TED | Talks | Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence (video)

Talks Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

About this Talk

In a preview of his next book, Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we've come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about.

TED | Talks | Al Seckel: Your brain is badly wired -- enjoy it! (video)

Talks Al Seckel: Your brain is badly wired -- enjoy it!

About this Talk

Al Seckel, a cognitive neuroscientist and master of visual illusions, explores some of the perceptual illusions that fool our eyes and our brains. Running through example after example of images that buck our expectations, he asks why such tricks make us so happy (The Pursuit of Happiness was the theme of the 2004 TED conference). He even creates some of his own illusions, challenging our notion of what's true.

TED | Talks | Stefan Sagmeister: Yes, design can make you happy (video)

Talks Stefan Sagmeister: Yes, design can make you happy

About this Talk

Analyzing a list of things that have made him happy, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister realized that almost half of the items were in some way related to design. In this intensely personal talk, he shares the details of some of those moments, and gives props to three artists whose work has had a positive impact on his world. Concluding with some examples of his own work, Sagmeister offers a real insight into his aesthetic and philosophy of work -- and life.

TED | Talks | Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes (video)

Talks Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

About this Talk

Here's one of those talks that can change your view of the world forever. Starting with the deceptively simple story of an ant, Dan Dennett unleashes a dazzling sequence of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of "memes" -- a term coined by Richard Dawkins for mental concepts that are literally alive and capable of spreading from brain to brain. On the way, look out for:
+ a powerful one-sentence secret of happiness
+ a compelling insight into terrorists' motivation
+ a chilling view of Islam
And just when you think you know where the talk's heading, it dramatically shifts direction and questions some of western culture's fundamental assumptions.
This. Is. Unmissable.

TED | Talks | Philippe Starck: Why design? (video)

Talks Philippe Starck: Why design?

About this Talk

Legendary designer Philippe Starck -- with no pretty slides behind him -- spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question "Why design?" Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized mantra for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, he cheerfully admits, is to aid in the design of a better toothbrush.

Cultural Studies & Analysis

Basic Characteristics of Life Development Stages

Infancy
Birth-4 Years Individuality
19-23 Years
Self-awareness
40-43 Years
Reflection
60-65 Years
Infants live in the present in a bonded state of absolute dependence with mother as the provider of all needs. The infant's relationship to its mother will change rapidly as the infant develops mobility, but the mother's relationship as nurturer to the infant will not. The fundamentals of taste in music, clothing, partners, and personal concepts such as what is attractive or sexy are set here. However, just as your personal identity is emerging you take on other social identities: employee, spouse, and/or parent. The value in learning tilts from Experience to Utility. This is a nuanced, experienced, and edited version of the individual at 23. Depending on the degree of change necessary to bring the mature self into alignment, this process can be dramatic or simple. The final shakeout will fall back to more nuanced preferences confirmed at 23. This stage marks the beginning of a search for meaning. A renewed interest in religion of youth or popular philosophy or spirituality is common. Value is found in experiences such as non-utilitarian learning, travel, and personal development. As in childhood, goods are valued for their Affiliation.
Childhood
4-10 years
Alliance
23-30 Years Readjustment
43-50 Years Recognition
65-70 Years
Children are experiential learning machines, gathering and manipulating data until all possibilities are exhausted, then moving on (play.) The nature of play limits long-term brand loyalty. Children look to role models to validate discoveries. Value in consumer goods lies in Affiliation. The learning stage of a long period of conflict and resolution between the individual and overlaying social identities. Shared meals emerge as an important social collaboration for gauging relationships. Value of consumer goods lies in Validation of rapidly evolving social mobility. The learning stage of the maturity period. Products and practices that do not fit are dropped. There is a new openness to new alliances and ideas compatible with examined and refined values. Consistency and reliability are high priority values. The learning stage of the resolution period. Practices and products that do not meet the new standards of core value for cost (money or spiritual) are dropped. Brand loyalty for valued products is fixed unless the product changes or cost increases negate value.
Preadolescence
10-14 Years
Practice
30-35 Years Mastery
50-55 Years Accommodation
70-75 Years
The first nostalgia age as children look to establish lifelong values. Preadolescents work to strike a balance between present and future states, actively seeking new role models while finding security and investing value in the icons of childhood. As life gets more complex, imbalances come to the fore. This period marks the second nostalgia age as icons of childhood reemerge as symbols of value. The core values of nostalgia are reliability, consistency, and security. The third nostalgia age as we reflect on life's path. A period of fine-tuning of alliances and practices. The editing-out process is rapid. As social mobility slows, acquisition of goods also slows. Value is found by a return to a nuanced version of the childhood play stage of Experience. The final fine-tuning period of stripping away what doesn't work and valuing what does. A sense of freedom not experienced since childhood drives us to explore for intrinsic motivation alone. Nostalgia is commonly expressed in unfavorable comparison the present to the past.
Adolescence
14-19 Years Evaluation
35-40 Years Reevaluation
55-60 Years
Acceptance
75+ Years
The emergent identity is driven to sever the dependent relationship with the parent. Validation shifts from parent to peer group. Self-testing and the "trying on" of mediated identities drives both the consumer good and experience markets. A time of identity-driven separation similar to the adolescent stage. A period of reexamination of the web of relationships that comprise the social whole, with a rejection of those that do not fit the individual identity. A third period of reexamination of identity based on the realization that you are now most likely operating at maximum capability in all areas of your life. Value is placed on understanding and security. De-accessioning consumer goods begins.

