My wife was channel surfing this evening, and I had to ask her to pause - we ran across "Red Dead Redemption". At first I thought it was a trailer ad for the game, but it's a 30 minute movie - filmed inside the game engine:
But the story doesn't end there; instead of posting the video online or on the consoles the game is out on, the RDR short film will be debuting on Fox this Saturday at midnight. That's right: it's a damn television premiere.
The day is approaching when this kind of production will give actors a run for their money...
A more cynical person might say "let no insufficient number of money laden lobbyists go unpunished". The Feds have decided that Apple is in need of a good spanking:
"The [Justice Dept.] is doing outreach," an anonymous Hollywood source told the Post. "You can't dictate terms to the industry. The Adobe thing is just inviting the wrath of everybody."
Someone should just ask this first - after all the yelling and legal maneuvering, exactly what did the Microsoft cases amount to? Lots of money for lawyers, and precious little else. The competition moved MS back, not the DOJ - although I suppose you could argue that the DOJ made MS skittish enough that they didn't engage well. I'm not sure I'd call that a win.
Now it's Apple's turn. And you know what? In the mobile space, there's plenty of competition. I don't think Google needs help, and it looks like HP is jumping in with WebOS. And Microsoft is trying (not well, but that goes back to being skittish, I think), with their planned Windows 7 phones. What exactly can the DOJ do that won't be done better by letting this play out?
We didn't discuss WebVelocity 1.1, since we covered that on a recent podcast. Arden is anxious to hear what your needs are in Cincom Smalltalk - if you like what you hear this week (and next; this is part 1 of a 2 part podcast), let him know. And if you think there's something else we should be doing - let him know about that, too!
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
To listen immediately, use the player below:
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
holding what, on the surface, would have seemed to be a relatively safe 10-5 lead over one of the worst teams in baseball, Joe Girardi decided it was time to embark on what we have come to call "the constant search for the one guy who doesn't have it" and, in the course of three Yankee pitching changes, the Indians batted around to take a 12-10 lead.
In the midst of that mess, one of the pitchers thrown into the fray got a man out on a routine flyball, but was then pulled - likely on the basis of some stat lurking on a clipboard. What the clipboard doesn't show is the intangible "he has good stuff" thing. Some days athletes do well; other days, they're just off. I say that as a guy who ran track and cross country in high school, and I remember plenty of "on" and "off" days.
In modern baseball, that concept has been totally lost. Instead, it's all pitch counts, individual matchups, and other arcane stats. The notion that someone might be "on" is utterly gone.
Now, going with your gut is probably not the best way to run a baseball team - the moneyball thing has paid dividends. But... it's also overused, and Girardi seems to be an utter slave to the idea. When it comes to pitching, it's obvious that he never pays attention to what's going on out on the field - it's only the clipboard that matters to him.
After August 2010, Skype will start charging a “small monthly fee” for use of the 3G calling feature. You heard that right — even though you’re already paying AT&T (in the U.S., at least) for your data plan, Skype is throwing in an extra fee. At this point we’re not sure if the move is Skype’s own doing, or if the network operators had a hand in trying to make the Skype app a less desirable option.
In contrast, a station with eight Eaton/TEPCO Quick Chargers could theoretically fuel just 24 i-Mievs to 80-percent full in an hour. To match the capacity of a modest gas station, completely filling 160 i-Mievs to 100-percent of battery capacity (on 25 minute charges) in one hour, would take at least 67 Quick Chargers with one parking space for each charger. Figure 300-square feet of space for each charger and parking spot and that’s a half acre of land before accounting for driveways or other infrastructure
Mind you, that kind of "quick charge" also depletes battery life - everything I've been reading says that you would, as an owner, want to limit the number of quick charges you did. Which means the picture is even worse - imagine the typical recharge station requiring a 4-6 hour parking time. That's fine if everyone lives within range of their destination (work, say), and they don't ever have to drive anywhere else after they get to work. A few minutes pondering how we actually use our cars will puncture that fantasy pretty quickly.
Of course, there's another issue as well. The "clean power" for these vehicles doesn't jump magically from a wall; in fact, it may well come from a coal fired plant. And if you were to replace a significant number of cars with electric vehicles, well - I think you would need to start putting in new generation capacity as well.
