Spectacular view from the new Mars rover Curiosity: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Jupiter, Venus and Earth in the sky from Mars[/caption] Jupiter, Venus and Earth in the sky. Amazing to think where science is these days, and the sheer achievement of landing that rover in the first place is a testament to technology and its advancements. How long until we land humans on Mars?
In case you are a Order of the Stick reader but haven’t heard, Rich Burlew (creator of OotS) is doing a reprint drive, raising some cash on Kickstarter. In fact, of the original target of $57,000, there’s a stunning amount of overfunding. Almost $900,000 in overfunding, that is. So: if you’ve ever read Order of the Stick, step up! Help us clear a cool million! You can get some great rewards, or pick up all the books for extra cheap while helping kick along this fantastic comic series! ...
Overthinking It reviews L.A. Noire, and realises it isn’t your run-of-the-mill sandbox game: There are a few ways to play L.A. Noire: Do your best on the fly, looking for clues at crime scenes and making your best guesses, maybe taking advantage of the in-game help, but mostly just playing at the pace of the story to get to the next cutscene. Read or watch walkthroughs and do the things they tell you to get five stars on every mission. Puzzle out the specifics of the cases, which can be surprisingly time-consuming and require a whole lot of attention to detail. Focus on reading the characters’ faces and gestures, and use that to guide you through interrogations, rather than the evidence. Brute-force everything, clicking on everything in every search and restarting each interrogation over and over again until you get it right. Dick around, free-roam and do side quests and stuff. [I]n video games, brute forcing is almost guaranteed to work — rather than a problematic chore for cryptologists, it has become the major driving force behind playing most games, ostensibly for fun. Let’s act like algorithms for a few hours until dinner-time. Ah, leisure! ...
I’ve been an Apple user since 2006, but I’ve been a Windows user since 1993 - the sheer gravity of Microsoft Windows on the computing landscape is inescapable, and it’s given me a certain amount of perspective: you can’t be ideological about what you use to get your work done1 Last week, Microsoft introduced the upcoming Windows 8 at its BUILD conference to an audience of developers. In many ways, it’s almost the direct opposite of what Apple would do - introduce to devs and market to devs the biggest change in the user interface since Windows 95, instead of a consumer-friendly presentation. The key here is that Microsoft needs developers on board much more than they need the consumers - for all the hype Apple gets, it’s still only around 10% of the computing market, and the overwhelming weight of Microsoft in the corporate environment will give Windows inertia for years. ...
Interesting post from the MacroBusiness blog: looks like the widely reported cringe about Australia’s workplace productivity declining is far too overblown. To quote: In his speech Dr Parkinson quoted figures showing that Australia’s annual productivity growth slipped from 2.1 per cent in the 1990s to 1.5 per cent in the 2000s. It is far more illuminating, however, to describe the productivity performance of the non-mining and mining sectors of the economy separately. This can be done by removing both mining output and the hours worked in the mining industry from the national figures and analysing the residual. ...