Thursday, May 22, 2014
A Great Bookshelf Speaker
Pioneer has replaced our previous pick, the SP-BS41-LR, with the $130 SP-BS22-LR, and from the reviews they’re just as good, if not better. As such, they’re our new pick for inexpensive bookshelf speakers.
Why these? Well, you can check out the full rationale for the SP-BS41s here. The short version is that storied speaker designer Andrew Jones designed these inexpensive speakers. One of his other notable designs are the TAD Reference One’s which sell for slightly more money than the SP-BS22-LRs: $70,000.There’s near-universal praise from the audio reviewers who have checked out the SP-BS22-LRs. Neil Gader, in his review for The Absolute Sound magazine, had this to say, “The BS22 has an honest tonal signature that doesn’t pander to the “let’s move ’em” sensibilities of big-box-store salesmen. It is remarkably free of sonic hype.” He continued, “However, the essence of the BS22’s performance is found in the quality of its midrange. Jones has fashioned a smooth, tonally ripe midband with just enough heft and weight behind vocal and instrumental images to provide reasonable dynamic and harmonic scale. The treble is surprisingly open, which lends overtones a fullness and dimensionality that are often lacking in blue-plate loudspeakers.” He concluded his review with, “The BS22 is simply one of the great buys out there, without reservation.”
CNET’s Steve Guttenberg, who reviewed both the old and the new models, said, “I’ve heard the complete system and the new models really do sound better, they sound clearer, make more bass, and can play louder than the original speaker line.” When comparing the small speakers to the 6-inch tall size common in this price range, Steve said, “If you care more about sound quality than getting the smallest possible speaker, consider something a bit larger, like the Jones designed SP-BS22-LR, the price is inline with the pint-size competition.” In a roundup of his Top 10 inexpensive speakers, Steve said of the BS22, “In its price class, nothing can touch this bookshelf speaker.”
by Geoff Morrison, Wirecutter | Read more:
Image: Pioneer
The Trouble With IBM
In the summer of 2012, five American technology companies bid on a project for a demanding new client: the CIA. The spy agency was collecting so much information, its computers couldn’t keep up. To deal with the onslaught of data, the CIA wanted to build its own private cloud computing system—an internal version of the vast fleets of efficient, adaptable servers that run technically complex commercial services such as Netflix. For the agency, the power of the cloud was tantalizing. “It is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human-generated information,” the CIA’s chief technology officer, Ira “Gus” Hunt, told a gathering of industry leaders earlier that year, calling it “high noon in the Information Age.” For the bidders, more was at stake than a piece of the lucrative federal IT market. Whoever won the 10-year, $600 million contract could boast that its technology met the highest standards, with the tightest security, at the most competitive prices, at a time when customers of all kinds were beginning to spend more on data and analytics.
IBM was one of two finalists. The company would have been a logical, even obvious, choice. Big Blue had a decades-long history of contracting with the federal government, and many of the breakthroughs in distributed computing can be traced back to its labs. The cloud was a priority and a point of pride. In 2012, IBM’s new chief executive officer, Virginia Rometty, used her first speech to shareholders to describe big data as a “vast new natural resource” that would fuel the company’s growth for a decade.
On Feb. 14, 2013, the CIA awarded the contract to Amazon.com. The e-commerce company, a pioneer in offering cloud computing services to corporate customers from Nokia to Pfizer, had persuaded the spymasters that its public cloud could be replicated within the CIA’s walls. Amazon had been bleeding IBM for years—its rent-a-server-with-your-credit-card model was a direct threat to IBM’s IT outsourcing business—but this was different. Amazon beat IBM for a plum contract on something like its home turf, and it hadn’t done so simply by undercutting IBM on price. IBM learned that its bid was more than a third cheaper than Amazon’s and officially protested the CIA decision.
It would have been better to walk away. As the Government Accountability Office reviewed the award, documents showed the CIA’s opinion of IBM was tepid at best. The agency had “grave” concerns about the ability of IBM technology to scale up and down in response to usage spikes, and it rated the company’s technical demo as “marginal.” Overall, the CIA concluded, IBM was a high-risk choice. In a court filing, Amazon blasted the elder company as a “late entrant to the cloud computing market” with an “uncompetitive, materially deficient proposal.” A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of winning” the contract. The corporate cliché of the 1970s and ’80s, that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, had never seemed less true. IBM withdrew its challenge.
No single deal encapsulates a 103-year-old company with a market capitalization of $185 billion. But the CIA butt kicking is a microcosm of larger problems IBM is having as it struggles to adapt to the cloud era, in which clients large and small rent technology cheaply over the Internet instead of buying costly fixed arrays. Under Rometty’s leadership, revenue has declined for eight consecutive quarters, a period when most of corporate America has flourished. In January, after a year in which IBM was the only company in the Dow Jones industrial average whose shares lost value, Rometty and her top executives turned down their annual bonuses, worth in her case as much as $8 million.
