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1000roughdrafts · 4 years ago

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A Christmas Surprise

Pairing: Sam Winchester X Fem!Reader

Explicit 18+/Warnings: fluff, blowjob in the Impala, dirty talk, swearing unprotected vaginal penetration, Sam being adorable

Summary: Sam and Dean ‘force’ you to go to a Christmas party at Bobby’s, despite your pleas for a night in with just some beer and pizza. It turns out, it wasn’t so terrible of a night after all.

Word Count: about 2-2.5k

A/N: using a Poker Card: J💗(Dirty Talk, Holiday Fic, “I love hearing you moan.”)

This was queued for Christmas day but I'm very angry about the finale and since part two of Hope is a Dangerous Thing is in the editing stage, I thought I'd share this little creation whilst I finish that one. Hope you like it :)

Sitting in the backseat of the Impala, you stare out of the window in annoyance as the snow, illuminated only by the passing street lamps, trickles down. You place a hand on Dean’s shoulder to grab his attention.

“Do we have to go?” you softly whine, hoping that Dean’s music would hide your voice from Sam. He was more excited for this party than you and Dean combined, although with the fight the two of you put up, that wasn’t that great of a feat.

As Dean opens his mouth to reply, Sam flips off the music and spins around to face you. He says something about how everyone is expecting at least an appearance from the three of you, and when was the last time you’d all been in the same place when it didn’t involve work?

“We don’t get to take these kinds of breaks often, Y/N. The least we could do is show up, hm, babe?” Sam says, eyebrows pressed together and lips taut like a mother at her wits end. If he didn’t look so cute in the Christmas sweater he found at a discount market, you might have fought back a little.

“Fine,” you say like a peeved teenager, crossing your arms and scooting back in the seat.

Dean slaps a hand onto Sam’s knee, much to Sam’s irritation. “Besides, we got a surprise for you,” he says with a smug grin, waggling his eyebrows at Sam who whispers for him to shut up before glaring at his brother and clearing his throat.

“Is it a case?” you say in monotone without removing your eyes from the falling snow.

They awkwardly chuckle, saying nothing more until Sam adjusts in his seat and points out of the windshield. Dean takes a sharp right turn down a skinny road, sending your body flying against the seat.

“What the Hell, Dean?” you shout.

“Sorry, cupcake,” Dean chuckles, “just some last minute... loose ends to tie up,” he says, glancing over at Sam. He shuts off the engine in front of a closed up pawn shop. Turning around to face you, he holds a hand up, “stay here,” he says.

He and Sam step out without giving you a chance to respond. Minutes later, the two come back and get into the Impala without so much as a word.

“Did you just break into a pawn shop?” you ask, leaning forward as Dean starts up the engine.

“Uh, yeah,” Sam replies, looking back at you through the side of his eye.

“Why?” you ask.

Sam opens and closes his mouth, holding an open palm in the air and glances at Dean. Dean rolls his eyes before meeting yours in the rear view mirror.

“Bobby asked us to check up on something on our way over. Something about a haunted object, or whatever,” he says, twirling his hand before spinning the wheel. “I don’t really know, but it was a bust, nothing haunted there,” he says.

“You probably didn’t inspect it thoroughly,” you groan, “should have let me come in to do it right,” you say under your breath.

As Dean gets back on the main roads, he holds up a finger, “ooh! Let’s play a game,” he says, looking at you through the mirror. “I made it up and it’s called ‘shut up and quit whining or I’ll make you wear Sam’s ugly sweater’,” he says with a smirk and raised eyebrows.

“Dean!” Sam scolds, looking at you apologetically.

“No, it’s fine,” you say, giving Dean a snide smile before settling in for the rest of the drive.

Having been hunting with the Winchesters for years, you know how Dean gets. Though the two of you occasionally butt heads, you have been great friends. Sam has always been the apple of your eye, however. You knew you loved him the second you laid eyes on him, and somehow, despite it taking him a few years to come around to the idea of being together, you knew it was the same for him.

If it weren’t for Dean’s sharp corners and reckless driving, you might have fallen asleep. Pulling into Bobby’s salvage yard, you perk up, eager to step out of the car and say hi to everyone.

The exhaustion of greetings aside, and when you had a few drinks in you and Bobby by your side, you started having more fun than you imagined you would. Talking with Bobby always seemed to ease your stress about any situation. He was the father to you that yours couldn’t be.

Hunting ran in the family, and unlike Bobby, your dad didn’t really include you in his operations. It was something that really connected you to Sam and Dean when you met, as they knew what that kind of relationship felt like. At least Dean understood. He knew what it felt to always want acceptance from the man who taught you everything, and getting close to nothing instead was soul grinding.

Bobby was able to give you that, as he did for Sam and Dean, and it was times like tonight that made you even more grateful for the Winchesters. When hands slid onto your sides and you feel the scruffy cheeks of your boyfriend on the side of your face, you smile, and turn around to embrace him. The whiskey you’d been sipping on has you feeling the perfect amount of buzzed; a bit dizzy, very happy, and not overly talkative.

“Hey, handsome,” you whisper, kissing his collarbone

“Hi, gorgeous,” he coos, kissing the top of your head.

You hear Bobby groan from behind you, mumbling something about getting a room, and chuckle as Sam removes a hand from your back just long enough to wave at Bobby before he walks off.

Sam pulls you from him, a smile radiating from him as his eyes oscillate between yours. He reaches behind you for his drink from the table, taking a sip and winking at you before bringing it into the air while keeping his eyes on yours.

“Excuse me,” he says, stopping to clear his throat. “Uh, can I have everyone’s attention, please?”

With all eyes on him, he brings the drink back down and wraps a hand around your back, letting his hand rest on your hip as you turn to face your friends and family.

“As you all know, we had a rough year, and the fact that we were all able to get together to celebrate means the world to me, to us,” he says, using his drink to gesture at you. “I learned a valuable lesson this year, and the many before, that time is not on our side, especially as hunters,” he says, everyone nodding and humming in agreement. “So, it’s important, I think, to let the ones you care about know that you care about them, that you love them,” he says, voice shaking slightly.

He slowly sets his drink onto the table, pulling his arm from behind you. Standing in front of you, your eyes widen as he reaches into his back pocket for a little red box. Gasps fill the room as he drops to one knee, smiling up at you.

“Y/N, ever since I met you, I knew that you were the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with,” he chuckles, “whether that be another two years or twenty. So I’m asking you,” he lets out a breath, “in this ugly Christmas sweater, in front of all of our family and friends,” his eyes scan the room before meeting back with yours. With one hand, he grips onto yours, and uses the otehr to hold the box steady in front of you, “will you make me the happiest man on the planet by taking my hand in marriage?”

Shocked, surprise, and happy doesn’t even begin to explain what you’re feeling. You cover your mouth with your hand, tears swelling in your eyes as you look down at him. You know you should answer him soon, but you want to soak in the sight of him in front of you like this, you want to be able to close your eyes and picture him like this whenever things get bloody.

His eyebrows raise just a bit as he expects your answer.

Nodding first, you squeak out a yes. He pulls the ring from the old, battered box and places it on your finger before standing. Cupping his hands around your face he kisses you, and the room fills with cheers and clapping.

When you pull away, you examine the ring, “wow, I actually love this.”

“Oh, good,” he says, letting out a breath, “stole it from the pawn shop,” he says, winking at you.

“That’s what we were doing there?” you ask, laughing. “What if my ring belonged to a dead person?” you joke, wrapping an arm around his waist.

“Good thing we know how to deal with that,” he laughs, kissing the top of your head.

“You know,” you say, “there’s a few other ways I could make you the happiest man on the planet.”

Eyebrows raise, “is that so?”

“Yep,” you say, biting your lower lips. Grabbing his hand you lead him out of the front door, smiling at friends as they cheer with "congratulations".

You make it to the Impala, nodding for Sam to get into the backseat. “Lay back, like that, yeah?” you say.

He tilts his head as he looks down at you. With a chuckle, he asks, "here, really? Dean'll kill me," he laughs.

"He won't even know, just get in," you smile, pushing his arms.

He slides into the backseat of the Impala, hands nervously placed in his lap rubbing his thighs.

You sit next to him, shutting the door behind you, in a rush to unbutton his pants. Tugging on the elastic of them, he lifts up enough for you to pull them down.

You can't help but to smile seeing him hard and ready for you, kissing him on the lips before peppering the kisses down his neck. Wrapping your hand around his dick you squeeze gently, almost forcing an airy moan from him.

You slide your hand up and down, Sam's eyes closing as his head falls back against the seat. He scoots forward a bit, giving you more room.

Lowering your head, you open your mouth and let your tongue slip between your teeth, using it to guide you. The back of your tongue falls onto his tip, and he moans as you bring it to the base of his dick and back.

Placing your lips around him, you force the entirety of his erection into your mouth, humming while you suck until your lips hit his stomach. You wrap a hand around the base of him, adding pressure with your lips as you make your way back to the tip in a twist motion.

He moans louder, sending an electric rush through you, "fuck, I love hearing you moan," you mumble with your lips still wrapped around his dick. His hand falls onto your head, careful not to apply very much pressure, but enough to let you know he enjoys it.

You twirl your tongue around his length, licking and sucking at the tip while holding onto his legs. His moan turns into a growl as he gets a grip of your hair, pulling your head up.

His lips slam into yours, forcing you into the wall of the Impala. You let out a whine as his teeth pierce into your neck, just enough to leave a mark without drawing blood. His hands grip onto your sides, and through nibbling kisses he barks a command, "take your pants off."

You oblige, as nothing gets you hotter than when Sam takes charge. Fumbling to get your pants off, he helps pull them down your legs, and as soon as they are, yanks you into his lap.

His fingers dig into your back as he pulls you close to him, lips pressed deep into your neck. He waits until he can feel you getting wet before pushing himself inside of you.

You lay your hands on his chest, arching your back as you awkwardly bounce up and down. His hands scratch their way down your back and to your hips, pulling them into him before up and back down. He bites down on his lip, squeezing you tightly as he spreads out his legs.

When you lean back, his thrusts go deeper, the tip of his dick hitting your cervix in a way you never thought you'd enjoy. A pain that carries an excitement with it. Your eyes clench shut as you let you head fall against your back, and he takes it as a sign to go stronger.

Keeping one hand on the small of your back, he uses the other to stimulate your clit, moaning when he sees how much it thrills you.

"Fuck," you utter in a shaky breath, now recognizing that you've been clenching your jaw. You slip your tongue between your teeth, focusing on breathing through your nose. But when his pace quickens, he bounces his legs with a gasp of his own, and your mouth opens to let out a choppy moan.

You can feel yourself puddle in his thigh, and soon after, the pulsing of his dick as he finishes inside of you.

"Fuck," you say again, breathless and sweaty. "I cant believe I get to do this for the rest of my life."

He chuckles, sliding his hand up your back to cradle your head. He pulls your head to his, kissing you softly.

"I can't believe it either," he smiles.

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shirtlesssammy · 4 years ago

Text

15x15: Gimme Shelter

Then:

Dean used his words to save the world once

Now:

At a food bank community center, three teens dole out food while stressing out about one attendant who’s breaking their cleanliness rules. Connor heads over to talk to the woman, but is stopped by the center’s pastor. The pastor challenges Connor’s motivation. ”We have rules, but we also have spirit too, right?” The pastor tells Connor to lead with compassion, so Connor brings the woman food instead of kicking her out of the building.

Later, Connor walks home. Much like all other cold open walks, this one also involves a solitary alley. He hears someone calling his name. Trying to find the source of the voice, he trips and finds a talking teddy bear, and a metal hook around his neck.

Dean and Sam discuss research. Sam’s found a non-case, while Dean’s hit the jackpot in Atlantic City. Specifically, an unexplained blackout has him thinking that Amara’s enjoying her new gambling addiction on the East Coast.

Cas pops up and thinks he should go with the brothers, but they tell him to stay put and babysit Jack. I say TFW is just better together, but I’m not writing this episode. Hrmph. The brothers are packed and ready to go, but Jack stops them in the war room to ask about the case Sam found.

Sam tells him it’s nothing. Dean encourages Cas and Jack to investigate --to keep Jack busy. Cas seems skeptical, but Dean insists.

Agents Swift and Lovato meet with the local law enforcement to learn more about the case. Sweet Jesus is it cute that Cas continues to use pop-star names. It’s cute that Jack takes after his father with the upside down badge. It’s cute that Jack recognizes the teddy bear and says he has one (Did Cas buy it for him? He has a history of buying stuffed animals for his quasi-children.)

The sheriff tells them about the victim, and how the word ‘Liar’ was carved into him.

Jack posits that this all seems demonic.

Cut to Cas digging into the ground at a crossroads. Time to get some information. Cas buries a picture of himself that Dean took when he was wearing a cowboy hat (Don’t worry, Dean still has his copy, and keeps it safe…. for reasons.) and Jack sets up a social media account. He’s WAY under 13 years old, so he needs a parent’s permission. Cas grants it easily. (Also, ALSO!! ALSO, there are NOT too many cats on the internet. This writing is so OOC, smh.)

A demon appears.

He’s channeling his inner Crowley, and I suddenly miss the bugger for a moment. Zach, the demon, is very bored and desperately wants something to do. He’s not really British and tells the duo that no one's making demon deals right now. Rowena’s of the philosophy that “people will end up where they belong.” Cas realizes their mistake and moves to leave. “Sam was right, it’s not a monster,” Jack laments. “He was half right. Sometimes humans can be the worst kind of monsters,” Cas adds.

At the community center, a woman locks up, and grabs a whole lotta cash from the donation box before she bails. Once outside, she hears a voice call her name. She looks around but sees nothing. She turns back to her car to find a masked individual. A weird editing choice cuts back to her...and commercial.

Cas checks in with the brothers. Dean tells Cas to be wary of those “Hallelujah types” and I’m like, wha? Cas is an ANGEL OF THE LORD. He’s been around the block, Dean. Lol for looking out for your BFF, tho. Also, second awkward moment of the episode when Dean just hangs up on Cas? I’m…

Sam voices his reservations about the whole finding Amara --lying to Amara --killing Amara plan. Say it louder for the brother in the seat next to you, Sam!

(Boris: I’m just going to insert this in the middle of this recap and never mention it again. Can we trust Billie? Is her plan actually something that is GOOD for our TFW 2.0? What is her agenda and does it align with what we want? What if what SHE wants is as equally bad as what Chuck wants? What if we as an audience are getting played right now??) (Natasha: What if the strings she’s pulling are emotional and she’s playing a dangerous game of chicken with Dean’s rage and Chuck’s entitlement?)

Jack joins the community center. He watches Dr. Sexy the pastor in a prayer circle, and talks to a disillusioned young woman who asks him to fill out a form before walking away.

Cas walks in separately and wanders over to Dr. Sexy the pastor praying with a parishioner, and tells him about the cash stealing Valerie. She never made it home.

Cut to Valerie tied and gagged. Her hands are in an elaborate guillotine. She wakes. Her screams are muffled. A TV turns on and flashes the word ‘Thief’. And one of her fingers gets chopped off. A timer starts on the TV. AND WE ALL RECOIL.

Jack finishes the paperwork and tries to talk to the girls working the food line. The one girl storms off, upset. Jack follows her and tells her that he didn’t mean to upset her.

She tells him that Connor and her dated. Well, they watched a lot of old movies together. (AHEM! AHEM! AHEM! “I’m your Huckleberry.” AHEM. Please stop the clowning, it hurts so much.)

Jack confesses to the girl that he lost his mother. The girl tells Jack that her mom died three years ago, and now it’s just her and her emotionally unavailable father, the pastor. “I have more dads than most, and I’m always just feeling like I’m letting all of them down.” JACK!!!! The girl tells Jack to trust God, not people.

And we laugh, and laugh, and, guh, laugh.

Cas, meanwhile, meets with Dr. Sexy the pastor.

Cas interrogates Dr. Sexy Pastor about whether anyone else has gone missing recently. Well, there was one guy who used to work for the “faith-based community” but they parted ways. Cas and the pastor enjoy a little god talk. Cas, the weary angel, opines that God just doesn’t care. The pastor has a different take on faith - it’s about the people of his church doing what they can to take care of each other. We learn that this church recently changed from a fundamentalist branch to something more welcoming. Connor was able to come out as gay due to the changes, so some good happened. (Hindsight thoughts: this makes his death and the “Liar” all the more awful.) “A saint is a sinner who keeps trying,” the pastor concludes...and if that ain’t the truth about Cas!

Sam and Dean are on the too-slow train to Atlantic City when Amara drops in during a gas stop and invites them out for pierogi.

At Patchwork, the pastor asks Jack to share his journey of faith during a prayer circle. Jack falters, and Cas steps in. “I do know what blind faith is. I used to just follow orders. Without question. And I did some pretty terrible things. I would never look beyond the plan. Then, of course, when it all came crashing down I found myself lost. I didn’t know what my purpose was anymore. And then one day something changed. Something amazing. I guess I found a family. And I became a father. And in that, I rediscovered my faith. I rediscovered who I am.” BRB crying!

Later in the cafeteria, Jack asks Sexy Pastor, M.D. how he brought together so many people with different ideas of religion. “It’s not about what they believe. It’s what they do,” he reiterates. (I imagine, for a moment, an ending where Jack calls out to the whole world and all living creatures and Heaven and Hell unite to win the final confrontation and make a better world together.)

The tranquil moment is interrupted by the TV turning on to security feed footage of the victim. The timer runs out and she loses another finger and screams and screams. Jack rushes over to the TV and pulls out a USB stick from the back.

Meanwhile, the Winchesters dine with Amara.

They bring up Chuck’s destruction of the other universes and tell her they have a plan to stop him. They’ve got a nephilim on their side AND he’s super powerful. All they need is for Amara to help them trap Chuck and...WHAMMO. Amara gently refuses to betray her brother. She lays some new mythology on them. She and Chuck are twins - creation and destruction - and their splitting apart first brought life into the world.

Cas and Jack barge into the church’s ex-AV tech’s room. And by that, I mean, Jack gets hurled through another door? Um. Okay. The part of me that grew up with 3 Stooges is HERE FOR IT, tbh.

They discover the guy is dead, chained up in bed with cuffs, with the word “lust” painted above him.

Getting ready to leave town, Sam’s ready to accept Amara’s choice. Dean “Fuck Acceptance” Winchester heads back inside and corners Amara. He asks why she brought back Mary.

Amara tells him that she wanted him to see that the apple pie dream life he’s always striving for isn’t real - that Mary was only human - and BETTER because of that. Amara thought that would help him to accept his life. Amara also thought that having Mary back would release Dean from his anger.

He leans forward and lets her know that he’s furious. Everyone in this universe is trapped, he tells her - including her. And she’s doing nothing. Amara falters in the face of this, and then asks him if she can trust him. “I would never hurt you,” he LIES TO HER FACE. She tells him she’ll think about it.

That evening Sylvia, the pastor’s daughter, listens to her friend gush over the social media attention she’s getting after posting about the torture video. In a flash of rage, Sylvia stabs her friend and races away. Dr. Sexy Pastor finds the current (still alive) victim just as Sylvia catches up to him. She accuses him of laughing at her mother after her mother died from trying to heal by prayer rather than medical science. She accuses him of changing the church that her mother grew up in. Jack jumps into the fray and gets stabbed for his trouble. When Cas arrives, Sylvia is quickly subdued by his Vulcan forehead tap of slumber.

Cas yanks away the restraints from the victim (SOOOO strong) and then heals her fingers back on while the pastor looks on in wonder.

For So Strong Science:

Later, they gather outside while Sylvia gets taken away in cuffs. The pastor still cares about his daughter and vows to get her help. The driver of the car is Zach the crossroads demon? Oookay.

Cas and Jack drive home. In the truck of feelings, Cas asks Jack why he couldn’t share during the prayer circle. Jack confesses that he’s been lying. The spell Billie is doing with him is turning him into a bomb to be used against Chuck and Amara. It’ll work - they’ll cease to exist. But Jack will be obliterated too. “This is the only way they’ll ever forgive me,” he tells Cas.

Cas is horrified. He can’t watch Jack die again! Cas refuses to watch Jack die again, but Jack seems to have fully embraced this as his necessary fate.

Back at the bunker, Dean heads for the whiskey bottle late at night when he spots Cas shuffling towards the exit. Jack’s settled in his room, Cas reports. Cas then tells Dean he’s going to look for “another way.”

Oh AND, “In case something goes wrong and I don’t make it back, there’s something you and Sam need to know…”

FADE. TO. BLACK.

The Se7en Deadly Quotes:

You guys go Highway to Heaven that bitch

You look greener than Baby Yoda

“Did anyone find any tiny bags with chicken bones inside?” “Did anyone smell sulfur?” “Did anyone feel cold?”

There were too many cats

Where can I find the Kool-Aid?

I wanted you to see that your mother was just a person

It was a gift, Dean. Not a trial

Want to read more? Check out our Recap Archive!

#spn recap #dean winchester #sam winchester #castiel #cas #jack kline #spn 15x15 #gimme shelter #supernatural season 15

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kny111 · 5 years ago

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Meanwhile, the same dilemmas of knowledge, authority, and power have moved beyond the realms of offices, stores, and factories to overwhelm everyone of us and our societies as a whole. In her latest book, Zuboff comes up with a new frame of reference through which to view what Google, Facebook, and the like have been doing—nothing less than generating a new variant of capitalism. They were the first movers in this new world. They declared their right to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides. In this way they have come to dominate what Zuboff calls “the division of learning in society,” which she sees as the central organizing principle of the twenty‐first century social order, just as the division of labor was the key organizing principle of society in the industrial age.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (a tome of 663 pages, including 127 pages of notes) offers a disturbing exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world in this century. This entails a new mutation of capitalism, which operates by providing “free services” that billions of people use, enabling the providers to monitor the behavior of those customers in amazing detail, often without their explicit consent. “Surveillance capitalism,” Zuboff writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behavior” (8).