Forgotten in the stream of "beginning of summer" barbecues is where Memorial Day came from - it was originally set aside as "Decoration Day" - a day to honor the fallen from the US Civil War. Over time it's become a day to remember US veterans in general, from all wars and eras, but - I think it's useful to recall the original idea. The Civil War remains a huge breaking point between then and now - before, "United States" was often plural, whereas after, it became singular. A small seeming change, but it's had a lot of impact over time.
Sitting here in Maryland in 2010, it's hard to imagine the depth of feeling people in 1861 had for their regions and states. That could be because I'm a transplant from New York, surrounded by other transplants from all over, but it's the way things are. It's not only times that change - nations and the people who comprise them change over time as well.
I just finished a fairly engaging techno-thriller: Counterstrike: The Last World War, Book 2. It's a follow on from The Last World War
, something I read a few years ago. I happened upon the book at Borders while getting my daughter an AP prep guide; I had mostly forgotten about the earlier book.
It's a typical techno-thriller, with a Stargate wormhole type of plot device. The kicker - aliens fighting a long (think generations) war create the technology, hoping to use it as a game changer, allowing them to deploy across their own planet. Instead, they end up accidentally opening wormholes to Earth, and humanity gets involved in the war.
Through the first book, it's not at all clear why the war was happening; in the second book, a vague "cold war gone hot" device crops up, with Earth siding with the "Western" side of the conflict. An anti-war group becomes something of a plot device in the second book, but not for long - mostly, they help set up the predictable plot twist that puts the book on the race track towards the conclusion.
The story was fun enough to read, in a "beach reading" sort of way - although I really wonder how much longer authors can pull out grizzled Vietnam war vets to fight again. Seriously - that's a long time ago now :) On the other hand, how many techno-thrillers have you read recently where a North Korean tank jockey is one of the good guys?
Anyway, if you pick up these books, don't expect anything deep. They are enjoyable yarns, but that's about it.
I just finished reading a the book Power Hungry
- it's a good book, detailing where the power of today and tomorrow are likely to come from. You have to be willing to deal with some math to read this book - and the math makes it pretty clear (at least to me) that wind and solar are not going to be more than bit players in our energy future.
That all comes down to something pretty simple: energy density. To over-simplify a lot, how much space do you need in order to generate a given amount of energy? For things like coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear (or for vehicles, gas), the space you need is pretty small, and you can locate the power generation capacity close to where the power is needed. For things like wind and solar, you need gobs of space, and, generally speaking, they need to be located pretty far away from where the power they generate is needed.
And that doesn't even get into the intermittancy problem (which the author, Robert Bryce, covers in some detaiil). I've written recently about my skepticism about electric cars, and one of the more amusing parts of this book is the series of headlines about electric cars being "the future" - with that series beginning in 1901. It seems that electric vehicles have been the "wave of the future" for a long time, and the problem remains the same now as it was for Edison - battery capacity and life.
Bryce thinks the future belongs to what he calls N2N - Natural gas and nuclear - and he makes the point that if you are concerned about air pollution (either CO2, or, to me at least, the more dangerous toxins that are emitted by burning things like coal), you should favor that future as well.
That's a very brief summary of his points - like I said, Bryce marshals a lot of data in support of his conclusions. I'd recommend taking a look before you draw your own conclusions. I think he makes a ton of sense.
On January 19, 2010, Rosenberg was apparently trying to get from 96 Daly Street, Park City, Utah, to 1710 Prospector Avenue, Park City, Utah. She looked up the walking directions using Google Maps on her Blackberry. Google Maps suggested a route that included a half-mile walk down "Deer Valley Drive," which is also known as "Utah State Route 224." There's not much more to say--she started walking down the middle of a highway, and a car hit her. Who wouldn't have seen that one coming?
In what version of reality does behaving like that involve a lawsuit?
It's useful to read Nick Carr from a "there's a set of ideas to avoid" standpoint. Take his latest on the humble link:
Sometimes, they're big distractions - we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we've forgotten what we'd started out to do or to read. Other times, they're tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not.
Now, imagine Carr a few thousand years ago, when the written word appeared. He would have fulminated against it as the "death of storytelling". To an extent, he would even have been correct - no one develops memorization skills as our ancestors did anymore. Then again, we don't have to - Wikipedia (et. al.) are never more than a link away.
Carr has become a force in favor of inertia. He's comfortable with a certain level of technology, and pretty much wants things to stay in his comfort zone. The trouble is, he sounds just reasonable enough to get a few shallow thinkers to follow along.
Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 2 of a 3 part look at the VisualWorks UI Painter (GUI Builder) tools. Today we look at hooking up the UI to a domain model. If you want to see part 1, go here. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Over the weekend I finished a depressing book - Vox Day's The Return of the Great Depression
. Day doesn't have much patience for the Keynesian model of economics; in fact, there's a fairly extended discussion of the flaws (as Day sees them) in Paul Krugman's thinking.
You may not agree with Day's take on things, but one thing's for sure - it's quite different than what you'll see on CNBC, or just about anywhere else in business/economic reporting. What he says about debt and fiat currency makes a lot of sense to me (although I have no idea what the "right" answer is to the huge levels of debt that all governments seem to have acquired). Suffice to say that Day is not optimistic - the title of his book pretty much gives away where he thinks things are going.
He quotes Mish Shedlock a few times in the text, and I enjoy reading Mish's blog. If you want a non-mainstream take on how things are going, you'll get it from this book and from Mish. I think it's worth getting the perspective, even if you come away unconvinced.
Of course, they wouldn't be publishers if they didn't also lust after robust DRM measures, which might explain why they're not roundly supporting the readily available EPUB format. It has DRM options, but perhaps they're not gnarly enough for the dudes responsible for bringing us the psychological horror of the Twilight series. We still don't like the suggestion that the people, Amazon primarily, who popularized this market should just open it up out of the goodness of their own hearts -- maybe we would if publishers ever showed themselves capable of doing similarly noble things.
Really, that about sums it up. If they want a standard, what's wrong with ePub?
This leaves a huge opening for Google (and eventually HP, if they get anywhere with WebOS):
I see now why people are so angry at the ‘murky’ nature of the App Store, and I’m starting to agree with them. My Frame was approved by Apple 3 times (once for each version we released), and then now, at version 1.2 they decide it’s to be removed? How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that can change at any time, cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog. There is no alternative platform, despite what others may say about Android, it’s immature and their app store(s) are a wild west nightmare. It really is Apple’s way or the highway, and that really stinks.
That kind of unpredictability isn't at all good for a business plan. It works for Apple now, because there's something of a void beyond them. However, all it'll take is for Google and/or HP to create something "good enough" to start luring developers across - because predictability will trump coolness....
Along with a host of other changes to their billing plans for data, ATT will finally be rolling out tethering (although tethering will wait for OS 4). The big change - the "unlimited" data plan is gone, replaced by a 2 tier plan with - wait for it - reasonable overage charges. Engadget has the details.
Warning: the first idiot who writes a comment on this post pointing out the "irony" of its links will be tracked down, tortured, and shot.
In discussing reaction to his piece on links and attention span, he pretty much had to link to other people - what's a discussion otherwise?
The part of this I find amusing is this: Carr seems to think that the web will destroy long form, immersive reading. Excuse me? When was there a huge amount of that going on anyway? Long form reading is (and always has been) engaged in by a fairly small number of people. This supposed golden age of media that Carr seems to yearn for never existed. Most newspapers prior to the mid 20th century were openly biased scandal sheets; there was a brief confluence of technology that allowed a few people (like Carr, it seems) to believe that journalists were some new class of objective uber-men, able to convey the news to us poor heathens in a pure form.
What hasn't occurred to Carr is this: stuff on the net is one form of writing, consumed in a particular way. Books are a different form of writing, consumed in another. Some people prefer one over the other, just as there were plenty of people back in the 80's who preferred "People" to "The Wall Street Journal".
There's no "winner" or "loser" here; there's just a new form of writing and reading. Maybe Carr can't consume books like he used to; that sounds like a personal problem. As you can see here, I haven't run across that problem, and I'm pretty heavily immersed in this whole internet thing.
Overall, I think Mathew Ingram has Carr pegged pretty well.
Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 3 of a 3 part look at the VisualWorks UI Painter (GUI Builder) tools. Today we look at hooking up the UI to a domain model. If you want to see part 1, go here - for part 2, go here. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
as reader Giorgio Galante found out today, sending AT&T's CEO two emails in two weeks results in a phone call from AT&T's Executive Response Team and a warning that further emails will result in a cease and desist letter
I wonder if AT&T can spell PR - even if you spot them the first two letters...
Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at some of the interesting things you can do with the inspector and the workspace involving drag/drop in VisualWorks. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Arden is asking for people interested in WebVelocity to check out the 1.1 beta, which should be ready shortly. Interested? Send an email to him, or to me.