by Nick Summers, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image: 731; Photographs by Nigel Parry/CPI Syndication (Rometty); Mikehaywardcollection/Alamy (Cloud)
IBM was one of two finalists. The company would have been a logical, even obvious, choice. Big Blue had a decades-long history of contracting with the federal government, and many of the breakthroughs in distributed computing can be traced back to its labs. The cloud was a priority and a point of pride. In 2012, IBM’s new chief executive officer, Virginia Rometty, used her first speech to shareholders to describe big data as a “vast new natural resource” that would fuel the company’s growth for a decade.On Feb. 14, 2013, the CIA awarded the contract to Amazon.com. The e-commerce company, a pioneer in offering cloud computing services to corporate customers from Nokia to Pfizer, had persuaded the spymasters that its public cloud could be replicated within the CIA’s walls. Amazon had been bleeding IBM for years—its rent-a-server-with-your-credit-card model was a direct threat to IBM’s IT outsourcing business—but this was different. Amazon beat IBM for a plum contract on something like its home turf, and it hadn’t done so simply by undercutting IBM on price. IBM learned that its bid was more than a third cheaper than Amazon’s and officially protested the CIA decision.
It would have been better to walk away. As the Government Accountability Office reviewed the award, documents showed the CIA’s opinion of IBM was tepid at best. The agency had “grave” concerns about the ability of IBM technology to scale up and down in response to usage spikes, and it rated the company’s technical demo as “marginal.” Overall, the CIA concluded, IBM was a high-risk choice. In a court filing, Amazon blasted the elder company as a “late entrant to the cloud computing market” with an “uncompetitive, materially deficient proposal.” A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of winning” the contract. The corporate cliché of the 1970s and ’80s, that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, had never seemed less true. IBM withdrew its challenge.
No single deal encapsulates a 103-year-old company with a market capitalization of $185 billion. But the CIA butt kicking is a microcosm of larger problems IBM is having as it struggles to adapt to the cloud era, in which clients large and small rent technology cheaply over the Internet instead of buying costly fixed arrays. Under Rometty’s leadership, revenue has declined for eight consecutive quarters, a period when most of corporate America has flourished. In January, after a year in which IBM was the only company in the Dow Jones industrial average whose shares lost value, Rometty and her top executives turned down their annual bonuses, worth in her case as much as $8 million.
by Nick Summers, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
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Facebook Offers Privacy Checkup to All 1.28 Billion Users
[ed. FB and privacy - it's like a virus, you should probably do a scan every time you log on.]
Chances are that you don’t.
Responding to business pressures and longstanding concerns that its privacy settings are too complicated, Facebook announced on Thursday that it was giving a privacy checkup to every one of its 1.28 billion users.
The company, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., will also change how it treats new users by initially setting their posts to be seen only by friends. It will explain to them that adjusting the setting to “public” means that anyone on the Internet can see their photos and messages.The change in default settings and the person-by-person review, which may shock users who suddenly realize how widely their personal information has been shared, is a sharp reversal for Facebook.
Facebook will change how it treats new users by initially setting their posts to be seen only by friends. It will explain to them that adjusting the setting to “public” means that anyone on the Internet can see their photos and messages.
“They have gotten enough privacy black eyes at this point that I tend to believe that they realized they have to take care of consumers a lot better,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. Ms. Dixon was briefed in advance about the latest changes.
For most of its 10-year history, Facebook has pushed — and sometimes forced — its users to share more information more publicly, drawing fire from customers, regulators and privacy advocates across the globe.
But for Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, more sensitivity to privacy might be good business.
Mr. Zuckerberg has seen privacy-friendly services like WhatsApp and Snapchat, and anonymous-sharing apps like Secret and Whisper, emerge as a competitive threat, particularly among younger users. That prompted him to strike a deal earlier this year to buy WhatsApp for as much as $19 billion.
“What we really want is to enable people to share what they want,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview last month. “People read a lot of the stuff that we do as if we are trying to somehow get people to share more things, but all the core innovations are around giving people the tools they need to be comfortable.”
Facebook might also be acting to forestall any actions by regulators, who constantly scrutinize its privacy practices. European privacy officials are reviewing the company’s proposed acquisition of WhatsApp, which follows stricter privacy procedures than Facebook does. In the United States, the company is wrangling in a federal appeals court over how it uses the personal data of teenagers in advertising sent to their friends.
Even as Facebook takes steps to empower its users on privacy, it continues to introduce features that raise new issues. On Wednesday, it announced an optional service for mobile phones that eavesdrops on the sounds in a room to try to identify any music or television shows that might be playing. Facebook says it doesn’t store the information for long, but it is the first time the company has tried to listen in on its users’ lives.
by Vindu Goel, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How the Internet Destroyed Tom Cruise
It was Jason Tugman's first day of work. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams.
A former circus fire-eater, he'd taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he didn't want to screw it up. But as Tugman carefully hung black curtains in Studio B, directly behind the orange set where Oprah taped, those screams wouldn't stop. The crowd sounded as if it was going to tear the building down.
"I could just hear the audience going absolutely apeshit," Tugman says. "Just the absolute losing of minds." He glanced at a monitor that transmitted a silent, live feed. Tom Cruise was on a couch.
You've seen it, too. You can probably picture it in your head: Tom Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a cowering Oprah as he jumps up and down on the buttermilk-colored couch like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the last decade, the punchline every time someone writes about his career.