Zuboff focuses mainly on Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, which she sees as the Petri dishes in which the DNA of surveillance capitalism is best examined. The fact that surveillance capitalism was invented in the United States, in Silicon Valley, and at Google, makes it an American invention, which, like mass production at an earlier stage, became a global reality. For this reason, much of the book deals with the developments in the United States, but with the explicit recognition that the consequences of these developments are worldwide.

What Zuboff adds to the existing stock of knowledge about the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook, and the like is the insight and scholarship to locate those companies in a broader context. She points out that we are dealing with the latest phase in capitalism's long evolution—from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioral productions stealthily derived from the surveillance of users. She rightly emphasizes that surveillance capitalism is a human creation, which lives in history and is not the result of technological inevitability. It was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google, invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the wake of the dotcom bust, when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google's founders Larry Page, and Sergey Brin abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they embarked on a course that boosts ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs in combination with their already by then considerable analytical capabilities and computational power to generate predictions of user click‐through rates, taken as a signal of an ad's relevance. This meant in practice that Google would both repurpose its growing collection of behavioral data, now capitalized on as a behavioral surplus, and develop methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data which users intentionally chose to keep private—as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. This surplus would then be analyzed for hidden meanings that could predict click‐through behavior. The surplus data thus formed the basis for new predictions markets involving targeted advertising. Eventually this whole setup became the foundation of a new kind of commerce that depends upon online surveillance at scale.

Contrary to a common misunderstanding, we are not the customers of surveillance capitalism; instead we are the sources of its crucial surplus, the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw material‐extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism's actual customers are the companies that trade in its markets for future behavior. Zuboff insists that, “as long as surveillance capitalism and its behavioral futures markets are allowed to thrive, ownership of the new means of behavior modification eclipses ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth and power in the twenty‐first century” (11).

Surveillance capitalism quickly spread to Facebook and later to Microsoft, while a company like Amazon, with its new emphasis on “personalized” services and third‐party revenue, is clearly veering toward it as well. Zuboff thinks (as yet) differently about Apple, to whom surveillance capitalism is a constant challenge, both as an external threat and as a source of internal debate and conflict. Apple's iPods/iTunes innovations leveraged the new capabilities of digital technologies to invert the consumption experience as had been common in the age of mass production. This inversion depended on a few key elements. Digitalization made it possible to rescue valued assets—in this case songs—from the institutional spaces in which they were trapped. The costly institutional procedures that GM's Alfred Sloan had described in relation to mass production and consumption in the 1920s and after were eliminated in favor of a direct route to listeners. In the case of the CD, for instance, Apple bypassed the physical production of the song along with its packaging, inventory, storage, marketing, transportation, distribution, and physical retailing. The combination of the iTunes platform and the iPod device made it possible for listeners to continuously reconfigure their songs at will. Thus, Apple was among the first to attain formidable commercial success by catering to a new society of individuals and their demands for individualized consumption. According to Zuboff, following a line of reasoning by sociologist Ulrich Beck et al., the conditions of the implicated “second modernity”—in contrast to the “first modernity” of the industrial age and Fordist mass production and mass consumption—produced a new kind of individual for whom the Apple inversion, and the many digital innovations that followed, would become essential. Next to its liberating potential, the second modernity has also brought its troubles. Some of the challenges of the second modernity arise from the inevitable costs associated with the creation and sustenance of one's own life. Zuboff underscores that second modernity instability is also the result of institutionalized shifts in economic and social policies and practices associated with neoliberalism and its rise to dominance. “We live in this collision between a centuries‐old story of modernization and a decades‐old story of economic violence that thwarts our pursuit of effective life” (36‐37).

She considers the possibility of a new synthesis: a third modernity that goes beyond the collision, offering a genuine path to a flourishing and effective life for the many, not just the few. For a while, it seemed that Apple's fusion of capitalism and the digital might set a new course toward a third modernity. In her view, the Apple inversion implied trustworthy relationships of advocacy and reciprocity embedded in an alignment of commercial operations with consumers’ genuine interests. Likewise, at the early stage of Google's development, the feedback loops involved in improving its Search functions produced a balance of power. Google Search needed people to learn from, and vice versa. This symbiosis enabled Google's algorithms to learn and produce ever‐more relevant and comprehensive search results. During this early period, behavioral data were put to work entirely on the user's behalf. User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services. Users provided the raw material in the form of behavioral data, and those data were harvested to improve speed, accuracy, and relevancy and to help build auxiliary products such as translation. Zuboff calls this “the behavioral value reinvestment cycle” (97), in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the improvement of the product or service.

With the introduction of its targeted advertising patent in 2003, Google would no longer be the passive recipient of accidental data that it could recycle for the benefit of its users. Google hereby moved from its advocacy‐oriented founding toward the elaboration of behavioral surveillance as a full‐blown logic of accumulation (and its associated dispossession). In essence, the behavioral reinvestment cycle was subordinated in favor of a new commercial calculation. Behavioral data, whose value was previously “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus was the game‐changing, zero‐cost asset that was diverted from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange, which Zuboff refers to as “the dynamic of behavioral surplus accumulation” (131).

She poignantly compares the way Google unilaterally declared that the worldwide web was free for the taking for its search engine, to colonial conquest, especially that of the first Spaniards under Columbus who landed on the Caribbean islands. The conquest pattern in question unfolded in three phases: legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a luster of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate the declaration.

Likewise, the first surveillance capitalists simply declared our private experience to be theirs for the taking, for translation into data for private ownership and then proprietary knowledge. They relied on misdirection and rhetorical concealment, with secret declarations that we as users could neither understand nor contest. Or, put differently, first of all there was the arrogant appropriation of users’ behavioral data—viewed as a free resource, there for the taking. Then the use of patented methods to extract or infer data even when users had explicitly denied permission, followed by the use of technologies that were opaque by design and fostered user ignorance. As I should add, one can see all of this as a latter‐day variant of what Jürgen Habermas referred to as the “colonization of the life‐world” by systems, which he did not or could not foresee at the time of his writing.

Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism's antidemocratic and anti‐egalitarian juggernaut in terms of a market‐driven coup de gens from above (rather than a coup d’état in the classic sense): an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology implicated in this form of capitalism. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence of the people. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. Like the Spanish conquistadores and their silent invocations of the Requirimiento (Monarchical Edict of 1513), surveillance capitalism operates in the declarative form and imposes the social relations of a premodern absolutist authority (513). Paradoxically, this coup is framed as “personalization,” although it tarnishes, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about the individuals concerned that is personal.

Then there is the further evolution of surveillance capitalism, which moved from a focus on individual users to a focus on populations, such as cities, and eventually on society as a whole. Surveillance capitalism started with advertising, but then became more general. The big tech companies have used the knowledge about their users not only for ever more precisely targeted and more subtle ads but also to sell to other companies, politicians, governments, secret services and any other agency willing to pay for it. By now, surveillance capitalism is no longer restricted to companies or even to the Internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, generating whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market makers, and market players.

Driven by competition over prediction products, surveillance capitalists first learned that the more surplus, the better the prediction, which led to economies of scale in supply efforts. Then they learned that the more varied the surplus, the higher its predictive value. This new drive toward economies of scope led them from the desktop to mobile, out into the world, to monitor people's drive, run, shopping, search for a parking space, bodily conditions and face, and always their location. And ultimately, they understood that the most predictive behavioral data can be derived from what Zuboff calls “economies of action” as systems are designed to intervene in the state of play and actually modify behavior, steering it toward desired commercial outcomes. The experimental development of this new “means of behavior modification” can be seen in Facebook's infamous contagion experiments and the augmented reality game Pokémon Go developed at Google. In this phase of surveillance capitalism's evolution, the means of production became subordinate to an increasingly complex and comprehensive means of behavior modification. Thus, surveillance capitalism has created a new form of power that Zuboff terms “instrumentarianism.” It knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of weaponry and armies, it reaches its goal through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous architecture of “smart” networked devices, things, and spaces.

There are three key approaches to economies of action, the first two of which Zuboff calls “tuning” and “herding.” The third is what behavioral psychologists refer to as “conditioning.” “Tuning” may involve subliminal cues designed to subtly shape the flow of behavior at the precise time and place for maximally efficient influence. Another kind of tuning involves what behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein called the “nudge,” which they define as “any aspect of a choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way” (294). The term “choice architecture” refers to the ways in which situations are prestructured to channel attention and shape action.

Conditioning is a well‐known approach to inducing behavior change primarily associated with the Harvard radical behaviorist B. F. Skinner. He called the application of reinforcements to shape specific behaviors “operant conditioning.” His larger project was known as “behavior modification” or “behavioral engineering,” in which behavior is continuously shaped to amplify some actions at the expense of others. Skinner imagined a pervasive “technology of behavior” that would enable the application of such methods across entire human populations. In his 1948 “utopian” novel Walden Two, he brazenly extrapolated from the conduct of conditioning‐subjected animals to grand theories of social behavior and human evolution.

Zuboff outlines the intellectual background of the Skinnerian paradigm as it evolved since the late 1930s, and then focuses on the growth and elaboration of behavior modification as an extension of political power, which is key to her present interests and therefore needs elaboration here. In the 1950s and beyond, the CIA called for ever‐bolder behavior modification research and practical applications from academic psychologists. Scientists from the fields of medicine and psychology embarked on a project to demystify Chinese Communists’ brainwashing techniques, reinterpreting them through the frameworks of behavior modification. Their research concluded that “mind control” was better understood as a complex system of conditioning based on unpredictable schedules of reinforcement, in line with Skinner's findings on operant conditioning.

Skinnerian behavior modification practices expanded rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s, achieving some remarkable success in terms of their advocates’ objectives, but also evoking scrutiny from an often‐hostile public. By 1971, when the US Senate's Constitutional Rights Subcommittee convened hearings on the subject, the migration of behavior modification practices from military to civilian applications was already well underway. Behavior modification techniques had spread from government‐funded (typically CIA) psychology labs and military psychological operations to a range of institutional applications, each driven by a mission to reengineer the “defective” personalities of captive individuals in settings that offered total control or close to it, including prisons, psychiatric wards, classrooms, institutions for the mentally handicapped, schools for the autistic, and factories. A number of journalistic accounts raised alarms about the zealousness with which behavior modification techniques were applied and expressed grave concern that they debased their subjects, violated ethical considerations and infringed on fundamental civil liberties.

Another cause for alarm was the 1971 publication of B.F. Skinner's provocative book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which he laid out his social philosophy (already anticipated in Walden Two). Skinner argued that knowledge does not set us free but rather releases us from the illusion of freedom. In reality, freedom, and ignorance are synonyms. The acquisition of knowledge is heroic in that it rescues us from ignorance, but it is also tragic because it necessarily reveals the impossibility of freedom. For Skinner, our attachments to notions such as freedom, will, autonomy, purpose, and agency are defense mechanisms that protect us from the uncomfortable facts of human ignorance. The environment determines behavior, and our ignorance of precisely how it does so is the void that we fill with the fantasy of freedom. Skinner prescribed a future based on behavioral control, rejecting the very idea of freedom (as well as every principle of a liberal society), and cast the notion of human dignity as an accident of self‐serving “narcissism.” He imagined a pervasive “technology of behavior” that would one day enable the application of behavior modification methods across entire human populations. These thoughts triggered a devastating scientific, political, and moral critique from public intellectual Noam Chomsky in a widely read review.

Skinner foresaw powerful new instruments that could engineer behavior in every domain. As early as 1953, he anticipated today's digitally engineered casino environments, whose sophistication in the precise shaping of gamblers’ behavior has made them a testing ground for state security agencies and surveillance capitalists alike. He then also anticipated innovations such as Michael Jensen's incentive systems designed to maximize shareholder value and the choice architectures of behavioral economics designed to nudge behavior along a preferred trajectory. Moreover, Skinner was well aware that the engineering of behavior risked violating individual sensibilities and social norms, especially concerning privacy. In order to assuage these anxieties he advised that observation of human behavior must be unobtrusive, ideally remaining outside the awareness of the persons concerned. However, new technologies of behavior would have to continually expand such privacy invasions in order to access all the data relevant to behavioral prediction and control. In this he anticipated today's data‐harvesting frontier as new detection systems delve deeply into personalities and emotions.

Zuboff points out how the critique of behavior modification in the Senate Subcommittee's 1974 report has direct relevance for our time. It begins by asking a question that we should also ask now: “How did they get away with it?” (324). Just as surveillance capitalism was initially able to take hold and flourish under the auspices of a so‐called “war on terror” and the compulsion for certainty that it evoked, in the mid‐twentieth century the means of behavior modification moved from the lab to the world at large primarily under the cover of cold‐war anxieties. Later, the behavior‐change professionals were called upon by a society turned fearful after years of urban riots, political protest, and rising levels of crime and “delinquency.” The senators argued that calls for “law and order” had motivated the search for quick fixes; immediate and efficient means to control violence and other forms of antisocial behavior, which replaced time‐consuming attempts to understand its source. As so many behavior modification programs aimed at involuntary populations in state prisons and mental institutions, the report recognized that the means of behavior modification had to be reckoned with as a form of state power and questioned the government's constitutional right to “control” citizens’ behavior and mental activity.

The strident rights consciousness of the 1970s drove behavior modification from civilian life and out of the public limelight. However, mostly unknown to the politicians, scholars, rights activists, litigators, and many other citizens who opposed the antidemocratic incursions of the behavioral engineering vision, these methods did not die. The project would resurface as a creature of the market, now tied to unprecedented digital capabilities, scale and scope thriving under the flag of surveillance capitalism. US corporations enjoy the rights of personhood but are free of democratic obligations, legal constraints, moral calculations, and social considerations. Certainly in America, with so much influence of corporate wealth in politics, most elected officials show little interest in contesting behavior modification as a market project, let alone to defend the moral imperatives of the autonomous individual. In its latest incarnation, behavior modification takes the form of a global digital market architecture unfettered by geography, independent of constitutional constraints, and formally indifferent to the risks it poses to freedom, dignity, or the ideals of the liberal society that the 1971 Senate Subcommittee was still determined to defend.

Executives of surveillance capitalism such as Google's Larry Page, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg do not reveal much about their theories, delivering at best episodic and shallow information. But a core group of scientists and computational social scientists has emerged with detailed experimental and theoretical accounts of the ins and outs of instrumentarian power, providing insights into the social principles of an instrumentarian society. A prominent example is the work of Alex Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Lab within MIT's Media Lab. In collaboration with his students and associates, he has vigorously articulated, researched, and widely disseminated a theory of instrumentarian society in tandem with his prolific technical innovations and practical applications. As Zuboff emphasizes, Pentland “completes” Skinner, fulfilling his social vision with big data, ubiquitous digital instrumentation, advanced mathematics, sweeping theory, numerous acclaimed co‐authors, institutional legitimacy, plentiful funding, and corporate friends in high places without having attracted the worldwide backlash, moral revulsion, and anger that Skinner once elicited. She astutely remarks that “this fact alone suggests the depth of psychic numbing to which we have succumbed and the loss of our collective bearings” (419).

Pentland refers to his theory of society as “social physics,” a term that originates in the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, and his 1830s programmatic vision of a scientific approach to the study of society that would equal the precision of the natural sciences—a vision that various later thinkers reinvigorated. Although Pentland never mentions Skinner, in his 2014 book, Social Physics, he brings the old behaviorist's social vision into the twenty‐first century, now fulfilled by the instruments that eluded him in his lifetime. Skinner deplored the absence of “instruments and methods” for the study of human behavior comparable to those available to physics. As if in response, Pentland and his students have spent the last two decades determined to invent the devices, methods, and techniques that can transform all of human behavior, especially social behavior, into highly predictive math. A major outcome thus far is the “sociometer,” a wearable sensor that combines a microphone, accelerometer, Bluetooth connection, analytic software, and machine learning techniques designed to lay bare “the structure and dynamic relationships” in human groups.

Pentland outlines his theory of a full‐blown instrumentarian society in terms of five overarching principles, which Zuboff analyzes in depth, thereby showing the strong resemblances with Skinner's thinking and how Pentland updates Skinner's behaviorist utopia (430‐437). This technocratic society, led by a priesthood of data scientists/planners in collaboration with the owners of the means of behavior modification, is based on the pervasive outfitting and measurement of human behavior for the purpose of modification, control, and—given surveillance capitalism's commercial dominance in the digital world—profit.

Zuboff refers to an emergent system that offers us a view of a future defined by a fusion of instrumentarian and state power; the all‐inclusive “social credit” system that the Chinese government is currently developing as the “core” of China's Internet agenda. The aim is to leverage the explosion of personal data in order to improve citizens’ behavior. Individuals and enterprises are to be scored on various aspects of their conduct: where one goes, what one buys, and who one knows. These scores will be incorporated into a comprehensive database that links to government information as well as to data collected by private businesses. The system tracks “good” and “bad” behavior across a variety of financial and social activities, automatically assigning punishments and rewards to decisively shape behavior toward “building sincerity” in economic, social, and political life—a contemporary version of the old communist goal of “engineering of human souls.” The aim is to achieve guaranteed social rather than market outcomes using instrumentarian means of behavior modification.

Worth mentioning is the willingness that some US tech companies have shown to offer the Chinese government a helping hand with state surveillance and censorship. In August 2018, it was reported that Google planned to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, code‐named Dragonfly. By the end of the year, however, the project had effectively been abandoned after a clash within Google, led by members of the company's privacy team. Meanwhile, researchers at Microsoft Research Asia continue to closely collaborate with scholars linked to a Chinese military‐backed university on AI topics such as facial recognition and machine reading. This has raised concerns that the methods and technologies thus generated could very well be deployed in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where authorities have placed as many as 1.5 million Muslim Uighurs in “re‐education camps” and expanded an intrusive household surveillance system.

Zuboff hastens to point out the similarities between the (US‐dominated) Western and China systems: “Chinese users are rendered, classified, and queued up for prediction with every digital touch, and so are we. We are ranked on Uber, on eBay, on Facebook, and on many other web businesses, and those are only the rankings that we see” (393). “In China, these rankings are public territory, shiny badges of honor and scarlet letters that open or shut every door. In the West, we have ‘likes,’ ‘friends,’ ‘followers,’ and hundreds of other secret rankings that invisibly pattern our lives” (468). Chinese users are assigned a “character” score, while the US government presses the tech companies to develop algorithms for a “radicalism” score. We in the West have our own digital dossiers. Indeed, by means of the shadow text, in which behavioral surplus is lined up for manufacture into prediction products—separate from the first text, which users experience—our behavior is evaluated, categorized, and predicted in millions of ways that we can neither know nor contest.

The existing trend of social engineering and nudging individuals toward “better” behavior is also part of the Silicon Valley approach that holds that human problems can be solved once and for all through the disruptive power of technology. In that sense, perhaps the most disturbing element of the China story is not the Chinese government's agenda per se, but how similar it is to the path big tech companies are taking in the United States and the many regions within its digital orbit.

What can be done to curtail the progress of instrumentarianism? Current US privacy laws have not kept pace with the development of instrumentarianism. When assessing the ways in which digital capabilities challenge existing law, US scholars and jurists focus on Fourth Amendment doctrine which circumscribes the relationship between individuals and the state. It is of course vital, Zuboff writes, that the protections of the Fourth Amendment doctrine catch up to the twenty‐first century by protecting us from search and seizure of our information in ways that reflect contemporary realities of data collection. However, the problem is that even expanded protections from the state do not shield citizens from the assault on sanctuary (legal and otherwise) wrought by instrumentarian power and driven by surveillance capitalism's economic imperatives. Nevertheless, there could be some positive developments at this front, which needs mentioning.

The Cambridge Analytica revelations in March 2018 disclosed that this London‐based consulting firm had harvested the personal information of around 87 million Facebook users and deployed it for political purposes, which triggered congressional and parliamentary hearings, multiple regulatory investigations and a fundamental rethinking of Facebook's future. The US Federal Trade Commission began an inquiry into Facebook's privacy practices, and was joined by the US Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI in the summer of 2018. There are also initiatives like the Center for Human Technology, an activist group of former Facebook and Google employees aimed at “the reversal of the digital attention crisis” in trying to create a truly privacy‐friendly Internet. At the time of writing (March 2019), the US Department of Justice has declared that it opened a criminal investigation into Facebook's privacy practices. Facebook is also in discussion with the FTC about a possible settlement in a privacy case that could lead to a fine of several billion dollars.

Apparently panicked by his company's continuous fall from grace, Mark Zuckerberg just announced that Facebook will take a radically different course in the near future, in which “privacy‐focused” social networks will be central. For a start, the message services of Facebook's Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp will be integrated into one, which will have end‐to‐end encryption—only readable by sender and receiver, not by Facebook. This is only to be the first step toward a privacy‐oriented Internet. The announcement immediately triggered many responses, from hopeful to outright cynical. Zuckerberg's plan may very well be an ostentatious attempt to dodge penalties and regulations rather than a serious break with the business model that made Facebook into a capitalist behemoth. After all, Zuckerberg envisions a future in which closed, encrypted networks exist next to the open networks that are the standard now. The plan does not mean the end of Facebook's and Instagram's timelines, where users share their lives with many others and whereby Facebook continues its regular surveillance practices for the purpose of offering microtargeted ads that has made the company almost all its money.

Many hopes are set on the new EU regulation known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which became enforceable in May 2018. (Part of this law was anticipated by the action of the Spanish Data Protection Agency which, in August 2011, had ordered Google to stop indexing the contested links of 90 Spaniards who had fought for this aspect of their informational privacy under the banner of “the right to be forgotten.”) The EU approach fundamentally differs from that of the United States in that companies must justify their activities within the GDPR's regulatory framework. The regulations include: a requirement to notify people when personal data is breached; a high threshold for the definition of “consent” that puts limits on a company's reliance on this tactic to approve personal data use; a prohibition on making personal information public by default; a requirement to use privacy by design when building systems; a right to erasure of data (= the right to be forgotten), and expanded protections against decisionmaking generated by automated systems that imposes “consequential” effects on a person's life. The new regulatory framework also imposes substantial fines for violations, which will increase to a possible 4 percent of a company's global revenue, and it allows for class‐action lawsuits in which users can combine to assert their rights to privacy and data protection. With the GDPR and such actions as the $1.7 billion fine the European Commission imposed on Google in March 2019 (for forcing users to agree not to accept advertisements from other search engines), the EU is clearly much further ahead than the United States.