I am recruiting for a “3rd Line Application Support professional with experience of Smalltalk” for a global Investment Bank based in Zurich Switzerland.
With the rationales being offered by AT&T (and various consultants) for the changes to their data plans, I'm reminded of Vizzini's constant cry in "The Princess Bride":
But industry analysts said that when customers take “unlimited” literally, those plans rapidly become money losers for the companies — and lead to network congestion.
Gosh, how dare those pesky customers - taking the words the vendor used to describe the service seriously! Next thing you know, those pesky customers will also expect honest bills and polite service. The horror.
Giorgio Galante has released the contents of the email he sent to AT&T's CEO, along with the audio for the awesomely stupid response he got back. A company with a clue would have had something resembling a response by now, but I guess that's not AT&T.
Looks like they did recognize how bad this looked. Engadget reports that ATT has apologized to Galante:
Giorgio tells us that he's received a sincere apology from an AT&T senior VP, who took responsibility for the mixup. Apparently the cease and desist warning came about due to bad reading of AT&T internal policy -- Giorgio was told the rep who made the call is "not having the best of days today" -- and AT&T tells us it's reviewing its procedures to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Still - I wonder how awesome the next chat between Jobs and Stephenson will be?
While I like the XBox, I was annoyed by this - I went off to exercise earlier (stationary bike), and took the XBox upstairs with me. I don't have the wifi adaptor for the XBox, and there's no wire in that room, but I figured that shouldn't be a problem - I fired up Mass Effect 2
.
Wrong
It requires a connection. No problem - I grabbed my Macbook, set up internet sharing, and hooked the wire up. Easy, right? Well.... no. It didn't work. I didn't have all day, so I just went back and played another game, but I Googled later, and came up with this:
Start Internet Sharing
Edit /etc/bootpd.plist as root: change reply_threshold_seconds to 0
Reboot. Yes, you really do have to reboot. Don't start/stop Internet Sharing before rebooting because it will revert your change on you
Erf. Next time I give things a go, I'll try that. I've never had an issue sharing a connection from the Mac, either to other Macs or Windows PCs, so I'm kind of puzzled by this one...
Apple is riding high on their iPad sales right now, but I think Jason Snell is on to something. While showing off his iPad to a (non-techie) colleague, he ran into this:
The other day I was talking to a colleague, a bright guy who obviously works in the technology and media industries, but isn’t on the technical side. He’s what I’d call a moderately informed tech consumer, and I was showing him my new iPad. His response to me was shocking: He said that he had been interested in buying an iPad, but needed to read PDF files, and since Apple only supported its own formats, he couldn’t buy one.
Now of course, you can view PDF files on an iPad, and, load video and audio that didn't come from Apple. but - notice the assumptions. Apple is building up a reputation as a walled garden outfit. If that meme spreads, then their hardware sales will suffer.
Apple needs to open up the iPad and iphone enough to kill that growing meme - or the fall from grace they experienced during the rise of DOS and Windows will happen again.
I've put together a number of walkthrough posts, and I figured it might be nice to have a simple listing of them, rather than forcing people to page through the blog post category.
Looks like Apple is about to have real competition in the music - Google:
At Google I/O a few weeks ago, Google teased the audience with a glimpse of a web-based iTunes competitor that would be a new section of the Android Market. Details were sparse during that time, but we may have found the name of the service through a new logo that is hosted on Google’s domain: Google Music [ed: The url for that graphic 404's now].
Apple's going to have to get with the program - no more tethered only synching for iPads, Touches, and iPhones. Or, they can get left behind...
For example, if you download one episode of Mad Men (47min 41sec) from iTunes you’ll be using up 554MB for the standard video and a whopping 1.51GB for the episode in HD. That’s practically your whole data allotment.
AT&T has been explaining that the "average" iPhone user uses way less than 2GB of data per month, but: the iPhone is not the iPad. The iPad is a much better device for consuming video, and the usage patterns for it will differ from those of the iPhone.
If AT&T sticks to this plan, Apple will end up paying for it in very, very unhappy customers. Since Apple really, really doesn't like that, I expect this policy to change.
David Buck tells us that the Ottawa STUG will be talking about debugging in June:
Smalltalkers user the debugger all the time to see what a program is doing and to help familiarize themselves with new parts of the system. Most developers, however aren't familiar with some of the more advanced features of the debugger. In this talk, David will present some of the more obscure areas of the debugger including various options for stepping, breakpoints, one shot breakpoints, watchpoints, variable watches, class watches and more.