There's just one catch: It never happened.
Like Humphrey Bogart saying, "Play it again, Sam," Tom Cruise jumping on a couch is one of our mass hallucinations. But there's a difference. Bogart's mythological Casablanca catchphrase got embedded in the culture before we could replay the video and fact-check. Thanks to the Internet, we have video at our fingertips. Yet rather than correct the record, the video perpetuated the delusion.
In May 2005, the same month that Cruise went on Oprah, the world of celebrity changed. Perez Hilton and the Huffington Post launched, with TMZ right behind them, and the rise of the gossip sites pressured the print tabloids to joining them in a 24-hour Internet frenzy. Camera phones finally outsold brick phones, turning civilians into paparazzi. YouTube was a week old, and for the first time a video could go viral overnight.
The Internet finally had the tools to feed us an endless buffet of fluff, chopping up real events to flashy — and sometimes false — moments that warped our cultural memory. The first star to stumble in front of the knives was the biggest actor in the world — and the one who'd tried the hardest not to trip.
by Amy Nicholson, LA Weekly | Read more:
Image: The Oprah Winfrey Show
A former circus fire-eater, he'd taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he didn't want to screw it up. But as Tugman carefully hung black curtains in Studio B, directly behind the orange set where Oprah taped, those screams wouldn't stop. The crowd sounded as if it was going to tear the building down.
"I could just hear the audience going absolutely apeshit," Tugman says. "Just the absolute losing of minds." He glanced at a monitor that transmitted a silent, live feed. Tom Cruise was on a couch.
You've seen it, too. You can probably picture it in your head: Tom Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a cowering Oprah as he jumps up and down on the buttermilk-colored couch like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the last decade, the punchline every time someone writes about his career.There's just one catch: It never happened.
Like Humphrey Bogart saying, "Play it again, Sam," Tom Cruise jumping on a couch is one of our mass hallucinations. But there's a difference. Bogart's mythological Casablanca catchphrase got embedded in the culture before we could replay the video and fact-check. Thanks to the Internet, we have video at our fingertips. Yet rather than correct the record, the video perpetuated the delusion.
In May 2005, the same month that Cruise went on Oprah, the world of celebrity changed. Perez Hilton and the Huffington Post launched, with TMZ right behind them, and the rise of the gossip sites pressured the print tabloids to joining them in a 24-hour Internet frenzy. Camera phones finally outsold brick phones, turning civilians into paparazzi. YouTube was a week old, and for the first time a video could go viral overnight.
The Internet finally had the tools to feed us an endless buffet of fluff, chopping up real events to flashy — and sometimes false — moments that warped our cultural memory. The first star to stumble in front of the knives was the biggest actor in the world — and the one who'd tried the hardest not to trip.
by Amy Nicholson, LA Weekly | Read more:
Image: The Oprah Winfrey Show
Stairway to Heaven: The Song Remains Pretty Similar
Back in England that winter, Page laid out the budding epic for the band at another house, Headley Grange, where the magic continued around a fire fueled on one occasion by a section of stairway banister. As Page plucked, singer Robert Plant seemed to channel another world as he wrote the lyrics. To Page, who has referred to the song as “my baby,” it was Zeppelin’s crowning achievement. “Stairway crystallized the essence of the band,” he told then-teenage rock writer Cameron Crowe in a March 13, 1975, Rolling Stone interview. “It was a milestone for us. Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with Stairway.”For generations of middle-class youth, the song is the 8-minute soundtrack of adolescent romance—or at least the anticipation of it. Stairway is slow dancing, the last song played at high school proms, sweet-16 parties, and summer camp mixers across a broad swath of the late 20th century.
Stairway’s stature—financially, culturally, and musically—is towering. By 2008, when Conde Nast Portfolio magazine published an estimate that included royalties and record sales, the song had earned at least $562 million. It was so profitable in part because Led Zeppelin refused to release the song as a single, forcing fans to shell out for the entire album, which is untitled but known as Led Zeppelin IV. In the U.S., the album has sold more copies (23 million, according to the Recording Industry Association of America) than any save Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971-75). To this day, Warner Music Group cites the song in its annual reports as an example of its publishing portfolio.
For live audiences, Stairway’s power starts with its introductory notes. “Can you think of another song, any song, for which, when its first chord is played, an entire audience of 20,000 rise spontaneously to their feet, not just to cheer or clap hands, but in acknowledgment of an event that is crucial for all of them?” Observer critic Tony Palmer wrote in a 1975 profile. Dave Lewis writes in Led Zeppelin: The Complete Guide to Their Music that “Stairway has a pastoral opening cadence that is classical in feel and which has ensured its immortality.”
But what if those opening notes weren’t actually written by Jimmy Page or any member of Led Zeppelin? What if the foundation of the band’s immortality had been lifted from another song by a relatively forgotten California band?