Zuboff rightly argues that GDPR's impact will depend upon how European societies interpret the new regulatory regime in legislation and in the courts. And it will not be the phrasing of the regulations but rather collective action by popular movements at the grassroots level that focus on the relevant issues, which shape these interpretations. Importantly, technology is not the inevitable force that the tech leaders want us to believe. She refers to the rich history of digital applications prior to surveillance capitalism that really were empowering and consistent with democratic values. Surveillance capitalism is a human‐made phenomenon. It is therefore in the realm of politics that surveillance capitalism must be tackled. Surveillance capitalism has had two decades to root and flourish relatively unrestrained. From a human rights standpoint, there is a strong need for new paradigms resulting from a close understanding of surveillance capitalism's economic imperatives and foundational mechanisms. The GDPR is a good starting point on which to build to help found a new paradigm of information capitalism.

Zuboff is skeptical of some proposals to solve the problems in question. The idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution, but what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place? All that it does is further institutionalize and legitimate data capture. More significantly, data ownership also does not reckon with the realities of behavioral surplus. Users might get ownership of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists, but they will not get ownership of the surplus of the predictions derived from those data—not without new legal concepts and interventions built on an understanding of these operations. Furthermore, there may be sound antitrust reasons to break up the largest tech firms, but this fact alone will not eliminate surveillance capitalism. Instead, it will result in smaller surveillance capitalist firms and open the field for more surveillance capitalist competitors. Moreover, large tech companies may shore themselves up against antitrust measures; Facebook is a case in point. Once the recently proclaimed integration of its three messaging platforms—WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger—occurs, attempts to break such a bolstered entity up will become all the more difficult.

In the end, Zuboff acknowledges that there is no simple action program to effectively curb surveillance capitalism. But she correctly states that in any confrontation with the unprecedented (which surveillance capitalism most surely is), the work begins first of all with naming. She considers her own work in this regard as the first necessary step toward taming this rogue mutation of capitalism and aims to contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all the young.

This is an impressive and illuminating book—a true masterwork. Some reviewers have noted that it reminds them of Thomas Piketty's magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty‐First Century (2014) —that Zuboff herself quotes from—in that it opens our eyes to things we ought to have noticed but overlooked. Through the usage of notions such as “accumulation,” “commodification,” and “behavioral surplus” (playing on the notion of “surplus value”) Zuboff's elaborate analysis reminds this reader more of Capital, Karl Marx's nineteenth‐century quest for the “iron laws” of capitalism. The book is thoroughly sourced and well‐written, accessible yet challenging, thought‐provoking and stimulates deep reflection. It demands a close, slow reading in stages, in order to optimally digest all of this healthy intellectual food. It goes well beyond “an initial mapping of a terra incognita” that will hopefully “pave the way for more explorers,” as is the author's self‐professed intention (17). It introduces an appropriate vocabulary; that is, concepts and frames which enable us to recognize the overall pattern in what seemed to be disparate phenomena, theoretical notions, and fragments of rhetoric and practice. Thus, it provides a comprehensive heuristic schema, an analytical framework that—along with Zuboff's fruitful borrowings and creative integration of relevant insights from an array of philosophers, historians, economists, sociologists (including eminent thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Jean‐Paul Sartre, John Searle, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, David Harvey), data scientists and AI experts—helps us to develop a deeper understanding of the inner workings and logic of the new mutant of capitalism.

There are a few details to take issue with, however. Industrial capitalism is more entrenched and persistent in the United States than Zuboff suggests, and her characterization of its golden, post‐World War II years (lasting until the early 1970s) is rosier than the actual reality was for significant parts of the working population. The New Deal order had a “social‐democratic tinge” (in Richard Hofstadter's terms) that existed in the United States neither before nor after. But it remained by and large confined to the white, male industrial working class, into which members of the second‐generation “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe had by that time integrated. It is true, however, that the “embedded liberalism” and Keynesian economics of the postwar era tethered market capitalism (however imperfectly) to society's interests. Surveillance capitalism abandons the reciprocities with people of the social compact that then helped to embed capitalism in society.

This also calls the following bold conclusion by Zuboff into question: “The struggle for power and control in society is no longer associated with the hidden facts of class and its relationship to production but rather by the hidden facts of automated engineered behavior modification” (309). To the contrary, capitalist elites (investors, especially venture capitalists) still play crucial roles in financing and (often indirectly) controlling the state of play. Zuboff herself mentions the relevance of the ownership of the means of behavior modification for surveillance capitalism, and refers to the rise of shareholder capitalism and its impact on the management of corporations. Moreover, the scientists, engineers, social scientists, and managers involved, choose (consciously or not) to advance and operate the digital systems in question for the interests of surveillance capitalists. They could make a different choice, as some indeed have done or may very well do in the future. In this context, “production,” should also be understood in a much broader sense than manufacturing to include all kinds of services and highly skilled white‐collar work.

Furthermore, Zuboff's view of the longue durée history of capitalism (apparently inspired by Piketty's observations) seems much too optimistic regarding the possibilities of a capitalism that combines with new forms of organization and ownership to provide a human digital form in tune with a replenished democracy (520‐521). There appears to be quite a lot of wishful thinking here.

We must also realize that relying on a company like Apple (whose earlier practices Zuboff admires) for support in the fight against the excesses of surveillance capitalism is no longer pertinent, if it ever was. Today, Apple presents itself as a moral crusader, fearless, blameless, and ostentatiously restricting collection of its users’ data under the slogan “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” Apple's CEO Tim Cook wants the US government to come up with a stringent privacy law, like that of the EU, in itself a good move but Cook disregards how much power he himself has. Indeed, there is much hypocrisy here. If Apple is so troubled by Google's practices, why is Google Search then the default in Apple's web browser and not a privacy‐friendly variant like DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com? This is simply, of course, because Google pays Apple billions of dollars for this preferential position. Cook admonishes against the “shadow economy” behind online stores, but at the same time Apple keeps its own advertising network for, among other things, the App Store, where 1.4 billion devices get their software from. And why are Google's and Facebook's apps available in the App store at all? The answer is obvious: people would not buy an iPhone with no Google, You Tube, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apps installed on it; apparently Apple's own services do not suffice or are not good enough yet.

At the time of writing, Apple has launched a new platform with paid subscriptions for games, TV series, magazines and newspapers (as yet only two: LA Times and The Wall Street Journal), partly to compensate for a decline in revenues and profits because of slowing iPhone sales. It has announced a series of new TV deals and original programs that will put it head to head with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and their rivals in streaming media. Apple thereby continues to publicize an emphasis on privacy‐friendly, ad‐free services, with the selection and production of content largely in the hands of human experts—an indirect sneer at Google and Facebook whose financial well‐being depends largely on advertising and automated recommendations. Apple too uses such techniques, but relies more on human selection. Still, on its way to become a provider, following the example of Amazon in trying to combine as many services as possible, Apple may turn into a full‐fledged surveillance capitalist.

Somewhat problematic is Zuboff's conclusion that the instrumentarian power of surveillance capitalism should not be seen in terms of “digital totalitarianism”—an omnipresent Big Brother watching and aiming to control people everywhere all the time—but rather as a nontotalitarian “Big Other” that bends the new digital apparatus to the interests of the surveillance capitalist project, the result of which is an all‐pervading means of behavior modification whose economies of action are designed to maximize surveillance revenues. She draws too sharp a contrast between these two forms of power in suggesting that surveillance capital's instrumentarian power is best understood as the precise antithesis of Orwell's Big Brother. The Orwellian view of what is happening does have a granule of truth in it, with the obvious qualification however, that this now involves first of all commercial surveillance: ubiquitous monitoring by corporate capitalists rather than the state (although in the context of homeland security and the “war on terror” the US government maintains ties to all‐seeing tech companies that remain shadowy and opaque, which whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have informed us about).

But it should then also be recognized that in everyday reality there is a combination of Orwellian and Huxleyan elements. In the dystopian society that Aldous Huxley envisioned in his Brave New World (1932), people are drugging themselves into bliss by various means, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights, rather than George Orwell's vision of the future in Nineteen Eighty‐Four (1949), in which totalitarian governments resort to repression by means of ever‐present surveillance, thought control through propaganda, and brutal censorship. In Huxley's dystopia, distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. It can be argued that contemporary America, formally a liberal democracy, shows culturally a Huxleyan–Orwellian mix of hedonistic entertainment and distraction (with infotainment playing a crucial role), advertising/propaganda (corporate, political, military), surveillance and repression—the latter hardly, if at all, recognized by the mainstream media.

To be clear, none of these issues diminishes the great merits of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It will most likely become the definitive work on today's digital capitalism for years to come—an essential read for every engaged citizen in this day and age.

Mel van Elteren - First published: 27 June 2019 - https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13051

I remember reading this entire article, non stop, deeply fascinated by the world of counter surveillance capitalist methods and journalism finishing it at exactly 10:00am on the dot like the lord said "this is exactly what I needed you reading" and I wasn't disappointed. I definitely recommend yall check out Shoshana Zuboff's book that highlights the workings and perils of the surveillance capitalist industry that itself relies on white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to thrive.

#tech #technonlogy #democracy #privacy #surveillance capitalism #surveillance cap #illegal surveillance #surveillance systems #government surveillance #news #journalism

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homespork-review · 5 years ago

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Spork Introduction

CHEL: Hi! I go by Chel, they or she pronouns, and I’m the one spearheading this project. I still like at least a fair percentage of Homestuck, but after the ending disappointed me a great deal, I got bitter, and when Hussie pissed me off further by Godwinning himself, I decided to do something about it. I’m no longer angry about it, but I felt I’d benefit from picking out what I hate from what I love so I can focus on the latter without annoyance getting in the way, and also to benefit my own writing efforts.

BRIGHT: Howdy! I’m Bright, and I got into Homestuck fairly recently. After ploughing through the archive and digesting for a while, I realised that I was thoroughly annoyed by how something enjoyable had fallen apart so comprehensively. I am looking forward to the time-honoured practice of ripping the story apart to identify its weak points and shout at them.

FAILURE ARTIST: Hello, I’m Failure Artist (call me FA for short), she/her/herself pronouns, and I’m so old-school they burned the school down. I was introduced to Homestuck via Something Awful’s Webcomic thread. I checked the old mspadventures.com site and the latest update was [S] John: Bite Apple. After watching that bizarre piece of animation, I had to know what the hell happened before then. I found I enjoyed the wit of the comic though I didn’t really care much about the plot. It was only when Act 5 came around that I became a serious fan. I currently have 122 Homestuck works on Archive of Our Own. I have a lot of free time, you see. I am very disappointed in how Homestuck ended. Possibly there was no completely satisfactory way it could end but it still could have been better. I feel like Hussie was a juggler who threw a lot of balls into the air and ignored them as they fell to the ground and some fans think not catching them was a master move since you’d expect he’d try to catch at least one. Sadly, lots of the problems with the ending are embedded deep within the canon.

TIER: Hi hi. I am Tier, a very late newcomer to the wonderful world of Homestuck (2018 reader!) and average fan overall. I love this webcomic to bits, but the low points are deep and I enjoy seeking out what the heck went wrong. Not particularly analytical myself, hope that's cool!

CHEL: Cool by us! We’ve already done plenty of analysing before we started, as you may realise from my Tumblr’s “homestuck ending hate” tag (at @chelonianmobile).

FAILURE ARTIST: But let’s put that aside for a moment and talk about the good stuff.

Homestuck is incredibly innovative. It is the first true webcomic. It’s not just a print comic posted online. It uses not just still images and words but also animation, music, and interactive games.

Homestuck is the latest adventure in the series MS Paint Adventures. MS Paint Adventures started as a forum adventure. In forum adventures, the OP acts as a sort of Dungeon Master and other forum members give them prompts. Andrew Hussie’s previous works under MS Paint Adventures were Jailbreak (which is little more than Hussie dicking with the prompters in scatological ways), Bard’s Quest (Choose-your-own-adventure), and the actually-completed Problem Sleuth. Problem Sleuth lacks the music and animation and despite the weird physics shenanigans is a simpler story than Homestuck. The characters aren’t even two dimensional.

Homestuck (and the previous MS Paint Adventures minus Bard’s Quest) are set up like adventure games. Adventure games are where the player is a protagonist in a story and are usually focused on puzzle-solving though sometimes there’s combat. In the beginning, these games were purely text. The player would type what they wanted to do and the game would spout back text describing it - assuming the computer parser understood you.

CHEL: Oh god, I HATED that. I wasn’t around for the heyday but I’ve played a couple and

Pale Luna

was barely an exaggeration (horror warning).

FAILURE ARTIST: As graphics improved, adventure games started using them, but the commands were still in text. Only later was the point-and-click interface created and players didn’t have to guess what exact sentence the computer wanted them to type. Homestuck and the other MS Paint Adventures play with that frustration while paying tribute to the genre. The game within the comic uses RPG elements but the comic itself is set up like those good ol’ adventure games. In the beginning, Homestuck was guided by commands from forum members. Even after he closed the suggestion box, he used memes and fanon created by readers.

CHEL: How good an idea this was varies, as we’ll be showing.

We probably don’t need to describe Homestuck much more. Everyone here who hasn’t read it will doubtless have heard of it. Almost everyone with a Tumblr will have seen fanart, almost anyone at a convention will have seen cosplay. Shoutouts have been made to it in professional works such as the cartoon Steven Universe, and the Avengers fandom latched onto “caw caw motherfuckers” as a catchphrase for Hawkeye to the point that it’s now often forgotten it didn’t originate from there.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Homestuck fandom term “sadstuck” for depressing stories/headcanons somehow leaked into other fandoms. Using second-person is actually cool now and not just for awkward reader fics. Astrology will never be the same again.

CHEL: Now, in the interests of fairness, we will say that when Homestuck is good, it’s amazing, and it’s good often. The characters at least start out appealing and are all immediately distinguishable; even with the typing quirks stripped, it’s easy to tell who said what. The magic system is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen, who doesn’t love classpecting themselves and their faves? Hussie also shows a lot of talent for the complex meta and time travel weirdness, and it is fascinating to watch a timeline thread unfurl. And whatever else one says, it’s a fascinating story that’s captivated millions. I think it is deserving of its title as a modern classic.

However, as the years have passed, we have ended up noticing problems, big and small, and they nagged at us until we decided it had to be dissected. Our intention here isn’t to tear apart something we loathe entirely. It’s to take a complex work and pick out what works from what doesn’t. As I said, when Homestuck is good, it’s very very good. But when it’s bad, we get problems of every scale from various offensive comments to dragging pace to characters ignoring problems and solutions right under their noses to an absolute collapse of every theme and statement the comic stood for before.

The comic is ludicrously long; eight thousand pages, or thereabouts, to be specific. Officially one of the longest works of fiction in the English language, in fact. Naturally, we can’t riff that word by word in any timeframe short of decades, and we can’t include every picture, even if that was permitted under copyright law. Instead, as comics have been done here before, we’ll recap most of the time, and include sections of dialogue and pictures when particularly relevant to a point.

Here are the counts we’ll be using, possibly to be added to later if we find we forgot anything. Most of these counts will only start to climb post-Act 5, but we’ll be keeping track of them from the beginning. Most of them could have been fixed with a decent editor, which is sadly a hazard of webcomics, but still frustrating to read.

TIER: Note: we started this endeavor months before the thought of a "technically not but still we'll count it" set of canon epilogues were a twinkle in the eyes of the fandom. That is, by the way, a whole 'nother can of worms that will be dealt with at a later date if that ever comes around. We're judging Homestuck the Webcomic as a whole, so no after the credits stuff is to be noted for whatever reason.

ALL THE LUCK - Vriska Serket constantly gets a pass or gets favored over every other character. This count is added to every time she pulls some shenanigans with which others wouldn’t get away. ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY? - Sometimes it’s not entirely clear whether a thing is supposed to be taken seriously or not. We don’t require hand-holding through every joke, but when, for example, we’re supposed to take one instance of violence seriously while a similar case is supposed to be funny, this count goes up. CALL CPA PLEASE - Instances of creepy sexual behaviour (and perhaps particularly gratuitous acts of violence) from the thirteen-year-old cast. Now, mileage may vary on this one. We won’t pretend that thirteen-year-olds are perfect pure angels, especially thirteen-year-olds growing up in what is openly supposed to be a nightmarish dystopia. However, when full pages focus on said behaviour, there comes a point of it being very uncomfortable to read. Clarification: does not refer to cases where the adults do something heinous, this is strictly when the kids do. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS - When an offensive joke or comment is made, particularly when not justified by the personality of the character involved, or presented in the narration as being okay. GET ON WITH IT! - When the pace drags. ‘Nuff said. Hazard of the format, but it makes archive bingeing very annoying. GORE GALORE - For unnecessary and/or excessive torture porn which is treated less seriously because it features troll characters, and therefore less “realistic” blood colours. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC - When the comic does something mentioned in How Not To Write A Novel, and it isn’t justified by the webcomic format. HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING - Characters repeatedly neglect to do something about or even react to terrible happenings, either because they don’t care even if they should or they forget they have the capacity. Not necessarily anything to do with their magical powers, either - characters ignore personal problems that are right under their noses, too. IN HATE WITH MY CREATION - For reasons that are unclear, Hussie chose to create characters he apparently hated writing, or at least ignored in favour of others. Every time he’s clearly disrespecting one of his own characters, this goes up, whether it’s by nerfing their powers or changing their personalities. RELATIONSHIP GOALS? - Romantic relationships in particular get fumbled quite often. Ship Teasing is used with skill, but that skill tends to be lost when the characters actually hook up. Fumbled friendships and family relations can also come under this heading. SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER - When characters other than Vriska get away with something morally questionable. Covers everything from sexual harassment to not trying to save people from the apocalypse. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS - Later on in Homestuck’s run, Hussie tried to make up for the offensive humour and casual -isms counted by Clockwork Problematykks above. How successful he was at this varied. This count goes up whenever an attempt at progressivism is waved in front of the reader but doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. WHAT IS HAPPENING?? - When the already confusing plot kicks it up a notch. Admittedly this is as much a selling point of the comic as it is an issue, but either way, we’re going to keep track. Points will be added to when it gets confusing, and taken away when a previous confusing thing is explained adequately. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM - What is shown about Alternia repeatedly contradicts what we’re told about how different it is from Earth. For example, trolls still use heteronormative terms even after it’s established they reproduce bisexually, and the demonstration of the class structure doesn’t always add up. This count goes up every time that happens. It also goes up every time something happens which strongly implies Hussie was envisioning the human kids as white, despite his later claims that they were always supposed to be “aracial”, and every time their economic statuses don’t add up either.

#homespork #homestuck #review #literary critique #sporking #let's read #reread #homestuck meta

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trendyourway45-blog · 6 years ago

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20 Inventions of all time.

Introduction

Since the time primordial man first picked up a rock and thwacked a scurrying rodent on its head to fix his dinner, mankind has always been inventing things. Improvising, innovating, crafting tools out of almost nothing to overcome the many difficulties of day-to-day life. Whether it was the rudimentary spear crafted by sharpening the end of a stick or much later a simple chair, inventions have shaped our very evolution.

Before you get worried we’ll assure you we’ve not gone that far back in time.

The inventions we’ve covered span core-science aeronautics, biology, physics, medicine, automobiles, electronics and of course technology. We’ve avoided things like “fire” or “the wheel” because quite frankly no one really knows how the former was discovered (not invented) and who invented the latter.

1.3D Printers

The 3D Printer is one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century allowing you to turn your ideas into real objects.

The latest Bond movie, Skyfall used a 3D printer from a German company called Voxeljet to produce three 1:3 scaled models of 007’s Aston Martin just to blow up during the movie!

What sounds like a really cool toy to have is actually used for some very serious operations. Let’s first understand how it works.

3D printing is achieved using an additive process in which successive layers of materials are laid out in different shapes. Cutting and drilling (also known as subtractive processes) are not involved at all making the process easy, efficient and highly suitable for prototyping.

The biggest consumer of the 3D Printer is the medical industry. So far it has produced prosthetics and bones and the ability to generate human

organs from these machines is currently being tried out. If this is managed, it could revolutionize medicine and completely obliterate the need for organ donation. Using a 3D printer in conjunction with CAT scans, surgeons can print out tumours so that they know exactly what they’re dealing with.

We’re sure you’re familiar with Pirate Bay, the file sharing company. It has launched a new content category called ‘Physibles’ i.e. data objects that can be made into physical products. 3D blueprints are uploaded and shared with those who want to print out the actual objects.

2. Airplane

The Wright brothers are given credit for the invention of the Airplane in 1903. The first flight lasted a little over 12 seconds at Kill Devil Hill, Northern Carolina. Since then, much progress has been made in the world of aviation. The sky wasn’t the limit here. War and sci-fi stories inspired great minds like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Werner von Braun to achieve flight beyond the atmosphere, making space travel a possibility.

The invention of the airplane sped up services in every single field starting with the postal service in 1920. World War II in 1939 kick-started developments in the aviation sector. Countries competed with each other to one-up the others’ sophisticated developments, with the British developing the airplanedetecting radar followed by the Germans developing radio wave navigation techniques. Fighter jets, advanced landing systems and high altitude aircrafts followed.

In 1947, US Air Force Pilot Captain Charles Yeager broke the sound barrier in the first supersonic flight becoming the fastest man alive.

Commercial flights started not long after and now, well, an airplane makes a landing somewhere around the world every three seconds!

Air travel is considered to be the safest form of travel in the world. A funny but true fact reveals that donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes. Inspite of these phenomenal odds, 80% of the population of the world has Aerophobia, viz fear of flying. In some (5%) this fear is so intense that they abandon flights and opt for other modes of transport.

