Comment Re:"all the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Gmail users" (Score 1) 96
That's a really useful way of thinking of it. Also, I'd love for this explanation to appear on TV news.
Comment Time to reread Greg Egan's Blood Sisters (Score 1) 754
It's a short story about the "Monte Carlo project" to randomly generate viruses. A pertinent quote:
The theory also included the best containment facilites in the world, and five hundred and twenty people all sticking scrupulously to official procedure, day after day, month after month, without a moment of carelessness, laziness or forgetfulness. Apparently, nobody bothered to compute the probability of that.
Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting:
"EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
Comment Anything by Ian Stewart (Score 1) 630
Especially his "Cabinet of mathematical curiosities".
"The music of the primes", by Marcus de Sautoy, is also worth reading.