Follow the link for location details - it's on June 9th at 6 PM
The beta release of WebVelocity 1.1 is ready for evaluation - I've sent a note out to the mailing list for the product. If you're interested, check out the discussion group we set up.
Safari Reader: Click on the new Reader icon to view articles on the web in a single, clutter free page
Most sites have a header, footer, sidebars, and, with ads, all manner of annoying tactics to get your attention. If this catches on, it could do for typical web advertising what the web did to classifieds...
You have to love the sheer cluelessness of this Apple demo site - they are trying to show off how Safari supports standards such as HTML5, which is fair. But, if you try a different browser, you get this:
It would be a lot more effective if you could use the site to compare and contrast with Safari. Found via this Guardian story.
I hadn't thought of Apple's mobile space this way, but mp3newswire has an interesting set of numbers:
In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units.
As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild.
Now, combine that with the announced iAd platform, and you have a new media empire rising - and it's one for which Apple doesn't have to share the revenues as much as the networks had to...
The mercy rule (if a team is winning by "too much", the game is just called as a victory for them) makes some sense in youth sports - sometimes one team is just so clearly overmatched that it's painful to watch more. But this?
In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.
That's just stupid. In sports, it's easy to let your guard drop and be suddenly surprised. Trying to artificially keep games close is bad for all parties involved. The team getting beaten knows that they are being let off easy, and the winning team will end up being filled with rage that their victory has been stolen from them. I can hardly think of a more counter-productive move in sports.
I just finished reading The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman. I haven't read a lot of his stuff since his classic The Forever War, but I like his writing style.
The characters in this book are mostly good, although "Martha" from the immediate future ends up being a little stiff. The main character, Matt, is better drawn, but is mostly along for the ride. I found the first half of the book to be very compelling, but - as with the H.G. Wells
story with which is shares an awful lot, how things got to be the way they are whenever Matt lands is never explained. Maybe it's my love of alternate history, but I really wanted to know how the throwback Massachusetts (a primitive religious culture guarded by obnoxious AIs) got to be the way it is. Never mind though; it's off to the next stop.
The rest of the book tied things up too tightly, I thought. The more or less magical beings who work with Matt to get him to somewhere better just don't make a lot of sense, and by the end of the story, I felt like I did at the end of The Stand
- a great opening had been rushed to a conclusion, with a fair amount of stuff in the middle that we didn't really need. I liked the book, but I can't give it a ringing endorsement. If you like Haldeman, you'll like the book. Otherwise, it's a quick read, but not a great one.
This week's podcast features our Product Manager, Arden Thomas. This is part 2 of two; if you didn't listen to part 1, you might want to grab that episode first. In this podcast, Arden discusses three things with us:
We didn't discuss WebVelocity 1.1, since we covered that on a recent podcast. Arden is anxious to hear what your needs are in Cincom Smalltalk - if you like what you hear this week (and next; this is part 1 of a 2 part podcast), let him know. And if you think there's something else we should be doing - let him know about that, too!
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
To listen immediately, use the player below:
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
I've been playing Mass Effect 2
for a few days now - it took me a bit to get used to the changed interface from Mass Effect. The game is much bigger than the initial game, and mostly better. I really only have a few complaints:
The new planet scanning thing. Adds nothing to the game, it takes a fair amount of time, and you can't really avoid it. That should be streamlined
The whole running out of fuel thing is realism at the expense of game play. Chuck it; It's like narrating a sound sleep in a book.
That makes me sound more down on the game than I am. It's very immersive - much more so than the first game. That's part of why the annoying aspects are so annoying - they take time away from an otherwise enjoyable game. I hope BioWare cleans those two things up for the third iteration.
. 
, but I like his writing style.
story with which is shares an awful lot, how things got to be the way they are whenever Matt lands is never explained. Maybe it's my love of alternate history, but I really wanted to know how the throwback Massachusetts (a primitive religious culture guarded by obnoxious AIs) got to be the way it is. Never mind though; it's off to the next stop.
- a great opening had been rushed to a conclusion, with a fair amount of stuff in the middle that we didn't really need. I liked the book, but I can't give it a ringing endorsement. If you like Haldeman, you'll like the book. Otherwise, it's a quick read, but not a great one.
. The game is much bigger than the initial game, and mostly better. I really only have a few complaints:
