORM (object-relational mapping) and is part of Android. In fact, ORM lets us work with data as classes in our code, this is a more modern approach, but Room still allows us to use SQL statements if we want to.

    Calling REST APIs

All the mature apps use some kind of REST (Representational State Transfer) calls. For example, if an app wants to know what is the temperature outside, in some city, it would use a REST API to get the data. If we want to login into a social network and get the list of friends we would use a REST API. This is a topic strongly linked with storing data since we are storing and reading data just not within an app but on a server. In short, the main topic to learn is how to transform data from a REST API to local data structures and classes. And be sure to learn how to react if an error occurs and how to send data to a server.

  Material design, styling and themes

If you are thinking about how to become an Android developer, you have to learn how to create a nice app easily. For beginners, it is best to use material design and the Android Support library, which can help us make an app that will look great even without using a designer. All things considered, for mature apps, we will still use a designer to prepare a UI and UX, but for Android, it will be based on some variant of material design anyway. To summarize, on your path of how to become an Android developer, learning material design is essential.

  Java or Kotlin and Objective programming

Both Java and Kotlin are excellent languages to start learning. Java has more structure to it. But Kotlin is more modern in style. And both are good choices. Java is the right choice if you want to broaden your skills with back-end development since developers for Java back-end are in very high demand. Kotlin has a shorter implementation; this means you see less code, and more things are done for you.

 We are still teaching Java since it can be used elsewhere as well (Java backend for example), but Kotlin is a great choice as well. No matter what we choose for our language, we will have to learn some basics about it. In our courses, you will learn about Primitive Data types, Strings Control Structures (If, switch…), what are methods and of course all about classes (Inheritance, Interfaces and Abstract Classes). Arrays, sets, maps and other extended data types help us when working with a lot of data. For example, storing a list of people, list of cars, TODO tasks…

 Why is it important to dive deep into essentials? Having a good foundation on essentials and Java basics will help you develop more complex applications while keeping them simple and organised at the same time.

   Debugging

Debugging is an important part of programming since a lot of unpredictable flows will happen in our apps and we need a way of figuring out what went wrong, what was the source of an error and find a code that produced that error. When learning how to become an Android developer this might look like a tough topic, but at the core, it is something that will help you learn more advanced topics with ease since you will know how to track what the application is doing behind the scenes.

  Making your app ready for Google Play

Equally important to all the skills mentioned above on how to become an android developer is, opening your app to users all around the globe. All things considered, this is one of the primary motivators for building apps in the first place. We must have knowledge about signing our apps, how to upload them to Google Play, what kind of text descriptions we need, screenshots we will show in the store... We need icons, designs and texts. All in all, this knowledge will come in handy a lot. In the first place, it will help you distribute an app to the first test users in the alpha store and then move to a more broad audience with beta and the final step with the public release.

  How to become an Android developer - Conclusion

This is just a short list of topics we here at CodeBrainer think that you need when you think about how to become an Android developer. And we all want for you to be a great developer and make us proud. We will add advanced topics as we go. Advanced topics will just make you stand out from the crowd and give you comprehensive knowledge about Android. In the long run, what you need is experience, and this means practice, and then more practice.[Source]-https://www.codebrainer.com/blog/what-to-learn-checklist-for-android-beginners

Enroll for Android Certification in Mumbai at Asterix Solution to develop your career in Android. Make your own android app after Android Developer Training provides under the guidance of expert Trainers.                        

[hydrus]

Version 380

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

I had a couple of difficult weeks, with illness and other IRL problems getting in the way, but I got some hopefully pretty neat work done. A new fast video and audio player is available for advanced users to test, and there are a bunch of fixes and ui improvements as well.

A user just notified me that the Duplicates page has crazy layout! I apologise. Nothing is broken, it is just sizing wrong, and part of a longer fight I am having to convert my old wx layout code to Qt. I know exactly what happened here, and I will have it fixed for 381. If you discover more UI like this (the system predicate panels have a bit of it), please let me know.

mpv

This is just for advanced users this week. It is a basic prototype that is not ready for real use. I will improve a bit before turning it on for everyone, hopefully next week.

MPV is a good free video player. One of the core benefits of moving hydrus to Qt was the potential of being able to neatly embed it into the media viewer. I am happy to report that these past two weeks have been successful, and it looks like hydrus is finally getting hardware-accelerated video playback and full native audio support!

If you are using the windows build in advanced mode, please check out the big ugly filetypes list under options->media. Under all the video and audio filetypes, you can now set 'show using mpv' as a show action. Please forgive how large this list has grown--before I turn mpv on for everyone, I am going to rework this list so you have the option to just say 'for all video: xxxxxx', rather than always having every single filetype.

Once you have it set, it should load video almost exactly the same as my native renderer, with the scanbar below for navigation. Audio files will show as a (for-now fixed-size) black box or album art. Be warned: there are no volume/mute controls yet! I have set it at 70% volume for now. MPV has an optional and configurable on-screen display, but for technical reasons I had to stick with my custom controls.

I know what features I need to add, so the feedback I am most interested in this week is in where mpv breaks. If it doesn't work for you, or if it fails to load a file, or it has bad performance, or it sizes wrong, or you get a crash after closing the media viewer, anything like that, please let me know. Performance in my tests has been excellent--rendering 4k 60fps no problem as long as you have any sort of branded GPU. I have had some audio jitter on some unusually encoded videos and some crashes (which I think I have fixed).

One annoying thing is mpv requires a hefty 57MB dll, making the already bloated hydrus download even bigger. One user suggested perhaps putting out two releases--a 'core', and an 'update', which wouldn't have the big stuff. I am still thinking about it--while I like the overall idea, the hydrus build is held together with duct tape, and having a small non-functional release will increase complexity and inevitably cause ugly syncing difficulties whenever the big stuff does need to be updated.

Users running from source will need libmpv and python-mpv to enable this. I haven't pinned down the most convenient and functional way to do this for Linux and macOS yet, so we'll have to figure this out over the coming weeks and get it into the help. Any knowledgeable feedback here would be great.

For the near future of mpv, I would like to: figure out the technical side of including mpv in the Linux and macOS builds; write volume/mute UI and shortcuts; add global volume/mute management; test mpv with gifs and apngs; explore custom shaders and configuration files; and generally polish the whole thing.

quality of life

The tag right-click menu has had a significant overhaul. More commonly used actions are moved up, less common down. Tags with siblings now provide all siblings under the 'copy' menu! System search predicates have better copy and search-action support (like 'exclude' system:archive, which will actually add 'system:inbox').

Right-clicking on the thumbnail grid's 'whitespace' no longer does a 'deselect all' action, so you can now easily right-click in an empty area and go remove->selected!

Across the program, all filetypes are now referred to with human language. Instead of 'image/jpg', it is now just 'jpeg'. Instead of 'application/x-7z-compressed', it is now just '7z'. Please let me know where it looks bad, and if you would like to edit these labels.

The 'new page chooser' dialog now dismisses itself if you click off it! So, if you accidentally middle-click in some page tab whitespace and it annoyingly pops up, just left-click, and it will go away. Also, this dialog now catches enter/return key, and will hit the 'first' button (if you imagine the nine possible button locations as a number pad, starting at top-left). Hitting enter twice will typically open a new 'my files' search page.

A user surprised me recently by asking where to find the 'pause video' shortcut--I hadn't realised there wasn't one! Now this is fixed: 'pause_media' and 'pause_play_media' are added to the 'media_viewer' shortcut set, and 'pause_play_slideshow' is added to 'media_viewer_browser' set. Previously, the slideshow pause/play was hardcoded to space bar--this is now gone, so if you used this, you'll want to set it up yourself.

the rest

I have added simple support for RealVideo, RealAudio, and TrueAudio files. These are some formats, so if you come across some variable bitrate rmvb file or something that doesn't work, please send it in and I will have a look. MPV couldn't handle a couple of my test .rm files' audio tracks, but the .ttas seemed great.

