Can it be? Is this company really attributing some of its success to the open source community? While this is not like a company like Intel or HP saying they couldn't have done something without the help of the open source community, it is definitely a step in the right direction. Once we get the proper recognition, we will be on our way to attaining mainstream popularity.
PROFILE Captain Xbox The inside story of how Seamus Blackley and a team of renegades persuaded Microsoft to build a video game console. By Dean Takahashi April 11, 2002
Bill Gates was showing off his new baby. It was March 2000, and thousands of people packed the room at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California, and the event was broadcast on TV worldwide. Standing on a dark, cavernous stage, Mr. Gates talked about the future of video games. He pulled a black shroud off a table and there was the machine, a shiny chrome box in the shape of the letter X, with a big green jewel in its center. "The modest tag line here is the future of console gaming," he said.
Offstage, Jonathan "Seamus" Blackley was worried sick. "I was under so much stress, it was remarkable I didn't explode," he recalls. The renegade program manager who was one of several co-creators of the Xbox, Mr. Blackley was a main character in an internal Microsoft insurgency that convinced Mr. Gates to spend an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion to enter the video game business. This was Mr. Blackley's spotlight moment. He and a small band of fellow renegades had convinced Mr. Gates that Microsoft had to field a non-PC box that didn't run Windows, that the company had to go into the money-losing hardware business, and that it had to defeat Sony's PlayStation 2 game console or surrender any hope of controlling technology in the living room.
Feigning confidence, Mr. Blackley walked on stage. He draped a leather jacket emblazoned with the acid-green Xbox logo over Mr. Gates's shoulders, then proceeded to wow the audience by showing on a big screen what the Xbox could do. With a controller in hand, he set off animations ranging from hundreds of Ping-Pong balls bouncing all over a room to a computer-animated woman practicing martial arts with a giant robot.
Everything went great until it looked like the demo froze. Backstage, Mr. Blackley's friends had a moment of horror when the action stopped on the screen; they thought the machine had crashed. That was all they needed: jokes about how Microsoft's blue screen of death--references to the familiar crashing of Windows--would now be part of video games. But Mr. Blackley had only pressed the Pause button, and he finished the demo without a hitch. The enthusiastic crowd showered him with applause.
The shiny box that Mr. Blackley had helped midwife from conception to delivery became Microsoft's weapon to take on Sony and Nintendo in the video game business and to make games the company's premier entertainment medium.
"We've put quite a budget behind this one, and we're going to break through in a very big way," Mr. Gates concluded to the audience of game developers. More than the marketing promises from the world's richest man, however, it was Mr. Blackley's demos that made this proposition credible.
The X-Man Until the Xbox, few people outside the industry knew much about Mr. Blackley, but he was a familiar figure to many at the Game Developers Conference. Easy to spot in a crowd, Mr. Blackley is in his early 30s, stands 6 feet, 2 inches tall, weighs 190 pounds, and has the build of a linebacker. He has close-shorn red hair and wears studs in his ears. Raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he has mastered an eclectic mix of topics including cars, physics, jazz, and history. A friend describes him as "one of the first cool people I met among the geeks" in the games business.
He stood out in another way, too. A year earlier he'd been at the same trade show--but under much different circumstances.
Back then, he met with Johnny Wilson, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine. Mr. Blackley's highly anticipated game, Trespasser: The Lost World, had just met with terrible reviews and lackluster sales. The game, which he undertook for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive, had been expected to propel computer games forward as an art form, but instead it became yet another example of the inferiority of games to movies. The gray-bearded Mr. Wilson was a kind of elder statesman among game journalists. He saw Mr. Blackley as an ambitious genius who had tried to break new ground, yet his magazine was one of those that panned the game.
The pair sat at the Microsoft booth at the end of the show, as workers were busy dismantling the exhibits. Mr. Blackley was mentally packing away his dreams. He had produced hit games before, and his intuition had never let him down, but now he worried that his career was ruined.
Mr. Wilson stretched out his hands to Mr. Blackley, and told him in a kindly voice, "Seamus, keep making games." The moment was too much for Mr. Blackley. He broke down in tears. "I figured no one would trust me to make a game again because I fucked up," he recalls. "It was an emotional disaster. It turned out, fucking up was a really good experience."
