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3grealtors · 11 months ago
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seanplotkin-blog · 8 years ago
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Sean Plotkin - Things You Need To Understand Concerning The Guy
Sean Plotkin can be a productive entrepreneur totally committed to his firms and consumers with more than 20 years of business progress and expenditure knowledge. He has a broad method of Realestate and Properties Management, Bail Bonds, Broker together with Overseas Enterprise amongst others.
A few of Sean Plotkin’s qualified job and integrated firms include:
Angels Bail Bonds
Angels Bail Bonds is the Southern California’s biggest bail bond company. Your family-held bail-bond business has been helping persons all over the state of California supporting that beloved individual from prison since 1956. Most of the compassionate, professional bail professionals know the ins and outs of every offender in Red, La, San Bernardino together with Riverside Counties, they are experts at assisting first time appellants article help for costs from DWIs to Domestic Violence. Sean Plotkin has been emphasizing loss prevention and unique underwriting considerations at Angels Bailbonds for 21 years in order to assist their consumers better than the competitors.
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Southern California Multiple-Household & Commercial Property Investor
Designed for people that are considering investing in a multiple-family commercial property which includes loads of rewards when contemplating this kind of expense. Sean has established quite strong connections with several adjustable-family and commercial real estate landlords and developers. Additionally, he has a close network of real-estate attorneys, trust & estate lawyers. If his clients are involved regarding the progress, security, and risk page of the benefits, it is crucial that they have the very best & most skilled coordinator in the marketplace.
A current owner may market their house and find a larger home or better-positioned ton that will increase the long-term return on their value in a somewhat protected investment software.
Long Beach Property Management
Presently managing accommodations through the entire Long Beach location. Companies include managing single family houses, condos, condominium houses, and commercial units.
Following the requirements of their occupants and property owners by giving skilled supervision providers. The success in assembly these needs is really a result of knowledge, devotion, and target from the staff, which never compromises quality customer support. Sean Plotkin continues to be working for the organization for more than 12 years currently, and his triumphs include enhancing benefit, maximizing income, reducing continuing bills and re-position for maximum return.
Uncomplicated Investments
Seanis professional experience involves connecting buyers/sellers with exclusive goods such as for instance fastest-growing highend champagne in the Unitedstates particularly Beloved Joie wine. Working being an buyer and significance/move expert the main organization is holding and handling their clientis investments for investment applications.
Major Rock
Primary Rock can be a primary merchant and wholesaler of dimensional stone (granite, pebble, quartzite, onyx, soapstone, sandstone, limestone and more). They're committed to guaranteeing excellent quality and selection of amazing, uncommon, and popular pure rock at competitive prices.
A few of Sean Plotkin's results while working together with Key Jewel were having the company commenced, protected money, obtaining destinations and discuss contracts for over 10 years.
Major Alliance
Performing as being a dealer for 13 decades, Sean has suggested multifamily, retail, professional and industrial levels. The Principal Coalition (TPA) can be an independent advisory team enabling cross-border financial progress between top household-managed enterprises. TPA serves an important purpose as senior industrial counsel to the proprietors and senior supervision of the select band of closely-held corporations and family businesses productive in-growth areas.
TPA recognizes geopolitical trends and converts these into professional opportunities. By dealing with fundamentals and sovereigns, they can mitigate danger and create opportunities that offer the specified outcome. TPA pulls on its team's comprehensive knowledge and systems across sectors and geographies to create ecological advancement techniques and benefits.
Sean Plotkin’s Knowledge
Sean Plotkinis powerful informative history and skilled work expertise permit him to supply a unique standpoint to the authorized and financial market.
Sean visited the Company of Real-Estate Supervision to become a Certified Property Manager while in the Order/Temperament subject.
As a Certified Property Supervisor (CPM) he became an actual estate expert honored by the Company of Property Management (IREM) and acquiesced by the National Organization of Realtors (NAR).
The Company provides a thorough program created entirely for home and resource administrators working with significant portfolios of house types. The designation is seen to be one of the sectoris premier real estate administration recommendations. You will find more than 8,600 professional Real Estate executives who store this name global. CPM people manage approximately $900 billion in real estate resources.
To attain the CPM class, a candidate must pass about five essential lessons written by IREM, addressing marketing, human resources, asset management and integrity and finish a management project on a subject building. IREM also inspects the choice's knowledge and asks for three professional referrals.
The businessman also joined the California State-University-Dominguez Hills getting a Grasp of Business Management (MBA) in Overseas Company field, during this period, among other activities he was actively playing Philosophy Research.
When attending the University of California located in Santa Barbara, Sean Plotkin attained a Bachelor of Disciplines (BA), Bachelor of Research (BS) (Faith/Anthropology). One of the extracurricular activities inside the School, he created himself in some sports clubs such as for example Chess, Triathlon and Water-Polo. Furthermore the Argument Team and Del Playa Drinking Team.
Sean Plotkin's father, Dory, founded a for continuing education to retain bail brokers upto-date on the new laws and renew their minds to the aged versions, called Plotkin School of Continuous Bailbonds Training wherever Sean graduated with a Help Agent Permit in 1995.