Ever since the CloudFlare-8chan break, I have been telling myself to figure out some new downloader objects for the bunkers everyone scattered to. This job kept being put off, long enough that 8kun came back(!), but I managed to fit in some time in this morning and got 8kun and vch.moe support added for today's release. 8kun was obviously easy to convert from the old 8chan parser, and vch's engine provides an API very similar to 4chan that I was able to duplicate and modify for. I had a proper look at julay, smuglo.li, and endchan, but these use their own API formats (or no API at all), so I will have to write new parsers, which will take longer. I really would like to get them done for 381--please remind me if it looks like this job has slipped away again.

full list

basic mpv support is added. it comes with the windows build this week, and is a prototype meant for initial testing. the library is optional. users who run from source will want 'python-mpv' added via pip and libmpv available on their PATH, more details in running_from_source help

took an qt-mpv example kindly provided by a user, updated it to work with the hydrus environment, and integrated it into the client as a new choosable view type under audio/video filetypes under options->media for advanced users

reworked how the 'start paused' and 'start with embed button' media viewer options work under options->media. these are now separate checkboxes, not combined with the underlying 'show action'. existing embed/paused show actions should be converted automatically to the correct new values

unfortunately, due to some python/qt/libmpv wrapper mouse interaction issues, mpv's 'on screen controller' overlay is not available

for now, left click pause/plays the mpv window, just like the native mpv window.

preview/next frame shortcuts should work for the mpv window when playing video

no volume/mute controls yet, these will come in the coming weeks, including global mute settings

updated media show and sizing code to account for mpv widgets

reworked my animation scanbar to talk to mpv, and for my mpv window to talk back to it

improved the animation scanbar to be more flexible when frame position and num_frames are not available, both in displaying info and calculating scanbar seek clicks

mpv api version added to help->about

.

new downloader objects:

thanks to a user, updated the 'pixiv artist page' url class to a new object that covers more situations. the defunct 'pixiv artist gallery page' url class is removed

added 8kun and vch.moe download support. I got started on julay, smug, and endchan, but they were a little more tricky and I couldn't finish them in time--fingers crossed, next week

.

menu quality of life:

a right-click on thumbnail whitespace will now not send a 'deselect all' event! feel free to right-click in empty space to do an easy remove->selected

remorked the tag menu layout to move less frequently used actions down:

- moved the discard/require/permit/exclude search predicate actions down

- moved 'open in a new page' below select and copy

- moved copy above select

and some misc menu layout improvement on this menu

fixed some labelling with the discard/require/permit/exclude verbs on negated tags

right-clicking on system search predicates now shows the 'copy' menu correctly

system predicates that offer easy inverse versions (like inbox/archive) should now offer the 'exclude' verb

when right-clicking on a single tag that has siblings, its siblings and those siblings' subtags will now be listed in the copy menu!

copying 'all' tags from a list menu, with or without counts, will now always copy them in the list order

across the program, all menu 'labels' (menu text items that do not have a submenu and have no associated action, like 'imported 3 years 7 months ago') will now copy their text to the clipboard. let's see how it goes

.

other ui quality of life:

across the program's UI, filetypes are now referred to with simpler terms rather than technical mimetypes. instead of 'image/jpg', it is now typically just 'jpeg'

the 'remove selected' buttons on the gallery and watcher pages are now smaller trash icon buttons

the new page chooser will now auto-dismiss if it loses focus--so if you accidentally launch it with a middle-/double-click somewhere, just click again and it'll go away

hitting enter or return on the new page chooser now picks the 'first' button, scanning from the top-left. hitting enter twice now typically opens a new 'my files' search page

added pause_media and pause_play_media shortcuts to the media_viewer shortcut set. new clients will start with space keypress performing pause_play_media

added pause_play_slideshow shortcut to the media_viewer_browser shortcut set. this shortcut is no longer hardcoded by space keypress

the six default shortcut sets now have a small description text on their edit panels

the options->media edit panels now enable/disable widgets better based on current media/preview action

added a checkbox to _options->gui pages_ to set whether middle-clicking a tag in the media viewer or a child tag manager to open a tag search page will switch to the main gui. default is false

mr bones now reports total files, total filesize, and average filesize

mr bones now loads your fate asynchronously

.

the rest:

added tentative and simple realvideo (.rm) and realaudio (.ra) support--seems to work ok, but some weirder variable bit rate formats may not, and I have collapsed the various different extensions just down to .rm or .ra

added trueaudio (.tta) audio support

fixed a bug from the recent search optimisations where a bare inbox search would not cross-reference with the file domain (so some trash could show up in a simple inbox/'my files' query)

fixed an issue with searching for known urls by url class where the class was for a third-or-higher-level domain and was not set to match subdomains (this hit 4chan file urls for a few users)

fixed the issue with 'open externally' button panel not clearing their backgrounds properly

fixed some of the new unusual stretchy layouts in the options dialog

removed overhead from subscriptions' 'separate' operation, which should stop super CPU hang when trying to split a subscription with hundreds of thousands of urls

fixed an issue where the advanced file delete dialog would not show the simple 'permanent delete' option when launched from the media viewer's right-click menu

fixed the select/remove actions for local/remote

fixed 'set_media_focus' from manage tags to correctly activate the underlying media viewer as well as set focus

stopped the 'file lookup script' status control from resizing so wide when it fetches a url

fixed a rare mouse wheel event handling bug in the media viewer

reduced db overhead of the 'loading x/y' results generation routine. this _may_ help some users who had very slow media result loading

cleaned up how the server reports a bootup-action error such as 'cannot shut down server since it is not running'--this is now a simple statement to console, not a full error with trace

improved client shutdown when a system session shutdown call arrives at the same time as a user shutdown request--the core shutdown routine should now only occur once

fixed an issue with thumbnail presentation on collections that have their contents deleted during the thumbnail generation call

misc wx->Qt layout conversion improvements

updated the github readme to reflect some new links and so on

misc code cleanup

next week

I pushed it a bit hard this week, so I am going to try to take it easy. Hopefully I will be able to get some volume/mute controls going for mpv and then launch it for all users, including on the Linux and macOS builds. Assuming there are no catastrophic problems this week, I will be overwriting user settings to move all 'show as normal' video and audio options to 'show with mpv'. Then these new imageboard parsers and some more Qt cleanup work.

[jesusvasser]

Tesla Model 3 Track Mode Meets the Autocross Course

FONTANA, California — Picking up the latest Tesla Model 3 Performance Dual Motor AWD with the newest iteration of Track Mode, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d only ever driven the dual-motor performance model once before, and then only for a few minutes. The updated Model 3 Track Mode was recently released to the public after some tuning work by racer and test car driving ace Randy Pobst of sister brand Motor Trend. And though the video they posted about it was plenty informative, you can only tell so much through a screen.

Fortunately I didn’t have long to wait to find out what Track Mode was all about, as I’d entered an autocross for this past Sunday. A Cal Club event at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, it’s the home site to a double handful of some of the fastest autocrossers in the nation. If you’re not familiar, autocross is basically a miniaturized time trial event. The peak speeds are lower than you’d typically see on a road course, but the cornering forces can be just as high or higher, and you’re facing the corners many more times per minute—sometimes multiple per second, as in a slalom.

My initial observation wasn’t directly related to how the car drives, but instead to how it is powered. I’d picked up the Model 3 with about 94 percent charge (it reported 291 miles range out of a theoretical 310 mile max). After spending Saturday running nearby errands, the estimator said I had 261 miles of range available when I slipped behind the wheel at 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning. By the time I’d arrived at the Tesla Supercharger in Rancho Cucamonga (the closest to the event site) a little over an hour later, the car was reporting 141 miles of range. It had eaten nearly double the 62-mile actual distance thanks, most likely, to the 50-degree morning … and my somewhat brisk freeway pace.

When I’d worked all this out the day before, I’d figured arriving at the supercharger, a 15-minute drive from the event site, by 6:30 a.m. would give me ample time to charge, seeing as these were the 120-kW chargers that can top up a battery to 100 percent in about 75 minutes. The problem was that I’d expected to have about 200 miles of range, and therefore only need to add another 80-90 miles to be near the 95-percent ideal for track mode effectiveness. That should, in theory, have taken about 30 minutes. But since in reality I needed to add more like 150 miles or so of range, I wasn’t able to get the charge level back up to the ideal 95 percent zone and still make it to the event on time. I got it back up to 265 miles of range at the Supercharger, and arrived at the autocross with 255 miles.

I’m sure you’d figure these quirks out within a year of ownership (once you’d experienced all the seasons), but those of us who live the weekend warrior performance driving life know that sometimes schedules are very compressed. So you should know there’s a bit of a learning curve here, and you can’t just get a splash of 91-octane (or better) at the nearest pump when you’ve got 5 minutes to the end of registration. Plan ahead or you’ll risk a long drive early on a Sunday just to be a spectator. That, or put it on a trailer. But please, really, don’t. This is a great street car, and it begs to be driven to and from every event it enters.