We’ve come a long way since 1903. In fact the wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight! The world today would be crippled without the discovery of flight. Businesses would crash, economies would slow down, worse still, holidays would be cancelled!

3.Artificial Intelligence

AI could be on either end of two extremes – man’s best invention or worst. In its best light, Artificial Intelligence would showcase robots, drones, machines serving us making daily life easier and more efficient or, as seen in movies, taking over the human race and entirely replacing the work force leading to unemployment, depression and general laziness.

The study of Artificial Intelligence formally began in Dartmouth College in 1956, as an effort by a group of research scientists to evaluate and mechanically replicate human intelligence. That is, they wanted to program machines to think and respond like humans. Their research was based on the assumption that a machine can be made to simulate learning, reasoning, logic and intelligence demonstrated by humans when given proper description and direction.

Every future invention by man will have its base in AI. Every invention will require an intelligently thinking bot to perform tasks faster and more efficiently than their human counterparts.

Essay grading software, weapons that have minds of their own, Siri by Apple, Kinect the 3D gaming interface, Watson by IBM – formerly a trivia expert machine now used to make decisions on lung cancer treatment and smart CCTVs that can identify crime as it happens: these are the varied and most advanced productions of AI.

4.Biometric Scanners

Biometrics – turning yourself into an identity card. No need for passwords, ids, pin numbers, etc. All you need is you. It’s a move from traditional access control systems to feature-based authentication that provides access based on physical presence rather than token (such as passport or drivers license) and knowledge based (password or PIN) methods.

With advancements in e-commerce and e-transactions, individuals have to retain a large number of passwords, PINs and identity cards. This number will only grow in size with passing time. Passwords and PINs are easy to crack by the right hacker, thus compromising your security. Biometrics couldn’t have come at a better time offering the ideal kind of security since no two fingerprints are alike.

The use of Biometric Scanners could unleash an era of super secure gadgets. It is already being used in cars programmed to operate only when a known driver is in the driver’s seat, weapons which fire only on detecting the owner’s fingerprints and smart household security systems that keep intruders out, among other applications. Not only fingerprints, facial scanning biometric devices are also not rare. Take the Samsung Galaxy S III for example. It has a Face Unlock feature which makes sure that only its owner can unlock the phone.

Fingerprint scanners are the cheapest and hence most commonly used biometric devices. Face and voice recognition follow, as iris and retinal scanning are concepts that most people find intrusive and are not too comfortable using.

The invention of Biometric Scanners was a big step into the future. They’ve led to the creation of the ultimate unique identifiers – those that cannot be forgotten, changed or lost.

5.Bluetooth

A wireless technology used to exchange data over short distances using short-wavelength radio transmission, Bluetooth was created by Ericsson in 1994 as an alternative to data cables. The term “Bluetooth” is an anglicized version of Blatand, the epithet of 10th century Danish king Harald who united separated Danish tribes into a single kingdom. The technology was named after him as Bluetooth does what Blatand did but with communications protocols – unites them into one universal standard.

Since its introduction, Bluetooth has increased in popularity over the years – while in 2008, only 5% of mobile devices were Bluetooth-enabled, in 2013, roughly 95% of mobile devices support it. Also, while traditional Bluetooth devices only worked within a range of 10 feet of each other the newest versions now enable transfers to a distance of up to 100 feet. However, what makes Bluetooth stand out as a form of wireless data transfer is that it uses very little power, can be incorporated into a wide variety of devices and can have up to eight devices communicating with each other at once and automatically without a user’s prompt.

Coming soon (15 more)

#inventions #digital #India #real estate #Bluetooth #digital marketing #internet

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bettydgunter90 · 3 years ago

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113: Jaren Moves On

Back in the summer of 2018, I started working with Jaren Barnes.

He was the first person I had ever hired as a full-time employee for REtipster.

He was a special find for someone like me because he had a lot of specialized experience, not only in the world of content creation but also as a land investor and house wholesaler. He had all kinds of great insights to share, not based on theory, but based on his first-hand experience.

Over the past three years, he has made some incredible contributions to the content library at REtipster and he brought a new voice and personality to the podcast and YouTube channel.

As of October 1, Jaren is leaving REtipster to pursue his own projects. Jaren is still a great friend of the REtipster Community and we’ll still hear from Jaren from time to time on the podcast, but we won’t be seeing much from him on the blog or YouTube channel anymore.

Let’s talk about what’s next for Jaren and why he’s moving in a different direction.

Links and Resources

Jaren.co (Jaren’s website)

REtipster Terms Library

House Hacker University

The Beginner’s Deal Finding Guide

Land Investing Masterclass

How Land-Specialized Real Estate Agents Can Change the Game for Land Investors

REtipster Land Coaching Program

Traveling Mailbox Review: Here’s Why I Switched

My Experience With Fund and Grow: 0% Interest Loans for Real Estate Investing and Beyond

Profit First Changed My Life. It Will Change Yours Too.

Share Your Thoughts

Leave your thoughts about this episode on the REtipster forum!

Share this episode on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn (social sharing buttons below!)

Help out the show!

Leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts Your ratings and reviews really help (and I read each one).

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on Spotify

Subscribe on Stitcher

Thanks again for listening!

Episode 113 Transcription

Seth: Hey, everybody how’s it going? This is Seth Williams and Jaren Barnes, and you’re listening to the REtipster podcast. Today is a little bit different. Jaren and I have never done this, but we’d never actually recorded a podcast conversation where we’re both in the same place at the same time where I was on Zoom or something. But I’ve got him sitting right next to me. I can reach right out and touch him. I might do it throughout this conversation.

We met up here together at Calvin University, my alma mater. This is kind of where we usually gather whenever we have to shoot videos or do anything in person. Yeah, we’re just going to hang out.

This isn’t a terribly structured episode, but one thing I wanted to cover right off the bat is a big change or transition in terms of just Jaren and his involvement with REtipster. Jaren started working with me back in July of 2018 or June of 2018. It’s been a little over three years now. And ever since then, it’s been awesome. He has brought a ton of value to REtipster, and there’ve been a lot of big things that have happened in his tenure here. And just kind of with some changes in Jaren’s life and Jaren can chime in on this too.

Do you want to chime in Jaren? I don’t want to speak for you.

Jaren: Yeah, man. I think the biggest thing is my land business has been growing quite a bit. And then I have two boys now. One that is two and a half, and the other one who is 10 months. When life changes like that, your ability to pull all-nighters or grind or adjust and change changes. I just started running into the fact that I was running too thin.

And so, I don’t know if you even officially said it yet, but Jaren Barnes is officially moving on from the REtipster. I don’t even like saying it that way, man, because it’s not that I’m not pro REtipster or not going to still be around, but I’m no longer a W2 employee of REtipster, to put it that way.

Seth: Jaren is kind of like his own free agent now doing his own thing. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to hear it from him. Probably will be less regular maybe. Not every podcast episode. We’re probably not going to see a whole lot of blog posts and videos from Jaren anymore. The general day-to-day involvement won’t be there.

I think tentatively at least as long as we can, as long as it makes sense, Jaren will probably be joining me on the office hours for the members of the Land Investing Masterclass. I’m also obviously going to be there, but whenever Jaren can be there, he’ll show up too.

There is no bad blood or anything. Everything is really great. In fact, I can’t think of a better way for Jaren and REtipster to part ways, sort of. It’s just a change. People change, priorities change and responsibilities change, and that’s kind of what’s happening. Jaren is going his separate way, so to speak, we’ll stay friends and we’ll probably still hear from him, maybe not on the regular, but hopefully at least from time to time.

Jaren: So, that’s the end of the episode, right? I’m just kidding.

Seth: Yeah, see you guys.

Jaren: The way that it kind of works is if people in the REtipster community are interested in land coaching, Seth is going to send them my direction and I’m still going to be heavily using REtipster material because that’s how I got started in the land business and why I worked at REtipster. I helped Seth and we fleshed out the coaching materials. So, it’s all heavily based on REtipster material. It’s still like a friend of REtipster, but once people come in my direction, it does step into a different company and it is going to be my own thing. But I guess you could call it, my coaching consultant business thing is going to be a friend of REtipster.

Seth: Yeah. One way to explain it, coaching is always something that I’ve gotten requests for over the years. It’s just this, not like a tidal wave, but a constant trickle of people just asking, “Hey Seth, can you coach me?” And I did that for a little while for a few years, but it’s not really my thing. It’s not that I don’t enjoy talking to people. It’s just in my mind, it’s not scalable.

And it’s something that, I don’t know if it is the personality issue, but if I had 10 options of different things to spend my day on and coaching was one of those options and other things were making a video, making a blog post, plan on something for the company, coaching would be pretty low on that list for me. It’s just kind of not how I’m wired, but Jaren is wired that way and he does enjoy it.

Obviously, one path that I’ve always been able to go was like, “Well, I can just refer people to other coaches.” And perhaps someday we’ll get more into that but the bottom line is coaches can teach all kinds of weird things. And it’s hard for me to know what a person is teaching people, especially when I send somebody to some of the coaches that I don’t really know well.

And the fact of the matter is that I do know Jaren really well and I know how his business operates and what he teaches people and just his whole thought process. It’s not that there are no other people in the world I could trust, but I’m there with Jaren. And I understand what people are going to get if they go his way. So, for the time being anyway, that’s why Jaren is the main guy that people would be going to.

In the future, if I’m able to get to know other coaches better and understand what they teach people, maybe I will add to that list of people we can refer to. But at this point in time, Jaren is the guy. So, if somebody wants to get coaching through REtipster, I basically will send them to Jaren. So, you’re not going to be working with REtipster once I send you to him. Jaren has his own thing. And your agreement is with him, not me, not REtipster.

Jaren: If I go crazy and I start teaching that the sky is purple or something, you can’t get mad at REtipster and make a bunch of bad reviews.

Seth: There you go. That’s the bottom last. I also thought it’d be kind of fun to just look back over the past few years. Because sometimes when you’re in the day-to-day of running a company like REtipster, it’s almost easy to forget what got done, the things that were accomplished, and the good that was done for the world.

Maybe you know of other things, Jaren, but I just made a list of some of the big things that we did while you were around. We did almost a hundred podcast episodes together, not quite, but almost. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of conversations. A lot of people we talked to.

We launched the forum. That was a big thing that was years in the making. And we launched the Terms Library. That was an idea that Jaren had. And I actually had it too but Jaren was the first who articulated it and said it. And it confirmed what I was thinking and we decided we should start doing a Terms Library and it’s been a nightmare.

I think we filled a big need, but it’s been going in a different direction in terms of just teaching people what these weird words mean in the real estate business. When people say things like MAO or ROI or cash on cash return or cap rate. There are just thousands of these random words and lingo and jargon that people use in real estate that for a beginner, they’re just like, “What? Are you speaking some other language?”

Jaren: Yeah.

Seth: And so, we decided to make a whole lot of articles explaining in depth what all those things mean and making videos about some of them just to make it crystal clear basically how to understand this language of real estate investing. And Jaren voiced that idea and we’d decided to pursue that. And that was like a year and a half ago now, I think.

Jaren and I made two courses together. Jaren actually didn’t do hardly anything for House Hacking University, but we both worked together a lot on The Beginner’s Deal Finding Guide. It’s a ton of work, but a lot of fun just to go through that process together, make videos and create content. And it’s kind of cool to look back on that kind of stuff when it’s done and just be like, “Wow, that’s something we can be proud of.”

Let’s see… what else? We started the actual coaching program, the official legit thing that we bring people through. And Jaren actually created this whole coaching-specific curriculum that basically follows The Land Investing Masterclass but it has a lot of other ancillary insights and documentation and just stuff from Jaren’s world. That’s not necessarily in the course.

Jaren: Like checklists and stuff that I’ve taken from the Masterclass and then distilled it down into, “Okay, a due diligence checklist. Step one, step two, step three, step four.” That kind of stuff.

Seth: Yeah. That was a big deal. It still is a big deal. Then we rebranded the land course. In 2015, when I first launched it, I always called it the REtipster Club, which I called it because my goal was to have this membership website that would have multiple courses inside it. But for those first few years there, it was just the land course. So, it was just kind of confusing and weird. Jaren always thought we should call it The Land Investing Masterclass and we were able to do it. I thought that was kind of cool.

Let’s see, what else did we do? Office Hours improved a lot. For a long time, it was just me sitting there and once Jaren joined, I don’t know that the experience was necessarily worse for the attendees, but it was just harder for me to just be one voice in the room. Just kind of talking to myself.

Jaren: Yeah, you feel like you’re talking on a wall.

Seth: Yeah. And I say that because during Office Hours, people can get on their webcam and talk, but usually, it’s easier to just type out the questions in the chatbox. And then we just go through it and answer those questions. Sometimes there would just be moments of silence when there are no questions. And in those moments of silence, it’s weird to be one person just staring at the screen or just talking to yourself. And having Jaren there, it just made it a lot easier.

We got some really good podcast guests because of Jaren. He was really good at finding people that were worth talking to. Perry Marshall, a bunch of people in the apartment syndication space that I probably never would have reached out to.

Jaren: I think the interview with Pat Flynn. It was a milestone for my life for sure, because it was a dream. I started learning about content marketing I think in 2009, 2010. I was trying to figure out ways to make money as a newly made 20-year-old. I found some obscure affiliate marketer that had all these different people. One of them was Pat Flynn. I went all in and I’ve always dreamed about being on the Smart Passive Income podcast and all that. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Seth: Pat Flynn is one of those guys, like…

Jaren: He’s like the godfather of content marketing.

Seth: Yeah. Well, if just any random person saw him on the street, they would have no idea who he is. But to people who are into blogging or podcasting or any of that stuff, he’s just somebody that everybody knows because he has been so helpful. And he’s been such an example to follow. He was a big part of why I started REtipster because I hadn’t realized I could do anything like this until I saw what he was doing. I was like, “Oh, maybe there is a place for me here. Maybe I could do this kind of thing.” To actually talk to him in that format was just really cool.

Jaren: Yeah.

Seth: And Jaren is a much better connector of people than I am. He is just much more social and outgoing and just willing to put himself out there. And that’s just a real gift he has that I don’t. Especially when you are doing this kind of work where you’re just holed up in an office and you’re by yourself and it’s very easy to shut off from the world really and just not connect with people.

Jaren: Live in a rabbit hole or something.

Seth: Yeah. Lots of people I met because of him that I never would have met otherwise. I don’t know why Tyler Hazel comes to mind. But when we were at that self-storage conference in Indiana, Tyler was a guy who developed his own climate-controlled storage facility and we got to make a cool video about it. And he’s been a good guy to talk to. Just stuff like that.

I think anytime whether you hire somebody or partner with somebody or work with somebody in some capacity, it’s really helpful to find somebody who has skills and abilities that you don’t have. Because if everybody is just a genius at the same thing, then you don’t really expand that much outside of your comfort zone. You don’t really cover new ground because everybody is just plugging away at the same stuff. So that’s definitely what Jaren was, and is. So, it was really helpful to have him around for that.

Jaren: I think the land specialized real estate agent as a strategy.

Seth: Oh, yeah. Totally.

Jaren: I think that was an industry game-changer thing, which is funny because it’s really my wife who did it. But I remember when I first started working for REtipster and when I first started in the land business, before I started working for REtipster, the common knowledge was you never work with an agent. Agents don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re a waste of time. They’re going to ruin deals. Never do it, never do it. And my wife was like “Jaren, I think we should try to find a land specialist agent.” And I was like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” whatever. But we rolled the dice. And I exclusively work with land specialist agents now, and now it seems like it’s kind of…

Seth: A lot of people say that now. Like it’s their secret weapon or their idea. And now it’s like, maybe, but it was I never heard a single person say that. I remember constantly saying that agents just don’t understand this business. And I think that’s true.

Jaren: It’s true for most people.

Seth: It’s true if you’re talking to a house agent, which most agents are. So, I still I guess stand by that if that’s what you’re talking about. But this idea of, well, there is actually this other hidden sub-genre or sub whatever you want to call it of agents that do know land and the key is to find them. And I think to do that requires what Jaren is good at. Getting out there and pounding the pavement and picking up the phone and calling people. A lot of people don’t want to do that.

Jaren: I think another thing too, that was a unique piece of content was Traveling Mailbox. Virtual mailboxes weren’t really a thing. Everybody’s default was like Pak Mail.

Seth: I don’t think I even knew it was a thing until a few years after. And even then, I think it was the Earth Class Mail that I had actually tried for a time. And it was so expensive, it was super expensive. And I thought that was like the only one, but it’s one of those things where my life would have been way easier. To this day, I still have my physical mailbox that I have to drive to you, and I hate it every time. It’s totally a first-world problem. Like it’s not a big deal, but still, I’d rather just sit on my couch and push a button and see it that way instead.

Jaren: Yeah. It really does come in that way. Like you say, scan and read it in your email. If I was in some remote part of the world, like in Kazakhstan or something where my wife is from, I’d still be able to see my business mail. That’s hard to beat.

Seth: Yeah. One thing I believe the way Traveling Mailbox works is they basically subcontract with companies like Pak Mail, where I get my stuff from. They just find storefront locations that are willing to implement their plan. And so, I think I’ve seen some nasty YouTube comments on that video Jaren did saying, “Traveling Mailbox is garbage. They are a horrible company,” or whatever. I think what was going on there is, it does depend to a degree on the quality of the storefront location that they happened to be working through. It’s just like a general contractor hiring a subcontractor. You are depending on multiple parties here to get the job done.

Jaren: I also think that you run the risk if you pick an address of no longer continuing working with them. I had that happen in Florida. It really made me have to switch. So, I decided to just go to the headquarters in North Carolina. So now it’s super awkward because my land business has a Florida phone number, but a North Carolina address. It still works, I haven’t had anybody, not a single person says anything.

Seth: That is good though. Because at least that is a headquarters office, you know that will be done well. At least if any place is going to do it right, they are. I wonder if it works the same way for iPostal and I know there are a bunch of other random ones out there that basically do the same thing. I wonder if it’s a similar deal where they have headquarters, but then a bunch of other satellite offices all over the place.

Jaren: Yeah, I wonder. Probably. They probably have to start by doing it themselves and then branch out.

Seth: Yeah. I have a Traveling Mailbox. One of the differentiators between that and Earth Class Mail is that Traveling Mailbox is not ridiculously expensive to use. I think it’s more than if you were just doing a storefront, but it’s not that much more. It’s pretty reasonable what it is.

Jaren: I agree.

Seth: I know there were a bunch of epic blog posts you put together.

Jaren: That voice-over video.

Seth: Yeah, that was cool.

Jaren: 7 reasons why land is better than everything else.

Seth: Yeah, that is true. That was an awesome one. And there was the land flipping lifecycle video. That was actually your idea to make the video but I was the one that shot the video. Those were the original talking points you would put together.

There’s the Fund and Grow review. The Fund and Grow was a little bit of… I won’t say controversial, but basically, the way it works, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a company that helps you find and obtain business lines of credit or business credit cards that don’t touch your personal credit report. But the idea is you can get it at 0% interest for 12 to 15 to 18 months at a time. And that’s really cool if as long as you’re planning to totally pass those credit cards or refinancing them before you have to start paying interest. Because if you don’t, and then you do have to start paying interest, it’s going to be very expensive.

Jaren: Not as expensive as… Well, it might be comparable with hard money or depending on your credit score too. It’s expensive but it’s all relative. To a traditional consumer or somebody who’s just getting started in the land business, it’s expensive. But to a house flipper or a wholesaler, it might not be. Or if you’re spending 50% of your profit on a private money guy in land.

Seth: Yeah. The reason I say it is controversial is that if a person uses it, they really need to be smart about it.

Jaren: Yeah, and be very disciplined.

Seth: Yeah. I felt weird going out there and saying, “Hey, max out all these business credit cards, it’s going to be great.” Because if you’re not really paying attention to what you’re doing, you can really screw yourself over financially.

Jaren: I think there’s a certain segment of society, probably myself included in that, that probably would do better off not touching credit cards in any fashion. But then there is the other side of people that are really disciplined and they can run their entire financial infrastructure on credit cards. Because if you can do it, you have the ability to be very disciplined and pay it off. The rewards that you get from credit cards are awesome.

Seth: Yeah.

Jaren: And if you’re going to use them just for things that you would spend money on anyway, one, you have more protection because you’re not actually using your money. And then in addition to that, you get free stuff. So, it’s a game that if you play, you can actually win. But certain people don’t have that organizational discipline bone, probably myself included. I’ve always just done way better financially when I didn’t have any debt.

Seth: It’s a good alternative, again, if you’re disciplined and detail-oriented enough. It’s a good alternative to hard money loans or working with a financial partner if you run out of cash, which most of us do at some point in the land business. It’s going to be to keep things going.

And most properties, if you bought it right, and it’s a good property and you are marketing it well, most of them sell within a year. That’s a fairly normal time cycle. So, it is doable to sell it and make your money and pay off your credit card that way. But again, it’s like a loaded gun. You need to know what you’re doing or you could really hurt yourself.

But anyway, Fund and Grow is a company that helps people do this. Just given the whole realm of credit cards and that kind of thing, it’s easy for a person to think like, “Man, is this just like some kind of scam? Or is this like a fly-by-night company?” And Jaren actually used them and did a really good review on it. And just really did a good job of summarizing what they do and what they don’t do and who it’s for and that kind of thing. So, that was another pretty awesome blog post.

Jaren: Yeah. Another one too, and I don’t know if it’s like taking off or having a super big impact, but at least for me personally, a piece of content that sends out is how Profit First changed my life. I’m kind of an evangelist for Profit First.

Seth: Profit First is a book by a guy named Mike Michalowicz. It’s this financial framework for entrepreneurs and businesses.

Jaren: Yeah. And again, if you’re more disciplined, you probably don’t need Profit First. If you’re more of the guy that can make sure you pay off your credit cards on time and make sure that things are iron-tight or if you have a traditional accounting background, Profit First might be a little bit annoying to you. But I think for a lot of people, it’s a way to manage business finances for the layperson in a way that the layperson thinks kind of more naturally or logically and all that. So, that was a big piece for me. I feel like that solved a lot of problems for my business personally and cash flow issues. I wish that when I left high school, they handed me that book.

Seth: There are so many critical things they don’t teach in school. A lot of financial basics that it’s just crazy, man, that they don’t get into it. It’s so critical for life and most people are just walking around with no awareness of how to get ahead.

Jaren: Yes.

Seth: But anyway, just to wrap this up. I’m just really excited for Jaren. I’m really excited to see him and his land business growing and growing to the point where he needs to devote more time to that. It’s cool to see where it’s headed and I just wish him the best. I appreciate everything that you’ve done, Jaren. Just the way that you improve lives for REtipster and the community and help people see the light in a lot of ways. And hopefully, you can continue to do that as a coach and just wherever you go in life. It’s something you’ve got a gift for.

Jaren: Thank you. And I just want to say for our listeners out there, Seth is the real deal guys. I’ve walked with him for three and a half years, four years, something like that. Some of the questions people ask me through discovery calls and coaching or whatever, “Is Seth really as sincere as he projects himself?” It’s true, that’s who he is. I would actually say that he has more integrity behind closed doors than you would think. And you think he would have a lot of integrity just by watching his videos and how he presents himself to be in the world. But I’ve seen him time and time again pick the higher road the way he had no reason to.

And Seth you’ve really modeled how to do business well and to walk in integrity. In a lot of ways, you’ve been a mentor and helped me figure out a lot of things. I’m really grateful.

Seth: Thanks, man. I appreciate that.

Jaren: And hopefully, you will still speak into my life and make sure I don’t go crazy and teach people about purple skies.

Seth: Yeah. I will keep an eye on that. If anybody out there hears Jaren talks about purple skies, definitely send me an email.

Hey guys, it’s Seth here. Just one final word before I wrap up this episode. I didn’t really mention this, but this is episode 113. If you want to see the show notes from everything we talked about, some of the blog posts and content pieces that Jaren mentioned, you can check that out at retipster.com/113.

And also, I thought it might be kind of fun for those of you out there who were impacted in any way by Jaren and just his work with REtipster over the years, if you ever had any big takeaways or “aha” moments or even a personal interaction with him that meant something to you or helped you figure something out or change the course of your business in some way, head over to the REtipster forum and post about it. And let’s start a little Jaren appreciation thread. It might be kind of cool just to see any key findings that people got from Jaren during his time, working directly with REtipster like you did.

Again, Jaren, if you’re listening to this little out show that we didn’t record when we were both sitting there together at the table at Calvin, I appreciate you, man. Thanks for everything you did. I wish you all the best and let’s stay in touch.

Thanks to everybody out there listening. Again, if you guys are listening to this on your phone, take out your phone and go ahead and text the word “FREE” to the number 33777. You can stay up to date on all the happenings and goings-on in the world of REtipster. Thanks again for listening. Talk to you again soon.

The post 113: Jaren Moves On appeared first on REtipster.

from Real Estate Tips https://retipster.com/113-jaren-moves-on/

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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The Many App Stores Before the App Store

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

How much credit does Apple deserve for introducing its App Store concept to mainstream consumers? I mean, how obvious is the idea, anyway?

This is a question that seems worth asking as modern app development has become so centered around building applications that exist in digital storefronts like Apple’s App Store, the Google Play Store, Steam, and numerous others. What about app stores that existed when the proverbial dodo was still around? There are more than you think.

“A trip back in time reveals at least one popular one-click store which predates Apple’s attempt by at least 5 years. I know because I built it.”

— Michael Robertson, the software developer best known for his creation of MP3.com, in a blog post discussing his work on “Click-N-Run,” an early attempt at creating a digital download store along the lines of the App Store in the early 2000s. Click-N-Run (CNR), which was an aspect of the commercial Windows-like Linux distribution Linspire that Robertson helped build, was a commercial GUI-style interface for Debian’s apt package manager. It was eventually made available to other distros to much interest, though the results were reportedly a mixed bag. While no longer made, Linspire’s work on CNR (one of a few stabs at the GUI-based software distribution interface in Linux) likely inspired the graphical package managers now commonly offered with many Linux distributions, which largely work the same way.

The question around what an app store actually is probably starts with shareware

Let’s play a game: If you were to access a piece of shareware circa 1991 and wanted to unlock the full version of that application with your computer alone, how would you do it?

No web. Perhaps no Windows. (Perhaps GeoWorks.)

Sure, there were probably lots of ways to download an application, if you had the tools to do so—as in, a modem. Perhaps you might grab it on a BBS, or through a service like Compuserve. Maybe Usenet binary groups were your preferred strategy.

But still, you’d be stuck with a nag screen. Your copy of WinZip would just be annoying you every time you started it.

See, the issue with the distribution of software via computer was never about the download part—that part was figured out relatively quickly. It was the paying part that proved difficult.

Think about how it might work compared to a store: You choose a physical object of interest, you give a physical object of value (i.e. money) in exchange, an intermediary (i.e. a cashier) confirms you bought it (by scanning a barcode), and you walk out, without an object of value but with an object of interest.

Which is why every time you read a story about some shareware pioneer, like the developer of Paint Shop Pro or Tim Sweeney’s efforts to sell folks ZZT, it’s always paired with a story about these developers literally taking checks in the mail, despite the fact that it was entirely possible to purchase things fully electronically with a credit card by this point.

Without the retail element, people were kind of stuck distributing software without a way to easily purchase it. (What’s the big deal, the open-source folks say.) There was no way to secure the process, so therefore, fraud was prevalent. And if people are distributing through multiple systems, the experience of downloading becomes annoying, because it feels wildly inconsistent.

This is the problem a few entrepreneurs worked to solve starting in the mid-to-late 1990s, with varying levels of success.

1993

The year that Tucows, a well-known repository of downloadable software, first went online. The repository was built by Scott Swedorski, a technology enthusiast in Flint, Michigan, who spotted a need for a central resource for basic internet software. Swedorski’s work, while not initially intended to be commercial, proved the basis of a long-running company that came to prove an essential part of the early internet. After all, we needed software to get on the internet, right?

An example of the Electronic AppWrapper, a program for NeXT computers that could be used to distribute software digitally. Image: JohnWayneTheThird/Wikimedia Commons

The first “app store” on a Steve Jobs-operated platform involved a CD-ROM and an email-sending mechanism

The app store that generally gets the nod for being first dates to the early 1990s, on a platform that was responsible for a lot of software firsts. I’m, of course, talking about NeXT, the platform on which the World Wide Web came to life and whose object-oriented approach to programming became a big part of what has made iOS so successful.

That software is called the Electronic AppWrapper. (See, it had “app” in the name way back in 1993!)

It did not exactly have the same kind of distribution method that one might expect for a modern app store, however. Really, what it did that is incredibly clever was that it took the shareware CD-ROM and made it into something that allowed for trials.

NeXT was a good platform for this in part because of its initial target audience—since the NeXT Cube tended to focus on educational and research settings, those settings were often networked well before PC and Mac equivalents, so people were able to purchase software online before other markets.

In fact, Electronic AppWrapper developer Paget Systems, which initially built a print version of the AppWrapper, made this very point in a 1992 article first proposing the idea:

The NeXT community is a perfect testbed for electronic distribution. The market is still small; we know where almost all of the computer owners are, and the community is more fluent with networking than most. And we have more than our share of creative people willing to tackle problems in new ways.

Also helping matters: Since NeXT systems were rare, users of this platform didn’t really have the advantage of being able to go to Radio Shack to purchase software, so it was either do everything through the mail, or go electronic.

Paget Systems’ great gift to the app store concept was the process it enabled. A 1993 issue of NeXTWORLD described the benefits of the tool like this: “To order by e-mail, just click a button; the application automatically displays an order form, asks for your credit-card number, and sends an encrypted message to Paget.”

That sounds pretty simple, right? It was, and it's not all that dissimilar to how we do things today.

(Side note: Jesse Tayler, who helped develop Electronic AppWrapper, has put up an informative documentary website highlighting the history of NeXT and the innovations the company helped to enable—including this. A highlight is Tayler’s discussion of successfully demoing the Electronic AppWrapper to Steve Jobs.)

“Since virtual shelf space is much cheaper than a storefront, Online can represent thousands of products. We can carry Microsoft Word and hundreds of related add-on products, while traditional re-sellers can barely find shelf space for mainstream software.”

— Tim Choate, the president of the firm Online Interactive, discussing the company’s atOnce online software store, which was one of the first examples of a traditional app store for Windows computers. As NetworkWorld explained in 1996, the atOnce software store was something of a test, complete with Microsoft’s blessing, to see if application distribution of commercial software over network mediums was even possible. The process required a more secure approach, at Microsoft’s behest. It should be noted that atOnce provides an interesting case—as it was effectively the app store for the AOL era (along with a very early web presence), though it quickly went away.

The Digital River website, as it appeared in 1998. Image: Internet Archive

The guy who realized that downloadable apps were going to be a really big deal in 1994

Joel Ronning probably doesn’t get the credit he deserves in the grand scheme of things, but he is a figure in this discussion that matters.

In the 1980s, he spent time focused on the Macintosh market, selling software and distributing white-label accessories as well. This gave him an understanding of the digital market, so he could see all the flaws of the retail approach up close.

Around 1993 or so, he had a revelation that proved prescient: downloadable commercial software was going to be big. Really big. Big enough that he should spend the next few years developing processes for making the ideas around secure downloadable software workable, and patenting them. And building a company around them. And turning them into something that other companies would likely want to use.

Ronning’s work led to the creation a dozen patents—and a company called Digital River that could handle the encryption and distribution of applications. Not that anyone knew how to properly contextualize the idea at that early stage. In a 1997 profile with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, columnist Dick Youngblood tried, and came up with this:

What Digital River has created is an enormous virtual warehouse containing tens of thousands of software products offered by hundreds of developers and retailers through their individual Web sites.

In simple terms, the system gives customers the ability to download their software choices with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of security for the credit card numbers and other personal data required for the transaction. I like to think of the operation as sort of the Supervalu of electronic software wholesaling.

Imagine having to describe something that people do over the internet on a daily basis without being able to use the terms “app store” or “cloud,” nor the frame of references that come with those terms, and that’s probably what you might come up with.

A patent drawing by Digital River that showed an early example of its digital-distribution technology, which included encryption functionality. Ronning has a lot of patent filings to his name. Image: Google Patents

The approach Digital River took in this early stage is actually quite similar to what we think of as an app store today—including the idea that the middleman is going to take a cut. (Digital River took just 20 percent, rather than Apple’s infamous 30 percent cut.)

But one difference is that the company represented a provider of purchasing services—i.e., it built the tools for individual companies to create their own storefronts, rather than becoming an app-store player itself. This model worked for them. By the year 2002, Digital River (a still-active company!) had more than 32,000 customers according to NetworkWorld, with roughly a third of those representing three quarters of Digital River’s sales.

“Year over year we continue to see more products purchased digitally.” Ronning said in a NetworkWorldinterview. “People are getting more comfortable with getting a digital file than they were one, two or six years ago. That’s good news because it allows us to deliver a product halfway around the world in a matter of seconds.”

And hey, because the company was in a position to provide the technical know-how of running an app store, there was at least one case where Digital River was tapped to manage someone else’s app store—the creation of Research in Motion’s Blackberry App World in 2009.

Download Warehouse, a.k.a. what app stores would look like if we made no changes to our approach between physical and digital distribution. Fun fact: This is what the atOnce website evolved into. Image: Internet Archive

Not every site was a winner, of course: When looking for info about app stores, I ran across this website on the Internet Archive that literally sold digital software as if it was still in a shrink-wrapped box, which made me crack up so hard. The backend? Digital River.

In many ways, the success of the app store was just as much about the packaging—i.e., the way consumers were pitched about the idea, rather than the shrink wrap—as the commerce itself.

1996

The year StarCode Software, a developer of software for the BeOS operating system, was formed. The company built PackageBuilder and SoftwareValet, which combined together to become one of the first graphical package managers purpose-built for an operating system—and one Be acquired in 1998 and integrated into the operating system.

Stardock Central, a digital distribution service produced by the customization-focused company Stardock. Image: via the Stardock website

Five mainstream examples of app stores that predated the Apple App Store

Steam. The digital distribution service started by Valve in 2003 was effectively the app store that proved the model to the world in a big way. There’s a reason why Steam remains so dominant in the PC gaming space, and it’s because they nailed it the first time—to the point where many of its competitors directly mimic the service.

Windows Marketplace. This circa-2004 online store, targeted at consumers, was an attempt by Microsoft to centralize the often-confusing app distribution options for Windows software. It wasn’t successful, but it helped set the stage for later digital storefront successes for Microsoft.

Club Nokia. This online store for Nokia’s early mobile phones provides a really interesting example of a service that was essentially a direct analogue to the modern iOS App Store, but in a situation where the carriers, rather than the phone-maker, holds all the power. This service, founded in 1997, became controversial as ringtones became more popular, and Nokia eventually folded to pressure from mobile carriers and scaled back its service in favor of the mobile providers’ options. Could you imagine Verizon and AT&T doing this to Apple today?

Xbox Live Arcade. Launched in 2004, this represented an important formative effort in the attempts to bring digital download services to a large group of people. One secret to the success of Xbox Live Arcade was its piggybacking upon what Microsoft was doing elsewhere; it leveraged the existing Xbox Live service to sell people more simplistic games. (Apple later replicated this by using its mechanisms for the iTunes Store to sell apps.) It later proved the starting point for the company’s Xbox Live Marketplace, which could distribute full shrink-wrapped games to consumers.

Stardock Central. I’ve mentioned them in Tedium before, but Stardock is an interesting company historically because of the fact that it was early to a number of important trends that have become even more essential today. One of those trends was customization; another was digital distribution, which it first dipped its toes into with Stardock Central, an app-distribution service from circa 2001. It worked particularly well for Stardock in part because it offered apps in a variety of verticals, including games.

The NTT DoCoMo NEC N904i, a phone that supports the formative i-mode network, is considered the first mobile app store ecosystem. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The turning point of the app store concept, honestly, is the mobile phone

Thinking less about the maker of the phone itself or its general functionality, the mobile phone represents something about technology that a regular desktop computer doesn’t—it is intended as a full package, one that is hermetically sealed and managed by its maker and distributor.

Because it started from a different place, the expectation is different. That expectation creates tension for power users who wish that their phones or tablets worked a little more like their laptops, but on the other hand, the devices aim broader for a reason.

And one can point to the reason for the expectation that applications would be managed by the provider. After all, the first mobile app store that feels like what we got with the modern App Store or Play Store came from a mobile company—Japan’s NTT DoCoMo released i-mode, a service that offered access to digital services through their phones. It worked particularly well in Japan because home internet was rare at the time when i-mode was first released in 1999, meaning i-mode was many Japanese users’ first experience with an internet-style service.

As The Japan Times noted in 2011, the reason i-mode succeeded (and spawned many imitators) was the tight integration of payments and software:

For those of you who may not know, i-mode is the mobile Internet-access service built into cell phones from Japanese communication giant NTT Docomo. It costs ¥315 per month to use and includes the i-mode network, which is Docomo’s closed system, separate from the Internet at large. Within this network there are “official” i-mode sites, which are only accessible from an i-mode enabled cell phone. On sites such as these, users can purchase goods and services and have the payment appear on their cell phone bill. This cell phone-integrated-payment is what makes the i-mode system so special.

Other companies tried to do this same thing during the early 2000s, including firms like Nokia, to mixed levels of success, but the connective tissue was that the phone was treated like an integrated experience of purchasing, distribution, and usage, rather than a vessel for applications.

Perhaps this integration explains, in the present day, why Apple has ramped up attacks against sideloading (or allowing the installation of external applications outside of an App Store experience), something that nearly other mobile platform (including Android) has long allowed. As it wrote in a white paper it recently released:

Allowing sideloading would degrade the security of the iOS platform and expose users to serious security risks not only on third-party app stores, but also on the App Store. Because of the large size of the iPhone user base and the sensitive data stored on their phones—photos, location data, health and financial information—allowing sideloading would spur a flood of new investment into attacks on the platform.

Mobile phones have been built with this expectation that the whole experience is seamless and managed by the hardware developer—and at one point, the mobile provider even played a significant role. In some cases, it still does.

But one wonders how strong Apple’s case against sideloading will actually be, given that, y’know, it also sells desktop computers that allow sideloading … or as we call it over that way, downloading and installing apps from the Web.

It’s long been said that Apple, when it released the iPhone, launched a device so compelling that it made people forget that there was years of prior art that predated the moment.

In many ways, the App Store made people forget about app stores. It was such a brilliant concept, idea, and execution that when Steve Jobs announced it in 2008, people basically ignored the nearly two decades of prior art that wasn’t even particularly well-hidden.

In some ways, the move to centralization was arguably disappointing, because it wasn’t perfect, and it put a middleman in control. Apple’s approach to the digital storefront had flaws—most notably the size of its cut (which companies like Microsoft are now explicitly counterprogramming against) and the weirdness of putting a single company’s moral compass in charge of the apps that people downloaded.

But we can look at the positives of their approach as well, and sort of the element that they nailed that few others were able to in quite the same way. The integration of the App Store into the operating system made both better; the integration of commerce into the App Store using a common system solved the problem of having to give a credit card number out every time you wanted to download an app; and the integration of a development strategy that worked in tandem with the App Store gave (and still gives) Apple a reason to constantly improve its programming interfaces so they remain at the top of their class.

No developer of a prior app storefront had been able to nail down quite this mix (with Steam possibly getting the closest), which explains why it was so effective when Apple did it.

But prior art is prior art, and one hopes that the technology industry takes a step back to learn the lessons from both the Apple App Store’s strengths and weaknesses going forward. After all, so many others got there first.

The Many App Stores Before the App Store syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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bentonpena · 4 years ago

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Surprise – NVIDIA’s AI and graphics news today for big industry is relevant to artists, too

https://bit.ly/3mHQJfP Surprise – NVIDIA’s AI and graphics news today for big industry is relevant to artists, too https://bit.ly/3wIEvZ4

Even as NVIDIA has a keynote with simulated robots making the rounds of a BMW factory, some of the GPU giant’s latest brings industry- and enterprise-grade tools to artists, too. That also could prove relevant as the pandemic has folks looking for work.

Music and live visual work means one thing – stuff has to happen live. And so that makes these chips more interesting. It means that fundamentally what musicians and artists do, which is to work with materials live in time, now matches up with the way graphics (and AI) chips work. Since they’re crunching numbers faster, it means the ability to create “liquid” interfaces. (That was the concept interactive visionary and legend Joy Mountford introduced years ago in a talk we had together on the South by Southwest stage, and it’s stuck with me.)

Now, I won’t lie, some of this is awaiting GDC, the game dev event. That’s because when you don’t have a BMW factory-sized budget, the punk-style approach of gaming has a ton of appeal. (You can see a bunch of gamers complaining on YouTube actually, I think misunderstanding that this is not a gaming keynote and … that’s coming later and … NVIDIA has always had workstation customers. But we know gaming trolls are not the most reasonable folks and – I for one enjoy watching Mercedes Benz simulate the Autobahn. It’s the Kraftwerk in me. GTA: Normal German Life Simulator. The Edeka parking lot is off the chain.)

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But having listened to NVIDIA talk about their new offerings, I think there’s more here than just pro and enterprise applications and the usual workstation / gaming PC divide.

Follow along as there is a ton of geeky machine learning, metaverse, Omniverse, and 3D artistry stuff coming – https://gtc21.event.nvidia.com/

Omniverse

The big pillar here that impacts audiovisual creation is Omniverse. I wrote about this connected platform for collaboration and exchange of all things 3D, built on open tools like Pixar’s very own USD file format (also a subtle hint that y’all can make bank with this stuff):

This week, we get a lot of the questions answered about where NVIDIA was going strategically.

But yeah, if you’re wondering if this could allow audiovisual artists and musicians to connect to big-budget projects – at a time when even the shows you watch at night (Mandalorian, cough) are made with these tools? You bet.

First, the most exciting detail for me was a commitment that Omniverse for individuals and artists will always be free – meaning anyone can get at this platform. That also means that individual 3D artists and AV creators can play with big industry – so it’s a source of gigs.

Also, the Omniverse pricing is not astronomical for those “enterprise” use cases. A small team can buy into it at a per-seat license of $1800 a year, plus a $25,000 cost for a nucleus server. That’s within reach of interactive and design shops, and it seems NVIDIA may even work to adapt to those kinds of small use cases even beyond that.

Omniverse on a shoot? Yes.

I expect NVIDIA may even be underestimating the demand for those individuals – partly because as their tools and partner tools get massively more powerful and easier-to-use, it may not even take an entire team to do great work.

Now, the wait is on just for connectors. 3DS Max, Photoshop, Maya, Substance, and awesomely, Unreal Engine are all supported. But keep an eye out for Blender, Marvelous Designer, Solidworks, and Houdini for even more sign this is on.

It’s an open beta; keeping an eye on the convention is a chance to stay posted:

https://www.nvidia.com/omniverse/

And yes, yes Unreal:

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The new RTX stuff is here

It’s tough to mention anything to do with semiconductors right now, given the global shortage that’s on. But yeah, the new pro RTX architecture looks predictably insanely great, for anyone doing real-time visuals, rendering, graphics, and AI.

So, if you’re planning to make your proud reentry into music festivals in 2022 with that fully immersive 3D opera involving live artificial intelligence, you’ll want to go ahead and write these into the grant application.

Desktops get the A5000 and A4000. Laptops get A2000, A3000, A4000, and A5000.

“But how will I fit them in my case?” the tiny man wonders. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” And then he stares into one too long and a whole Kubrick dream sequence starts, alas.

Either way, you get all the new technology for tons of creative use. Also, even though there’s the mention of “pro,” these laptop chips fit in low-power, thin and light machines. You could wind up buying them in a reasonably inexpensive notebook computer and using it to run a live stream.