Sean was also part of the Board at Costa Mesa Aquatics Team (CMAC) which will be an marine team plan designed for the younger types to support water-polo and boating. CMAC offers an affordable aquatics strategy with all the aid of skilled staff. Reaching out to underrepresented numbers to boost their attention and involvement in aquatic sports. Likewise, distinguishing and modeling abilities in the earliest probable stages of an individual's running improvement and developing the cityis awareness of health and lifestyle great things about pool activity.
A few of Sean's jobs during his volunteering engaged supporting the president along with his duties by accomplishing certain designated jobs from time to time.
The corporation focused on leading regular monthly gatherings where they'd handle a budget and all-club expenses, approve new associates and account deletions, document the committee’s activities, make recommendations towards the committees regarding their function. All of this often describing an energetic, persistent program of club assistance, societal, and fundraising actions. The board of directors could also willpower people if essential, accept the president’s nomination of people to all or any standing committees, report to the club all action followed by the table, promote club clients to go to board gatherings whenever you want as well as doing other tasks as could possibly be referred to it from the membership.
Sean Plotkin’s Professional Endorsements
Among several of the Qualified Recommendations that several colleagues, co workers, purchasers and organization partners of Sean Plotkin have shared with us we can list the following:
"Excellent Customer Support"
"Sean has broad and sharpened Administration abilities"
"He appreciates HOWTO put up a good Marketing Strategy."
"Appreciates how-to steer and earn any Arbitration."
"He is a great strategist, whether it is Planning, Organization or Discussions, he understands just how to do it."
"Warm, empathetic and reputable whenever he's Speaking in Public Areas."
"Sean has aided thus significantly Acquiring my Business."
"Good understanding of Socialmedia."
"This Is The greatest Dealer and Dealer I am aware."
"Our Ventures have become probably thanks to him."
"Due To the Property Supervision of his business, my assets are tougher today"
"I enjoy working together with him, he's a real Head and understands how exactly to Create A Staff."
"Sean Plotkin guided me through safe and sound Investment Attributes, I really enjoy his guidance"
"Seanis familiarity with Real Estate Advancement is massive; they can effortlessly assist you to grow your organization."
"Among The biggest Entrepreneurs I understand, he has been able to handle a number of stable and trusted corporations altogether."
"the most effective crew of Buyers"
"One of Many finest advisors/instructors I've had"
"Legitimate Property Economics experience"
"My sales have increased from the time I began company with Plotkin."
"Sean is very competent when it comes to Creating A Fresh Company."
"He served me take my organization to Overseas Areas"
"Qualified and skilled Bail Bondsman, his assistance was a huge help at complicated situations"
"Plotkin has been doing so much for both Money and Lawful grounds"
Sean’s Published Book
Sean Plotkin perhaps authored (at a very young age) a book called "A Young Child's Area Is Not In A Volcano" released back May of 1991; it's a kids' book where Sean produced the essence of his youth. Pairing hype with reality Sean, his grandpa, and two pals go on a magic-carpet experience on the water to some volcano on a rural area where they have some intriguing, unique and incredible journeys.
The book is onsale on Amazon, and it has gathered a five-stars pace so far. Among some of the critiques we can find extraordinary statements like: "In his guide, the eleven-yearold Plotkin exhibited intelligence beyond his decades. The guide was entertaining to read, and it was one of my favorite books that I've actually read. I'm only 12 years of age, but I'd advise this to all, youthful and old alike" or "A voyage" and "I used to be inundated in the exciting themes and information that abounded in this book. Written by a child for children, Plotkin appreciates precisely what to write."
Private & Family Life
Dorry Plotkin (Sean's dad, early motivation, and tutor) was a-successful entrepreneur and real-estate trader who going back 23 decades of his living fought Multiple Sclerosis. Dorry continued to function and definitely jogged his business before morning he perished. (1949-2012)
Sean published the next correspondence with a friends of his daddy, Dorry Plotkin after he passed away a couple of years ago:
Beloved friend,
I wish to thank you for your time you shared with my father. It's been a to possess you be part of his living. His passing got me very by surprise, and I am still collecting my air to carry on preventing the combat. Several, many folks have come to me wondering "can there be something I will do to greatly help? Please I would like to learn". To the, used to do not understand how to use their love and help until yesterday evening. I would prefer to everyone which was a part of Dorryis living to publish an account or reports, good or poor, brief or prolonged about their encounters and memories of Dorry on his sites which I am creating bailquad.com and dorryplotkin.com.
Being which you were a crucial a part of his living and that I was not at all times conscious of everything, every place and every detail in his life or may I have been since he was playfully deceptive and certainly unbiased to even his death, I'd prefer to observe in case you would-be prepared to detail the locations he frequented, them all as possible think of regardless of how unnecessary they could have appeared in order to help me locate individuals who remember Dorry. I'd prefer to obtain contact info, e-mail, contact number, posting address, title and dynamics of their companionship. In this way I will have my staff be in effect with these persons and ask them for the funeral, as well as depart their stories Dorryis legacy on his website.