Mr. Blackley had learned one of the key lessons of being an entrepreneur: if you fail, get up and try again. The story of how Microsoft undertook the Xbox project mirrors the resurrection of Mr. Blackley. Though he wasn't the sole creator of the Xbox, his early collaborator, Ted Hase, gives him credit as the general who secured victory on the battlefield. And in November 2001, as Microsoft began selling millions of Xboxes, Mr. Blackley was the only original member of the team who was still involved in the project--a testament to the fierceness that can come from failure.
After the Trespasser debacle, Mr. Blackley took a job working on graphics technology at Microsoft on February 5, 1999. He had let down his idol, Mr. Spielberg, and he thought he craved the anonymity of quietly working on code. But Mr. Blackley wasn't one for sitting on the sidelines. Within days of joining the Redmond, Washington, giant, he changed course.
Sony had been touting the Internet-ready PlayStation 2 as a gadget that could eclipse the PC as the most useful digital appliance in the home. Many at Microsoft, from Mr. Gates down, mobilized in reaction.
Mr. Blackley teamed with graphics expert Otto Berkes, games evangelist Mr. Hase, and games marketer Kevin Bachus to explore the project before having obtained permission from their bosses--renegade behavior within Microsoft. This sort of behavior was tolerated by Mr. Gates and his lieutenants as long as the renegades were ultimately successful. The team proposed that Microsoft adapt the PC to be more like a console and, one by one, talked their superiors into supporting what they called Project Midway, so code-named because their machine would be midway between a PC and game console. It also raised memories of Americans beating the Japanese at the battle of Midway in World War II. It wasn't, perhaps, the most politically correct name for a project at a company that would need plenty of support from Japanese game publishers, but it was pure Mr. Blackley, who had the mind of a competitive gamer. He was so driven that he formed fast friendships with his comrades and quickly made enemies of his opponents. (The Midway project was later renamed the Xbox, after Microsoft's DirectX multimedia software, which runs the console.) He set aside his many interests--even breaking up with a longtime girlfriend--to devote himself entirely to the Xbox.
Mr. Blackley has a knack for getting people excited about new technology; he argued that equipping the game machine with the best technology from PCs would lead to the creation of new kinds of artistic expression. Game developers would use the Xbox to finally deliver the creative visions trapped in their heads. While Nintendo saw games as toys, and Sony viewed them as entertainment, Microsoft would come to regard them as art. And it would make a game console that was as easy to program as the PC, using the same familiar tools that developers had used for ages. That was in contrast to the unwieldy, untested tools that other console makers created for each of their new models. Also, Microsoft would take advantage of a PC's architecture, which computes images in a straightforward style, compared to the complex parallel processing of Sony's PlayStation 2, where programmers determine how to balance the processing load of each individual chip inside the machine. But unlike the PC, the Xbox would be a stable platform with uniform hardware. No more would developers have to make sure that their games ran on every conceivable graphics card or PC peripheral. Give the artists the platform they had always dreamed of, and they would flock to it, Mr. Blackley argued.
Boxing Match The Xbox renegades made their pitch to Mr. Gates on May 5, 1999. In Microsoft's executive boardroom, they laid out their case. They faced opponents from the WebTV division of Microsoft. The rivals, backed by executives Craig Mundie and Jon DeVaan, believed PC technology was inferior to the PlayStation 2. They felt Microsoft should build a customized console around WebTV's technology, coming "up from the appliance" instead of "down from the PC" to battle Sony. They criticized the Xbox, loaded with a $55 hard disk drive, as too expensive for a machine that needed to sell at less than $300 in order to compete with Sony.
In one heated exchange, the WebTV team said the Xbox guys were clueless because they didn't have the presence of mind to include screws in their estimate of the cost of the console. But Mr. Blackley's team had rigged clever demos to show what the PC could do, and they appealed to Mr. Gates's own love of gadgetry; the Xbox team wanted to deliver a machine for the most enthusiastic gamers who don't really care how much they have to pay.
In that intense first meeting, Mr. Gates said that the goal was to contain Sony and grab a lasting foothold in the living room. Afterward, he asked both teams to keep going, but in the weeks that followed, Mr. Blackley enlisted crucial support from the game-development community. He invited star developers like Epic Games's Tim Sweeney to tell Microsoft brass that the Xbox idea was superior to WebTV. Arguments from developers--which Mr. Gates recognized had helped Microsoft triumph in the PC market--helped the Xbox team prevail. Microsoft's executives knew developer support was indispensable if the company was to succeed in the video game market.