You’d need to rewrite the history of rock ’n’ roll.
by Vernon Silver, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image: Chris Walter/WireImage via Getty Images
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Why Our Guilt About Consumption Is All-Consuming
During a recent visit to California, I attended a party at a professor's house with a Slovene friend, a heavy smoker. Late in the evening, my friend became desperate and politely asked the host if he could step out on the veranda for a smoke. When the host (no less politely) said no, my friend suggested that he step out on to the street, and even this was rejected by the host, who claimed such a public display of smoking might hurt his status with his neighbours … But what really surprised me was that, after dinner, the host offered us (not so) soft drugs, and this kind of smoking went on without any problem – as if drugs are not more dangerous than cigarettes.
This weird incident is a sign of the impasses of today's consumerism. To account for it, one should introduce the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment elaborated by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: what Lacan calls jouissance (enjoyment) is a deadly excess beyond pleasure, which is by definition moderate. We thus have two extremes: on the one hand the enlightened hedonist who carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting hurt, on the other the jouisseur propre, ready to consummate his very existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment – or, in the terms of our society, on the one hand the consumerist calculating his pleasures, well protected from all kinds of harassments and other health threats, on the other the drug addict or smoker bent on self-destruction. Enjoyment is what serves nothing, and the great effort of today's hedonist-utilitarian "permissive" society is to tame and exploit this un(ac)countable excess into the field of (ac)counting.
Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it is healthy, that it doesn't threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate, yes, but fat-free; Coke, yes, but diet; coffee, yes, but without caffeine; beer, yes, but without alcohol; mayonnaise, yes, but without cholesterol; sex, yes, but safe sex …
So, what is going on here? In the last decade or so there has been a shift in the accent of marketing, a new stage of commodification that the economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin designated "cultural capitalism". We buy a product – an organic apple, say – because it represents the image of a healthy lifestyle. As this example indicates, the very ecological protest against the ruthless capitalist exploitation of natural resources is already caught in the commodification of experiences: although ecology perceives itself as the protest against the virtualisation of our daily lives and advocates a return to the direct experience of sensual material reality, ecology itself is branded as a new lifestyle. What we are effectively buying when we are buying "organic food" etc is already a certain cultural experience, the experience of a "healthy ecological lifestyle".
And the same goes for every return to "reality": in a publicity spot widely broadcast in the US a decade or so ago, a group of ordinary people was shown enjoying a barbecue with country music and dancing, with the accompanying message: "Beef. Real food for real people." The irony is that the beef offered here as the symbol of a certain lifestyle (the "real" grass-root working-class Americans) is much more chemically and genetically manipulated than the "organic" food consumed by an "artificial" elite.
What we are witnessing today is the direct commodification of our experiences themselves: what we are buying on the market is fewer and fewer products (material objects) that we want to own, and more and more life experiences – experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle. Michel Foucault's notion of turning one's self itself into a work of art thus gets an unexpected confirmation: I buy my bodily fitness by way of visiting fitness clubs; I buy my spiritual enlightenment by way of enrolling in the courses on transcendental meditation; I buy my public persona by way of going to the restaurants visited by people I want to be associated with.
The anti-consumerist ecology is also a case of buying authentic experience.
by Slavoj Žižek, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: 2014 Prix Pictet: Hong Hao
This weird incident is a sign of the impasses of today's consumerism. To account for it, one should introduce the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment elaborated by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: what Lacan calls jouissance (enjoyment) is a deadly excess beyond pleasure, which is by definition moderate. We thus have two extremes: on the one hand the enlightened hedonist who carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting hurt, on the other the jouisseur propre, ready to consummate his very existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment – or, in the terms of our society, on the one hand the consumerist calculating his pleasures, well protected from all kinds of harassments and other health threats, on the other the drug addict or smoker bent on self-destruction. Enjoyment is what serves nothing, and the great effort of today's hedonist-utilitarian "permissive" society is to tame and exploit this un(ac)countable excess into the field of (ac)counting.Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it is healthy, that it doesn't threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate, yes, but fat-free; Coke, yes, but diet; coffee, yes, but without caffeine; beer, yes, but without alcohol; mayonnaise, yes, but without cholesterol; sex, yes, but safe sex …
So, what is going on here? In the last decade or so there has been a shift in the accent of marketing, a new stage of commodification that the economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin designated "cultural capitalism". We buy a product – an organic apple, say – because it represents the image of a healthy lifestyle. As this example indicates, the very ecological protest against the ruthless capitalist exploitation of natural resources is already caught in the commodification of experiences: although ecology perceives itself as the protest against the virtualisation of our daily lives and advocates a return to the direct experience of sensual material reality, ecology itself is branded as a new lifestyle. What we are effectively buying when we are buying "organic food" etc is already a certain cultural experience, the experience of a "healthy ecological lifestyle".
And the same goes for every return to "reality": in a publicity spot widely broadcast in the US a decade or so ago, a group of ordinary people was shown enjoying a barbecue with country music and dancing, with the accompanying message: "Beef. Real food for real people." The irony is that the beef offered here as the symbol of a certain lifestyle (the "real" grass-root working-class Americans) is much more chemically and genetically manipulated than the "organic" food consumed by an "artificial" elite.