I am hoping that once we get one, we find another and another inside the neverending resource of his pals and their shared experiences. This task must be performed as swiftly as possible, we have a funeral for Dorry, but I have forced it back to ensure that we could have time for you to complete the duty. If you're unable to participate professionally, I would appreciate your expertise and memories so that I will tell others to go what your location is unable.
The soreness and pit that I feel are thus vast and overwhelming and one of the only techniques ICAN convey my father back is through the tales, adulation, and perspectives of the effectiveness where he managed his existence. Please support my children and me in this journey to become better able to recognize and remember Dorry permanently on. Thanks greatly if you are a lively element of my dad's life.
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symbianosgames · 8 years ago
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Hi! My name is Coray Seifert, I’m the Director of Production here at Experiment 7. I’ve been working on VR games in various capacities for the past 4 years, first with Impeller Studios, then with Autodesk’s AR/VR Interactive Group, but most meaningfully with the fine folks here at Experiment 7. Over that time, I’ve made a number of horrific mistakes that haunt my dreams to this day. I’d like to share some of them with you!
If the beer is virtual, are the calories real?
Below you’ll find 7 lessons I learned working on VR strategy games at Experiment 7. I wanted to put this list together so others who are just getting into VR development can avoid some of the same challenges.
Why spend the time to share key learnings with potential competition? The bottom line for our corner of the industry is that the more teams there are making great VR games, the more consumers we’ll see adopting VR platforms, and the better the market will be for all of us. Just like how Tesla shares their best practices with their competition to help drive their industry forward, we hope that creating a marketplace of shared ideas will help the VR game creation space move forward as well.
In traditional game development, we have experiences, best practices, and cautionary tales that effectively guide our efforts. Platform migrations have happened in the past and we’ve tweaked our best practices accordingly. What works on PC might not work on console due to input differences, processing power or consumer expectations, so we modify our approach slightly to adapt for the new medium. 
VR, on the other hand, is a complete paradigm shift. Not only do our best practices need to be refreshed, but some of the core tenants of what we believe about game development need to be unlearned. Moving the player’s first person camera may make them sick. 2D planes for VFX can be invalidated due to stereoscopic rendering. UI and UX design has to be completely rethought from the ground up. This is a complete phase shift from the old way of doing things. 
That's no UI object...
I find myself annoyed by long-form lists where you have to scroll forever to see if the pillars of the article are worth investing your time in, so here are the 7 lessons, in brief:
Double down on engineering – More tech needs, less asset budget. Trade artists for engineers.
Make sure someone on your team has shipped something in VR – Ideally your tech lead.
Don’t skimp on preproduction – Prototype aggressively, define hardware/QA/pipelines first.
Respect the minspec – Pick your platforms, identify your minspec, and stick to it.
Realism is important, but comfort is king – Use realistic proportions, but framerate/comfort is priority.
Start small – Maintain vision, but start with a fraction of what you’re eventually trying to build.
Expect the unexpected – Prepare for rapidly evolving hardware, dev tools and marketplace.
If you just came for the pillars, I hope they’re helpful in your adventures. If you’re here for context, let’s dive into the details!
Let’s start at the beginning.
When you’re building your team for your VR project, you’ll want to staff heavier on the engineering side than you would for a traditional game project. Further, it's optimal to populate your team with a greater percentage of experienced developers than normal. 
While more engineers doesn’t perfectly equate to increased velocity, the simple fact is that every problem you face will require new solutions, a risk that can be meaningfully mitigated with people power. Even if you’re using a proven commercial game engine, everything from feature development to optimization takes a long time on VR and involves a significant learning curve. These are new knots to untangle and for the most part, very few people across the industry have meaningful experience in VR.
Here’s how I would recommend adjusting your engineering team size: 
>10 total headcount: 3x
11-50 total headcount: 2x
50+ total headcount: 1.5x
If you’re working with a fixed budget on your game, this may mean scaling down your art headcount, which isn’t great in and of itself. One mitigating factor is that stereoscopic rendering means you're basically rendering everything twice. A game of comparable scope simply has fewer pixels it can push through the renderer.
Accordingly, the content requirements for VR are lower than other platforms. If you think back to past generations of console games and the scope of art created for those games – both in terms of the raw asset density and in terms of the amount of polish per asset – you can get a good sense of where VR is in its current (2017) iteration. 
In an ideal world, I recommend a small VR art team laden with senior artists who enjoy new technology challenges and plenty of technical artists who are passionate about the medium.
The good news on this front is that great engineers are frequently drawn to new technology problems, just as great artists can be drawn to new mediums of expression.  You can harness that excitement to bring fantastic people into your organization.
It’s one thing to read about the technical limitations of VR or talk to someone who has shipped a game in VR, but don’t talk yourself into thinking you can make it without significant input from someone who released a commercial product on the platform. You need someone who has directly worked on solving the unique problems of the medium. It can be a freelancer, consultant, or advisor, but ideally that person is someone who is a core member of your team. 
The best case is if this person works in the engineering vertical of your company, even more so if your VR expert is the head of your engineering team. This allows that person to translate those experiences working on the platform directly through their team, providing that intrinsic, internalized knowledge of VR-specific challenges to everyone working on the technology that drives your game.
