Rafe – Page 76

Author: Rafe (page 76 of 989)

A general model for GUI applications

Matt Gallagher at Cocoa With Love provides his general model for Cocoa applications. The terminology is specific to Cocoa, but the model applies to nearly all GUI applications. Needless to say, the way you fill in the blanks in his model is what makes an application unique and useful.

File sharing doesn’t seem to diminish creativity

June 22, 2010 / Rafe / 5 Comments

Just as background, here’s what the Constitution says about intellectual property:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The Constitution makes it clear that copyright and patents exist not to make sure that people can profit from their creations but to encourage innovation and creativity. Researchers at the University of Kansas have found that the number of creative works being produced have increased since file sharing became available. It’s important to keep this in mind when people talk about strengthening copyright laws or escalating copyright enforcement. Piracy may be unethical, but it doesn’t seem to be stifling the production of creative works.

Car alarms don’t work

June 20, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

As I was listening to a car alarm go off last night (and again this morning), I wondered whether as a security measure they are effective at all. My guess was that the massive number of false positives insures that they go completely ignored when they go off. I was right. Transportation Alternatives has the numbers. Don’t go around thinking The Club is a better choice, either. Professional thieves target cars with The Club so that they can avoid walking around with a pry bar.

How developers think of their tools

June 16, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

John Siracusa nails the developer mentality when it comes to tools perfectly:

And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they’re current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand. Anything lower-level is seen as barbaric, and anything higher-level is a bloated, slow waste of resources. This remains true even as the overall level of abstraction across the industry marches ever higher.

The economics of raid lockouts in World of Warcraft

June 16, 2010 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Interesting post from Greg Street, the lead game systems designer for World of Warcraft, explaining why they are changing the game so that you can’t do the same raid more than once a week.

Some of you guys are coming from the angle that players should take responsibility for not playing more than they want to. I agree with that of course, but I also think the game design should not be something that puts that kind of pressure on you. We don’t want to make a game full of traps or temptations that you should have to resist. It’s more fun, I think, if what the game asks of you is reasonable. Killing the same boss twice or four times (as in ToC) or an unlimited number of times (as in the “no loot” model) doesn’t seem reasonable. Neither does having to play Alterac Valley hundreds of times in a weekend to get a prestigious PvP rank. Neither does having to grind for consumables for hours every week before raid night. All of those things are theoretically “features” that players could have shown some common sense and opted out of, but realistically they were just boneheaded design decisions that we needed to fix.

It’s this sort of real systemic thinking about how games work that make Blizzard’s games the best.

Dan Froomkin on Obama’s oil spill speech

June 16, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

This sentence from Dan Froomkin pretty much says it all when it comes to President Obama’s speech on the oil spill:

How unmoored from reality are Obama and his top advisers to think that some pretty words with so little substance could accomplish so much?

The words weren’t even that pretty.

My deeper fear is that President Obama’s limited reach still exceeds the nation’s feeble grasp. Is there a great untapped willingness to take on the challenge of climate change or even moving to cleaner fuels for other, less politically toxic reasons? I don’t see it.

Richard Feynman’s advice to Stephen Wolfram

June 16, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Richard Feynman gave Stephen Wolfram the following advice when Wolfram asked about starting his own research center:

Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.

The long path to justice

June 15, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The government of the United Kingdom released the Saville report on the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, and Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged the report’s findings, which shone a poor light on the British government of the time. It took four decades for the UK government to do so, and I wonder if after four decades we’ll see the US government take responsibility for the excesses on the war on terror. Right now, we’re still headed in the opposite direction. The Supreme Court has declined to grant Maher Arar access to US courts to sue the US government for sending him to Syria to be tortured after he was detained at a US airport on his way back to Canada. If he just waits another 20 or 30 years, I’m sure we’ll come around.

The externalities of gasoline

June 13, 2010 / Rafe / 10 Comments

Ezra Klein’s Washington Post column today is about the externalities of gasoline:

Most of us would call the BP spill a tragedy. Ask an economist what it is, however, and you’ll hear a different word: “externality.” An externality is a cost that’s not paid by the person, or people, using the good that creates the cost. The BP spill is going to cost fishermen, it’s going to cost the gulf’s ecosystem, and it’s going to cost the region’s tourism industry. But that cost won’t be paid by the people who wanted that oil for their cars. It’ll fall on taxpayers, on Gulf Coast residents who need new jobs, on the poisoned wildlife on the seafloor.

That means the gasoline you’re buying at the pump is — stick with me here — too cheap. The price you pay is less than the product’s true cost. A lot less, actually. And it’s not just catastrophic spills and dramatic disruptions in the Middle East that add to the price. Gasoline has so many hidden costs that there’s a cottage industry devoted to tallying them up. At least the ones that can be tallied up.

The most implausible aspect of Glee

June 10, 2010 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Turns out the most implausible aspect of Glee is that they could perform all of the popular songs they do without paying for the rights to do so:

The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines.

Balkinization guest blogger Christina Mulligan walks readers through the absurdity of modern copyright statutes using examples from Glee.

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