What we are witnessing today is the direct commodification of our experiences themselves: what we are buying on the market is fewer and fewer products (material objects) that we want to own, and more and more life experiences – experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle. Michel Foucault's notion of turning one's self itself into a work of art thus gets an unexpected confirmation: I buy my bodily fitness by way of visiting fitness clubs; I buy my spiritual enlightenment by way of enrolling in the courses on transcendental meditation; I buy my public persona by way of going to the restaurants visited by people I want to be associated with.
The anti-consumerist ecology is also a case of buying authentic experience.
by Slavoj Žižek, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: 2014 Prix Pictet: Hong Hao
Is It Possible to Create an Anti-Love Drug?
[ed. I'll take a bottle or two.]
Just take a pill, Bill? Science may soon provide the 51st — and perhaps first-ever pain-free — way to leave your lover.
While love potions and elixirs have been stock characters seemingly since storytelling began, comparatively little drama (hello, Eternal Sunshine!) has focused on their opposite: antidotes to free people from unwanted longing.
A drug that precisely targets only one specific relationship for destruction may be decades away, but drugs that interfere with specific aspects of love like sexual desire are already here. And as scientists begin to tease out the chemical chronology and specific brain systems involved in love, they are already investigating how existing medications taken in carefully timed ways could, for example, prevent the "bonding hormone" oxytocin from initiating or sustaining a relationship.
This could forever change what it means to sever romantic ties. And the ramifications go beyond “Please let me forget”–type situations à la Eternal Sunshine. Anti-love drugs could also provide an intriguing new “treatment” for those trapped in abusive relationships.
Brian David Earp, a research fellow at Oxford University's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and his colleagues have recently published a series of papers making the case for chemically enhancing — and disrupting, if necessary — our most powerful romantic connections. An anti-love drug, as they call it, “would be any substance that works to block or diminish a feeling of love, lust, attraction or attachment,” he says.
by Maia Szalavitz, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Just take a pill, Bill? Science may soon provide the 51st — and perhaps first-ever pain-free — way to leave your lover.
While love potions and elixirs have been stock characters seemingly since storytelling began, comparatively little drama (hello, Eternal Sunshine!) has focused on their opposite: antidotes to free people from unwanted longing.
A drug that precisely targets only one specific relationship for destruction may be decades away, but drugs that interfere with specific aspects of love like sexual desire are already here. And as scientists begin to tease out the chemical chronology and specific brain systems involved in love, they are already investigating how existing medications taken in carefully timed ways could, for example, prevent the "bonding hormone" oxytocin from initiating or sustaining a relationship.This could forever change what it means to sever romantic ties. And the ramifications go beyond “Please let me forget”–type situations à la Eternal Sunshine. Anti-love drugs could also provide an intriguing new “treatment” for those trapped in abusive relationships.
Brian David Earp, a research fellow at Oxford University's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and his colleagues have recently published a series of papers making the case for chemically enhancing — and disrupting, if necessary — our most powerful romantic connections. An anti-love drug, as they call it, “would be any substance that works to block or diminish a feeling of love, lust, attraction or attachment,” he says.
by Maia Szalavitz, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Inside Story of Oculus Rift and How Virtual Reality Became Reality
As he flew from Orange County to Seattle in September 2013, Brendan Iribe, the CEO of Oculus, couldn’t envision what the next six months would bring. The rhapsodic crowds at the Consumer Electronics Show. The around-the-block lines at South by Southwest. Most of all, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook. That fall Oculus was still just an ambitious startup chasing virtual reality, a dream that had foiled countless entrepreneurs and technologists for two decades. Oculus’ flagship product, the Rift, was widely seen as the most promising VR device in years, enveloping users in an all-encompassing simulacrum that felt like something out of Snow Crash or Star Trek. But it faced the same problem that had bedeviled would-be pioneers like eMagin, Vuzix, even Nintendo: It made people want to throw up.
This was the problem with virtual reality. It couldn’t just be really good. It had to be perfect. In a traditional videogame, too much latency is annoying—you push a button and by the time your action registers onscreen you’re already dead. But with virtual reality, it’s nauseating. If you turn your head and the image on the screen that’s inches from your eyes doesn’t adjust instantaneously, your visual system conflicts with your vestibular system, and you get sick.
There were a million little problems like that, tiny technical details that would need to be solved if virtual reality were ever to become more than a futurist’s fantasy. The Rift had made enough headway to excite long-suffering VR enthusiasts, but it was still a long way from where it needed to be.
But then Iribe got a call from Michael Abrash, an engineer at Valve; the gaming software company had conducted VR research for a while and had begun collaborating with Oculus. Valve had a new prototype, and it didn’t make people sick. In fact, no one who had tried the demonstration had felt any discomfort. Iribe, who was famously sensitive to VR-induced discomfort—“cold sweat syndrome,” he calls it, or sometimes “the uncomfortable valley”—flew up to Valve’s offices outside Seattle to be the ultimate guinea pig.
Abrash escorted Iribe into a small room tucked off a hallway. The walls and ceilings were plastered with printouts of QR-code-like symbols called fiducial markers; in the corner, a young engineer named Atman Binstock manned a computer. Connected to the computer was Valve’s prototype headset—or at least the very beginnings of a headset, all exposed circuit boards and cables. Iribe slipped it over his head and found himself in a room, the air filled with hundreds of small cubes.