Having a Ball Mr. Blackley was almost giddy from the contact with Mr. Gates and Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer. He had participated in more meetings with the top dogs than any first-year Microsoft employee could ever hope to. In a meeting with the Xbox team a few weeks after the May 5 pitch, Mr. Ballmer started out bowling them over with one of his infamous monologues. He boomed, "The Xbox is the greatest fucking thing in the world! It's going to make billions! It's the greatest thing ever!"
Mr. Ballmer then hammered the team on its naÔve business model, but he offered a lot of encouragement in his own fashion. Once, when they were standing in line at the company cafeteria, Mr. Ballmer sneaked up behind them and bellowed, "It's the Xbox guys!"
"I almost peed in my pants," Mr. Blackley says. He looked over at Mr. Bachus, whose face went white, like someone who had just been caught in a crime. Mr. Blackley adds, "But at the same time, it was so motivating that he was showing everyone else there exactly who we were." As Mr. Ballmer moved closer, he joked more quietly, "Are you making any money yet?"
Even though the Xbox became a legitimate project at Microsoft, executive oversight caused angst for Mr. Blackley's cohorts. Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer weren't going to roll the dice and let Mr. Blackley run wild with the Xbox, as Steve Jobs had famously been allowed to do with the Macintosh at Apple Computer. In July 1999, Microsoft brought in Rick Thompson, the head of its hardware group, which sold 20 million mice a year, as well as a host of PC peripherals like joysticks and game controllers. He was joined a month later by J Allard, who had helped move Microsoft onto the Internet, to run the Xbox program. Suddenly, the Xbox renegades had lost control of their project and were forced to accept lesser roles: Mr. Blackley would assist game developers and create demos, and Mr. Bachus would sign up publishers to make games. Several team members, like Mr. Berkes and Mr. Hase, left the team and returned to their old jobs. Others left the company entirely. But Mr. Blackley and Mr. Bachus propped each other up and became servants to the cause; Mr. Blackley himself had no job to return to.
"Part of it was Trespasser," Mr. Blackley recalls. "I was not going to fail again. I decided I could react to Trespasser by making it make me stronger or weaker."
Mr. Blackley created a group of programming experts who could help developers finish their games, and he took charge of all demos of Xbox technology. He also worked with yet another group to create Xbox prototypes carved from blocks of solid aluminum, commandeering a lab set aside for Microsoft's toy division. Mr. Thompson set about trying to acquire a game publisher that would guarantee success for Xbox titles, but was unable to lasso the likes of Nintendo, Sega, and Square. Ed Fries, head of Microsoft's games publishing division, began approving Xbox titles but had to make sure they didn't eclipse the division's work on PC games. In a PC-focused company, it was still dangerous to neglect games for the PC.
Many of the Xbox team's original ideas were tossed aside, including the team's proposal that the Xbox run Microsoft's Windows operating system. Upon hearing this, Mr. Gates blew his top. But he eventually saw that Windows would only get in the way of developers creating great games.
On September 29, 1999, Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer signed off on Mr. Thompson's plan to spend $5 billion to $6 billion on the Xbox, with much of the money going to marketing and the costs of making the money-losing hardware. Mr. Allard and Mr. Blackley quarreled at first, but Mr. Blackley came to trust Mr. Allard's ability to sell ideas upward at Microsoft, and Mr. Allard said he gave Mr. Blackley "a lot of leash" to run wild with technical ideas.
In January 2000, Mr. Bachus and Mr. Blackley hit the road. For about four weeks, they traveled across Europe, the United States, and Japan meeting with publishers and developers. The trip proved crucial to the Xbox's initial success. "If Seamus had not gone out and gotten those demos early, then Xbox might not have had the momentum to be taken seriously," says Michael Abrash, a graphics expert who worked for Mr. Blackley on the Xbox. "There was a critical period there when someone had to make the outside world and people inside Microsoft feel like this was a project that was going to keep going. He did that."