(Side note: the Supercharger was in a mall parking lot, which is I’m sure is usually very convenient. But at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday, there were no bathrooms, no food, no facilities at all. Sitting in the Model 3’s spartan interior, sleek toroid charge-bots the only attendants, I get the sense that I’m seeing through a window in time to the post-human future, when self-driving cars are the dominant sentient life form. Bleak for humans, but the cars seem happy.)

By the time I’d made it to the autocross course, the surprises were over. It was a windy day, even by Fontana standards, and cool in the morning, warming toward the middle of the day. The surface is older asphalt, a bit eroded on the surface, with a smooth aggregate that doesn’t hold too tightly in its tarry bed. My run group was up first, which meant we’d see the dirtiest, coolest surface—in other words, the least grip—of the day. But I figured that might actually work to my advantage, driving a high-torque all-wheel-drive sport sedan. As it turned out, I think I was correct.

Setting up the Tesla Model 3 for track or autocross use is simple: Get in, put your foot on the brake, wave the card that serves as your key over the magic spot in the console, tap the little car icon on the screen, tap the Driving tab, then tap the Track Mode button, then tap it again on the little warning screen that pops up to confirm. Now all you have to do is not get out of the car. If you do, you’ll have to repeat that little process again. It seems like a lot when it’s written out, but in reality it’s only a couple of second procedure once you’ve done it a few times.

Pull up to the line, wait for the starter to give you the green flag, and then mash the face-stretching pedal. More than five times (I stopped counting) I had experienced autocrossers stepping out of their own high-horsepower rides to comment on how insane the Model 3’s acceleration looks, even from nearly a quarter-mile away. It’s really, really quick, especially in the 20-80 mph range, which is perfect for autocross work.

That first mash will start a powerslide, which, hopefully, you can just keep arcing into the braking zone, because holy heck, you’re already in it. Lift off the throttle before going to brake because you’re not sure how it’ll like pedal overlap and before you even get to the brake pedal the car’s already rotating because the computer is using the energy regeneration function on the electric motors to do what is essentially negative torque vectoring. It’s really smart, surprisingly accurate, and very fun—up to a point.

That point is when you need to press in hard to the real brakes, the Brembo-sourced big-disc baddies that normally deliver excellent pedal feel and consistent stopping force. Unfortunately, the otherwise stellar hardware seems to be let down somewhere along the way. It’s almost as if the ABS tune still isn’t quite right, even after Pobst’s recent go at it. Braking into a fast, bumpy, tight left-hander at the upper portion of the course, the car went into what I’d call “ice mode,” significantly reducing braking effectiveness and giving me a moment of doubt as to my ability to avoid the railing bounding the event site. Fortunately I managed to get the car a bit straighter, release the brakes, and then re-apply them to remain within the course. ABS tuning has been a pain point for the Model 3, but it has been greatly improved already, and I expect to see further improvements here soon, too.

That one little moment aside (I did modify my approach to that corner so as to avoid provoking it as much as I could), I learned quite a bit about how Track Mode handles, or perhaps I should say interprets, hard driving, from restrained and tidy all the way to a tenth or two past 10.

Track Mode’s main feature appears to be that it allows a great deal of yaw and wheel spin before intervening to stop you from whatever ham-fisted course you’ve chosen. Step on the throttle with a bit of angle to the steering, and you can feel the system vectoring torque around to help enhance your desired rotation. Lift off and you can feel it even more—the car rotates almost maniacally on turn-in so long as you’re not hard on the brakes, a decidedly un-typical production car tune. It’s tremendous fun.

You can really lean into it and the car just keeps on taking it. But once you get past the big slides and want to start hitting apexes and shaving down your time, you have to realize that you must come to the car; it will not come to you. I certainly haven’t fully figured out how to drive the Tesla Model 3 Performance to its limits yet; I’d want another week of Sundays to have even a solid start, but there’s some magic to be had re-learning corner entry to include a moment of pure regen braking, I think, and some more time to be gained learning just how early you can open the gates on all that electric torque.

There’s no Corvette-style PTM system there witching you into, through, and out of corners. Come in too hot, and the Model 3 will understeer until you’ve bled enough speed. If you give it a bit too much throttle, it will slide and slide and slide, laying the loveliest of carbon-black strips behind. For these reasons, I strongly advise owners of Model 3s with Track Mode to follow Tesla’s recommendation that you do not engage Track Mode on the street. This isn’t a performance-enhancing safety net. It’s just enough rope to hang yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Fortunately I have at least some idea of what I’m doing, as I won my class at the autocross and brought the car back as shiny as I got it.

A few months ago, when I drove the Model 3 Performance Dual Motor AWD for the first time, I said that it felt like it might be the perfect enthusiast’s car. And while it certainly has its quirks, they’re just that. Quirks. Personality. It’s a car that allows you to play, and even helps you, but does not do the playing for you. If you were to get the Enhanced Autopilot system in addition to all the performance and Track Mode goodies, it might truly be the best of both worlds: a comfy, green car that wil from Performance Junk WP Feed 4 https://ift.tt/2B0QNRE via IFTTT

[jonathanbelloblog]

Tesla Model 3 Track Mode Meets the Autocross Course

FONTANA, California — Picking up the latest Tesla Model 3 Performance Dual Motor AWD with the newest iteration of Track Mode, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d only ever driven the dual-motor performance model once before, and then only for a few minutes. The updated Model 3 Track Mode was recently released to the public after some tuning work by racer and test car driving ace Randy Pobst of sister brand Motor Trend. And though the video they posted about it was plenty informative, you can only tell so much through a screen.

Fortunately I didn’t have long to wait to find out what Track Mode was all about, as I’d entered an autocross for this past Sunday. A Cal Club event at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, it’s the home site to a double handful of some of the fastest autocrossers in the nation. If you’re not familiar, autocross is basically a miniaturized time trial event. The peak speeds are lower than you’d typically see on a road course, but the cornering forces can be just as high or higher, and you’re facing the corners many more times per minute—sometimes multiple per second, as in a slalom.

My initial observation wasn’t directly related to how the car drives, but instead to how it is powered. I’d picked up the Model 3 with about 94 percent charge (it reported 291 miles range out of a theoretical 310 mile max). After spending Saturday running nearby errands, the estimator said I had 261 miles of range available when I slipped behind the wheel at 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning. By the time I’d arrived at the Tesla Supercharger in Rancho Cucamonga (the closest to the event site) a little over an hour later, the car was reporting 141 miles of range. It had eaten nearly double the 62-mile actual distance thanks, most likely, to the 50-degree morning … and my somewhat brisk freeway pace.

When I’d worked all this out the day before, I’d figured arriving at the supercharger, a 15-minute drive from the event site, by 6:30 a.m. would give me ample time to charge, seeing as these were the 120-kW chargers that can top up a battery to 100 percent in about 75 minutes. The problem was that I’d expected to have about 200 miles of range, and therefore only need to add another 80-90 miles to be near the 95-percent ideal for track mode effectiveness. That should, in theory, have taken about 30 minutes. But since in reality I needed to add more like 150 miles or so of range, I wasn’t able to get the charge level back up to the ideal 95 percent zone and still make it to the event on time. I got it back up to 265 miles of range at the Supercharger, and arrived at the autocross with 255 miles.

I’m sure you’d figure these quirks out within a year of ownership (once you’d experienced all the seasons), but those of us who live the weekend warrior performance driving life know that sometimes schedules are very compressed. So you should know there’s a bit of a learning curve here, and you can’t just get a splash of 91-octane (or better) at the nearest pump when you’ve got 5 minutes to the end of registration. Plan ahead or you’ll risk a long drive early on a Sunday just to be a spectator. That, or put it on a trailer. But please, really, don’t. This is a great street car, and it begs to be driven to and from every event it enters.

(Side note: the Supercharger was in a mall parking lot, which is I’m sure is usually very convenient. But at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday, there were no bathrooms, no food, no facilities at all. Sitting in the Model 3’s spartan interior, sleek toroid charge-bots the only attendants, I get the sense that I’m seeing through a window in time to the post-human future, when self-driving cars are the dominant sentient life form. Bleak for humans, but the cars seem happy.)

By the time I’d made it to the autocross course, the surprises were over. It was a windy day, even by Fontana standards, and cool in the morning, warming toward the middle of the day. The surface is older asphalt, a bit eroded on the surface, with a smooth aggregate that doesn’t hold too tightly in its tarry bed. My run group was up first, which meant we’d see the dirtiest, coolest surface—in other words, the least grip—of the day. But I figured that might actually work to my advantage, driving a high-torque all-wheel-drive sport sedan. As it turned out, I think I was correct.