Even apart from all the utterly essential graphics applications, that’s good news for music, because the ongoing pandemic ripples are likely to disrupt at least some international travel for the foreseeable future. Oh yeah, and it also means thin-and-light PCs with NVIDIA architectures to compete with Apple’s own silicon solutions. (I wouldn’t write out Apple from possibly future pro interoperability with these architectures, too.)

Yep, laptops will have these – though keep an eye on the semiconductor shortage to see what’s shipping when, as it’s … a doozy, generally.

But the performance gains are huge – in short:

RT cores with up to 2X the previous generation��s throughput (for tracing your rays, shading your whatever, all that jazz)

Third-generation Tensor Cores, also up to 2X throughput (so you can make a HAL that might open the pod bay doors even before someone has to ask)

CUDA cores (2.5X FP32 throughput) for … everything (and possibly even some audio/music applications, but certainly anything that uses the word ‘render’ in it)

Assuming some pros are the right generation for this, so – “It will be mine. Oh yes.“

Specific to desktop:

Up to 24GB GPU memory (or even 48GB with a two-GPU NVLink rig)

Virtualization (tell the server admin)

PCIe Gen 4 (twice the previous bandwidth – yeah, you might want your actual data transfer to catch up with the chip specs above, so this is essential)

Specific to laptop:

Third-gen Max-Q – so it doesn’t sound like a you’re vacuuming the carpet any more (“whisper” quiet is the phrase you want)

Up to 16 GB GPU memory

Also specific to pretty high-end workstation laptops, the the NVIDIA T1200 and NVIDIA T600 refresh of the Turing architecture is out. (That either means something to you because you use multiple-application workflows, or nothing to you and is a cool name.)

I might note, too, that these don’t look quite like the specs of that Apple Silicon stuff – not at the M1 level. I think it’s safe to say that for now, these are different use cases. But I also wouldn’t worry about it, either – the general scene is that working with 3D, video, AI, and streaming all get substantially easier in 2021 industry-wide, once chips get out there.

I also can imagine making an investment this year that lasts a good while, which is what happens when you do make a generational leap.

AI on the cloud

Without going into too much detail (I’ll leave that to NV), there is also a bunch of news this week for delivering GPU acceleration and (crucially for servers) AI computation via the cloud. There are a lot of “cool demo!” capabilities – machine translation, speech recognition, face recognition, eye contact, and live video processing continue to evolve through machine learning techniques from NVIDIA. (Yes, that also means more uncanny valley stuff and questions about the fabric of society, surveillance, and reality.)

But it means the ability to do stuff with big volumes of data, and in a way that doesn’t actually require you to be a huge enterprise to use.

This also deals with science – meaning artists who do understand machine learning now can make these topics relatable to the public. That’s potentially important, as we live in a world that demands more scientific understanding. (NVIDIA included an AstraZeneca chemistry example – and suddenly our lives are all revolving around that chemistry.)

I’ve been critical of some of the very examples NVIDIA uses here – like Spotify making playlist personalization more “efficient.” That’s nothing new – automating music based on trends and profit is basically as old as the music industry. But to really be able to criticize these things, I think it matters that musicians can understand, re-engineer, explain, and advocate with a solid grounding in the science and technology behind the topic. In the case of music, it’s now more complex to talk about the impact of playlists when they’re AI-driven than when you could point to something as intuitive as “payola.”

But science? Yeah, you can do genome analysis on your laptop.

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And they continue to advance the state of the art in machine learning – even with smaller data sets:

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Watch this space

I realize this was a very niche look at this stuff and will cause anyone not familiar with the area to have their eyes glaze over.

But AI + graphics + 3D + collaboration capabilities will pour into more recognizable use cases soon, powered by this tech.

And watch this space for what this might mean for artists, musicians, and creativity using tools like Unreal. Because there is no question in my mind that Unreal and Blender might well be mentioned in the same breath as Ableton Live and a Eurorack rig more frequently in the coming months and years.

But hey, at the very least, maybe tonight you’ll dream about standing on top of a surrealist skyscraper, gazing up at a King Kong-sized graphics card, and shouting at it “when are you shipping? why do these crypto people keep buying you? I just want to play some video games!“

Giant video card is listening. (Cue 2001-style Ligeti soundtrack… aeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee……)

Also, this is super cute – and great to see what young people are doing with this stuff, especially knowing this is a tough time for them and they deserve some fresh opportunities.

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Music via Create Digital Music https://bit.ly/2N55ART April 12, 2021 at 02:48PM

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vsplusonline · 5 years ago

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Backed by SoftBank, Herman Narula’s Improbable is struggling to revolutionize gaming industry

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/backed-by-softbank-herman-narulas-improbable-is-struggling-to-revolutionize-gaming-industry/

Backed by SoftBank, Herman Narula’s Improbable is struggling to revolutionize gaming industry

By Amy Thomson

Worlds Adrift was supposed to be a multiplayer game like no other: think Minecraft meets Second Life. Released to some users in 2018, the virtual world promised to take immersive gaming to another level by using a new technology from SoftBank-backed wunderkind, Improbable Worlds Ltd. Players would build ships to explore a universe of floating islands created by other participants. Then last May its creator, Bossa Studios, said it was pulling the plug.

“We fell way short of what the game’s original vision was,” Bossa co-founder Henrique Olifiers explained in a YouTube video. “What we have live today is probably perhaps 20% of the game that we wanted to launch, and it shows.”

Worlds Adrift is one of at least three games using Improbable technology that were pulled last year—a setback for Improbable, which promised to revolutionize gaming by helping developers create complex worlds that rival the real one. There are many reasons games can fail, but two people familiar with the situation say Improbable is struggling in part because it surprised developers with frequent updates that forced game studios to spend more time fixing code than perfecting their products.

Founded about seven years ago by Cambridge University students, Improbable is unprofitable and has only one game running on its platform. Since 2018, the company has lost its chief financial officer, chief legal officer, vice president of people operations and chief creative officer, according to their LinkedIn profiles. One high-level person who left said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Herman Narula didn’t give executives autonomy to make their own decisions, from hiring to choosing which projects to pursue. Several people who worked with Improbable and requested anonymity to avoid hurting their careers in the insular gaming industry, also said Narula alienated game developers with his temper—shouting orders and complaints on the phone and in meetings.

Improbable has since lured a former Disney executive to become the new CFO, is working with several other studios and is starting to develop its own games. Company spokesman Daniel Griffiths said that it’s not unusual for game developers to decide against a commercial launch after a trial period. Additionally, he said, studios could decide when to implement updates and were allowed to use an older version of the platform for a period of time. The company offered assistance and kept developers updated of changes in its forums and through emails, Griffiths said. He called accusations of shouting and micromanaging “hearsay” and pointed to Narula’s approval rating on the Glassdoor job review site, which was at about 83% when this article was published, and said most reviewers on the site would recommend working at Improbable to a friend.

As for employee attrition, Griffiths said that the company’s voluntary turnover rate is in line with the tech industry, which is high. A report from LinkedIn put employee churn for tech at 13.2%, the highest of all the industries it surveyed. Improbable has an internal tool that lets employees offer anonymous feedback as part of efforts to manage its culture, he said.

The London-based startup’s travails are just the latest setback for SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund, which in 2017 led an investing group that plowed $502 million into Improbable. Along with Narula, SoftBank is one of two Improbable shareholders that have significant control, with a stake of 25% to 50%, according to Companies House, the U.K. registrar of companies. While some of SoftBank’s bets have paid off, such as its 2018 sale of a majority stake in Flipkart Online Services Pvt Ltd. to Walmart Inc. for $16 billion, several of the Japanese investor’s companies have run into difficulties recently. WeWork pulled its initial public offering, robot pizza maker Zume Pizza Inc. announced it was cutting hundreds of jobs in January, and Indian lodging startup Oyo Hotels is eliminating thousands of employees and losing money after an aggressive expansion. SoftBank didn’t provide a comment.

Pic: Improbable

Narula, the son of Indian construction magnate Harpinder Singh Narula, founded Improbable in 2012 with Rob Whitehead, a fellow graduate student at Cambridge who’s now chief product officer. The men originally worked out of a barn next to Hyver Hall, the Narula family’s mansion, before moving to an office in central London two years later. They’d met in the university’s computer science department where they bonded over a shared passion for games, dreaming of creating huge, detailed virtual worlds where lots of people could play together.

SpatialOS was going to be the tool that made those dreams a reality. It helps developers create complex, simulated environments. Plants and animals continue to grow and reproduce even when nobody’s playing; it can enable programs that mimic how electrical grids, transportation networks and traffic work together. It promised to create elaborate, persistent worlds unlike anything that had been built before.

“We’re in a place today where it is actually possible to create artificial realities,” Narula said in a 2017 interview with Wired. “Basically, we want to build the Matrix,” he joked. SoftBank’s investment that year was one of the biggest in a U.K. startup, on par with Google’s 400 million pound ($511 million) acquisition of artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. Before that, Improbable got early funding from Andreessen Horowitz, which put in about $20 million in 2015, as well as billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures and Singapore’s state investor Temasek Holdings Pte, which were part of a group that invested $30 million later that year. All told, the company’s attracted more than $600 million in investment.

Even after SoftBank’s investment, Narula retained control of his company, keeping 75% of the voting rights, according to regulatory filings.

People who know Narula describe the 31-year-old executive as unusually charismatic and persuasive, drawing people into his “reality distortion field,” a characteristic famously attributed to Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs. During a Ted talk last year, Narula said the types of games his creation enables will reshape human relationships and identity as people spend more time together in huge, collaborative worlds.

“If we could co-inhabit, co-experience things together, undiminished by physical frailty or by lack of context, create opportunities together—that changes things,” Narula said in the talk. “That bonds people.”

Bossa Studios was Improbable’s first big gaming customer to use its technology platform. The two companies began discussions about what they could build together in 2014, giving some users early access to Worlds Adrift in 2018. It was a major departure for a gamemaker that previously specialized in simpler, social titles, such as I Am Bread, “a beautiful story of one slice of bread’s epic and emotional journey as it embarks upon a quest to become toasted.”

Following Bossa’s vote of confidence, Spilt Milk Studios decided to give Improbable a try with a game called Lazarus. Described as a sci-fi twist on Groundhog Day, the game let thousands of players fight over technology and territories in a world that reset weekly. After about three years letting players test the game, Spilt Milk shut it down in September, saying the game was too expensive to continue and cited the costs of maintaining, running and updating the game as it became more feature-packed.

On its website, Improbable says it costs “slightly more” to use SpatialOS than traditional cloud-hosted, dedicated game servers. Improbable estimates that for the smallest “templates,” hosted in the U.S., developers are paying 8% to 35% more per hour.

Bossa declined to comment and Spilt Milk didn’t reply to requests for comment. Both are focusing on other games.

The biggest failure so far has been Automaton, a SpatialOS game developer which last year went into administration, the British version of bankruptcy. Its Mavericks: Proving Grounds game was going to be a 1,000-player “battle royale” shooter with users ducking in and out of abandoned buildings and running across landscapes to be the last one standing. The game had weather systems, and players left footprints and shell casings behind that let others track them. Mavericks was going to be vastly bigger than similar games, like Fortnite, which typically host a maximum of 100 people at once.

Big, complicated games like Mavericks are expensive to develop, and Improbable offered studios financing ranging from thousands to millions of pounds, the people said. Studios in return agreed to give Narula control over aspects of their business including communications and financials, depending on the deal, people familiar with the arrangements said. Game makers also agreed not to make disparaging comments about Improbable, they said.

Last year, Improbable provided Automaton a credit line of about 5 million pounds that could be converted into equity, according to the administrators’ report. The deal gave Improbable some control over Automaton’s finances. But Improbable became so involved in the game’s development that Automaton felt more like a subsidiary than an independent studio, and employees complained that they didn’t know who was making decisions, people familiar with the episode said.

Then last summer, Improbable told Automaton, which had drawn down less than a third of its credit line, that it would be withdrawing further funding, according to the administrators’ report. No other benefactors materialized, and the firm, which had been profitable through the fiscal year ending in May 2018, entered administration with just 30% of Mavericks development completed. As part of discussions about the company’s insolvency, Improbable said it would be willing to take on about 20 staff who’d been working on the project. The company had 40 employees at the time. Automaton’s founder, James Thompson, now works at Improbable as head of product research. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Improbable loan was meant to be a bridge while Automaton looked for other investors, Griffiths said. The loan was to be used specifically for Mavericks, and did give Improbable some oversight over how the money was spent, but was never meant to fund the game’s entire development, he said. Improbable decided not to extend the loan further after Automaton notified them that it hadn’t secured any additional money, though the company did contribute to a fund for Automaton’s employees who were affected by the administration, he said.

Improbable, which is private, reported that sales rose to 1.22 million pounds for the year ended in May 2019, double the revenue from a year earlier, but less than the 7.8 million pounds in fiscal 2017. Its net loss narrowed to 39.2 million pounds from a 50.4 million loss in 2018 as the company invested in its technology and expanded, adding employees.

In the absence of significant game traffic on its platform, Improbable has said its main revenue source has come from defense industry projects.

The company’s next move is to develop its own games. Improbable has set up studios and bought Midwinter Entertainment, a Washington state-based SpatialOS developer, in September. No games are ready for commercial release, though Midwinter has been play-testing one title, called Scavengers, where opposing players must decide whether to join forces to defeat monsters and survive in the wilderness. The company also acquired game development consultancy the Multiplayer Guys in September and hosting firm Zeuz in February.

There are also a number of other SpatialOS games in development including Seed, a multiplayer game by Klang, and Wizard’s Wrath, a fantasy first-person-shooter from DragonfiAR.

Improbable has also recently attracted a new CFO, Dan Odell, who spent 15 years at Walt Disney Co. where he was finance chief of Maker Studios and Disney Mobile and Social Games, the company said.

But so far, the only game for sale is from NetEase Inc., a Chinese gamemaker that invested more than $50 million in Improbable in 2018. Called Nostos, the multiplayer survival title launched as an early release in December.

“It’s a great team with solid technology, and Herman Narula is a visionary CEO,” NetEase said in an emailed statement. “We chose to work with Improbable for their advanced technical capability and the increasing usability of their technology further confirmed our choice.”

Nostos got three out of five stars on game-distribution platform Steam, with reviewers hailing its promise and beautiful graphics, but complaining that the game is unpolished and buggy. NetEase developers posted in January that they realized there were some problems and had been working on improving performance issues.

“I really want to like the game, I really do but there isn’t much game here,” the top reviewer, the self-styled Trashgoblin, wrote in December.

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

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The Shareware Scene, Part 4: DOOM

The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D‘s popularity during 1992 and 1993 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard. Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid episodes, yet that number hardly begins to express the game’s real reach. Most people who acquired the free episode were content with it alone, or couldn’t afford to buy the other installments, or had friends who had bought them already and were happy to share. It thus seems reasonable to assume that the total number of Wolfenstein 3D players reached well into seven digits, putting the game’s exposure on a par with The 7th Guest, the boxed industry’s biggest hit of 1993, the game generally agreed to have put CD-ROM on the map. And yet Wolfenstein 3D‘s impact would prove even more earthshaking than that of The 7th Guest in the long run.

One telling sign of its influence — and of the way that it was just a fundamentally different type of game than The 7th Guest, that stately multimedia showpiece — is the modding scene that sprang up around it. The game’s levels were stored in a rather easily decipherable format: the “WAD” file, standing for “Where’s All the Data?” Enterprising hackers were soon writing and distributing their own level editors, along with custom levels. (The most popular of them all filled the corridors of the Nazi headquarters with facsimiles of the sickly sweet, thuddingly unclever, unbelievably grating children’s-television character Barney the Dinosaur and let you take out your frustrations with an automatic weapon.) The id boys debated fiercely among themselves whether they should crack down on the modders, but John Carmack, who had read Steven Levy’s landmark book Hackers at an impressionable age and thoroughly absorbed its heroes’ ethos of openness and transparency, insisted that people be allowed to do whatever they wished with his creation. And when Carmack put his foot down, he always got his way; at the end of the day, he was the one irreplaceable member of the id collective, and every one of the others knew it.

With Wolfenstein 3D‘s popularity soaring, the id boys started eyeing the territory of the boxed publishers greedily. They struck a deal with a company called FormGen to release a seventh, lengthier installment of the game exclusively as a boxed retail product; it appeared under the name of Spear of Destiny in September of 1992. Thus readers of magazines like Computer Gaming World could scratch their heads that fall over two separate luridly violent full-page advertisements for Wolfenstein 3D games, each with a different publisher’s name at the bottom. Spear of Destiny sold at least 100,000 copies at retail, both to hardcore Wolfenstein 3D addicts who couldn’t get enough and to many others, isolated from the typical means of shareware distribution, who came upon the game for the first time in this form.

Even Nintendo came calling with hat in hand, just a couple of years after summarily rejecting id’s offer to make a version of Super Mario Bros. 3 that ran on computers. The id boys now heeded Nintendo’s plea to port Wolfenstein 3D to the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System, whilst also grudgingly agreeing to abide by the dictates of Nintendo’s infamously strict censors. They had no idea what they had signed up for. Before they were through, Nintendo demanded that they replace blood with sweat, guard dogs with mutant rats, and Adolf Hitler, the game’s inevitable final boss, with a generic villain named the “Staatmeister.” They hated this bowdlerization with a passion, but, having agreed to do the port, they duly saw it through, muttering “Never again!” to themselves all the while. And indeed, when they were finished they took a mutual vow never to work with Nintendo again. Who needed them? The world was id’s oyster.

By now, 1992 was drawing to a close, and they all felt it was high time that they moved on to the next new thing. For everyone at id, and most especially John Carmack, was beginning to look upon Wolfenstein 3D with a decidedly jaundiced eye.

The dirty little secret that was occluded by Wolfenstein 3D‘s immense success was that it wasn’t all that great a game once it was stripped of its novelty value. Its engine was just too basic to allow for compelling level design. You glided through its corridors as if you were on a branching tram line that had been mashed together with a fairground shooting gallery, trying to shoot the Nazis who popped up before they could shoot you. The lack of any sort of in-game map meant that you didn’t even know where you were most of the time; you just kept moving around shooting Nazis until you stumbled upon the elevator to the next level. Anyone who made it through seven episodes of this — and make no mistake, there were plenty of players who did — either had an awful lot of aggression to vent or really, really loved the unprecedented look and style of the game. The levels were even boring for their designers. John Romero:

Tom [Hall] and I [designed] levels [for Wolfenstein 3D] fast. Making those levels was the most boring shit ever because they were so simple. Tom was so bored; I kept on bugging him to do it. I told him about Scott Miller’s 300ZX and George Broussard’s Acura NSX. We needed cool cars too! Whenever he got distracted, I’d tell him, “Dude, NSX! NSX!”

Tom Hall had it doubly hard. The fact was, the ultra-violence of Wolfenstein 3D just wasn’t really his thing. He preferred worlds of candy-apple red, not bloody scarlet; of precocious kids and cuddly robots, not rabid vigilantes and sadistic Nazis. Still, he was nothing if not a team player. John Romero and Adrian Carmack had gone along with him for Commander Keen, so it was only fair that he humored them with Wolfenstein 3D. But now, he thought, all of that business was finally over, and they could all start thinking about making a third Commander Keen trilogy.

Poor Tom. It took a sweetly naïve nature like his to believe that the other id boys would be willing to go back to the innocent fun of their Nintendo pastiches. Wolfenstein 3D was a different beast entirely than Commander Keen. It wasn’t remarkable just for being as good as something someone else had already done; it was like nothing anyone had ever done before. And they owned this new thing, had it all to themselves. Hall’s third Commander Keen trilogy just wasn’t in the cards — not even when he offered to do it in 3D, using an updated version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine. Cute and whimsical was id’s yesterday; gritty and bloody was their today and, if they had anything to say about it, their tomorrow as well.

Digging into their less-than-bulging bag of pop-culture reference points, the id boys pulled out the Alien film franchise. What a 3D game those movies would make! Running through a labyrinth of claustrophobic corridors, shooting aliens… that would be amazing! On further reflection, though, no one wanted the hassle that would come with trying to live up to an official license, even assuming such a thing was possible; id was still an underground insurgency at heart, bereft of lawyers and Hollywood contacts. Their thinking moved toward creating a similar effect via a different story line.

The id boys had a long-running tabletop Dungeon & Dragons campaign involving demons who spilled over from their infernal plane of existence into the so-called “Prime Material Plane” of everyday fantasy. What if they did something like that, only in a science-fiction context? Demons in space! It would be perfect! It was actually John Carmack, normally the id boy least engaged by these sorts of discussions, who proposed the name. In a scene from the 1986 Martin Scorsese movie The Color of Money, a young pool sharp played by Tom Cruise struts into a bar carrying what looks like a clarinet case. “What you got in there?” asks his eventual patsy with an intimidating scowl. As our hero opens the case to reveal his pool cue, he flashes a 100-kilowatt Tom Cruise smile and says a single word: “Doom.”

Once again, Tom Hall tried to be supportive and make the best of it. He still held the official role of world-builder for id’s fictions. So, he went to work for some weeks, emerging at last with the most comprehensive design document which anyone at id had ever written, appropriately entitled The DOOM Bible. It offered plenty of opportunity for gunplay, but it also told an earnest story, in which you, as an astronaut trapped aboard a space station under assault by mysterious aliens, gradually learned to your horror that they were literal demons out of Hell, escaping into our dimension through a rift in the fabric of space-time. It was full of goals to advance and problems to solve beyond that of mowing down hordes of monsters, with a plot that evolved as you played. The history of gaming would have been markedly different, at least in the short term, if the other id boys had been interested in pursuing Hall’s path of complex storytelling within a richly simulated embodied virtual reality.