Staying on the job was tough. Other team members tired of the constant bickering and of the plodding pace of Microsoft's management as it explored alternatives, like buying Sega or Nintendo, during late 1999 and early 2000. The talks with Sega stalled because it wasn't yet ready to give up on its Dreamcast hardware, and Microsoft only wanted the Japanese company's software teams. Mr. Blackley and others felt these talks were needless distractions and that Microsoft should go it alone.
When Mr. Thompson's hardware designers chose to use graphics technology from a little-known startup called GigaPixel, Mr. Blackley once again enlisted outside game developers to steer Microsoft back to its favored, if more expensive, Nvidia graphics chips.
"You wouldn't believe how much time we wasted," Mr. Blackley says. The company had less than two years to field the Xbox so that it could get the machine to market without being hopelessly behind the pace of Sony and Nintendo. As new battles were waged, Mr. Blackley became the morale booster on the Xbox team.
Wine and Spirits The evening after his big demo with Mr. Gates at GDC in 2000, Mr. Blackley and his exhilarated team celebrated at Scott's Seafood in San Jose, California, an upscale restaurant. They were so rowdy, shouting "Xbox! Xbox! Xbox!," that the maître d' almost kicked them out. As they were leaving, they all piled into one elevator. Mr. Blackley was the last to come diving in. The elevator was already sinking, and one of his drunken colleagues feared Mr. Blackley would be decapitated as the doors closed. Once Mr. Blackley was inside, the elevator promptly fell four floors to the ground. The team pulled open the doors and crawled out. The incident drew no official complaint from Redmond, but it triggered a gentle rebuke when top management read about it in the Wall Street Journal.
There were plenty of other moments when Mr. Blackley's flair for "morale building" activities got him into trouble. At one internal meeting, he showed an animation dubbed "Survival of the Fittest." It sported a couple of Microsoft's mascot characters at a shooting range. They fired weapons and eviscerated mascots like Sega's Sonic, Nintendo's Mario, and Sony's Crash Bandicoot. He was quoted in a newspaper as saying, "Playing video games is like masturbation; everyone does it but no one wants to admit it." Another time, he hired a couple of female models to pose as nurses during a rally so the Xbox game developers could ogle them. Redmond corporate culture didn't tolerate such shenanigans even though they were popular in the games industry. He also argued vociferously on behalf of his friends as they proposed games to Microsoft's approval committee, which had been dubbed "The Star Chamber" after an '80s movie that was itself named after a corrupt and secretive English court of law in the Tudor and early Stuart periods.
Yet his own team, called the Advanced Technology Group, saw Mr. Blackley as one of the few Microsoft people who understood gamers and game developers. The team included a wide variety of technical experts who helped developers improve their games and unlock the power of the Xbox hardware. They locked themselves behind closed doors in a separate part of campus and posted signs like "electrical closet" and "our confidential materials are bigger than your confidential materials" to keep unwanted visitors away. His group was so elitist it caused tensions with others, and Mr. Blackley, who got to appear with Mr. Gates on stage again at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2001, drew resentment from others who saw him as a clown or publicity hound. Yet Mr. Blackley's attitude went unchanged: you have to have fun if you're making a fun product.
Having fun got to be a chore. Mr. Blackley's good friend, Mr. Bachus, ran afoul of the Microsoft corporate climate. A few weeks before the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 2001, the game industry's biggest trade show, held each year in Los Angeles, Mr. Bachus resigned. "I didn't like my job anymore," he says. Mr. Blackley thought about resigning himself, but those inside and outside the company insisted he stay to keep the Xbox project alive. Things weren't rosy at the E3 trade show, where Nintendo surprised everyone with an impressive presentation of its GameCube console. The Xbox seemed to be losing steam.
Mr. Blackley was infuriated with the bad publicity at E3, where Microsoft's games got a cool reception. He yelled at his boss, Robbie Bach, about what went wrong at the show. Mr. Bach, to his credit, responded positively by asking Mr. Blackley to step in and fix the post-E3 image problem. Mr. Blackley set his team loose assisting the developers with the best games in the works. And he began yet another weeks-long tour for analysts and the media, showing off games as they came together.
Thirty-two months after embarking on their project, the Xbox team had done all it could do (last- minute cramming not withstanding) and was near the end of its journey. The console's fate then depended on marketing plans, advertising, and Flextronics, a contract manufacturer that would assemble each console.