He turned his head to look behind him—more floating cubes. Cubes to the left, cubes to the right, cubes overhead, floating away into infinity. Iribe leaned forward and peered around to see the side of the cube closest to him; he crouched and could see its underside. A small camera on the headset was reading the fiducial markers on the (real) wall and using that spatial information to track his position among the (virtual) cubes. So far, so good; no motion sickness yet.
Binstock tapped some keys and moved the demo to its next stage. Inside the headset, Iribe stood in a giant chamber, a web browser page on each wall. Iribe picked out a word on the wall across from him and started shaking his head back and forth, rotating as fast as he could, waiting for the word to smear across his vision and make him dizzy. Nothing. In any of Oculus’ own prototype headsets, Iribe would have gotten nauseated long ago, but he was still feeling good.
As Binstock continued clicking through the demo, Iribe faded in and out of a series of rooms—bare-bones virtual worlds filled with cubes and spheres. In all of them he took his time, moving, crouching, panning this way and that, taking in his 360-degree surroundings. Eventually he came to the grand finale, in which he floated slowly though a vast structure, its interior walls like some glowing mashup of Tron and a Death Star trench. The demo was at an end.
But Iribe couldn’t take his headset off. “Again,” he said, scarcely able to believe what he was asking for. They ran through the entire series once more. Finally Iribe took off the prototype. His head felt strange—not dizzy, not displaced, but overwhelmed. “How long was I in there?” he asked Abrash and Binstock.
It had been close to 45 minutes.
That’s it, Iribe thought. This is going to be bigger than I ever expected.
And that’s saying something, because the expectations surrounding the Oculus Rift have always been huge, ever since an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey hacked together a rough prototype in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, California, in 2011. In June 2012, John Carmack—the legendary founder of id Software, the company that created Doom, Quake, and the entire concept of 3-D gaming—brought that early prototype to the E3 videogame show, reintroducing VR to the popular conversation for the first time since The Lawnmower Man. A year later, Oculus brought an HD prototype to E3 and blew minds all over again. Then it brought another, even more advanced one to CES this past January. Then another unit to the Game Developers Conference in March. And finally, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook. All for a company that doesn’t even have a commercial product yet and is chasing a dream that most of the tech community had seemingly given up on decades ago. (...)
Beyond that, though, the company and its technology herald nothing less than the dawn of an entirely new era of communication. Mark Zuckerberg gestured at the possibilities himself in a Facebook post in March when he announced the acquisition: “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home.” That’s the true promise of VR: going beyond the idea of immersion and achieving true presence—the feeling of actually existing in a virtual space.
That’s because Oculus has found a way to make a headset that does more than just hang a big screen in front of your face. By combining stereoscopic 3-D, 360-degree visuals, and a wide field of view—along with a supersize dose of engineering and software magic—it hacks your visual cortex. As far as your brain is concerned, there’s no difference between experiencing something on the Rift and experiencing it in the real world. “This is the first time that we’ve succeeded in stimulating parts of the human visual system directly,” says Abrash, the Valve engineer. “I don’t get vertigo when I watch a video of the Grand Canyon on TV, but I do when I stand on a ledge in VR.”
Now Oculus is hard at work on its long-awaited headset for consumers, which the company predicts will be released later this year, or more likely early next year, or perhaps even not so early next year. Whenever it comes, we’ll finally have something that has eluded us for more than 30 years: immersive, affordable virtual reality. And we’ll all know what Brendan Iribe knew standing in that room outside of Seattle.
This is going to be bigger than we ever expected.
This was the problem with virtual reality. It couldn’t just be really good. It had to be perfect. In a traditional videogame, too much latency is annoying—you push a button and by the time your action registers onscreen you’re already dead. But with virtual reality, it’s nauseating. If you turn your head and the image on the screen that’s inches from your eyes doesn’t adjust instantaneously, your visual system conflicts with your vestibular system, and you get sick.There were a million little problems like that, tiny technical details that would need to be solved if virtual reality were ever to become more than a futurist’s fantasy. The Rift had made enough headway to excite long-suffering VR enthusiasts, but it was still a long way from where it needed to be.
But then Iribe got a call from Michael Abrash, an engineer at Valve; the gaming software company had conducted VR research for a while and had begun collaborating with Oculus. Valve had a new prototype, and it didn’t make people sick. In fact, no one who had tried the demonstration had felt any discomfort. Iribe, who was famously sensitive to VR-induced discomfort—“cold sweat syndrome,” he calls it, or sometimes “the uncomfortable valley”—flew up to Valve’s offices outside Seattle to be the ultimate guinea pig.
Abrash escorted Iribe into a small room tucked off a hallway. The walls and ceilings were plastered with printouts of QR-code-like symbols called fiducial markers; in the corner, a young engineer named Atman Binstock manned a computer. Connected to the computer was Valve’s prototype headset—or at least the very beginnings of a headset, all exposed circuit boards and cables. Iribe slipped it over his head and found himself in a room, the air filled with hundreds of small cubes.