High speed password cracking on PlayStation 3 - News - heise Security UK

High speed password cracking on PlayStation 3

The Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console has been used to generate high speed MD5 hashes by a New Zealand security consultant. He claimed a rate of over 1.4 billion iterations per second in a presentation at the Kiwicon conference in Auckland. The researcher attributes this performance to both the parallelism available from the multi-core processor and the simplicity of the processor architecture. Generating hashes for the words in a dictionary or simply all valid character combinations and comparing the result to a given hash from a password file is the basic mechanism of password cracking.

Nick Breese, the kiwi penetration tester who performed the experiment, pointed out that the PlayStation's architecture is "very suitable for cryptography", being optimised for high speed repetitive execution of simple processes. The processor uses six cores, each capable of executing four calculations simultaneously due to a Single Instruction, Multiple Data internal architecture. This permits 24 simultaneous calculations on the device as a whole, which runs at a clock rate of 3.2 GHz, implying that an iteration occupies around 50 machine cycles.

Breese claims to have achieved a speed improvement factor of 100 over previous upper limits. In earlier experiments he conducted on a Core 2 Duo processor he apparently attained around eight million iterations per second. It is not clear right now how the performance demonstrated in the PlayStation test compares with that of the GeForce-8 solution recently introduced by Elcomsoft. Nevertheless, at 300 UK pounds or less (half the price of the Elcomsoft software package alone), this demo potentially puts super-fast password hash cracking in the hands of almost any user.

Apparently pure research was not the only motive for this project. Breese is himself a gamer, and this project justified to his bosses the business expense of a PlayStation 3 for his office!

Christian Cenizal, Designer-Developer (Flocking and emergent behavior)

Flocking and emergent behavior

Flocking! It’s one of the simplest implementations of a concept known as emergent behavior, and it is rad as heck.

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 BitTorrent Tools and Tricks

Top 10 BitTorrent Tools and Tricks

TED: Ideas worth spreading

Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers

Triond - How it Works

How it Works

Triond is as simple as 1-2-3:

1. You create interesting content and submit it to us.
2. We publish your content on appropriate websites.
3. You earn royalties.

It's as simple as that.
Creating Content

You may create interesting content on any topic, in any language, and in any media format. You can submit articles you have written, videos and pictures you have shot, and podcasts or original music that you have recorded.
Publishing

Once your content is submitted and approved, we publish it on the websites where we feel it will have the greatest impact – either on our networks or our affiliates' networks. From that moment on, your content starts generating revenue for you.
Getting Paid

As soon as your content is published it will start generating revenue from online advertising that appears on the pages alongside your content.

Each month you will earn 50% of the revenue generated by your content in the previous month. And you'll keep on earning - because your published content will continue to generate royalties every month thereafter.

You will receive your monthly payment by check, Western Union money transfer, or directly to your PayPal account.

STANFORD Magazine: January/February 2008 > Features > Virtual Reality

Alt text for image

ELECTABLE LIKE ME: The power of digital imaging raises the specter of manipulation. When photos of undecided voters were partially morphed into those of candidates, the voters would prefer a candidate with whom they'd been melded, but could not detect that the photo contained their own face.

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing - Joel on Software

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

By Joel Spolsky
Thursday, March 23, 2000

This is a very old version of an article that has since been extensively rewritten. The latest version is The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, Version 3.0.

This version is here for historical reasons only.

Future Scanner

Future Scanner

Research Paper - Social network websites

Research Paper - Social network websites — faberNovel

Research Paper - Social network websites

faberNovel Consulting issues a new Research Paper on best practices from leading social network websites
Research Paper - Social network websites

Online social networks and meeting platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Meetic are currently developing at a frantic pace. These companies have been reporting two or three-digit growth rates and most of them have launched intensive acquisition campaigns in the last two years or are now being targeted by major media groups. The sector is beginning to structure itself around some key players, which have succeeded in becoming the reference platform within their field, as the result of their innovations and positioning.