As the November launch date approached, Mr. Blackley was the Xbox team member tagged for all the major press interviews because he was so persuasive. Game reviewers were also won over by substance. Mr. Fries's developers turned out polished titles like Halo, an alien-shooting game with stunning landscapes and a compelling story.
The Game of Love The big launch finally arrived. On November 14 at 12:01 a.m., Mr. Gates handed over the first Xbox to a dedicated gamer who had waited for hours at the Toys 'R' Us store in New York City's Times Square. Mr. Blackley and his new girlfriend, Vanessa Burnham, were at the scene. He introduced her to Mr. Gates.
"You know, Seamus, I think she could help you get your act together," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley asked. "Something has to."
"You ought to marry her," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley replied.
"Yeah, absolutely," Mr. Gates said. "Here's a ring."
"I'll give it a shot, OK, cool," Mr. Blackley said. He got down on one knee.
"Vanessa, will you marry me?"
She laughed, then answered, "Yes."
"Thank you," Mr. Blackley said.
He rose and they kissed. Everyone in the store applauded. Mr. Blackley put the ring on Ms. Burnham's finger. John Eyler, CEO of Toys 'R' Us, presented a stuffed animal to her. Mr. Gates had been briefed, but he had ad-libbed the part about Mr. Blackley getting his act together.
Microsoft managed to sell 1.5 million Xbox machines and more than three times as many games by the end of December. In the U.S. market, it outsold Nintendo's GameCube by a hair and put some pressure on the market leader, Sony, which sold nearly 3 million units in the U.S. market during the same period.
The Xbox's success is far from assured, but so were its chances of making it to market at all. After all, it is a piece of hardware from a software company, albeit the most successful software company on the planet.
Yet for all of the personal capital Mr. Blackley expended, he calls it one of the most exhilarating times of his life. As coworker Drew Angeloff says, "Once you've worked on a game console, what else is there to do?"
For Mr. Blackley, the answer is to start something new that can fire his imagination the same way the Xbox did. When he joined Microsoft, he had wanted to return to his original mission of making games that would be recognized as artistic endeavors. He will inevitably get back to that work, whether he's working for Microsoft or not. His old buddy Mr. Bachus has since started a game production company (in stealth mode) that works with developers and offloads the risk of development from publishers. The odds are good the two men will find a way to work together again. Mr. Blackley has done a game console, but he is still haunted by his own failure to make an artistic game.
At a dinner one evening in Los Angeles, after the bulk of his work on the Xbox was done, Mr. Blackley posed a question that revealed the personal demons he still hadn't quite exorcised.
"Have I made up for Trespasser yet?"
The complete story of the making of the Xbox is chronicled in Dean Takahashi's book, Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution (Prima Publishing, April).
As Nat King Cole famously sang, we have to "face the music and dance..." This month's editorial is coming to you with a reader beware warning!
I've been engaged in some great debates over the last month on a variety of topics, but the one that has caught my interest is the old chestnut regarding the longevity of Java. Is it here to stay? If not, how long do we have? Quite rightly, it's being talked about and I've had the good fortune to brush shoulders with a number of big names in our industry who have given me their perspectives on the whole debate. I have my own feelings about where Java is headed and I do believe that if, as a community, we don't get our act together, we may have only five years left at the most. After talking to my counterparts, it would appear I'm being overly generous with five years.
What's happening? Well, it's our old friend C# and its relentless march toward the development community. Setting aside the old argument that due to Microsoft's dominance it may well win the day, it's interesting to look at other reasons why C# may win the battle. Let's blow away some misconceptions that you may or may not be aware of regarding this new kid.
Myth #1: C# is a Windows-only technology. You could be excused for believing that, but did you know there's a major movement in the open source world to port the CLR (Common Language Runtime, i.e., their JVM!) to operating systems other than MS Windows? Linux, to name one. Imagine for a moment being able to run your.NET services alongside Apache on a Redhat box, seamlessly integrating into the rest of the network. This alone would be a major blow to server-side Java. It's also a subtle way for Microsoft to unofficially support the growing number of Linux seats without losing face (read www.halcyonsoft.com/news/iNET_PR.asp).
Myth #2: C# is an inferior Java clone. This is the most dangerous one and the one you probably tell yourself in order to keep the scales tipped in Java's favor. The truth is, it's not an inferior clone; it's a different clone, with many arguing that the differences are minute to the majority of the developer community. It will be frighteningly easy for Java developers to move over to C# with no real headaches to contend with. I suspect this was always on Microsoft's mind when developing the language (read www.prism.gatech.edu/~gte855q/CsharpVsJava.html).