He turned his head to look behind him—more floating cubes. Cubes to the left, cubes to the right, cubes overhead, floating away into infinity. Iribe leaned forward and peered around to see the side of the cube closest to him; he crouched and could see its underside. A small camera on the headset was reading the fiducial markers on the (real) wall and using that spatial information to track his position among the (virtual) cubes. So far, so good; no motion sickness yet.
Binstock tapped some keys and moved the demo to its next stage. Inside the headset, Iribe stood in a giant chamber, a web browser page on each wall. Iribe picked out a word on the wall across from him and started shaking his head back and forth, rotating as fast as he could, waiting for the word to smear across his vision and make him dizzy. Nothing. In any of Oculus’ own prototype headsets, Iribe would have gotten nauseated long ago, but he was still feeling good.
As Binstock continued clicking through the demo, Iribe faded in and out of a series of rooms—bare-bones virtual worlds filled with cubes and spheres. In all of them he took his time, moving, crouching, panning this way and that, taking in his 360-degree surroundings. Eventually he came to the grand finale, in which he floated slowly though a vast structure, its interior walls like some glowing mashup of Tron and a Death Star trench. The demo was at an end.
But Iribe couldn’t take his headset off. “Again,” he said, scarcely able to believe what he was asking for. They ran through the entire series once more. Finally Iribe took off the prototype. His head felt strange—not dizzy, not displaced, but overwhelmed. “How long was I in there?” he asked Abrash and Binstock.
It had been close to 45 minutes.
That’s it, Iribe thought. This is going to be bigger than I ever expected.
And that’s saying something, because the expectations surrounding the Oculus Rift have always been huge, ever since an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey hacked together a rough prototype in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, California, in 2011. In June 2012, John Carmack—the legendary founder of id Software, the company that created Doom, Quake, and the entire concept of 3-D gaming—brought that early prototype to the E3 videogame show, reintroducing VR to the popular conversation for the first time since The Lawnmower Man. A year later, Oculus brought an HD prototype to E3 and blew minds all over again. Then it brought another, even more advanced one to CES this past January. Then another unit to the Game Developers Conference in March. And finally, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook. All for a company that doesn’t even have a commercial product yet and is chasing a dream that most of the tech community had seemingly given up on decades ago. (...)Beyond that, though, the company and its technology herald nothing less than the dawn of an entirely new era of communication. Mark Zuckerberg gestured at the possibilities himself in a Facebook post in March when he announced the acquisition: “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home.” That’s the true promise of VR: going beyond the idea of immersion and achieving true presence—the feeling of actually existing in a virtual space.
That’s because Oculus has found a way to make a headset that does more than just hang a big screen in front of your face. By combining stereoscopic 3-D, 360-degree visuals, and a wide field of view—along with a supersize dose of engineering and software magic—it hacks your visual cortex. As far as your brain is concerned, there’s no difference between experiencing something on the Rift and experiencing it in the real world. “This is the first time that we’ve succeeded in stimulating parts of the human visual system directly,” says Abrash, the Valve engineer. “I don’t get vertigo when I watch a video of the Grand Canyon on TV, but I do when I stand on a ledge in VR.”
Now Oculus is hard at work on its long-awaited headset for consumers, which the company predicts will be released later this year, or more likely early next year, or perhaps even not so early next year. Whenever it comes, we’ll finally have something that has eluded us for more than 30 years: immersive, affordable virtual reality. And we’ll all know what Brendan Iribe knew standing in that room outside of Seattle.
This is going to be bigger than we ever expected.
by Peter Rubin, Wired | Read more:
Images: Dan Winters and Francesco Muzzi
CyanogenMod
[ed. Never heard of this before, sounds like something worth checking out. Wikipedia entry here.]
CyanogenMod is an enhanced open source firmware distribution for smartphones and tablet computers based on the Android mobile operating system. It offers features and options not found in the official firmware distributed by vendors of these devices.
Features supported by CyanogenMod include native theming support, FLAC audio codec support, a large Access Point Name list, an OpenVPN client, an enhanced reboot menu, support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering, CPU overclocking and other performance enhancements, soft buttons and other "tablet tweaks", toggles in the notification pull-down (such as wi-fi, Bluetooth and GPS), app permissions management, as well as other interface enhancements. CyanogenMod does not contain spyware or bloatware. In many cases, CyanogenMod may increase performance and reliability compared with official firmware releases.
CyanogenMod is developed as free and open source software based on the official releases of Android by Google, with added original and third-party code.
Read more about CyanogenMod, including its development and version history, at its Wikipedia entry. (...)
When making the decision on whether or not to modify the software on your device, several factors come into play. Your Android device is pretty much a full computer (and if it's a phone it has additional mobile functions), so it may help to think of it in the same way as you would consider modifying your laptop or desktop computer from its stock installation.
CyanogenMod is an enhanced open source firmware distribution for smartphones and tablet computers based on the Android mobile operating system. It offers features and options not found in the official firmware distributed by vendors of these devices.