Social networks have numerous specificities. A company’s ability to identify and understand these specificities, and offer suitable answers, results in major success within this field. Today, this sector appears mature enough to enable a study of the market’s leading firms’ development in order to identify their “best practices” and to propose a specific framework analysis for each type of website.


faberNovel Consulting, a member of the French association Silicon Sentier has taken the first step by presenting a study on social network websites. This study formulates the basic concepts of social networks and also analyses online matchmaking websites and business network websites. This third research paper is distributed under the Creative Commons license to allow for further contributions by other specialists and web users in the coming months, due to expected major industry moves.


Download this research paper here:
www.fabernovel.com/socialnetworks_en.pdf

See the press release: here
Voir le communiqué de presse : ici

Web 2.0 Templates

Web 2.0 Templates Web Templates | Web 2.0 Templates Flash Templates | Template Monster

Web 2.0 Templates Collection from Template Monster
As you know we at TemplateMonster always strive to satisfy the desires of our users as well as to follow the latest trends of Web design. That has become the reason for the TemplateMonster designing team to start producing Web 2.0 Templates. As Web 2.0 technologies greatly differ from an old web the design has also been changed. Everything starting with the background and ending with content fonts has been changed. From now on our templates are easier to use and customize.

Quantcast - Open Internet Ratings Service

Quantcast - Open Internet Ratings Service

Introducing Quantcast Internet Ratings

Quantcast is the world's first open internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of millions of web sites. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.

8 things to avoid when building an MMOG server

T=Machine » 8 things to avoid when building an MMOG server

A few years ago, I wrote an article for Develop magazine - “10 MMOs you don’t want to do”.

Here’s 8 things you really shouldn’t do but that might seem like a good idea if you’ve never made an MMOG before.

All these are examples of things that have been done on real MMO projects, usually MMORPGs.

1. use off-the-shelf middleware from the enterprise industry. It’s designed for completely different usage-patterns and cannot cope with MMO style usage. Equally, initially distrust anything from traditional Big Iron companies.
2. think that Grid Computing will somehow magically solve the problems. It won’t (c.f. previous point).
3. aim to code the server in a scripting language. You *can* run some scripts embedded in the server, but not the server itself - but even that can screw you when you’re trying to run thousands of scripts at once
4. assume that front-end load-balancing will solve any problems. It won’t, all it does is increase the efficiency of your cluster by a small amount. And it usually won’t provide you with failover, because most game designs will end up kicking you from your server if it dies, so the failover never gets used at that level.
5. ignore performance testing until mid-way through the project. If performance tests at 10% of the way through production say it’s slow, that means you’re in deep trouble - it does NOT mean that “we’ll come back and optimize it later”. Optimizing netcode and server code is NOT like traditional single-threaded local-only optimization: many of the things you’re dealing with (like LANs, and TCP/IP stacks) run orders of magnitude too slowly, so your optimization comes from imaginative system-architecture, not from optimizing small chunks of code at a time.
6. ignore billing concerns in your core game design. Non-free MMOG’s are entirely about billing, which means that you have to design it in, and build it in to the tech design from an early stage. Retrospectively adding billing hooks and billing information to existing server codebases is often about as easy and effective as retrospectively making your code secure. Just don’t go there.
7. hire an academic who specializes in networking, especially a PhD student (this gets done quite often). All this means is that they’ve obsessed with a very narrow slice of the many many problems, and generally they won’t know WTF to do about the rest of the problems. That’s no better than just promoting a general programmer to become “the new Server specialist”
8. innovate on both technology AND game design at the same time. Either do a traditional MMO so you can re-use all the existing common wisdom for design, and get to market (or at least a stable GDD) fast, and use the slack that buys you to focus on better tech, or use the most boring tech you can think of (instance lots; do lowest-hanging-fruit in your tech design) and innovate on the gameplay
9.

The Game Industry Salary Survey 2007 (US)

The Game Industry Salary Survey 2007 - GameCareerGuide.com

#
The Game Industry Salary Survey 2007
[09.03.07]
- Jill Duffy
#

Seventy-three thousand dollars a year.

That's the number that got a little bit of buzz this year. It's the average salary of a game developer. But it's just a number, and it's nowhere near what entry-level candidates should vie for when sealing the deal of their first industry job; nor is it a perfect bar against which to measure game developer salaries regionally, since the cost of living varies drastically between states like California, Texas, and North Carolina.

Here, we take a more tailored look at the statistics in light of what someone new to the game industry would need to know by paring down the results of Game Developer's sixth annual salary survey.