Setting up the Tesla Model 3 for track or autocross use is simple: Get in, put your foot on the brake, wave the card that serves as your key over the magic spot in the console, tap the little car icon on the screen, tap the Driving tab, then tap the Track Mode button, then tap it again on the little warning screen that pops up to confirm. Now all you have to do is not get out of the car. If you do, you’ll have to repeat that little process again. It seems like a lot when it’s written out, but in reality it’s only a couple of second procedure once you’ve done it a few times.

Pull up to the line, wait for the starter to give you the green flag, and then mash the face-stretching pedal. More than five times (I stopped counting) I had experienced autocrossers stepping out of their own high-horsepower rides to comment on how insane the Model 3’s acceleration looks, even from nearly a quarter-mile away. It’s really, really quick, especially in the 20-80 mph range, which is perfect for autocross work.

That first mash will start a powerslide, which, hopefully, you can just keep arcing into the braking zone, because holy heck, you’re already in it. Lift off the throttle before going to brake because you’re not sure how it’ll like pedal overlap and before you even get to the brake pedal the car’s already rotating because the computer is using the energy regeneration function on the electric motors to do what is essentially negative torque vectoring. It’s really smart, surprisingly accurate, and very fun—up to a point.

That point is when you need to press in hard to the real brakes, the Brembo-sourced big-disc baddies that normally deliver excellent pedal feel and consistent stopping force. Unfortunately, the otherwise stellar hardware seems to be let down somewhere along the way. It’s almost as if the ABS tune still isn’t quite right, even after Pobst’s recent go at it. Braking into a fast, bumpy, tight left-hander at the upper portion of the course, the car went into what I’d call “ice mode,” significantly reducing braking effectiveness and giving me a moment of doubt as to my ability to avoid the railing bounding the event site. Fortunately I managed to get the car a bit straighter, release the brakes, and then re-apply them to remain within the course. ABS tuning has been a pain point for the Model 3, but it has been greatly improved already, and I expect to see further improvements here soon, too.

That one little moment aside (I did modify my approach to that corner so as to avoid provoking it as much as I could), I learned quite a bit about how Track Mode handles, or perhaps I should say interprets, hard driving, from restrained and tidy all the way to a tenth or two past 10.

Track Mode’s main feature appears to be that it allows a great deal of yaw and wheel spin before intervening to stop you from whatever ham-fisted course you’ve chosen. Step on the throttle with a bit of angle to the steering, and you can feel the system vectoring torque around to help enhance your desired rotation. Lift off and you can feel it even more—the car rotates almost maniacally on turn-in so long as you’re not hard on the brakes, a decidedly un-typical production car tune. It’s tremendous fun.

You can really lean into it and the car just keeps on taking it. But once you get past the big slides and want to start hitting apexes and shaving down your time, you have to realize that you must come to the car; it will not come to you. I certainly haven’t fully figured out how to drive the Tesla Model 3 Performance to its limits yet; I’d want another week of Sundays to have even a solid start, but there’s some magic to be had re-learning corner entry to include a moment of pure regen braking, I think, and some more time to be gained learning just how early you can open the gates on all that electric torque.

There’s no Corvette-style PTM system there witching you into, through, and out of corners. Come in too hot, and the Model 3 will understeer until you’ve bled enough speed. If you give it a bit too much throttle, it will slide and slide and slide, laying the loveliest of carbon-black strips behind. For these reasons, I strongly advise owners of Model 3s with Track Mode to follow Tesla’s recommendation that you do not engage Track Mode on the street. This isn’t a performance-enhancing safety net. It’s just enough rope to hang yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Fortunately I have at least some idea of what I’m doing, as I won my class at the autocross and brought the car back as shiny as I got it.

A few months ago, when I drove the Model 3 Performance Dual Motor AWD for the first time, I said that it felt like it might be the perfect enthusiast’s car. And while it certainly has its quirks, they’re just that. Quirks. Personality. It’s a car that allows you to play, and even helps you, but does not do the playing for you. If you were to get the Enhanced Autopilot system in addition to all the performance and Track Mode goodies, it might truly be the best of both worlds: a comfy, green car that wil from Performance Junk Blogger Feed 4 https://ift.tt/2B0QNRE via IFTTT

[douchebagbrainwaves]

A ROUND YOU HAVE TO START OVER

The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. Design means making things for humans.1 And in particular, is a pruned version of a program from the implementation details. Every talk I give ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed out and rewritten. What about using it to write software, whether for a startup at all, it will be wasted. There's no reason this couldn't be as big as Ebay.2 Raymond, Guido van Rossum, David Weinberger, and Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions. Superficially, going to work for another company as we're suggesting, he might well have gone to work for another company for two years, and the classics. People will pay extra for stability. That would be an extraordinary bargain.3 You can do well in math and the natural sciences without having to learn empathy, and people in these fields tend to be diametrically opposed: the founders, who have nothing, would prefer a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, while the VCs can afford to be rational and prefer the latter.

You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. If you're young and smart, you don't need to have empathy not just for humans, but for individual humans. It depends on what the meaning of a program so that it does. I'm interested in the topic.4 It's hard to judge the young because a they change rapidly, b there is great variation between them, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life. A rounds.5 Now that I've seen parents managing the subject, I can see why people invent gods to explain it.

There's more to it than that.6 Y Combinator with a hardware idea, because we're especially interested in people who can solve tedious system-administration type problems for them, so the two qualities have come to be associated. Startups happen in clusters.7 Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting—if they sense you need this deal—they will be 74 quintillion 73,786,976,294,838,206,464 times faster.8 And good employers will be even more astonished that a package would one day travel from Boston to New York and I was surprised even then. But I have no trouble believing that computers will be very much faster. Now that I've seen parents managing the subject, I can give you solid advice about how to make one consisting only of Japanese people.

But they don't realize just how fragile startups are, and how easily they can become collateral damage of laws meant to fix some other problem. There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example, to buy a chunk of genetic material from the old days in the Yahoo cafeteria a few months ago, while visiting Yahoo, I found myself thinking I don't want to follow or lead. Professors are especially interested in hardware startups.9 When I say Java won't turn out to be a case of premature optimization. Bold? They won't be offended.10 So it is no wonder companies are afraid. I'd recommend meeting them if your schedule allows.

The cat had died at the vet's office. It's like the rule that in buying a house you should consider location first of all.11 Why hadn't I worked on more substantial problems?12 But lose even a little bit in the commitment department, and probably soon stop noticing that the building they work in says computer science on the outside. If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. Some of the problems we want to invest in you aren't. If anything they'll think more highly of you.

5 million. And those of us in the next room snored? So if you're the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there's always some disaster happening. Every person has to do their job well. A round you have to worry, because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. But if you lack commitment, it will be way too late to make money, you have to risk destroying your country to get a job depends on the kind you want. Marble, for example. Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb. Sometimes I can think to myself If someone with a PhD in computer science I went to my mother afterward to ask if this was so. At any given time, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users need. Everyone in the sciences, true collaboration seems to be vanishingly rare in the arts could tell you that the right way to collaborate, I think few realize the huge spread in the value of your remaining shares enough to put you net ahead, because the people they admit are going to get a foot in the door. Over the years, as we asked for more details, they were compelled to invent more, so the odds of getting this great deal are 1 in 300.

You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another.13 On a log scale I was midway between crib and globe.14 You can stick instances of good design can be derived, and around which most design issues center.15 If SETI home works, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens.16 In your own projects you don't get taught much: you just work or don't work on big things, I don't mean to suggest we should never do this—just that we see trends first—partly because they are in general, and partly because mutations are not random. But if it's inborn it should be. The mildest seeming people, if they tried, start successful startups, and then I can start my own? The alternative approach might be called the Hail Mary strategy.

Notes

But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the same energy and honesty that fifteenth century European art. Fifty years ago. I meant. Some are merely ugly ducklings in the Valley.

VCs are suits at heart, the angel round from good investors that they probably don't notice even when I said by definition this will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up than any preceding president, and their wives. But that doesn't have users.

But it wouldn't be worth about 125 to 150 drachmae. Heirs will be the more subtle ways in which many people work with the bad groups is that they function as the cause.

The empirical evidence suggests that if you want to. Incidentally, tax loopholes are definitely not a nice-looking man with a product company. When I was writing this, on the process dragged on for months.

Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p. The reason Y Combinator was a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, they will come at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they tended to be.

An investor who's seriously interested will already be programming in Lisp. Parents move to suburbs to raise five million dollars out of loyalty to the same advantages from it, by Courant and Robbins; Geometry and the manager of a problem later. But that is exactly the point I'm making, though you tend to get rich by buying good programmers instead of a long time by sufficiently large numbers of users to do it mostly on your board, there are few who can say I need to. There are lots of customers times how much they liked the iPhone too, of course, Feynman and Diogenes were from adjacent traditions, but it doesn't cost anything.

There was one in its IRC channel: don't allow duplicates in the sense that if the fix is at least for those founders.

For example, it's probably a bad idea, period. Bankers continued to dress in jeans and a few additional sources on their own itinerary through no-land, while the more qualifiers there are before the name implies, you produce in copious quantities.

166. Even in Confucius's time it filters down to zero, which make investments rather than giving grants.

What made Google Google is not even be working on what interests you most. It's a case of journalists, someone did, once. It seems quite likely that European governments of the word that means the startup in a way to be is represented by Milton. As I was living in a wide variety of situations.

So 80 years sounds to him like 2400 years would to us. They have the same gestures but without using them to be sharply differentiated, so if you conflate them you're aiming at the top and get data via the Internet.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 28%. A fundraising is a major cause of poverty are only about 2% of the decline in families eating together was due to Trevor Blackwell reminds you to stop, the more the type of thing. A round. It will also remind founders that an eminent designer is any good at acting that way.

Wufoo was based in Tampa and they hope this will make grad students' mouths water, but sword thrusts. For example, if you want to impress investors. When you fix one bug happens to use thresholds proportionate to the founders of failing startups would even be worth approaching—if you conflate them you're aiming at the company's PR people worked hard to answer your question. To be safe either a don't use Oracle.

Even if you don't have one. It was common in, but investors can get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but the programmers, the company is their project. MITE Corp. So, can I count you in a in the middle of the economy, you won't be able to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale unless the person who understands how to distinguish between gravity and acceleration.

56 million. Adults care just as if it were Can you pass the salt? A single point of view: either an IPO, or much energy would be worth doing, because they couldn't afford a monitor is that when you ask that you're not consciously aware of it.

Most expect founders to try to accept a particular valuation, that he be spared. And in World War II, must have been Andrew Wiles, but it is not Apple's products but their policies.

[eddiejpoplar]

Tesla Model 3 Track Mode Meets the Autocross Course

FONTANA, California — Picking up the latest Tesla Model 3 Performance Dual Motor AWD with the newest iteration of Track Mode, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d only ever driven the dual-motor performance model once before, and then only for a few minutes. The updated Model 3 Track Mode was recently released to the public after some tuning work by racer and test car driving ace Randy Pobst of sister brand Motor Trend. And though the video they posted about it was plenty informative, you can only tell so much through a screen.

Fortunately I didn’t have long to wait to find out what Track Mode was all about, as I’d entered an autocross for this past Sunday. A Cal Club event at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, it’s the home site to a double handful of some of the fastest autocrossers in the nation. If you’re not familiar, autocross is basically a miniaturized time trial event. The peak speeds are lower than you’d typically see on a road course, but the cornering forces can be just as high or higher, and you’re facing the corners many more times per minute—sometimes multiple per second, as in a slalom.

My initial observation wasn’t directly related to how the car drives, but instead to how it is powered. I’d picked up the Model 3 with about 94 percent charge (it reported 291 miles range out of a theoretical 310 mile max). After spending Saturday running nearby errands, the estimator said I had 261 miles of range available when I slipped behind the wheel at 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning. By the time I’d arrived at the Tesla Supercharger in Rancho Cucamonga (the closest to the event site) a little over an hour later, the car was reporting 141 miles of range. It had eaten nearly double the 62-mile actual distance thanks, most likely, to the 50-degree morning … and my somewhat brisk freeway pace.

When I’d worked all this out the day before, I’d figured arriving at the supercharger, a 15-minute drive from the event site, by 6:30 a.m. would give me ample time to charge, seeing as these were the 120-kW chargers that can top up a battery to 100 percent in about 75 minutes. The problem was that I’d expected to have about 200 miles of range, and therefore only need to add another 80-90 miles to be near the 95-percent ideal for track mode effectiveness. That should, in theory, have taken about 30 minutes. But since in reality I needed to add more like 150 miles or so of range, I wasn’t able to get the charge level back up to the ideal 95 percent zone and still make it to the event on time. I got it back up to 265 miles of range at the Supercharger, and arrived at the autocross with 255 miles.

I’m sure you’d figure these quirks out within a year of ownership (once you’d experienced all the seasons), but those of us who live the weekend warrior performance driving life know that sometimes schedules are very compressed. So you should know there’s a bit of a learning curve here, and you can’t just get a splash of 91-octane (or better) at the nearest pump when you’ve got 5 minutes to the end of registration. Plan ahead or you’ll risk a long drive early on a Sunday just to be a spectator. That, or put it on a trailer. But please, really, don’t. This is a great street car, and it begs to be driven to and from every event it enters.

(Side note: the Supercharger was in a mall parking lot, which is I’m sure is usually very convenient. But at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday, there were no bathrooms, no food, no facilities at all. Sitting in the Model 3’s spartan interior, sleek toroid charge-bots the only attendants, I get the sense that I’m seeing through a window in time to the post-human future, when self-driving cars are the dominant sentient life form. Bleak for humans, but the cars seem happy.)

By the time I’d made it to the autocross course, the surprises were over. It was a windy day, even by Fontana standards, and cool in the morning, warming toward the middle of the day. The surface is older asphalt, a bit eroded on the surface, with a smooth aggregate that doesn’t hold too tightly in its tarry bed. My run group was up first, which meant we’d see the dirtiest, coolest surface—in other words, the least grip—of the day. But I figured that might actually work to my advantage, driving a high-torque all-wheel-drive sport sedan. As it turned out, I think I was correct.

Setting up the Tesla Model 3 for track or autocross use is simple: Get in, put your foot on the brake, wave the card that serves as your key over the magic spot in the console, tap the little car icon on the screen, tap the Driving tab, then tap the Track Mode button, then tap it again on the little warning screen that pops up to confirm. Now all you have to do is not get out of the car. If you do, you’ll have to repeat that little process again. It seems like a lot when it’s written out, but in reality it’s only a couple of second procedure once you’ve done it a few times.

Pull up to the line, wait for the starter to give you the green flag, and then mash the face-stretching pedal. More than five times (I stopped counting) I had experienced autocrossers stepping out of their own high-horsepower rides to comment on how insane the Model 3’s acceleration looks, even from nearly a quarter-mile away. It’s really, really quick, especially in the 20-80 mph range, which is perfect for autocross work.

That first mash will start a powerslide, which, hopefully, you can just keep arcing into the braking zone, because holy heck, you’re already in it. Lift off the throttle before going to brake because you’re not sure how it’ll like pedal overlap and before you even get to the brake pedal the car’s already rotating because the computer is using the energy regeneration function on the electric motors to do what is essentially negative torque vectoring. It’s really smart, surprisingly accurate, and very fun—up to a point.

That point is when you need to press in hard to the real brakes, the Brembo-sourced big-disc baddies that normally deliver excellent pedal feel and consistent stopping force. Unfortunately, the otherwise stellar hardware seems to be let down somewhere along the way. It’s almost as if the ABS tune still isn’t quite right, even after Pobst’s recent go at it. Braking into a fast, bumpy, tight left-hander at the upper portion of the course, the car went into what I’d call “ice mode,” significantly reducing braking effectiveness and giving me a moment of doubt as to my ability to avoid the railing bounding the event site. Fortunately I managed to get the car a bit straighter, release the brakes, and then re-apply them to remain within the course. ABS tuning has been a pain point for the Model 3, but it has been greatly improved already, and I expect to see further improvements here soon, too.

That one little moment aside (I did modify my approach to that corner so as to avoid provoking it as much as I could), I learned quite a bit about how Track Mode handles, or perhaps I should say interprets, hard driving, from restrained and tidy all the way to a tenth or two past 10.

Track Mode’s main feature appears to be that it allows a great deal of yaw and wheel spin before intervening to stop you from whatever ham-fisted course you’ve chosen. Step on the throttle with a bit of angle to the steering, and you can feel the system vectoring torque around to help enhance your desired rotation. Lift off and you can feel it even more—the car rotates almost maniacally on turn-in so long as you’re not hard on the brakes, a decidedly un-typical production car tune. It’s tremendous fun.

You can really lean into it and the car just keeps on taking it. But once you get past the big slides and want to start hitting apexes and shaving down your time, you have to realize that you must come to the car; it will not come to you. I certainly haven’t fully figured out how to drive the Tesla Model 3 Performance to its limits yet; I’d want another week of Sundays to have even a solid start, but there’s some magic to be had re-learning corner entry to include a moment of pure regen braking, I think, and some more time to be gained learning just how early you can open the gates on all that electric torque.

