The Imagination Engine: Why Next-Gen Video Games Will Rock Your World →
Unreal Engine 4 represents nothing less than the foundation for the next decade of gaming. It may make Microsoft and Sony rethink how much horsepower they'll need for their new hardware. It will streamline game development, allowing studios to do in 12 months what can take two years or more today. And most important, it will make the videogames that have defined the past decade look like puppet shows.
High expectations, but I can't wait to see how it does. Time for a new computer, I suppose.
The Facebook Offering: How It Compares →
Great interactive visualization of other tech IPOs, their first-day gains, and their 3-year returns. For example, if you had held Amazon's IPO for 3 years, you would have a 2,763% return.
How Pixar Almost Deleted Toy Story 2 →
"rm -r -f *" just should not exist.
Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Markets, Movers, Monopolies →
The usual narrative is that capitalism and perfect competition are synonyms. No one is a monopoly. Firms compete and profits are competed away. But that's a curious narrative. A better one frames capitalism and perfect competition as opposites; capitalism is about the accumulation of capital, whereas the world of perfect competition is one in which you can't make any money. Why people tend to view capitalism and perfect competition as interchangeable is thus an interesting question that's worth exploring from several different angles.
Lots of great points in here about competition, whether in business or academics, monopolies, and markets.
Poll Shows Low Opinion of Facebook →
In the poll of U.S. adults published Tuesday, only 13 percent said they trust Facebook "completely" or "a lot" when it comes to keeping their personal information private. A majority, or 59 percent, said they trust Facebook "only a little," or "not at all."
Surprised?
Fungible →
There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers' role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don't replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.
While I don't agree with every point made, I do agree that this shift from information to recommendation is very interesting.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
— Anonymous
MS12-034: Duqu, Ten CVE's, and Removing Keyboard Layout File Attack Surface →
The Office document attack vector leveraged by the Duqu malware was addressed by MS11-087 – Duqu is no longer able to exploit that vulnerability after applying the security update. However, we wanted to be sure to address the vulnerable code wherever it appeared across the Microsoft code base. To that end, we have been working with Microsoft Research to develop a "Cloned Code Detection" system that we can run for every MSRC case to find any instance of the vulnerable code in any shipping product. This system is the one that found several of the copies of CVE-2011-3402 that we are now addressing with MS12-034.
Awesome. Hotmail uses a related system developed by MSRC for XSS attacks.
What Is and Is Not A Technology Company →
In confusing how these businesses make their product and what their product is, we introduce a whole set of assumptions and biases and information gaps that, by the looks of it, have resulted in a distorted market for companies and their equity, salaries, publicity, office space, and so forth.
Eddie Izzard on computers (some NSFW language)