Maxwell's Equations

science:

Irregular Webcomic:

Imagine you are James Clerk Maxwell, in 1865, formulating your theory of electricity and magnetism, and writing down your four equations for the first time in history. You write down the terms of these equations based on your experiments with electric batteries, bits of wire, and magnets. (…) You take the values you measured for εo and μo, multiply them together, take the square root, and then take the reciprocal. The answer is a speed, so it has units of speed, in this case metres per second. And the answer is very close to 300,000,000 metres per second. Converted into miles, that’s a tad over 186,000 miles per second. Being James Clerk Maxwell, and a brilliant physicist, you immediately recognise what this number is.

The speed of light. (…)

When you were writing down your equations, you were thinking about electricity and magnetism. Light was the farthest thing from your mind. You had not the slightest clue (and nor did anyone else) that light was related to elecricity or magnetism. But there it is, falling out of your equations.

You realise that you are the first person in all of history to know what light is made of. Can you imagine that feeling?

Clarification

rentzsch:

It’s not about Adobe.

It’s not about Flash.

It’s not about cross-platform.

It’s about less code.

It’s about fewer crashes.

It’s about faster-than-C runtime.

It’s about faster development time.

It’s about distributed computing.

It’s about pervasive multicore.

It’s about REPLs and live software.

It’s about software that preemptively exposes my coding errors.

It’s about better software.

“

Every time you do something that’s hard for you, every time you transcend some personal boundary or cross some goalpost you thought uncrossable or work really fucking hard at something (even — especially — if you fail) or do something you thought you couldn’t do, it is an accomplishment, and it’s important to acknowledge it. Every time you receive a compliment and say “thank you” instead of “oh, it’s nothing”, you are striking a blow against a poisonous, toxic, and dangerous social model. And every time you do that publicly, you give strength to someone else who sees you do it, because by accurately valuing your accomplishments and achievements as accomplishments and achievements, you teach others that their similar accomplishments and achievements are things to be valued — and thus, by extension, that they are to be valued.

And every time you see someone trying to downplay their achievements, especially compared against someone else’s, remind them that accomplishment is not a zero sum game: your achievement doesn’t reflect upon another’s, and another’s doesn’t reflect upon you. Measure against yourself. That’s the only standard that matters.

And if you’re one of those people who are policing the social appropriateness of claiming one’s accomplishments and placing value upon them in public, just fucking stop it already.

”

— Denise Paolucci > cleversimon > insooutso

There’s a very old bug on Adobe’s JIRA bug tracker about flash video performance being absolutely abysmal on MacOS. One of the QA engineers at Adobe commented a while ago on that issue to explain that Adobe was currently focusing all their effort on mobile devices, and “didn’t have time” to fix the Mac version. There was an uproar, and the comment was removed. As I have the original in my mail, I thought I’d repost it here for posterity:

Poor performance on Mac OS X  
Updated: 10/06/09 10:09 PM   Created: 11/01/08 03:57 PM  
The following comment has been edited on this issue:	[ Permlink ]
Author: John Chen 
Created on: 05/26/09 12:16 PM
Edited by: John Chen 
Edited on: 10/07/09 11:35 AM
Comment: 
We are well aware of this issue and there is already several bugs logged in our internal system. As with all bugs, they will be worked on based on priority. 

Please be patient. 

Original comment: 
Hi everyone, 

We are well aware of this issue and there is already several bugs logged in our internal system. As with all bugs, they will be worked on based on priority. 

I know how you all feel; it pisses me off to see h.264 streaming video such as ones from hulu.com take up 70-80% cpu usage on a MAC (PC uses about 30%). It heats up my MAC, drains my batteries, and lags for a second once in a while when streaming in 420p quality. 

What can be more important than fixing this MAC specific performance issue you ask? If you do a search on Google or have went to the recent MAX conference, you will understand that our highest priority will be optimizing our player to be faster than ninjas for mobile phones (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10098883-92.html) 

If you were CEO, what would you do? Spend resource to fix this bug (it's not like it doesn't work- it's just not as good as PC) to make a million people happy, or give Flash to everyone with phones (billions of people?). 

These MANY INSANE "optimizations and new technology" will fix many performance issues; and perhaps, this one included. 

With all that said, I'll continue to push this bug to be fixed. I would fix this bug myself if I could... 

Please be patient. 
Project:	Flash Player
Components:	 Rendering Performance
Affects Versions:	 Flash Player 10
Security Level:	Public (All JIRA Users)
Attachments:	 01 safari play.jpg, 02 safari pause.jpg, 03 camino play.jpg, 04 camino pause.jpg, 978-1.jpg, activity-monitor-snow-leopard-20090629-113345.jpg, d2bb8b2ebb2ba4e4233ccf0c80dcd7c58f30c726.png

On ngmoco’s We Rule

We Rule is a pretty boring FarmVille knock-off for iPhone and iPad. Actually, it’s really well made for what it is: nice graphics, music and atmosphere. But all you do is plant, harvest, order and deliver. I figured, maybe I can enjoy it anyway? One of the results from that is the image below.

It’s obvious ngmoco are rewarding people who spend as much time as possible in the game. The fastest way to get money is to plant the fastest crop, so that you’ll have to constantly stay in the game — 6 coins per minute. The casual gamer might plant beans and return once a day, but only get 0.3 coins per minute.

Seeing someone with a nice kingdom doesn’t mean that they are dedicated, however. If you give ngmoco real, actual money and buy ‘mojo’, they’ll shorten any waiting time to mere seconds. I understand that this is their entire business model, but I feel it takes away from any sense of accomplishment of doing things the non-paying way.

What really annoys me is what this game could have been. The makers of the game, Newtoy, helped make Age of Empires 2, so obviously they know how to make non-casual games too. I tcpdumped the server traffic and got a json description of my kingdom, which was highly interesting. They planned for several kinds of resources: stone, food and wood, which would have made for a much more complex and interesting gameplay. The best part, however, is how the json hints at armies; infantry, archers, cavalry. This game would have been absolutely *kickass* if you could attack other players! Or attack anything at all, for that matter. There is also hints of trading, another absent feature.

Perhaps these features are scheduled for a future release? I dearly hope so, but I really doubt it. I imagine Newtoy had great plans for a social medieval strategy and city-building game, and came to Ngmoco for financing. However, Ngmoco must have found the game much too inaccessible to all the casual FarmVille gamers out there; what’s the fun in building if it can be torn down? And however do you get ROI on a freemium game without heaps and bounds of casual gamers? And thus did Kingdoms (production name) become We Rule.

(I’m nevyn on Plus₊ btw, if you want to add me)

Geek Test

I scored ~38.856%. Sounds low, but apparently I’m a “major geek”. Phew!