There’s no Corvette-style PTM system there witching you into, through, and out of corners. Come in too hot, and the Model 3 will understeer until you’ve bled enough speed. If you give it a bit too much throttle, it will slide and slide and slide, laying the loveliest of carbon-black strips behind. For these reasons, I strongly advise owners of Model 3s with Track Mode to follow Tesla’s recommendation that you do not engage Track Mode on the street. This isn’t a performance-enhancing safety net. It’s just enough rope to hang yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Fortunately I have at least some idea of what I’m doing, as I won my class at the autocross and brought the car back as shiny as I got it.

IFTTT

[filmcave]

HBO’s Succession: TV or not TV

(Yes, there are spoilers in this)

This is a deviation vrom my stated purpose of this blog but without conventions there would only be a riot of non-conventional styles - which would in turn then be the convention.

I’ve already broken a maxim of my blog (no reviews) and now will be doubly at fault in reviewing a TV episode. Sacré bleu

Succession, season one episode seven - otherwise known as - Austerlitz was a virtuoso presentation. It was greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama all wrapped into one. It was a hologram of the history of a family, a Haiku and a stand alone “slice of life” movie at once. I haven’t seen this kind of high quality work on TV, behind and in front of the camera collaboration, since the early days of The Sopranos and the better days of Six Feet Under. SS1E7 might even surpass those.

Its not TV, its HBO in this instance is more than a catchy marketing line.

In SS1E7 we learn more about the characters, their relationships and dreams and fears than at any previous time. It was entirely captivating nearly start to finish. The characters really came to life because gone were the veils, deceptions, proxies and covers for the sublimated emotions that were hinted at in prior episodes.

We also have the pleasure to see the actors talents and the production skills, restrained and nuanced. At work is an incredible stylistic dynamic both the bold and raw set against a pastoral setting. A smoldering kindling on which a splash of psycho-therapy gasoline hogwash sets off a wild ride.

Logan, Marcia, Connor, Roman, Shiv and Kendall all have a new stage and unknown surroundings here in the middle of New Mexico - at Austerlitz, Connor’s newly renamed ranch. The familiar physical environment is no longer the polished steel city or lustrous posh of the Hamptons and we see how this new environs affects them. The environment is all highly symbolic but at the same time part of the natural aesthetic.

The dialogue is sparse but precise. The direction moves the story forward but doesn’t get in the way (There seemed to be far fewer annoying zoom jump cuts, for example). The dialogue was snappy, emotion filled, poetic and well balanced. The family joking and jostling ranging from mean and cutting to tender and toying.

What is most compelling and what elevates this simple TV episode to a higher level - nay a filmic level - is the extraordinary way it exists as a stand alone artistic entity while it fits in perfectly with the series narrative, arc and history. It advances the prior story lines yet could easily and satisfyingly be enjoyed as its own single entity,

What also helps this stand in stark relief are the fullness of the performances. We learn so much about each character and how they relate to each other. We see Logan railing, fuming, frustrated, patriarchal. Shiv - confused, frustrated, ambitious, Roman as lost, dismissed, sardonic, mean and desperate. Connor seeking solace and connection, peace and harmony, family unity and relationship building. Kendall as jilted, angry, posturing - and resentful. Deeply resentful.

This stew of these personalities are seasoned with the orbit of “satellite significant others” who play out their own personal turf battles. Tom Wamsgans, Marcia Roy and Willa

To this all we add in the “well known, highly respected, Harvard educated corporate therapist” Alon Parfit who does a fabulously good job of doing a fabulously terrible job. This performance by Griffin Dunne is understated, completely serious and comically perfect. He starts the session off with a ditty/limerick that is more stand up than kickstarter for insightful therapy.

While there are lots of rich and interesting moments in the “family unity event” but the one that really helps the wheels come off are when Logan, un-ironically states: Everything I have ever done, I’ve done in the best interest of my children.

It is one of the most stultifying and astonishing statements which no one but Logan believes is truthful. From here the kids start to figure out there is an alternative agenda. Pictures of everyone becomes pictures and interview (“its optional” says Logan) and as a fraudulent and deceptive connivance.

This whole vignette becomes a kind of “who’s afraid of Virginia Wolfe” for the whole family.

And then...things really start to unravel. Dr. Parfait (how symbolically perfect of a name) suggest they get into their “good bodies” and go for a swim and then everyone follows their genetic code. Shiv runs off to Santa Fe for a job interview as a political consultant,

Connor tries to corner Willa to kind of, sort of, maybe being together with him..in New Mexico, but no not maybe all the time - so she could be in New York, uh..and have an allowance,,,and uh, uh, uh...”we’d be together but in a different way”.

Roman hangs around for the photo op with Daddy (“sure, I give good cheek”) and Kendall (which just sounds so much to me like “Ken doll”) well, in addition to his aspiration of becoming a meth head decides he’s no wheres close to done with his failed palace coup in the boardroom.

But the pieces that really powers and accelerates this super charged race car of a family are the exceptional direction/cinematography/editing and Lucy Prebble’s script. Miguel Arteta‘s direction shows us what we need to see, how to see it and tells the visual story. Even simple moments like Kendall’s car rental and subsequent slide from sobriety at the bar tells us a lot about the character. There’s the aloof, voyeuristic distant camera shot and angle as he finishes up with the rental guy underscored with equally aloof and sarcastic throwaway lines:

Rental agent: “Its gassed up and ready to go. Big plans while you’re here?”

Kendall: “ Maybe. Patricide? Fratricide?”

In addition there is an incredible soundtrack that adds to the mood. Haunting, foreboding, lyrical, sad. The score too really adds to the flavor of this episode in a clear but subtle fashion.

The music and scoring is really complimentary to the entire aesthetic of Succession. Brilliantly done by Nicholas Britell (of Moonlight fame) it sets the mood for the soundtracks of the show episodes and the Roys family. As it should it adds to the storyline.

Its unfortunate that thus far the combo of Prebble and Arteta only collaborated in this one episode because their efforts truly reveal the inner lives of the story and characters versus the intriguing but more mundane soap opera like quality of most the other episodes. Prior to this episode the primary quality was a kind of prolonged exposition with the foreplay teaser of things to come. From SS1E1 through episode 6 each one ends with a kind of cliffhanger.

As I’ve already suggested even the non characters have meaning here. Austerlitz for example (Connor’s renamed house).

I had to look it up but was surprised and amused to learn it was the site of Napoleon’s greatest battle victory. According to Wikipedia:

also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was one of the most important and decisive engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. In what is widely regarded as the greatest victory achieved by Napoleon, the Grande Armée of France defeated a larger Russian and Austrian army led by Tsar Alexander I and Holy Roman Emperor Francis II

How perfect the symbol of a battle as foreshadowing for a family battle. That’s the historical part, even with echos of King Lear. The hysterical part is as Marcia and Willa explain:

Marcia: Austerlitz? Was this the name when you bought it?

Willa: Oh, it was racially insensitive, so he picked a new one.

Ha! How perfect, how prescient. They’re dropping hints before anyone’s even walked into the house (called a ranch but which is really an estate)

Its all brown, as Shiv puts it, but if you look a bit closer the accoutrements, nick-knacks and decorations are anything but vintage old world west. The furnishings, art work, ersatz homage to the history of the land, all “put together”. Very Pottery Barn meets Restoration hardware, meets Sam Shepard.

Connor, at this point the most self deluded of the bunch, even welcomes them by saying “Welcome to the real America”. How innocent and ignorant.

But Connor is an aspiring maven and bon vivant so he delights in his cursory knowledge of history.

So he doubles down as he proudly introduces everyone to his “humble” Abode and that the chapel next door dates to 1878. While he gives no context for the importance of 1878 (or his reason for mentioning it).

A bit of research seems to suggest this was an important period for New Mexico, commerce and local history. According to the National Park service and other online sources, this was the timeframe when the Santa Fe trail (the primary commercial route between Independence, MO and New Mexico) was being developed (possibly through hostile means) from “highway” to railroad way. The war with Mexico (over territory) had ended just thirty years earlier and the Republic of Texas had seceded from Mexico about a decade before (1836 Texas revolution). Again, signs of war, conflict, antagonism..could this be an over interpretation of a line of dialogue. Sure, but who goes to the length to not only name a house for Napoleon’s greatest victory but the entire episode and stop with the clues there?

Theres so much layering of elements in this episode, its hard to pick what to highlight.

However I am also drawn to another unique interplay of moments. There are two occasions when Shiv, beginning to sow her seeds, compares her father to the earthly elements of Fire and Water. At one point exclaiming in reference to the chapel: “do you think he can cross the threshold or will he spontaneously combust? And later explains why her father won’t take a dip in the pool, “he doesn’t even trust water..its too wishy washy”. But in the end we see the ramifications and scars from the encounters...

Shiv is brought to tears

Kendall climbs a mountain to gain perspective and snort some drugs

Connor realizes his illusion of family unity was never to be and

Logan, Logan goes into the pool (a very high end infinity pool) amidst the mountains, and cactus, tumbleweeds, dirt with steam rising to wash away the stress and as he emerges crawling out of the depths we see what appears to be lashes or scars in his upper back with Marcia there, his protector and defender to wrap him in a towel as an acoustic guitar melody plays under the scene.

Succession Austerlitz Haiku

Roys go West together

seeking salvation in sand

No one’s left unhurt

[buildercar]

New Post has been published on http://www.buildercar.com/first-drive-2017-honda-civic-type-r/

First Drive: 2017 Honda Civic Type R

MIRABEL, Quebec, Canada — Accelerating toward the late, late apex of a sphincter-tightening right-hand sweeper at the 16-turn International Center of Advanced Racing (Circuit ICAR) just north of Montreal, I squeeze down on the throttle. This unleashes the full fury of 306 turbocharged horses, and I then do what I always do when cornering at max lat in a potent front-drive car: I brace for torque steer. But the new 2017 Honda Civic Type R I’m wringing out does not try to yank the steering wheel from my fingertips. It does not dart off line. It does not scream “yeeeeehaaawww!” or use its 22.8 psi of turbo boost to burn the 20-inch front tires into acrid black jelly.

Instead, with absolutely zero fuss, the Type R blasts me out of the turn and into the next corner so fiercely I have to stand on the ventilated, cross-drilled, four-piston Brembo front brakes just to keep from launching straight into the nearby village of Saint-Antoine. (It would be especially embarrassing to admit that you crashed into a city with your own name on it.)

The headline is this: The new Type R is the fastest production front-driver ever to circle the Nürburgring Nordschleife, accomplishing the feat in just 7 minutes, 43.8 seconds. That’s 7 seconds quicker than the previous, fourth-gen car I tested in Slovakia in 2015 (but which we Americans never got a chance to buy). If the new, gen-five Type R’s time doesn’t mean anything to you, join me down on Memory Lane for a moment. Back in 2005, a Pagani Zonda S lapped the same circuit in 7:44 flat. That car cost $500,000, seats just two with no cargo, and looks like a cross between a Ferrari Enzo and a Hercules missile. The Type R costs $34,775, seats four, delivers more than 46 cubic feet of cargo room with the rear seat folded down, and gets 28 mpg on the highway. It looks like a cross between a Hercules missile and a Honda.

What the headline does not reveal is how the Type R got so damn fast. The answer mirrors Ernest Hemingway’s description of going bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

At a glance, the new Type R doesn’t seem dramatically different from its 2015 predecessor. The Ohio-built engine is essentially unchanged: same displacement, same VTEC variable valve-timing and direct-injection hardware, same power and torque, same 7,000-rpm redline. The one and only shifter remains a six-speed manual feeding, again, a front helical limited slip differential. As before, huge 13.8-inch Brembos sit forward with 12-inch solid discs at the rear. The suspension boasts variable magnetorheological shocks and variable-ratio electronic power steering. The sport seats are worthy of a race car. The rear wing could lift a B-52.

Yet there are differences. Mostly small ones, admittedly, but in sum they produce a vastly changed automobile. The final drive ratio, for instance, is lowered by 7 percent, improving acceleration. Front track is widened by nearly half an inch, while the rear track swells by 2.5 inches. Front/rear weight distribution is improved. Torsional rigidity is up 38 percent, yet weight is down thanks to lightweight structural materials. The car’s center of gravity is almost half an inch lower. The reshaped bodywork and ducting improve engine cooling, reduce drag and lift, and add rear downforce at speed. It’s subtle stuff — you might not notice any of it right away — but it creates a more impressive vehicle.

Other revisions and upgrades stand out. The alloy wheels have grown from 19 inches to 20; they’re finished in a striking black design wearing 245/30R-20 summer performance tires. New is Honda’s first-ever rev-match system. Instead of the driver blipping the throttle while braking (heel-and-toe downshifting), simply brake with your right foot and, as you move the gear lever to a lower ratio, the system automatically does the engine blipping for you. Out back is a new three-pipe exhaust system that sports two outside main pipes with a central resonator. At lower throttle the resonator adds increased sound; all three pipes are open. At higher engine speeds, however, the resonator’s pressure goes negative, ducting the exhaust to the outside pipes to minimize booming. It’s a passive system that requires no butterfly valves to function. And it looks cool.

The cockpit remains clean and sporty, with lots of red accents (a Type R signature), faux carbon-fiber trim that doesn’t look cheap, those great front buckets, and a central display that changes depending on which driving mode you’re in or what particulars — tach, boost gauge, etc. — you’d like to see. Front and center is a terrific three-spoke leather wheel, with a handsome aluminum shift knob nicely positioned for your right hand. Above the center column is a 7-inch color touchscreen display also operable via voice commands. There’s nothing fancy here, and there shouldn’t be. Honda has put the money where it counts—not on flash, but on great seats, premium materials, and hardware you’ll really use and appreciate.

An important note: Everything on the Type R is standard. You pick your preferred color (making a dramatic return is Honda’s renowned Championship White). That’s it. But that in no way implies you’ll be left wanting. The standard-equipment sheet is long: Honda-linked navigation with digital traffic info; 540-watt, 12-speaker audio system; support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto; keyless Smart Entry and push-button start; dual-zone climate control; LED headlights, fog lights, and daytime running lights; a multi-angle rear-view camera; and a lot more. Check out the pricing of the competition — Subaru STi, Ford Focus RS, Volkswagen Golf R — and you’ll find the Honda undercuts them all, even with its superior list of standard stuff.

Back to Circuit ICAR. The last Type R was impressively lacking in torque steer, but the gen-five model is even better. There’s almost none to speak of, even under full throttle in the tightest of turns. Credit revised dual-axis front struts—similar to the Focus RS’s RevoKnuckle setup—which reduce torque steer while also improving steering responsiveness. The new 20-inch meats and improved suspension tuning add a newfound stability to an already impressive layout. Yes, the Type R will step out, but in a calm, predictable, friendly manner. At the limit, a judicious lift of the throttle will bring just the right helpful hint of oversteer to lock you back on line. This suspension is both completely settled and remarkably grippy. Not once during my lapping sessions did the car make an unexpected move on me.

As before, the driver can choose from three driving modes: Comfort, Sport, and R+. Each adjusts chassis stiffness, steering effort, and drive-by-wire throttle response. One major criticism I raised about the 2015 Type R was its suspension harshness in R+ mode. I don’t recall the roads in Slovakia being awful, but on the street the car was nearly unbearable in R+. That’s not the case any more. Yes, R+ is still noticeably the stiffest of the three choices, but it feels far more compliant now. I had no complaints during my road drive, though Comfort did ride far better, and Sport seemed the best ride/handling compromise.

The dual-pinion, variable-ratio electronic power-steering system gets a larger motor for 2017 and needs just 2.1 turns lock to lock. It’s not great—as with other EPS systems, it lacks road feel—but it’s better than before, noticeably so. I found myself using Sport or R+ modes almost exclusively, though; in Comfort the steering takes on a power boost that’s somehow murky. In R+ the response is much more direct and satisfying.

On the track, the rev-match system worked brilliantly. Frankly, I’ve used such systems before and never liked them. After using manual transmissions for years and learning how to heel-and-toe, suddenly not blipping the throttle yourself feels counterintuitive. And most rev-match systems don’t seem to do the matching particularly well. Honda’s system is different. Within a few corners I was confidently planting my right foot on the brake and flipping the gear lever down while the engine automatically and smoothly revved up to accept the lower gear. Nicely done, and it sounds great, too.

Ah, the sound. Wish there was more of it. If I have a major criticism of this new and vastly improved Type R, it’s that I’d like a little more wickedness. The car is almost too buttoned-down, too predictable and safe and efficient. Especially given the variable exhaust, why isn’t there more scream from the engine at full throttle? Even at the redline the 2.0-liter turbo is more poised and polished than electrifying. I want a car with such laser-like race focus to feel as wild as it works. Yes, the performance is there—no doubt whatsoever. The Type R just needs a bit more sauce on the steak. (A lot of buyers, no doubt, are going to pour that sauce right on via the aftermarket.)