An extended version of this article, including information about developers' average level of education, differences in pay by gender, and more, can be found in the April 2007 issue of Game Developer magazine, available for downloadable purchase for $3.95.

16 Data Visualization Tools

16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools

16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools
May 15, 2007 — 01:18 AM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — Share This

From navigating the Web in entirely new ways to seeing where in the world twitters are coming from, data visualization tools are changing the way we view content. We found the following 16 apps both visually stunning and delightfully useful.

Computer Programs for Social Network Analysis

Links to Software for Network Analysis

Computer Programs for Social Network Analysis

Programs that convert data from one format into a different format

Fully Loaded Legal Windows

Fully Loaded Legal Windows at 0$ Cost » Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips

Fully Loaded Legal Windows at 0$ Cost

8 November, 2006 | written by Aibek | 15 comments

Many of my friends once in a while ask me to format and reinstall their windows system. While reinstalling is not a big deal, getting all necessary programs afterwards is. So, I decided to dedicate this post to all-needed software tools for healthy and trouble free PC usage(i.e. antivirus, spyware removal, firewall, system maintenance tools, office software, media players and etc). Based on number of downloads and user reviews I have compiled list of best software tools available which are 100% free. The cool thing about this list is that most of these programs are the best available in their particular domain. You can actually have fully loaded legal system at 0$ cost. Here it goes…
Name

Description

Review / Download
Security
Antivir Personal Edition 6 Antivirus Program link (allmost 1 mil downloads withiin 5 month)
AVG Antivirus Free Edition 7 Antivirus Program link (over 11 mil downloads within 3 weeks)
ZoneAlarm 6 Firewall (protect your computer from hackers and prevent some programs connecting to the internet without your consent) link (over 40 mil downloads)
Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4 Spyware Removal Tool link (over 80 mil download)
Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06 Spyware Removal Tool link (over 220 mil downloads)
Maintenance
SyncBack 3.2 Files Backup Tool link (over 50.000 downloads within 4 month)
CCleaner System Optimization Tool / Registry Cleaner link (allmost 1.8 mil downloads in 2 weeks)
RAM Booster 2 RAM Recovery Tool(speedup your computer by recovering RAM) link (3.2 mil downloads in 11 month)
Free RAM XP Pro RAM Recovery Tool link (4.4 mil downloads in 7 month)
Office/Documents
OpenOffice 2.0.4 Microsoft Office Alternative link (over 500 .000 downloads in 4 month)
Adobe Reader 7.0.8 View and Print Adobe PDF files link (over 30 mil downloads in 4 month)
Media (Play any Movies)
VLC Media Player These 2 players in combination with codec pack below will play almost any video file you may have. I am a big movie buff and it always worked for me link (approx 3.5 mil downloads in 6 month)
DivX Player 6.2.2 link (over 50 mil downloads in 5 month)
Advanced DVD Player DVD player link (more then 400.000 downloads in 3 weeks)
Avant DVD Player DVD player link (more then 400.000 downloads in 3 weeks)
Klite Codec Pack No more hunting for codecs. link (one of the best codec packs available)
Browsers & Internet Related
Mozilla Firefox 2.0 All belowed web browser link (more then 2mill downloads in 2 weeks)
Internet Explorer 7 New version of Microsoft’s IE browser. Much better then previous releases. (IE7 vs. Firefox 2 by CNET) link (more then 8 mil downloads within 3 weeks)
Flash Player 9 Needed for viewing flash animations on the websites link (more then 8.5 mil downloads in 4 month)
QuickTime 7.1.3 Most popular player used for viewing videos integrated into websites (ex; video blogs, trailers) link (more then 16 mil downloads in 2 month)
Other
WinRAR RAR archiver link (more then 40 mil downloads in 2 month)

Once you have all fundamentals, you can tweak and dress up your system even more with some of the desktop applications we reviewed before. Enjoy!

Collection of Rapidshare Tools and Tricks » Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips

Collection of Rapidshare Tools and Tricks

21 January, 2007 | written by Kaly | 22 comments

Rapidshare is world’s biggest file storage/sharing network and one of the most trafficked websites on the web. With it’s enormous file database (ebooks, software, audio,video, etc…) it became highly popular download destination. In this article you’ll find bunch of handy tips and tools(download managers and accelerators,search engines,how to get premium account, etc) designed for rapidshare users

Coolest Brainstorming Applications

Top Picks: Coolest Brainstorming Applications » Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips

Top Picks: Coolest Brainstorming Applications

14 June, 2007 | written by Kaly | 8 comments

From basic all-accessible (students, PR folks, etc) multi-person live brainstorming dashboards TO feature-rich, techy diagram creation tools.

Free Online Games

All Games - Free Multiplayer Online Games