Features supported by CyanogenMod include native theming support, FLAC audio codec support, a large Access Point Name list, an OpenVPN client, an enhanced reboot menu, support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering, CPU overclocking and other performance enhancements, soft buttons and other "tablet tweaks", toggles in the notification pull-down (such as wi-fi, Bluetooth and GPS), app permissions management, as well as other interface enhancements. CyanogenMod does not contain spyware or bloatware. In many cases, CyanogenMod may increase performance and reliability compared with official firmware releases.CyanogenMod is developed as free and open source software based on the official releases of Android by Google, with added original and third-party code.
Read more about CyanogenMod, including its development and version history, at its Wikipedia entry. (...)
When making the decision on whether or not to modify the software on your device, several factors come into play. Your Android device is pretty much a full computer (and if it's a phone it has additional mobile functions), so it may help to think of it in the same way as you would consider modifying your laptop or desktop computer from its stock installation.
Pros
Common reasons to modify your device's operating system include:
Common reasons to modify your device's operating system include:
- Remove unwanted programs ("bloatware") installed by your carrier
- Receive more frequent security updates (ie, get the latest fixes from Google in the newer OSes)
- Having access to the most current version of Android available (including new features)Most carriers take months to update to the latest version of Android, whereas rooted devices usually receive updates within days or weeks
- Better performance
- Extra features
Cons
Common concerns include the following:
To read more about the pros and cons of rooting and installing custom roms, check out this article from Android Authority.
For a good overview of CyanogenMod specifically, check out this article from Addictive Tips.
Common concerns include the following:
- Some device manufacturers or mobile providers may offer a limited or voided warranty after modifying
- It is possible that by installing a rooted operating system, you may be introducing new potential security issues (although this argument could be switched-- older operating systems may be insecure as well...)
- Non-stock firmware could contain malicious code - which is a good argument for making sure you download custom ROMs from a trusted source, or even better, learn to build it yourself!
- Stability issues may arise when using an experimental operating system. However, for many people, CyanogenMod has proven to be more stable than most 'official' ROMs.
To read more about the pros and cons of rooting and installing custom roms, check out this article from Android Authority.
For a good overview of CyanogenMod specifically, check out this article from Addictive Tips.
by CyanogenMod Wiki | Read more:
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
What If We Admitted to Children That Sex Is Primarily About Pleasure?
[ed. See also: Dan Savage's 'The Most Fundamental Truth About Sex'.]
When I handed the note to my mate at the dinner table, our son said with something of a proud smile, “I told Mrs. Reverby we’ve already talked about it at home.”The mate and I looked at each other and obviously had the same thought. Two weeks before, the class had been learning about electricity. The teacher had gotten stuck on some questions about batteries, so she had turned to our son, who was able to explain to the class exactly how batteries charge, recharge, and discharge. He’s learned a lot about electricity at home.
And quite a lot about sex.
“You know,” my mate said to our son, “this is one of those times when you have to not help the teacher even if you know how something works.”
I busted out laughing at the admonition. “Your dad is right,” I said, composing myself. “It’s entirely possibly you know more about sex than they do, but there’s some stuff some parents might not want their kids to know, so you have to keep a lid on it.”
“I know,” he answered.
But really. This was the kid who in preschool answered a teacher’s “Good morning, how are you today?” with “I’m fine, but my mother is menstruating, so her uterine lining is sloughing.” I just shrugged and explained to her that he’d seen blood on the toilet paper and wanted to know if I was OK.
So I had explained that it was normal, and he wanted to hear about the mechanics, like he always did about everything.
She laughed. As he went off to play, she reminded me of the time that the class had somehow gotten onto the discussion of baby cows, and one child had posed the question of how the cow gets out of the mommy’s tummy. The teachers glanced nervously at each other until one of them sputtered, “Through the birth canal!”
My son’s hand shot up: “Is that the same as the vagina?” Apparently he also pointed out that the baby must be in a uterus, not a tummy, because if the baby was in the stomach it would get digested, and that wouldn’t be good.
This was also the only kid in preschool who said, “Most boys have penises and scrotums and most girls have clitorises and vaginas.” I presume it is because my son knows so much about sex that sometimes his friends have tried to ask me questions. I never know what to do in such a situation.
Ordinarily I answer all children’s questions in an honest manner and make sure I evince no shame about the question or the answer, whether it is about war, disability, disease, sex, arguments between neighbors, whatever. But in this cultural climate of negativity around sex, can I really answer another person’s child’s question about sex?
One day nine-year-old Elaine started asking me about birth control out of the blue. I said to her, “Listen, I need to call your parents and ask them if it’s OK for me to talk to you about this, OK?” She said that’d be fine. So I did. I didn’t expect her mother’s response.
“Oh, God, yes, please answer any questions she has! And tell her it’s OK to go to you any time with those questions!” I told her that’d be fine, but that I’d also ask Elaine if it was OK for me to just let her mother know what we had talked about.
My mate has always been a little more reserved with “adult” information. This is a general difference between us, one that’s pretty apparent to everyone; a friend once asked our son what it’s like to be raised by Auntie Mame and Kermit the Frog. But I have to be forthcoming with the goods, especially when it comes to sex. My work on children born with atypical sex has put me in the position of advising other parents that it is critical to be calm and honest in response to children’s questions about sex. I kind of have to practice what I preach.
by Alice Dreger, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image: xNstAbLe/Shutterstock
Monday, May 19, 2014
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