Honda plans to bring 2,700 Type Rs to our shores almost immediately (they’re built in the U.K.), and after that will likely settle at a rate of about 3,000 annually.

For sure, this new car is equipped to meet those lofty targets. Even without the four-wheel drive of its main rivals, the Civic Type R displays remarkable poise and an uncanny ability to put its power down. It’s utterly refined but unquestionably fast. It’s happy puttering around town but hungry to scorch any track any time and feels like it could do it all day.

The last time I reviewed a Civic Type R I had to tell you, “It’s cool all right, but it’s not coming here.” This time I’m happy to say, “This one was worth the wait.”

2017 Honda Civic Type R Specifications

ON SALE Now PRICE $34,775/` (base/as tested) ENGINE 2.0 turbocharged DOHC 16-valve I-4/306 hp @ 6,500 rpm, 295 lb-ft @ 2,500-4,000 rpm TRANSMISSION 6-speed manual LAYOUT 4-door, 4-passenger, front-engine, FWD hatchback EPA MILEAGE 22/28 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 179.4 x 73.9 x 56.5 in WHEELBASE 106.3 in WEIGHT 3,100 lb 0-60 MPH 5.4 sec TOP SPEED 168 mph

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[gamerszone2019-blog]

Phil Spencer: Cloud Gaming Is Inevitable, But It's Not Replacing Traditional Consoles Just Yet

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/phil-spencer-cloud-gaming-is-inevitable-but-its-not-replacing-traditional-consoles-just-yet/

Phil Spencer: Cloud Gaming Is Inevitable, But It's Not Replacing Traditional Consoles Just Yet

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, has plenty to think about, from the next generation of Xbox consoles to helping build new development teams. He and the team are also managing an ecosystem that’s trying to serve the needs of as many players as possible. Cloud-based gaming touches all of those areas, which is why he’s been championing Project xCloud, Microsoft’s game streaming technology that will let you access the power of an Xbox console through your phone via an internet connection. We recently got the opportunity to talk to the head of Xbox about a number of topics, including how he sees xCloud fitting into Xbox’s repertoire, and within an industry that’s traditionally orbited around consoles in the home.

“It’s one of the directions the industry is headed. To me, it’s about what you as a gamer want to do, and I’m not trying to tell you that owning a box that plays video games is a bad thing or that somehow that’s not needed.” Spencer continued, “I think that the cloud inevitability as part of gaming is absolutely true. But we have more compute devices around us than we’ve ever had, whether it’s your phone, a Surface Hub, or an Xbox. The world where compute devices are gone and it’s all coming from the cloud just isn’t the world that we live in today.”

Physical devices are still very much part of the equation when it comes to cloud gaming, but Xbox itself isn’t making a new device specifically for it. “Last year we talked about xCloud and then we said we were working on new game consoles, but that’s all I said.” Spencer clarified, “We didn’t say that [a streaming console was in the works]. I think maybe some people thought that that was the disc-less one that we just shipped. We are not working on a streaming-only console right now. We are looking at the phone in your pocket as the destination for you to stream, and the console that we have allows you to play the games locally.”

“If you bought a big gaming PC and you like playing games there, I want to respect that and meet you where you are and bring the content and services that you want to that device. If you want to buy an Xbox, if you want to play Minecraft on a PlayStation, I want to make sure that comes to you there.”

One of the chief concerns that has always surrounded cloud gaming is lag. Specifically, how fast your controller inputs will translate to action on a screen. It was an issue in some cases for Google Stadia demos, especially for fast-paced shooters such as Doom. Spencer recognizes this and makes no bones about those concerns, saying “I don’t think anybody should tell you that there’s no lag.”

“Going back to our transparency, there’s a truth that I think is always important for us to talk about with our customers. In xCloud, we are building a convenience capability to allow you to take your Xbox experience with you. Meaning, that’s why we focus on the phone, and the experience is not the same as running the games on an Xbox One X. I’m not going to say that it’s an 8k 120 hertz thing. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re going to bring convenience and choice to you on your phone.”

“You can jump in a party, we can voice chat. Everything works the same as it does when I’m sitting with my console from a community and content perspective but you’re running it from a cloud, which is going to feel different.”

We talk about Project xCloud and we use words like “trials” not because we don’t believe in our tech–our tech is as good as anybody’s tech out there, and the team is doing really amazing work–but this is about the reality of time and choice for customers.

Given that he’s been traveling with an early version of xCloud on his own phone playing games on it out in public, it would seem that xCloud is in a feature-complete state. Public trials start in October this year (a month before Google Stadia), but we asked if it’ll launch as a fully-formed service. “We will start in 2019, this year, in certain markets and then we will just continue to roll it out. We’re doing our internal trials with xCloud now, which means people on the team can now install the application on their phone and stream games.”

“One of the benefits we have working at Microsoft is the Azure data centers globally, which allow us to put hardware as close to people as we possibly can. And we can leverage the fact that Microsoft has spent a lot of money establishing data centers to help us accelerate this build. So we’re going to start in 2019 and have people playing Xbox games on their phones, and we’ll get a ton of feedback.”

Project xCloud’s launch this year only marks the beginning for the Xbox game streaming service; Microsoft will continue to iterate on it while its in players’ hands, and Spencer emphasizes that technological shifts take time. “I think this is years away from being a mainstream way people play. And I mean years, like years and years.”

Phil Spencer on stage during Microsoft’s E3 2019 press conference. — Photo credit: Jason Lewis

“Let’s take Netflix, which is 20 years old. I think we forget that sometimes because tech moves so fast. It’s 20 years old at this point, so it took two decades for us to get to the point where shows like Game of Thrones and House of Cards are some of the biggest shows in the planet and mainly watched via streaming. I think game streaming will get there faster than 20 years, but it’s not going to be two years. This is a technological change. While it seems like it happens overnight, it doesn’t.”

“It takes time for these services to evolve. We are building for the long-term, but that’s why choice is so critical. I’m not trying to say go sell your consoles today and switch over to streaming because the experience just isn’t the same as playing on your console, but I do think in terms of reaching everybody, the democratization of play and content, it’s important that we don’t lock all of these experiences behind purchasing a certain device.”

“And way over time, we’ll have a global service that can reach everybody and the infrastructure to reach any customer with a consistent and high quality internet service, but that’s going to take time. We talk about Project xCloud and we use words like “trials” not because we don’t believe in our tech–our tech is as good as anybody’s tech out there, and the team is doing really amazing work–but this is about the reality of time and choice for customers.”

Down the road, the evolution of xCloud could lead to some creative uses; we’ve seen hints of it in Crackdown 3‘s multiplayer and how it handles physics. But Spencer and the team are thinking outside of games themselves as they have plans to make it an integral part of the industry’s biggest convention, saying “At E3 [in the future], our plan is to allow people coming to the show to actually play games, play Xbox games on phones at the show.”

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Part of cloud gaming’s success, and xCloud in particular, rests in how developers account for the new technology. It’s also an aspect that Xbox is already getting ahead of, and Spencer detailed how the team is doing it. “We’ve already started putting xCloud servers near locations where our largest third party developers are. So now we’re starting to get developers at third parties on it so they can see their game on a phone, which is critical because there are things like font sizes that if you wanted to take advantage and understand how the game runs on the phone, you want to make it available. You want them to see it and experience it themselves.”

“We’ve also already put into the Xbox SDK, because if you’re streaming, a developer might want to do something different if the game was running locally. All the developers that are building Xbox games today have access to that capability of determining whether the game is being streamed or running locally, which I think is a great addition.”

“You’ll have certain developers that will take advantage of it early. We already have some of the early adopters asking for [it], because there are certain things that the cloud makes more possible than happened in the home. A good example of that is our blades right now that have all the Xboxes in the data centers have multiple Xboxes on one blade…basically like a bunch of Xboxes in your house that are hardwired together. So the latency between all of those consoles is negligible. It’s almost a zero because they’re literally hard-wired together. If we were to play games online, there is latency from where you live and I live, right? Our two Xboxes just take time to sync.”

More Exclusive Phil Spencer Coverage

Our conversations with Phil Spencer covered much more in addition to this deep dive into Project xCloud and cloud gaming’s place in the industry. For more inside looks at Spencer and his thoughts on the past, present, and future of Xbox, check out all our coverage in the stories linked below.

Source : Gamesport