Experiment 7 is lucky in that our Technical Director, Mario Grimani, has been working in VR since the days of duct tape and bailing wire. One of our engineers worked on open source VR solutions. I worked on some of the very early (and very rough around the eyeballs) VR prototypes internally at Autodesk. Those experiences – often in figuring out what doesn’t work on the platform – have been crucial to the success of our team, even more profoundly than in traditional game platform transitions, because of the transformative nature of VR.
Baby steps from the Autodesk days...
New tech is exciting and none more so than VR. Which is why it’s vitally important that you take the time during preproduction to plan, prototype and test. Don’t get too excited and run straight into the teeth of your project! 
Stick to your phase gate plan. Build and iterate through your concept, look & feel, and early prototype in preproduction (which will take longer than you expect, especially for your first project). Getting a new asset pipeline for VR set up is no small task - do it early. If you wait until the production phase to finalize your content and feature workflow, you’ll spend your production cycle firefighting and redoing key systems, rather than delivering great features and content.
Make sure that you’re aggressively prototyping at every phase, even with proven mechanics. We made the decision to go with a relatively low-scope chess game for our first title, so we could easily integrate a Chess engine and use Unity store assets to test the concept of table games in VR early. That process, as rudimentary as it was, revealed tons of issues and opportunities in our core design and in our technology expectations. Issues that would have been hugely problematic (or significant missed opportunities) if we had left them to the end of the project.
"Okay, so imagine you've got a table...and it's magic..." - Geoff, probably
Finally, during preproduction, budget more time than you think for infrastructure. You can’t just buy a few machines and desks and be off to the races. Depending on the platforms you’re targeting, the various combinations of hardware and software can take significant time to track down, given the wide range of headsets currently in use (with new ones coming online every quarter). QA infrastructure can be especially difficult to get going on new VR projects given the specific physical device requirements at the scale of a full QA team.
In VR, more than any platform, framerate is more important than fidelity. 
As you may or may not know, framerate in VR has an outsized impact on the overall experience. High framerates (90+ fps) lead to a smooth experience, while lower framerates can lead to a profound sense of discomfort and render your application unusable to a significant portion of your audience. 
No matter how aggressively you scope for memory and processing power, content has a tendency to come in over budget – make sure your asset budget has lots of buffer room; more than you think you need. Things will get broken by new platforms that are dynamic and constantly evolving – make sure you’re accounting for this so that when something does break, it doesn’t completely nuke your game. Users will do horrible, horrible things to their hardware – make sure to account for your end users installing tons of CPU and memory-hogging applications on the target platform. 
If you’re multi-platform, set goals based on your lowest possible performing platforms…and stick to them! This is a non-trivial task, as it requires business, technology, and creative buy-in. Push this to the top of the priority list. 
Realistic proportions, movement, and physical relationships are critical to creating a VR experience that makes use of presence. Content that is out of scale with the world around it risks appearing "spooky" and unsettling, leading to subtle but meaningful feelings of cognitive dissonance in your users. Unrealistic or unfamiliar gravity, viscosity, or friction can have the same effect.
Door frames, windows, tables, chairs and other common real-world physical objects in game space are especially susceptible to this phenomenon. For games grounded in reality, there is a pretty simple solution. Measure things and stick to those sizes. This constraint can certainly be a limiting factor, but can also be a creative challenge that leads to dynamic and innovative solutions to problems both complex and mundane.
Preproduction proportions testing
During preproduction, try starting with realistic proportions and aggressively test with white-rooms to avoid having to rework assets down the road. Working from a regimented, realistic base of assets goes a long way towards making the user comfortable in your environment.
All that said, the one guiding principle for VR – especially in these relatively early days of mass market consumer VR – is that comfort is king. It’s imperative to ensure your experience is palatable to your target audience. 
If you’re making a card game for a wide audience, make sure that your framerate is extremely high, your contrast is relatively low, and you’re never accelerating or moving the character outside of motion-tracked head and body movements. If you’re making a hardcore flight simulator with 6 degrees of freedom and non-stop flak explosions, you have a different bar to hit, but core tenants (always high framerates, try to never move the player’s camera unless they’re controlling it, use slower acceleration where appropriate, etc.) are always good to keep top of mind.
Be cognizant that with every increment you push your experience past your target comfort point, you’re losing and alienating another large cohort of users, potentially damaging your reputation and your brand.
Find a spark and build from that. There are so many unknowns in VR – especially right at this moment in time – that it requires an entirely new pipeline, process, and technology outlook to bring anything to market, let alone something of notable scope. 
This is VR. You should dream big. However, the best advice I could give at this moment in time is to create a small chunk of that dream with your first VR release. Get that product to the market – to any market – and get into preproduction on your second title with everything you’ve learned. Use that experience to help your team execute more efficiently and at a vastly higher level than the first go round.
This is one thing we nailed at E7. We started off with a relatively small game in Magic Table Chess, moved on to something marginally bigger for our second game, with exponentially larger projects on the horizon. Each step along the way has enabled us to work faster, focus more on experiences than infrastructure, and push our quality bar higher and higher.
