With APB pushing nearly a decade in development, players may start breaking down real doors to finally get their paws on Jones’s game. They have reason to riot. Jones, after two decades in the business, occupies the tiny pantheon of certifiable game gods. His quirky first hit, Lemmings, became a chart-topping sensation and pioneered the real-time strategy genre. His next smash, a little game called Grand Theft Auto, pioneered the killer stuff-open-world mayhem, darkly comic urban realism, radio stations, etc.-which gamers now take for granted. Crackdown, his candy-colored, superhero/crime-lord mashup, is spawning its own sequel this summer.
Posted: September 30th, 2010
at 6:27pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: the column
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Designing for the poor is more important now than ever before. It is the future of business growth, as multinationals and local companies are increasingly developing products and experiences that serve not only the upper classes but also the "bottom of the pyramid" a the 4 billion people worldwide living on less than $2 per day.
Posted: September 30th, 2010
at 6:23pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: the column
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High-Speed Trans-Atlantic Cable
The race to accelerate Wall Street trading has moved underwater. Hibernia Atlantic today announced plans to build a trans-Atlantic submarine fiber optic cable that will provide faster connections between New York and London than any available today. A Hibernia said the new Project Express cable will provide high frequency traders with latency of under 60 milliseconds between New York and London, faster than the current top speed available on the fastests trans-Atlantic cable, Global Crossing's AC-1. The first phase of the new build will run a cable from the county of Somerset in the UK, to Halifax, Canada where it will connect with Hibernia's current low latency cable from Halifax to New York. The build is projected to be completed by the summer of 2012. AProject Express will be the first trans-Atlantic cable build in nearly 10 years, following the dot-com era overbuilding of 1998-2001, when seven new submarine cable routes were built. Pricing collapsed, and trans-Atlantic bandwidth remains among the lowest available. But Hibernia clearly sees an opportunity in the demand from the high frequency trading market, where a difference of microseconds can offer a competitive advantage.
Posted: September 30th, 2010
at 4:40pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: development,trade
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DualX E-Drive Plug-in Concept
Mercedes-Benz Technology has recently unveiled the Reporter pickup concept study at the 63rd IAA Commercial Vehicles in Hanover. Featuring something called the DualX E-Drive drive solution, the Reporter is both a plug-in and full-hybrid vehicle with an all-wheel drive system. Powered by a 70 kW electric motor, this green beauty can reach a top speed of 130 km/h and has a range of around 300 km
How to Start a Hedge Fund
If you've spent the last 5, 10, or 20 years enjoying the fruits of a blissfully unregulated financial system that created wealth for its adepts but nothing for the American people, then surely you're steamed at the big regulatory overhaul that passed in Congress this summer. But there's still something you can do: move over from the stringently monitored world of banking to the somewhat less monitored world of hedge funds. We spoke to an actual big-shot hedge-fund manager to pick up tips on how you too can start the rogue finance shop of your dreams.
George Lucas Stole Chewbacca
The creation of Star Wars is comprehensive mythology onto itself, populated by rarely documented anecdotes, the likes ofA"the Millennium Falcon was inspired by a hamburger, with the outrigger cockpit being an olive off to the side" (1)AorA"My original inspiration for Chewbacca was my dog Indiana." (2), compelling enough to be repeated until they're so prevalent that theyAmust be true, and are accepted even by hardcore fans and Lucasfilm itself. Unfortunately sometimes they're embellished truths or half-truths, sometimes entirely false and in pretty much all cases oversimplifying a truly interesting, and luckily exceptionally well documented creative process.
And that's what this is about; the creative process. Cultural touchstones like Star Wars might seem to have sprung fully formed from the minds of their lauded creators, but as in all creative endeavors, movie making, web design or this very post, nothing could be further from the truth. Creation is a process, and strangely, by looking at how everyone's favorite plushy first-mate sprang into existence, we can learn a lot about any collaborative creative endeavor.
Unfortunately, perhaps because of the verisimilitude of the disciplines needed to make a film like Star Wars come together, the making-of narrative is surprisingly fragmented and often incomplete. A quick look at the bibliography needed to put together this post should give a good idea of justAhow fragmented. And once you're down the rabbit hole, you quickly learn that nothing found there can be taken at face value. Quotes, drawings, photos and diagrams lack sources, are undated, some old, some new, some so distorted as to be pure fiction and most of it entirely out of context.
Posted: September 29th, 2010
at 1:28pm by Koookiecrumbles
Categories: myninjaplease,not ninja-worthy,film,mnp is for the children
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Improving Posture
If you’re one of the millions of knowledge workers slaving away in your cubicle all day, you deserve to work pain free. This article will help you on your way.
Solar Cells Thinner than Wavelengths of Light
Ultra-thin solar cells can absorb sunlight more efficiently than the thicker, more expensive-to-make silicon cells used today, because light behaves differently at scales around a nanometer (a billionth of a meter), say Stanford engineers. They calculate that by properly configuring the thicknesses of several thin layers of films, an organic polymer thin film could absorb as much as 10 times more energy from sunlight than was thought possible.