As it was, though, Hall’s ambitions landed with a resounding thud. Granted, there were all sorts of valid practical reasons for his friends to be skeptical. It was true enough that to go from the pseudo-3D engine of Wolfenstein 3D to one capable of supporting the type of complex puzzles and situations envisioned by Hall, and to get it all to run at an acceptable speed on everyday hardware, might be an insurmountable challenge even for a wizard like John Carmack. And yet the fact remains that the problem was at least as much one of motivation as one of technology. The other id boys just didn’t care about the sort of things that had Tom Hall so juiced. It again came down to John Carmack, normally the least articulate member of the group, to articulate their objections. “Story in a game,” he said, “is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

Tom Hall held out for several more months, but he just couldn’t convince himself to get fully onboard with the game his friends wanted to make. His relationship with the others went from bad to worse, until finally, in August of 1993, the others asked him to leave: “Obviously this isn’t working out.” By that time, DOOM was easily the most hotly anticipated game in the world, and nobody cared that it wouldn’t have a complicated story. “DOOM means two things,” said John Carmack. “Demons and shotguns!” And most of its fans wouldn’t have it any other way, then or now.

Tom Hall doesn’t look very happy about working on DOOM. Note the computer he works with: a NeXT workstation rather than an MS-DOS machine. John Carmack switched virtually all development to these $10,000 machines in the wake of Wolfenstein 3D‘s success, despite their tiny market footprint. The fact that the DOOM code was thus designed to be cross-platform from the beginning was undoubtedly a factor in the plethora of ports that appeared during and after its commercial heyday — that in fact still continue to appear today any time a new platform reaches a critical mass.

Making DOOM wound up requiring more than three times as many man-hours as anything the id boys had ever done before. It absorbed their every waking hour from January of 1993 to December of that year. Early on in that period, they decided that they wouldn’t be publishing it through Apogee. Cracks in the relationship between the id boys and Scott Miller had started forming around the latter’s business practices, which were scrupulously honest but also chaotic in that way dismayingly typical of a fast-growing business helmed by a first-time entrepreneur. Reports kept reaching id of people who wanted to buy Wolfenstein 3D, but couldn’t get through on the phone, or who managed to give Apogee their order only to have it never fulfilled.

But those complaints were perhaps just a convenient excuse. The reality was that the id boys just didn’t feel that they needed Apogee anymore. They had huge name recognition of their own now and plenty of money coming in to spend on advertising and promotion, and they could upload their new game to the major online services just as easily as Scott Miller could. Why keep giving him half of their money? Miller, for his part, handled the loss of his cash cow with graceful aplomb. He saw it as just business, nothing personal. “I would have done the same thing in their shoes,” he would frequently say in later interviews. He even hired Tom Hall to work at Apogee after the id boys cast him adrift in the foreign environs of Dallas.

Jay Wilbur now stepped into Miller’s old role for id. He prowled the commercial online services, the major bulletin-board systems, and the early Internet for hours each day, stoking the the flames of anticipation here, answering questions there.

And there were lots of questions, for DOOM was actually about a bit more than demons and shotguns: it was also about technology. Whatever else it might become, DOOM was to be a showcase for the latest engine from John Carmack, a young man who was swiftly making a name for himself as the best game programmer in the world. With DOOM, he allowed himself to set the floor considerably higher in terms of system requirements than he had for Wolfenstein 3D.

System requirements have always been a moving target for any game developer. Push too hard, and you may end up releasing a game that almost no one can play; stay too conservative, and you may release something that looks like yesterday’s news. Striking precisely the right point on this continuum requires knowing your customers. The Apogee shareware demographic didn’t typically have cutting-edge computers; they tended to be younger and a bit less affluent than those buying the big boxed games. Thus id had made it possible to run Wolfenstein 3D on a two-generations-behind 80286-based machine with just 640 K of memory. The marked limitations of its pseudo-3D engine sprang as much from the limitations of such hardware as it did from John Carmack’s philosophy that, any time it came down to a contest between fidelity to the real world and speed, the latter should win.

He still held to that philosophy as firmly as ever when he moved on to DOOM, but the slow progression of the market’s trailing edge did give him more to work with: he designed DOOM for at least an 80386-based computer — 80486 recommended — with at least 4 MB of memory. He was able to mostly ignore that bane of a generation of programmers, MS-DOS’s inability to seamlessly address memory beyond 640 K, by using a relatively new piece of software technology called a “DOS extender,” inspired to a large extent by Microsoft’s recent innovations for their MS-DOS-hosted versions of Windows. By transparently shifting the processor between its real and protected modes on the fly, Rational Systems’s “DOS/4GW” could make it seem to the programmer as if all of the machine’s memory was as effortlessly available as the first 640 K. DOS/4GW was included in the latest versions of what had heretofore been something of an also-ran in the compiler sweepstakes: the C compiler made by a small Canadian company known as Watcom. Carmack chose the Watcom compiler because of DOS/4GW; DOOM would quite literally have been impossible without it. In the aftermath of DOOM‘s prominent use of it, Watcom’s would become the C compiler of choice for game development, right through the remaining years of the MS-DOS-gaming era.

Rational Systems, the makers of DOS/4GW, were clever enough to stipulate in their licensing terms that the blurb above must appear whenever a program using it is started. Thus DOOM served as a prominent advertisement for the new software technology as it exploded across the world of computing in 1994. Soon you would have to look far and wide to find a game that didn’t mention DOS/4GW at startup.

Thanks not only to these new affordances but also — most of all, really — to John Carmack’s continuing evolution as a programmer, the DOOM engine advanced beyond that of Wolfenstein 3D in several important ways. Ironically, his work on the detested censored version of Wolfenstein 3D for the Super NES, a platform designed with 2D sprite-based games in mind rather than 3D graphics, had led him to discover a lightning-fast new way of sorting through visible surfaces, known as binary space partitioning, in a doctoral thesis by one Bruce Naylor. It had a well-nigh revelatory effect on the new engine’s capabilities.

That said, the new engine did remain caught, like its predecessor, in a liminal space between 2D and true 3D; it was just that it moved significantly further on the continuum toward the latter. No longer must everything and everyone exist on the same flat horizontal plane; you could now climb stairs and jump onto desks and daises. And walls must no longer all be at right angles to one another, meaning the world needed no longer resemble one of those steel-ball mazes children used to play with.

The DOOM level editor was a much more complicated tool than its Wolfenstein 3D equivalent, reflecting the enhanced capabilities of John Carmack’s latest engine. Most notably, the designer now had at his disposal the third dimension of height.

On the other hand, walls must still all be exactly vertical, and floors and ceilings must all be exactly horizontal; DOOM allowed stairs but not hills or ramps. These restrictions made it possible to map textures onto the environment without the ugly discontinuities that had plagued Blue Sky Productions’s earlier but more “honest” 3D game Ultima Underworld. Texture mapping in DOOM, while by no means perfectly perspective-correct, was at least closer to that ideal than in the older game. DOOM makes such a useful study in game engineering because it so vividly illustrates that faking it convincingly for the sake of the player is better than simulating things which delight only the programmer of the virtual world. Its engine is perfect for the game it wants to be.

In a telling sign of John Carmack’s march toward a more complete 3D engine, the monsters in DOOM were sculpted as three-dimensional physical models by Adrian Carmack and Greg Punchatz, an artist hired just for the task. (The former is shown above.) The id boys then took snapshots of the models from eight separate angles for insertion into the game.

The value of the simple addition of height to the equation was revealed subtly — admittedly not an adverb often associated with DOOM! — as soon as you started the game. Instead of gliding smoothly about like a tram, your view now bobbed with uncanny verisimilitude as you ran about. You might never consciously notice the effect, but it made a huge difference to your feeling of really being in the world; if you tried to go back to Wolfenstein 3D after playing DOOM, you immediately had the feeling that something was somehow off.

But the introduction of varying height was most important for what it meant in terms of the game’s tactical possibilities. Now monsters could stand on balconies and shoot fireballs down at you, or you could do the same to them. Instead of a straightforward shooting gallery, the world of DOOM became a devious place of traps and ambushes. A clever hack allowed for portals such as windows, adding another level of tactical depth. (Walls with windows were actually implemented as free-standing objects in the engine rather than “real” walls; the same technique allowed for many other types of partial barriers.) Carmack’s latest engine also supported variable levels of lighting for the first time, which opened up a whole new realm of both dramatic and tactical possibility in itself; entering an unexplored pitch-dark room could be, to say the least, an intimidating prospect.

This outdoor scene nicely showcases some of the engine’s capabilities. Note the fireball flying toward you. It’s implemented as a physical object in the world like any other.

In addition, the new engine dramatically improved upon the nearly non-existent degree of physics simulation in Wolfenstein 3D. Weight and momentum were implemented; even bullets were simulated as physical objects in the world. A stereo soundscape was implemented as well; in addition to being unnerving as all get-out, it could become another vital tactical tool. Meanwhile the artificial intelligence of the monsters, while still fairly rudimentary, advanced significantly over that of Wolfenstein 3D. It was even possible to lure two monsters into fighting each other instead of you.

John Carmack also added a modicum of support for doing things other than killing monsters, although to nowhere near the degree once envisioned by Tom Hall. The engine could be used to present simple forms of set-piece puzzles, such as locked doors and keys, switches and levers for manipulating parts of the environment: platforms could move up and down, bridges could extend and retract. And in recognition of this added level of complexity, which could suddenly make the details of the geography and your precise position within it truly relevant, the engine offered a well-done auto-map for keeping track of those things.

The DOOM automap, an impressive technical achievement in itself.

Of course, none of these new affordances would matter without level designs that took advantage of them. The original plan was for Tom Hall and John Romero to create the levels. But, as we’ve seen, Hall just couldn’t seem to hit the mark that the id boys were aiming for. After finally dismissing him, they realized that Romero still needed helped to shoulder the design burden. It arrived from a most unlikely source — from a fellow far removed from the rest of the id boys in age, experience, and temperament.

Sandy Petersen was already a cult hero in certain circles for having created a tabletop RPG called Call of Cthulhu in 1981. Based on the works of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, it was the first RPG ever to convincingly transcend the kill-monsters-to-level-up-so-you-can-kill-bigger-monsters dynamic of Dungeons & Dragons. But Call of Cthulhu remained a cult game even when the tabletop-RPG boom was at its height, and by the early 1990s Petersen was serving as an in-house design consultant at the computer-game publisher MicroProse. Unhappy in this role, he sent his résumé to the upstart id.

The résumé was greeted with considerable skepticism. It’s doubtful whether any of the id boys fully grasped the significance of Petersen’s achievement with Call of Cthulhu; while they were hardcore tabletop-RPG players, they were perfectly happy with the traditional power-gaming approach of Dungeons & Dragons, thank you very much. Still, the résumé was more impressive than any other they had received, and they did urgently need a level designer… they called him in for an interview.

Their initial skepticism wasn’t lessened by the man himself. Petersen was pudgy and balding, looking even older than his already ancient 38 years, coming across rather like a genial university professor. And he was a devout Mormon to boot, washed up among this tribe of atheists and nihilists. Surely it could never work out.

Nevertheless, they decided to grant him the favor of a test before they rejected him; he had, after all, flown all the way from Baltimore to Dallas just to meet with them. They gave him a brief introduction to the DOOM engine and its level editor, and asked him to throw something together for them. Within minutes, Petersen produced a cunningly dramatic trap room, featuring lights that suddenly winked out when the player entered and a demon waiting in ambush behind a hidden door. He was hired.

Romero and Petersen proved to complement each other very well, with individual design aesthetics that reflected their personalities. Romero favored straight-up carnage — the more demon blood the better — while Petersen evinced a subtler, more cerebral approach in levels that could almost have a puzzle-like feel, where charging in with shotgun blazing was usually not the best tactic. Together the two approaches gave the game a nice balance.

Indeed, superb level design became DOOM‘s secret weapon, one that has allowed it to remain relevant to this day, when its degree of gore and violence seems humdrum, its pixels look as big as houses, and the limitations of its engine seem downright absurd. (You can’t even look up or down, for Pete’s sake. Nor is there a “jump” command, meaning that your brawny superman can be stopped in his tracks by an inconveniently high curb.)

It’s disarmingly easy to underestimate DOOM today on your first encounter with it, simply because its visual aesthetic seems so tossed-off, so hopelessly juvenile; it’s the same crude mixture of action movies, heavy-metal album covers, and affected adolescent nihilism that defined the underground game-cracking scene of the 1980s. And yet behind it all is a game design that oozes as much thought and care as it does blood. These levels were obsessed over by their designers, and then, just as importantly, extensively critiqued by the other id boys and their immediate hangers-on, who weren’t inclined to pull their punches. Whatever your opinion of DOOM as a whole and/or the changes it wrought to the culture of gaming — I for one have thoroughly mixed feelings at best on both of those subjects — one cannot deny that it’s a veritable clinic of clever level design. In this sense, it still offers lessons for today’s game developers, whether they happen to be working inside or outside of the genre it came to define.

Subtle DOOM isn’t…

DOOM‘s other, not-so-secret weapon went by the name of “deathmatch.”

There had been significant experimentation with networked gaming on personal computers in the past: the legendary designer Dani Bunten Berry had spent the last half-decade making action-strategy games that were primarily or exclusively intended to be played by two humans connected via modem; Peter Molyneux’s “god game” Populous and its sequels had also allowed two players to compete on linked computers, as had a fair number of others. But computer-to-computer multiplayer-only games never sold very well, and most games that had networked multiplayer as an option seldom saw it used. Most people in those days didn’t even own modems; most computers were islands unto themselves.

By 1993, however, the isolationist mode of computing was slowly being nibbled away at. Not only was the World Wide Web on the verge of bursting into the cultural consciousness, but many offices and campuses were already networked internally, mostly using the systems of a company known as Novell. In fact, the id boys had just such a system in their Dallas office. When John Carmack told John Romero many months into the development of DOOM that multiplayer was feasible, the latter’s level of excitement was noteworthy even for him: “If we can get this done, this is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history.” And it turned out that they could get it done because John Carmack was a programming genius.

While Carmack also implemented support for a modem connection or a direct computer-to-computer cable, it was under Novell’s IPX networking protocol that multiplayer DOOM really shined. Here you had a connection that was rock-solid and lightning-fast — and, best of all, here you could have up to four players in the same world instead of just two. You could tackle the single-player game as a team if you wanted to, but the id boys all agreed that deathmatch — all-out anarchy, where the last man standing won — was where the real fun lived. It made DOOM into more of a sport than a conventional computer game, something you could literally play forever. Soon the corridors at id were echoing with cries of “Suck it down!” as everyone engaged in frenzied online free-for-alls. Deathmatch was, in the diction of the id boys, “awesome.” It wasn’t just an improvement on what Wolfenstein 3D had done; it was something else from it that was genuinely new under the sun. “This is the shit!” chortled Romero, and for once it sounded like an understatement.

The excitement over DOOM had reached a fever pitch by the fall of 1993. Some people seemed on the verge of a complete emotional meltdown, and launched into overwrought tirades every time Jay Wilbur had to push the release date back a bit more; people wrote poetry about the big day soon to come (“The Night Before DOOM“), and rang id’s offices at all hours of the day and night like junkies begging for a fix.

Even fuddy-duddy old Computer Gaming World stopped by the id offices to write up a two-page preview. This time out, no reservations whatsoever about the violence were expressed, much less any of the full-fledged hang-wringing that had been seen earlier from editor Johnny Wilson. Far from giving in to the gaming establishment, the id boys were, slowly but surely, remaking it in their own image.

At last, id announced that the free first episode of DOOM would go up at the stroke of midnight on December 10, 1993, on, of all places, the file server belonging to the University of Wisconsin–Parkside. When the id boys tried to log on to do the upload, so many users were already online waiting for the file to appear that they couldn’t get in; they had to call the university’s system administrator and have him kick everyone else off. Then, once the file did appear, the server promptly crashed under the load of 10,000 people, all trying to get DOOM at once on a system that expected no more than 175 users at a time. The administrator rebooted it; it crashed again. They would have a hard go of things at the modest small-town university for quite some time to come.

Legend had it that when Don Woods first uploaded his and Will Crowthers’s game Adventure in 1977, all work in the field of data processing stopped for a week while everyone tried to solve it. Now, not quite seventeen years later, something similar happened in the case of DOOM, arguably the most culturally important computer game to appear since Adventure. The id boys had joked in an early press release that they expected DOOM to become “the number-one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world.” Even they were surprised by the extent to which that prediction came true.

Network administrators all over the world had to contend with this new phenomenon known as deathmatch. John Carmack had had no experience with network programming before DOOM, and in his naïveté had used a transmission method known as a broadcast package that forced every computer on the network, whether it was running DOOM or not, to stop and analyze every packet which every DOOM-playing computer generated. As reports of the chaos that resulted poured in, Carmack scrambled to code an update which would use machine-to-machine packets instead.

In the meantime, DOOM brought entire information-technology infrastructures to their knees. Intel banned the game; high-school and university computers labs hardly knew what had hit them. A sign posted at Carnegie-Mellon University before the day of release was even over was typical: “Since today’s release of DOOM, we have discovered [that the game is] bringing the campus network to a halt. Computing Services asks that all DOOM players please do not play DOOM in network mode. Use of DOOM in network mode causes serious degradation of performance for the players’ network, and during this time of finals network use is already at its peak. We may be forced to disconnect the PCs of those who are playing the game in network mode. Again, please do not play DOOM in network mode.” One clever system administrator at the University of Louisville created a program to search the hard drives of all machines on the network for the game, and delete it wherever it was found. All to no avail: DOOM was unstoppable.

But in these final months of the mostly-unconnected era of of personal computing — the World Wide Web would begin to hit big over the course of 1994 — a game still needed to reach those without modems or network cards in their computers in order to become a hit on the scale that id envisioned for DOOM. Jay Wilbur, displaying a wily marketing genius that went Scott Miller one better, decided that absolutely everyone should be allowed to distribute the first episode of DOOM on disk, charging whatever they could get for it: “We don’t care if you make money off this shareware demo. Move it! Move it in mass quantities.” For distribution, Wilbur realized, was the key to success. There are many ways to frame the story of DOOM, but certainly one of them is a story of guerrilla marketing at its finest.

The free episode of DOOM appeared in stores under many different imprints, but most, like this Australian edition, used the iconic cover id themselves provided. John Romero claims that he served as the artist’s model for the image.

The incentives for distribution were massive. If a little mom-and-pop operation in, say, far-off Australia could become the first to stick that episode onto disks, stick those disks in a box, and get the box onto store shelves, they could make a killing, free and clear. DOOM became omnipresent, inescapable all over the world. When you logged into CompuServe, there was DOOM; when you wandered into your local software store, there was DOOM again, possibly in several different forms of packaging; when you popped in the disk or CD that came with your favorite gaming magazine, there it was yet again. The traditional industry was utterly gobsmacked by this virulent upstart of a game.

As with Wolfenstein 3D, a large majority of the people who acquired the first episode of DOOM in one way or another were perfectly satisfied with its eight big levels and unlimited deathmatch play; plenty of others doubtless never bothered to read the fine print, never even realized that more DOOM was on offer if they called 1-800-IDGAMES with their credit card in hand. And then, of course, there was the ever-present specter of piracy; nothing whatsoever stopped buyers of the paid episodes from sharing them with all of their DOOM-loving friends. By some estimates, the conversion rate from the free to the paid episodes was as low as 1 percent. Nevertheless, it was enough to make the id boys very, very rich.

Sometimes $100,000 worth of orders would roll in on a single day. John Carmack and John Romero each went out and bought a new Ferrari Testarossa; now it was the turn of Scott Miller and George Broussard to look on the id boys’ cars with envy. Glossy magazines, newspapers, and television news programs all begged to visit the id offices, where they wondered over the cars in the parking lot and the unkempt young men inside screaming the most horrid scatological and sexual insults at one another as they played deathmatch. If nothing else, the id boys were certainly a colorful story.

The id boys’ cars got almost as much magazine coverage as their games. Here we see John Carmack with his Ferrari, which he had modified to produce 800 horsepower: “I want dangerous acceleration.”

Indeed, the id story is as close as gaming ever came to fulfilling one of its most longstanding dreams: that of game developers as rock stars, as first articulated by Trip Hawkins in 1983 upon his founding of Electronic Arts. Yet if Hawkins’s initial stable of developers, so carefully posed in black and white in EA’s iconic early advertisements, resembled an artsy post-punk band — the interactive version of Talking Heads — the id boys were meat-and-potatoes heavy metal for the masses — Metallica at their Black Album peak. John Romero, the id boy who most looked the part of rock star, particularly reveled in the odd sort of obsequious hero worship that marks certain corners of gamer culture. He almost visibly swelled with pride every time a group of his minions started chanting “We’re not worthy!” and literally bowed down in his presence, and wore his “DOOM: Wrote It!” tee-shirt until the print peeled off.

The impact DOOM was having on the industry had become undeniable by the time of the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June of 1994. Here everyone seemed to want in on id’s action. The phrase “first-person shooter” had yet to be invented, so the many soon-to-be-released games of the type were commonly referred to as “DOOM clones” — or, as Computer Gaming World preferred, “DOOM toos.” The same magazine, still seeming just a trifle ambivalent about it all, called it the “3D action fad.” But this was no fad; these games were here to stay. The boxed publishers who had scoffed at the shareware scene a year or two before were now all scrambling to follow id’ lead. LucasArts previewed a DOOM clone set in the Star Wars universe; SSI, looking for a new lease on life after losing their coveted Dungeons & Dragons license, had multiple games of the type, including one using a rented version of id’s own technology.

And then, inevitably, there was id’s own DOOM II: Hell on Earth. As a piece of game design, it evinced no sign of the dreaded sophomore slump that afflicts so many rock groups — this even though it used the exact same engine as its predecessor, and even though John Romero, id’s rock-star-in-chief, was increasingly busy with extracurriculars and contributed only a handful of levels. His slack was largely taken up one American McGee, the latest scruffy rebel to join the id boys, a 21-year-old former auto mechanic who had suffered through an even more hardscrabble upbringing than the two Johns. After beginning at id as a tester, he had gradually revealed an uncanny talent for making levels that combined the intricacy of Sandy Petersen’s with the gung-ho flair of John Romero’s. Now, he joined Petersen and, more intermittently, Romero to create a game that was if anything even more devious than its predecessor. The id boys had grown cockier than ever, but they could still back it up.

John Romero in 1994, doing something the other id boys wished he would do a bit more of: making a level for DOOM II.

They were approached by a New York City wheeler-and-dealer named Ron Chaimowitz who wanted to publish DOOM II exclusively to retail. He had never had anything to do with computer games before; he had made his name in the music industry, where he had broken big acts like Gloria Estefan and Julio Iglesias, then moved on to publish Jane Fonda’s workout videos through his company GoodTimes Entertainment. But he had distribution connections — and, as Jay Wilbur has so recently proved, distribution often means everything. GoodTimes sold millions of videotapes through Wal-Mart, the exploding epicenter of heartland retail, and Chaimowitz promised that his new software label would be able to leverage those connections. He further promised to spend $2 million on advertising. He would prove as good as his word in both respects. Chaimowitz’s new software label, which he named GT Interactive, manufactured an extraordinary 600,000 copies of DOOM II prior to its release, marking by far the largest initial production run in the history of computer gaming to date.

In marked contrast to the simple uploading of the first episode of the original DOOM, DOOM II was launched with all the pomp and circumstance that $2 million could provide. A party to commemorate the event took place on October 10, 1994, at a hip Gothic night club in New York City which had been re-decorated in a predictably gory manner. The party even came complete with protesters against the game’s violence, to add that delicious note of controversy that any group of rock stars worth their salt requires.

At the party, a fellow named Bob Huntley, owner of a small Houston software company, foisted a disk on John Romero containing “The Dial-Up Wide-Area Network Games Operation,” or “DWANGO.” Using it, you could dial into Huntley’s Houston server at any time to play a pick-up game of DOOM deathmatch with a stranger who might happen to be on the other side of the world. Romero expressed his love for the concept in his trademark profane logorrhea: “I like staying up late and I want to play people whenever the fuck I want to and I don’t want to have to wake up my buddy at three in the morning and go, ��Hey, uh, you wanna get your skull cracked?’ This is the thing that you can dial into and just play!” He convinced the other id boys to give DWANGO their official endorsement, and the service went live within weeks. For just $8.96 per month, you could now deathmatch any time you wanted. And thus another indelible piece of modern gaming culture, as well as a milestone in the cultural history of the Internet, fell into place.

DOOM was becoming not just a way of gaming but a way of life, one that left little space in the hearts of its most committed adherents for anything else. Some say that gaming became better after DOOM, some that it became worse. One thing that everyone can agree on, however, is that it changed; it’s by no means unreasonable to divide the entire history of computer gaming into pre-DOOM and post-DOOM eras. Next time, then, in the concluding article of this series, we’ll do our best to come to terms with that seismic shift.

(Sources: the books Masters of Doom by David Kushner, Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D and Game Engine Black Book: DOOM by Fabien Sanglard, and Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke; Retro Gamer 75; Game Developer premiere issue and issues of June 1994 and February/March 1995; Computer Gaming World of July 1993, March 1994, July 1994, August 1994, September 1994. Online sources include “Apogee: Where Wolfenstein Got Its Start” by Chris Plante at Polygon, “Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Era of First-Person Shooters” by David L. Craddock at Shack News, Benj Edwards’s interview with Scott Miller for Gamasutra, Jeremy Peels’s interview with John Romero for PC Games N, and Jay Wilbur’s old Usenet posts, which can now be accessed via Google Groups. And a special thanks to Alex Sarosi, better known in our comment threads as Lt. Nitpicker, for pointing out to me out how important Jay Wilbur’s anything-goes approach to distribution of the free episode of DOOM was to the game’s success.

The original Doom episodes and Doom II are available as digital purchases on GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-shareware-scene-part-4-doom/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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galax-ygrrl · 5 years ago

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Mobile App Development Defined

With the detonating fame of cell phones and tablets, mobile application development in Singapore is turning into an undeniably well known mechanism of programming creation. Truth be told, mobile application incomes are anticipated to hit almost $600 billion of every 2020. This productive and developing industry is drawing in organizations from each edge of the commercial center searching for returns.

The formation of mobile applications draws quite a bit of its underlying foundations from customary programming development. The final product, in any case, is programming expected to use the interesting highlights and equipment of mobile gadgets. Current cell phones are furnished with Bluetooth, NFC, gyroscopic sensors, GPS, cameras thus considerably more. They can be utilized for virtual or enlarged reality, scanner tag checking and that's just the beginning. Mobile applications ought to use the full scope of cell phone highlights, which is more difficult than one might expect.

With work area PC programming development, software engineers must make an application that can work on a base arrangement of equipment. The equivalent goes for mobile applications, however the equipment changes in this case are significantly more insignificant. Simultaneously, the equipment in cell phones and tablets doesn't exactly coordinate that in PCs and personal computers, which implies mobile applications must be intended to show ideal execution.

For instance, a gaming application would be constrained in its graphical components as a result of the less-amazing illustrations processors in mobile gadgets. So, distributed computing is making it simpler than any time in recent memory to achieve mobile gaming. Well known games, for example, Fortnite, Hearthstone, and PUBG associate players across PCs, telephones and even consoles.

Mobile application development contemplations

Unraveling the issue of execution on some random gadget is at last reliant on building up an application locally on that gadget. This implies planning the code explicitly for the equipment on a specific gadget. In the case of iOS gadgets, this demonstrates very simple, as mobile engineers just need adaptations of the application for the iPhone and iPad to accomplish all inclusive ease of use. For Android gadgets, be that as it may, each cell phone and tablet runs on various equipment and differing variants of the working framework.

Electronic applications, then again, don't rely upon the gadget; they run off of an internet browser, making them less expensive to create and simpler to get to. The issue with web applications, be that as it may, is that their presentation doesn't come close to that of a local application. For instance, with web applications, you can't utilize the telephone's full highlights or send legitimate notices, and they look less expert.

Kinds of mobile applications and programming dialects

Like work area programming, mobile applications are structured utilizing a wide scope of programming dialects and systems. While the most well known working frameworks, iOS and Android, have worked superbly of normalizing the sorts of mobile application development accessible for software engineers, applications can at present differ. Here are some mobile application types:

- Native applications.

These are applications made for a particular stage (iOS or Android) utilizing the product development apparatuses and dialects upheld by those working frameworks. iOS utilizes Xcode and Objective-C, though Android utilizes Eclipse and Java. Designers regularly favor local applications due to their capacity to use a gadget's maximum capacity. With keen home gadgets getting progressively omnipresent, designers are making one of a kind applications that coordinate things like wearables, IoT sensors and shrewd screens for customized encounters. Obviously, development for every stage is actually quite difficult and is an exorbitant and tedious procedure that doesn't work for all organizations.

- HTML5 applications.

In view of the close all inclusive norms of web advancements – to be specific, HTML5, JavaScript and CSS – this kind of mobile application takes a compose once-run-anyplace way to deal with mobile development. Applications created in this structure are perfect with numerous stages and require just negligible changes to guarantee total usefulness in each working framework. HTML5 applications can at present send work area notices and trigger associations through email and different roads. Try not to limit web applications' ease of use, yet remember that clients are bound to utilize a local application. An examination from Oracle found that recent college grads invest 90% of their mobile energy in applications, contrasted and 10% in internet browsers.

- Hybrid applications.

These applications involve the making of a holder created in the local framework that makes it conceivable to insert a HTML5 application inside it. This permits applications to utilize the different and one of a kind components of every local framework. Before making your own marked application, consider rather using previously existing applications for more noteworthy effect. For instance, by utilizing mobile-concentrated showcasing on administrations, for example, Yelp, Facebook and Google Maps, you can direct people to both your site and physical area.

Programming development packs

Mobile application development expects access to programming development packs (SDKs) that give a situation through which software engineers can plan and test code in a recreated mobile condition. Be that as it may, making an application doesn't require full utilization of these packs. For instance, designers can make mobile games utilizing Unity and afterward utilize the Android SDK to guarantee its deliverability on mobile gadgets. Creating applications for iOS requires a paid iOS designer permit, while the Android SDK is openly accessible to clients.

iOS (47%) and Android (52%) have comparable mobile pieces of the overall industry, however producing for Apple is to some degree simpler in that you don't have to stress over a wide scope of gadgets from various makers. Despite which working framework you pick, in any case, there are hindrances to section.

Mobile application development administrations

Mobile application development is evolving continually. Regularly, like clockwork or somewhere in the vicinity, another adaptation of a working framework turns out with special highlights that mobile applications can use. Creating for a particular rendition of the working framework, or in any event, for a local working framework, as a rule expects engineers to attempt various answers for locate the one that suits their development needs.

Mobile application development prerequisites

Inability to stay aware of development updates could cause disastrous cybersecurity issues. Consider the expenses of building up an application, which can extend from $5,000 to $15,000 to begin, in addition to the expenses for proceeded with development and support. In the event that Android or iOS discharges another OS update, you can be delisted rapidly for being contrary.

Building up an application is valuable, yet just on the off chance that you build up an extraordinary application. A poor client experience will drive clients away, leaving you basically advertising for your opposition. Be perceptive of making a client experience and reasonable about spending plans, and you'll be well on your way of becoming the best mobile app developer in Singapore.

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kokania00 · 5 years ago

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Beginner's Guide to Buying a Desktop Computer

People certainly aren't camping outside stores in the rain to get the latest and greatest desktop computer these days, but PCs are far from dead. Simply put, there are certain functions that mobile devices and laptops either can't do or can't do nearly as well as a desktop.

Not to mention, there's no beating the price. A budget desktop is going to be miles ahead of a budget laptop. It's expensive to make things small. The small size is what appeals to some people when choosing a new computer, but these days big honking towers aren't your only choice.

Styles of desktop computers

There's a lot more variation and choice in the desktop form factor, which is great in some ways, but also makes the buying process that much more complicated. You can find computers in each of these categories at a variety of price points, so the most important thing to keep in mind is how you plan to use your desktop.

Tower

The classic desktop form factor, towers have stuck around for good reason. It's hard to fit a lot of power into smaller devices like a laptop or tablet for a reasonable price. The power to price ratio of tower computers is pretty much unbeatable.

There's also a lot more flexibility with a tower. There's more room to upgrade and expand the system when newer technology comes out, whereas with smaller devices you may just have to buy a whole new system.

Towers do, however, take up quite a bit of space and if space is at a premium in your home, a tower could be out of the question. They also require a separate monitor, keyboard, and mouse. There are some cases where those accessories are included, or you can get a discount if you buy them at the same time as the computer, but plan for buying those when you're making up your budget.

All-in-One

All-in-one computers offer a simple and space-saving set up. These are, in essence, a cross between a desktop and a laptop. They feature a large monitor with all the necessary components built into the back or base.

The small design gives you a lot more flexibility with placement and keeps your work area clutter free. Plus, because everything is all in one, set up usually just involves plugging it in. You do still need a separate keyboard and mouse however.

Because these computers are smaller, they aren't as powerful as a tower and you can't customize and expand them (although this also makes them much simpler). There's also the issue that if the monitor breaks, you need a whole new computer.

Mini and Stick PCs

These computers use mobile components to keep them small (like all-in-ones). As such, they're not very powerful, but they're extremely portable. Mini PCs are small enough to be hidden behind a monitor or TV set up and stick PCs are slightly larger than a thumb drive. Because of the small size, they're not very powerful and internal expansion is limited to impossible.

While you won't be able to do any advanced gaming or multimedia editing, they work great for day-to-day tasks, browsing the Internet, and watching media. Set up is extremely easy and they're quite versatile in that you can use it as a home office during the day, and then plug it into a TV for a home theater at night.

The different operating systems

The question of which operating system (OS) to go with isn't asked as often with desktops as it is with tablets and smartphones, but it's still something to consider.

Windows 10

This is definitely the most common desktop OS so you'll have a big selection of hardware as well as compatible third party software. It's designed around a touchscreen interface, though it still works great with the classic mouse and keyboard, so if you don't buy a touchscreen monitor you won't have any problems.

macOS Sierra

If you're in a family of Apple lovers, then Mac could be for you. Sierra is only found on Mac computers, so you're limited in your hardware, but these are well-made computers that historically have fewer problems with viruses. A Mac will also pair seamlessly with your other Apple devices and programs.

Chrome OS

If you're just looking for simple, no-frills computing the Chrome OS will be right up your ally. The OS runs custom apps and cloud-based programs as opposed to other operating systems that run software. It's not suited for demanding tasks like gaming, but it's great for email, file-sharing, and browsing. You will always need to be connected to the internet, but that's usually not an issue with desktops.

Types of desktop computers

Not everyone is going to use a desktop for the same reasons, and how you use it will influence the type of computer you buy. After all, you don't need a complex, high-powered machine just to check your email.

Business PCs

These PCs are stripped back, no-frills machines that don't allow for advanced computing, but are easy to service and upgrade. They also usually offer extra security, software and hardware certification programs, software support, and some even have on-site tech support.

Workstations

These are specialized PCs that feature multicore processors and intense graphics. They're perfect for scientific calculations, media creation, and other high-powered tasks that wouldn't be even remotely possible on a laptop.

Gaming PCs

These are (as the name suggests) made for gaming. They feature specialized graphics cards, extremely fast multicore processors, and many have flashy design elements although those generally cost more. Upgradability is a must as newer and more immersive games are released.

Learn the lingo

There's a lot of terminology you need to know before buying a PC so that you actually know what you're buying. This list from PCWorld goes into further detail, but here's a quick breakdown of the terms you should know and understand.

Processor (CPU)

This is the brain of your computer. Processor speed is measured in gigahertz (GHz) and generally, the higher the clock speed, the better the performance and the higher the price. The more cores a processor has the better the performance as well. Desktops either have an Intel or an AMD processor.

Memory

The random-access memory (RAM) determines how good your computer is at multitasking. The higher the RAM the better, especially for high-powered tasks like gaming. For simple tasks like email and web browsing 2GB is fine, but for anything more advanced than that, look for a computer with 4GB or more.

Internal Storage

The amount of storage your desktop has determines how much stuff you can keep on your computer. Desktops almost always have more storage than laptops and for a fraction of the cost. It's also easy to upgrade your hard drive for more storage, or upgrade to a solid-state drive.

Wait for the best price, but don't wait too long

Once you've figured out which computer you want (and have read plenty of reviews to ensure that it's actually up to snuff), it's time to buy. This can be tricky with a desktop because they can be pretty expensive and technology is always evolving.

While it can be tempting to just buy the computer when you're ready, you might miss out on a great deal or the latest tech. Shop regularly for a stretch of time instead of spending an entire day looking around. You're more likely to catch a deal that way. Also check the release dates of new models. You'll most likely get a good deal on an older model, or you might just want the latest technology.

Waiting for a sale also means you can bump up your computer specs with the money you save, meaning your computer is a bit more "future-proof" than if you were to just go for the cheapest one you can find.

However, this is a balancing act. If you spend too much time waiting around for the perfect deal or the latest model, you're never going to end up buying your desktop. So be patient and wait for sales, but once you find the model you want in an acceptable price range, go ahead and buy it.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT SORT

You don't have to be. But the smarter ones, particularly angels, can give good advice.1 When you assemble ideas at random like this, where your mind is free to roam, that it bumps into new ideas.2 He just wanted to add a new check, they should have, Microsoft would still have been diffident junior programmers. It's always alarming when two people trying the same experiment get widely divergent results. What's important about startups is the speed.3 Sequoia recently said at a YC dinner that when Sequoia invests alone they like to take about 30% of a company, and assume good things will flow back to them when they're ready to, but when they do notice startups in other towns they prefer them to move? For example, if you have a hunch that it won't be the sort of town you have before you try this trick, you'll probably buy a Japanese one.4 Structurally the idea is probably bad.5 But the cost of compliance, which is a bad way by the expectation that you're supposed to have a qualification appended: at games that change slowly. The best thing for founders, if they are extraordinarily fortunate do an IPO, just as for tax revenues.

People.6 I really wanted to know. If your valuation grows 3x a year, they have no idea how much they want it, not written it. Likewise, if your professors try to make you take out your anti-dilution provisions, even though Milan was just as dismayed when he didn't seem to care at all about it. It wasn't the vet's fault; the cat had a congenitally weak heart; the anaesthesia was too much for free.7 People in past times were much like us. The Sub-Zero 690, one of the ways we describe the good ones. It has to be decided by the market. That's not surprising; it takes a while to hit your stride. People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic union organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking now?

I think the place to do it.8 Some of the more adventurous catalog companies. Imagine if you were going back to the institutional investors who supplied our next round of funding to get started is so nearly universal that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you're getting above yourself. Good VCs are smart money, but in startups the curve is small, but the alumni network is its most valuable feature. Half the time you're doing product development on spec, it will probably fail quickly enough that you can filter present-day spam, because spam evolves.9 Identity Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious identity is one of the reasons artists in fifteenth century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.10 Often they have to, but to get the best deals. Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

Though actually there is something underneath. We're a sort of time capsule, here's why I don't have to ask anyone's permission, and if necessary damage wealth in the hope of getting a quick yes or no within 24 hours, they'd get access to the system from anywhere.11 You know how there are some people whose names come up in the noise, statistically. One is a combination of shyness and laziness.12 Surely this is a game with only two outcomes: wealth or failure. You don't seem to keep track of opinions that get people in trouble today.13 We made software for building online stores.14 Mostly because of the increasing number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found that when I come home to Boston.

Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way exercise keeps people young. That's why we advise groups to ignore issues like scalability, internationalization, and heavy-duty security at first. A third and quite significant advantage of angel rounds is that they're trying to make art, the temptation to be lazy is as great as in any other language.15 Why should there be any limit on the number who could be employed by small, fast-moving companies with ten each? So at the last round of funding. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. So far so good.16 Third, I do it because it yields the best results. I could put it online.

Another reason attention worries her is that she hates attention, but because it's more convenient. Rounds Whatever the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the programmers work down the list, for example. By 2012 that number was 18 years. The ones who keep going are driven by the same underlying cause: the number of sufficiently good founders starting companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.17 And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. A function type. Those characters you type are a complete, finished product. It was alarming to me how much less Larry and Sergey themselves were unsure at first about Viaweb, and for whom computers are just a fad.

Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum, there are 26 year olds with good ideas involving databases? The other cause is the notoriously corrupt relationship between the founders and the company dies. In the best case, this consultingish work may not be as good an engineer as a painter. But from what I've heard the founders didn't just give in and take whoever the VCs wanted. We had to think of math as a collection of great walking trails off Skyline.18 9999 free!19 But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language, the shorter the program not simply in characters, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something fast, listen to users, I guarantee you'll be surprised how far it would go.

It was like being told to think than as sources of information. And Aristotle's explanation of the ultimate goal of philosophy in Book A of the Metaphysics implies that philosophy should be useful too. I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of channels. I got from botnets. They'd face the mother of all boycotts. Instead he'll spend most of my time writing essays lately. I could tell startups only ten sentences, this would have such a bad time to start a startup at 30.20 Eventually I realized why.

Notes

Which means the right not to make people richer. Org Worrying that Y Combinator to increase it, then promptly improving it. Note: This is why they tend to be the least VC-like.

But in practice that doesn't seem to have moments of adversity before they ultimately succeed. But we invest in it, but at least a partial order. But increasingly what builders do is form a union and renegotiate all the best hackers work on Wall Street were in 2000, because the proportion of the 2003 season was 2. Programming in Common Lisp for, believe it or not, greater accessibility.

Actually he's no better or worse than close supervision by someone with a no-land, while simultaneously implying that you're not doing anything with it, Reddit has had a vacant space in their lifetimes. Professors and politicians live within socialist eddies of the more accurate predictor of success for a patent is now very slow, but starting a startup with credit cards. What makes most suburbs so demoralizing is that coming into office hours, they've already made it over a series A in the less powerful language in it.

Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. Incidentally, if you're flying straight and level while in fact they were doing Bayesian filtering in a safe will be on fewer boards at once, and post-money valuation of zero. One way to avoid companies that got built this?

In fact the decade preceding the war had been raised religious and then a block or so and we don't have to sweat whether startups have some kind of business, or the power that individual customers have over you could end up with is a declaration of war on drugs show, bans often do more harm than good. If you want to figure this out. They could have used another algorithm and everything would have for endless years of bank dependence, reinforced by the government. So by agreeing to uncapped notes.

It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because the Depression was one of them. Well, almost.

This prospect will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up. It's when they're on the partner you talk to corp dev people are magnified by the desire to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a lawsuit just as on a saturday, he was 10. If you're not convinced that what you're doing is almost pure discovery.

Who continued to sit on corporate boards till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933. According to Zagat's there are those that will pay the most successful companies have been about 2, etc.

Even the desire to get going, e.

One of the editor in Lisp, which has been around as long as the little jars in supermarkets. Thanks to Paul Buchheit points out that it's hard to think of a single project is a fine sentence, but a big VC firm wants to the next Apple, maybe you don't need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much effort on sales. Mayle, Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce?

There was no great risk in doing something different if it were.

Plus ca change. Xxvii. Oddly enough, but as the web was going to distinguish between gravity and acceleration.

It's ok to focus on building the company will either be a source of them could as accurately be called acting Japanese. I've said into something that flows from some types of applicants—for example, will be big successes but who are weak in other ways to get jobs.

In fact the decade preceding the war had been bred to look you over. Currently, when we created pets. The speed at which point it suddenly stops.

They don't know whether you're a YC startup you have the perfect life, and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to change. Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp seems to have to worry about the same motives. But it takes a startup enough to be the least VC-like. You leave it to colleagues.

William R. This was made particularly clear in our own Web site. Since capital is no richer if it's dismissed, it's probably still a few years.

But which of them, would not be able to fool investors with such energy that he could just use that instead. Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives were, they'd have something more recent.

Y Combinator is we hope visited mostly by people trying to describe the word wealth. It would help Web-based applications. In both cases the process dragged on for months.

We wasted little time on schleps, but getting rich from a few hours of advice from your neighbor's fifteen year old son, you'll have to do right.

Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried that or from speaking to our scholarship though without the spur of poverty. If anyone wanted to than because they need. 43.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #event #startup #goal #idea #Common #Note #reason #Street

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