Starting to come together...
This is the agile mantra, but especially so for new, rapidly evolving platforms like VR. It might sound cliché, but the pain is real. These are incredibly dynamic software and hardware products that are constantly evolving in meaningful ways. Platform updates right before VC meetings, cables getting imperceptibly loose and taking someone offline for hours, system background processes triggering and running the game at one frame every other second are all real possibilities that many of you will encounter. 
While there’s little you can do to truly mitigate for these challenges, knowing that something along the way will conspire to foul up your perfectly-planned software project can help you reduce the impact of these issues when they do happen.  
In addition to unexpected critical fails, if you’re working with a commercial game engine or platform back end suite, plan to be rolling over to new versions far more frequently than on traditional platforms. The dynamic nature of these platforms means that new updates address critical issues and can introduce new version mismatches more frequently than stable technology platforms.
In Conclusion Making games in VR is awesome. I frequently find myself losing myself in our games when I should be doing work, just because the experiences are still so profoundly magical. VR is a new and massively exciting frontier. A stereoscopic wild west.
It all comes together
However, like the American wild west of old, it’s full of danger and adventure. Being cognizant of the perils of the medium can’t help you to avoid these challenges altogether, but hopefully it can help mitigate the impact of them when you hit them.
I’d love to hear similar experiences folks have had working on early projects in VR. Horror stories are always great, or if you disagree with anything I’ve said here I’ll keep an oculus out for comments posted to this article.
Yes, I just ended this 2500-word VR article with an eyeball pun. 
This post originally appears on the Experiment 7 Blog.
Coray Seifert is the Director of Production for Experiment 7, a VR strategy game developer based in New York City and San Diego. For more than 15 years, Coray has developed games as a producer, game designer, and writer for organizations like Autodesk, THQ's Kaos Studios, and the US Department of Defense. A Lifetime Member of the International Game Developers Association, Coray was elected to the IGDA’s Board of directors in 2007 at the age of 27; the youngest board member in IGDA history.  
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repwinpril9y0a1 · 8 years ago
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Security trends & Windows 10
Cybersecurity threats both new and known, from Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), to the Internet of Things (IoT), to the shortage of cyberworkers, threaten us each day. To help protect ourselves and our customers, we mobilize threat intelligence and machine learning, a mindset of “assume breach” and much more. Across the world, countless businesses take part in this same point, counter point every day. This dynamic interplay makes cybersecurity one of the most fast-paced parts of the tech industry.
Microsoft has remained at the leading edge with a track record of security innovation and investment – most notably in Windows 10. In this blog, some of Microsoft’s top cybersecurity experts share some reasons how:
Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence builds the security analytics that help organizations detect and respond to threats more quickly and effectively.
“Cybersecurity should always be evolving. I’m confident in how Microsoft is addressing critical challenges across the cyber landscape that will emerge in 2017. First, optimizing threat intelligence to quickly identify and respond to the highest priority IOC’s and IOA’s. Our unique insights into the threat landscape create an intelligent security graph that protects endpoints, better detects attacks, and accelerates response for our customers. Second, optimization and automation across security technologies and processes help mitigate the increasing cybersecurity talent shortage. IoT devices are the new ‘DDoS Trojan Horse.’ Machine learning will be leveraged to stop cyber-attacks, from vulnerabilities in employee’s mobile phones to IoT devices to further protect companies from harm. Third, the reduction of the overall number of security vendors and technologies will bring an increased focus on integration and cross platform threat sharing that’s found in our Advanced Threat Analytics to alert suspicious user behavior, Azure Security Center let customers know when virtual machine exceptions and events are caused by malware, and Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection to provide trend alerts across endpoints that indicate an active attack in an organization.” – Ann Johnson, VP, Worldwide Cybersecurity
Malware
A growing trend Microsoft security experts see is attackers copying the tactics and exploits of APTs into common malware. This makes the common malware more difficult to track and defend against.
“The op-sec playbook of the APT is trickling down to broad spectrum malware families to preserve the stealth and effectiveness of their campaigns. Popular malware families encrypt themselves with strong passwords to avoid introspection at rest and social engineer users into decrypting and running them. They host payloads on whitelisted sites such as popular file sharing services and download their payloads over the provider’s SSL. They are hiding more in the application layer. We will see the tech industry respond by making the necessary adjustments to inspect within the encryption and application layers, much like we are, with our security products.” – John Lambert, @JohnLaTwC, Partner Director, Microsoft Threat Intelligence
“ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) is critical for our customers, along with increasing the cloud intelligence of Windows Defender. A key advantage to Windows 10 is that we are constantly updating it with innovative exploit mitigations and multiple layers of defense in depth technology for all users.  I also see Disaster Recovery and Security Operations becoming further entwined due to the increasingly destructive nature of nation-state cyberwarfare and attacks enabling extortion, like Ransomware. Lucrative cybercrime will become more mature: efficient, targeted and innovative. Attackers will get better at automating discovery of monetary opportunity and leveraging that to drive fewer, yet more devastating attacks.” –  Eric Douglas, Director of Security Research
Microsoft security researchers also see a continuing trend of businesses getting caught up in ransomware attacks.
“Our research into prevalent ransomware families reveals that delivery campaigns can typically stretch for days or even weeks, all the while employing similar files and techniques. As long as enterprises can quickly investigate the first cases of infection or ‘patient zero’, they can often effectively stop ransomware epidemics. With Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP), enterprises can quickly identify and investigate these initial cases, and then use captured artifact information to proactively protect the broader network.” – Tommy Blizard, Windows Defender ATP Research Team
Elimination of Traditional Passwords
Examining the societal and individual impacts on the spread of intelligent technologies to formulate best practices for secure design, is taking on new directions. Layers of connected devices, from phones, to refrigerators, provide new advantages for customers to enhance their security through personalization.
“While threat intelligence systems continue to decrease the time it takes to detect threats, we expect to see an increase in attacks, malware, and identity theft in 2017. In response, we expect to see customers increasingly considering application control solutions like Device Guard as one of their best defenses against malware. For identity we expect to see aggressive moves to Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) solutions like Windows Hello that can transition users to strong password-less authentication. Mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) will be at the forefront of discussion as there are literally billions of devices running platforms that weren’t designed or configured to be secure. This will ultimately increase the demand for Microsoft security solutions like the Windows 10 platform and other Microsoft products that are designed to take advantage of the Intelligent Security Graph which can help those products better protect organizations from new and emerging threats.” – Chris Hallum, Windows and Devices Group
Cybersecurity Workforce and New Operational Mindset
Globally, the shortfall of cybersecurity professionals is expected to reach 1.5 million by 2020, according to data published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This means that businesses must innovate and alter their mindset to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of their existing cybersecurity teams.
“Engineers who are security minded, have solid talent and real experience are getting harder and harder to find. Not to mention, there is fierce competition between companies as this talent pool shrinks.  The bad guys can recruit top talent with lucrative offers so it’s critical we attract the best to defend and combat against potential threats. To stay ahead, industry must think beyond the traditional role and definition of their security teams. The challenge for the industry will be where they seek out and source the best people for these teams.” – David Weston, Research & Development
“The security community has been adapting and embracing a new mindset of “assume breach.” When these conversations first started, much of the focus was on architecture and designing networks that would minimize lateral movement when malicious attackers were successful. Within Microsoft and several other companies, network security teams have shifted from a “detect and react” strategy to one where a team assumes attackers are in the network and actively hunts for them, looking for traces of anomalous activity that might indicate a breach. I think we’ll see a lot of “how to recruit and build an effective Hunter Team” type sessions at security conferences this year, along with an increase in blogs and articles along those lines. Ultimately, I think many more IT departments will be deploying Hunter Teams this year, to the point that by next year this will be close to a baseline expectation for operational security.” – Jeff Jones, Director, Issues Management
“Under an assume breach mindset, organizations need to actively hunt for and detect the adversary, in order to, contain the threat and minimize impact to the organization, before public damage is done. Smart teams along with cloud-level machine learning and automation will be necessary to protect and detect at scale for on premises, hybrid, and cloud environments.  Incident response teams will also understand that detecting failed escalation attempts aren’t indeed false positives but a sign of the adversary actively moving in the environment and will conduct the appropriate response investigation.” – Hayden Hainsworth, @hhainsworth, Customer & Partner Experience Program Leader, Cybersecurity Engineering
Microsoft is doing more to help businesses secure their environment, and help people protect their own digital security, than any other company in the world. Our unique insights into the threat landscape are shaping security and guiding organizations in optimizing their security action plans to address their most severe threats. In the coming months, we will share more about Windows expertise in staying ahead of emerging risks through AI, Machine Learning, and other important innovations that address the threats associated with cybersecurity trends.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2kqjV9p
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symbianosgames · 8 years ago
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Hi! My name is Coray Seifert, I’m the Director of Production here at Experiment 7. I’ve been working on VR games in various capacities for the past 4 years, first with Impeller Studios, then with Autodesk’s AR/VR Interactive Group, but most meaningfully with the fine folks here at Experiment 7. Over that time, I’ve made a number of horrific mistakes that haunt my dreams to this day. I’d like to share some of them with you!
If the beer is virtual, are the calories real?
Below you’ll find 7 lessons I learned working on VR strategy games at Experiment 7. I wanted to put this list together so others who are just getting into VR development can avoid some of the same challenges.
Why spend the time to share key learnings with potential competition? The bottom line for our corner of the industry is that the more teams there are making great VR games, the more consumers we’ll see adopting VR platforms, and the better the market will be for all of us. Just like how Tesla shares their best practices with their competition to help drive their industry forward, we hope that creating a marketplace of shared ideas will help the VR game creation space move forward as well.
In traditional game development, we have experiences, best practices, and cautionary tales that effectively guide our efforts. Platform migrations have happened in the past and we’ve tweaked our best practices accordingly. What works on PC might not work on console due to input differences, processing power or consumer expectations, so we modify our approach slightly to adapt for the new medium. 
VR, on the other hand, is a complete paradigm shift. Not only do our best practices need to be refreshed, but some of the core tenants of what we believe about game development need to be unlearned. Moving the player’s first person camera may make them sick. 2D planes for VFX can be invalidated due to stereoscopic rendering. UI and UX design has to be completely rethought from the ground up. This is a complete phase shift from the old way of doing things. 
That's no UI object...
I find myself annoyed by long-form lists where you have to scroll forever to see if the pillars of the article are worth investing your time in, so here are the 7 lessons, in brief:
Double down on engineering – More tech needs, less asset budget. Trade artists for engineers.
Make sure someone on your team has shipped something in VR – Ideally your tech lead.
Don’t skimp on preproduction – Prototype aggressively, define hardware/QA/pipelines first.
Respect the minspec – Pick your platforms, identify your minspec, and stick to it.
Realism is important, but comfort is king – Use realistic proportions, but framerate/comfort is priority.
Start small – Maintain vision, but start with a fraction of what you’re eventually trying to build.
Expect the unexpected – Prepare for rapidly evolving hardware, dev tools and marketplace.
If you just came for the pillars, I hope they’re helpful in your adventures. If you’re here for context, let’s dive into the details!
Let’s start at the beginning.
When you’re building your team for your VR project, you’ll want to staff heavier on the engineering side than you would for a traditional game project. Further, it's optimal to populate your team with a greater percentage of experienced developers than normal. 
While more engineers doesn’t perfectly equate to increased velocity, the simple fact is that every problem you face will require new solutions, a risk that can be meaningfully mitigated with people power. Even if you’re using a proven commercial game engine, everything from feature development to optimization takes a long time on VR and involves a significant learning curve. These are new knots to untangle and for the most part, very few people across the industry have meaningful experience in VR.
Here’s how I would recommend adjusting your engineering team size: 
>10 total headcount: 3x
11-50 total headcount: 2x
50+ total headcount: 1.5x
If you’re working with a fixed budget on your game, this may mean scaling down your art headcount, which isn’t great in and of itself. One mitigating factor is that stereoscopic rendering means you're basically rendering everything twice. A game of comparable scope simply has fewer pixels it can push through the renderer.
Accordingly, the content requirements for VR are lower than other platforms. If you think back to past generations of console games and the scope of art created for those games – both in terms of the raw asset density and in terms of the amount of polish per asset – you can get a good sense of where VR is in its current (2017) iteration. 
In an ideal world, I recommend a small VR art team laden with senior artists who enjoy new technology challenges and plenty of technical artists who are passionate about the medium.
The good news on this front is that great engineers are frequently drawn to new technology problems, just as great artists can be drawn to new mediums of expression.  You can harness that excitement to bring fantastic people into your organization.
It’s one thing to read about the technical limitations of VR or talk to someone who has shipped a game in VR, but don’t talk yourself into thinking you can make it without significant input from someone who released a commercial product on the platform. You need someone who has directly worked on solving the unique problems of the medium. It can be a freelancer, consultant, or advisor, but ideally that person is someone who is a core member of your team. 
The best case is if this person works in the engineering vertical of your company, even more so if your VR expert is the head of your engineering team. This allows that person to translate those experiences working on the platform directly through their team, providing that intrinsic, internalized knowledge of VR-specific challenges to everyone working on the technology that drives your game.
Experiment 7 is lucky in that our Technical Director, Mario Grimani, has been working in VR since the days of duct tape and bailing wire. One of our engineers worked on open source VR solutions. I worked on some of the very early (and very rough around the eyeballs) VR prototypes internally at Autodesk. Those experiences – often in figuring out what doesn’t work on the platform – have been crucial to the success of our team, even more profoundly than in traditional game platform transitions, because of the transformative nature of VR.
Baby steps from the Autodesk days...
New tech is exciting and none more so than VR. Which is why it’s vitally important that you take the time during preproduction to plan, prototype and test. Don’t get too excited and run straight into the teeth of your project! 
Stick to your phase gate plan. Build and iterate through your concept, look & feel, and early prototype in preproduction (which will take longer than you expect, especially for your first project). Getting a new asset pipeline for VR set up is no small task - do it early. If you wait until the production phase to finalize your content and feature workflow, you’ll spend your production cycle firefighting and redoing key systems, rather than delivering great features and content.
Make sure that you’re aggressively prototyping at every phase, even with proven mechanics. We made the decision to go with a relatively low-scope chess game for our first title, so we could easily integrate a Chess engine and use Unity store assets to test the concept of table games in VR early. That process, as rudimentary as it was, revealed tons of issues and opportunities in our core design and in our technology expectations. Issues that would have been hugely problematic (or significant missed opportunities) if we had left them to the end of the project.
"Okay, so imagine you've got a table...and it's magic..." - Geoff, probably
Finally, during preproduction, budget more time than you think for infrastructure. You can’t just buy a few machines and desks and be off to the races. Depending on the platforms you’re targeting, the various combinations of hardware and software can take significant time to track down, given the wide range of headsets currently in use (with new ones coming online every quarter). QA infrastructure can be especially difficult to get going on new VR projects given the specific physical device requirements at the scale of a full QA team.
In VR, more than any platform, framerate is more important than fidelity. 
As you may or may not know, framerate in VR has an outsized impact on the overall experience. High framerates (90+ fps) lead to a smooth experience, while lower framerates can lead to a profound sense of discomfort and render your application unusable to a significant portion of your audience. 
No matter how aggressively you scope for memory and processing power, content has a tendency to come in over budget – make sure your asset budget has lots of buffer room; more than you think you need. Things will get broken by new platforms that are dynamic and constantly evolving – make sure you’re accounting for this so that when something does break, it doesn’t completely nuke your game. Users will do horrible, horrible things to their hardware – make sure to account for your end users installing tons of CPU and memory-hogging applications on the target platform. 
If you’re multi-platform, set goals based on your lowest possible performing platforms…and stick to them! This is a non-trivial task, as it requires business, technology, and creative buy-in. Push this to the top of the priority list. 
Realistic proportions, movement, and physical relationships are critical to creating a VR experience that makes use of presence. Content that is out of scale with the world around it risks appearing "spooky" and unsettling, leading to subtle but meaningful feelings of cognitive dissonance in your users. Unrealistic or unfamiliar gravity, viscosity, or friction can have the same effect.
Door frames, windows, tables, chairs and other common real-world physical objects in game space are especially susceptible to this phenomenon. For games grounded in reality, there is a pretty simple solution. Measure things and stick to those sizes. This constraint can certainly be a limiting factor, but can also be a creative challenge that leads to dynamic and innovative solutions to problems both complex and mundane.
Preproduction proportions testing
During preproduction, try starting with realistic proportions and aggressively test with white-rooms to avoid having to rework assets down the road. Working from a regimented, realistic base of assets goes a long way towards making the user comfortable in your environment.
All that said, the one guiding principle for VR – especially in these relatively early days of mass market consumer VR – is that comfort is king. It’s imperative to ensure your experience is palatable to your target audience. 
If you’re making a card game for a wide audience, make sure that your framerate is extremely high, your contrast is relatively low, and you’re never accelerating or moving the character outside of motion-tracked head and body movements. If you’re making a hardcore flight simulator with 6 degrees of freedom and non-stop flak explosions, you have a different bar to hit, but core tenants (always high framerates, try to never move the player’s camera unless they’re controlling it, use slower acceleration where appropriate, etc.) are always good to keep top of mind.
Be cognizant that with every increment you push your experience past your target comfort point, you’re losing and alienating another large cohort of users, potentially damaging your reputation and your brand.
Find a spark and build from that. There are so many unknowns in VR – especially right at this moment in time – that it requires an entirely new pipeline, process, and technology outlook to bring anything to market, let alone something of notable scope. 
This is VR. You should dream big. However, the best advice I could give at this moment in time is to create a small chunk of that dream with your first VR release. Get that product to the market – to any market – and get into preproduction on your second title with everything you’ve learned. Use that experience to help your team execute more efficiently and at a vastly higher level than the first go round.
This is one thing we nailed at E7. We started off with a relatively small game in Magic Table Chess, moved on to something marginally bigger for our second game, with exponentially larger projects on the horizon. Each step along the way has enabled us to work faster, focus more on experiences than infrastructure, and push our quality bar higher and higher.
Starting to come together...
This is the agile mantra, but especially so for new, rapidly evolving platforms like VR. It might sound cliché, but the pain is real. These are incredibly dynamic software and hardware products that are constantly evolving in meaningful ways. Platform updates right before VC meetings, cables getting imperceptibly loose and taking someone offline for hours, system background processes triggering and running the game at one frame every other second are all real possibilities that many of you will encounter. 
While there’s little you can do to truly mitigate for these challenges, knowing that something along the way will conspire to foul up your perfectly-planned software project can help you reduce the impact of these issues when they do happen.  
In addition to unexpected critical fails, if you’re working with a commercial game engine or platform back end suite, plan to be rolling over to new versions far more frequently than on traditional platforms. The dynamic nature of these platforms means that new updates address critical issues and can introduce new version mismatches more frequently than stable technology platforms.
In Conclusion Making games in VR is awesome. I frequently find myself losing myself in our games when I should be doing work, just because the experiences are still so profoundly magical. VR is a new and massively exciting frontier. A stereoscopic wild west.
It all comes together
However, like the American wild west of old, it’s full of danger and adventure. Being cognizant of the perils of the medium can’t help you to avoid these challenges altogether, but hopefully it can help mitigate the impact of them when you hit them.
I’d love to hear similar experiences folks have had working on early projects in VR. Horror stories are always great, or if you disagree with anything I’ve said here I’ll keep an oculus out for comments posted to this article.
Yes, I just ended this 2500-word VR article with an eyeball pun. 
This post originally appears on the Experiment 7 Blog.
Coray Seifert is the Director of Production for Experiment 7, a VR strategy game developer based in New York City and San Diego. For more than 15 years, Coray has developed games as a producer, game designer, and writer for organizations like Autodesk, THQ's Kaos Studios, and the US Department of Defense. A Lifetime Member of the International Game Developers Association, Coray was elected to the IGDA’s Board of directors in 2007 at the age of 27; the youngest board member in IGDA history.  
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