Myth #3: C# is for developing Web services only. Most definitely not, and I have heard this one retorted back to me on a number of occasions. Ironically, this is the one area that could really hurt Java Ð on the client. As you know, Java has not made any significant headway in this space due mainly to its awfully slow Swing implementation. While the recent release of JDK1.4 has brought significant performance gains, it's still nowhere near the speed of its native Windows applications with respect to fast, snappy responses (although it must be said, the speed of a Swing application on a Mac OS-X does show what could be achieved). C# is the new building block for Windows applications, the next VB! And we know how many applications popped up when VB hit the market (read www.c-sharpcorner.com/WinForms.asp).
Okay, how many of you think I've abandoned all hope for Java and have gone to the dark side? I suspect some of you are questioning my loyalties at this precise moment, wondering if I'm fit to occupy my role as EIC. Well, don't panic, I'm merely being a realist and looking at it from all angles. You'd be the first ones to complain if I buried my head in the sand and just ignored the threat. We have to look at this together and come up with a strategy that will enable us to effectively take on C#. We'll be getting a lot of heat from all over and we need to be armed with the information and prepared to go back to the drawing board and reeducate the masses. Sadly, they are being led a merry dance by Pied Piper Gates.
Allow me to cite you an example of such blind ignorance and if this doesn't scare you, then I don't know what will. I was recently involved with the Scottish government, discussing technology and what have you, where naturally the topic of Microsoft was high on the agenda. Excusing the fact that these people took a certain pride in believing they knew what was going on and loved name-dropping, the phrase that caught me off guard was the following: "Java? No one is doing that now. Microsoft is no longer supporting it."
Wow! Talk about a major miscommunication. And this from someone who controls budgets for the technology sector in Scotland. Ironically, I believe he really thinks he has his finger on the pulse of technology. It's sheer ignorance like this that scares me the most. Microsoft has successfully planted and nurtured the seed in people's heads that just because it isn't supporting Java in Windows XP, Java is dead. I have to admit I was taken aback and quite flabbergasted when I heard that retort. I really didn't know where to go with that. So much background information was obviously missing that I wasn't too sure if I would come over as patronizing and whether, ultimately, they would understand.
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Ever since I started writing about this topic in my editorials, I've been hearing stories from you regarding similar misconceptions and it scares me. We have a beautiful language here in Java; it has achieved industry-wide support and is pushing forward with great velocity. What can we do to support it?
You do realize we need an anthem. All great causes have an anthem. Something for us to get behind and sing!!! Suggestions gratefully received. We need a Java song!
Until next month...
Author Bio
Alan Williamson is editor-in-chief of Java Developer's Journal. During the day he holds the post of chief technical officer at n-ary (consulting) Ltd, one of the first companies in the UK to specialize in Java at the server side. Rumor has it he welcomes all suggestions and comments.
No, it's not just you. The problem seems to be that MS has tried to expand too quickly at quite an inopportune time. Their attempts at horizontal integration of the entire consumer electronics industry has backfired with the current antitrust issues going on.
The half-assed attempt at a console, also known as the X-Box, is surely just an investment for the future home entertainment systems created by Microsoft, but at the rate they're going there will not be enough cash on hand to take the losses normally associated with selling console systems.
It will be interesting to see how successful Microsoft will be with their current networking desires that follow their.NET and passport ideas, and whether or not these too will fail or just become immensely unpopular. Regardless, the deathly grip they hold on the OS market has yet to see a legitimate adversary, so it will be a long time before we see the complete downfall of Microsoft.
Stephen Hawking seemed slightly worse, as always. It is a miracle that he has clung to life for over 20 years with Lou Gehrig's disease. Each time I see him I feel that this will be the last, that he cannot hold on to such a thin thread for much longer.
Hawking turned 60 in January. Over the course of his brilliant career, he has worked out many of the basics of black hole physics, including, most strikingly, his prediction that black holes aren't entirely black. Instead, if they have masses equivalent to a mountain's, they radiate particles of all kinds. Smaller holes would disappear in a fizz of radiation -- a signature that astronomers have searched for but so far not found.
The enormous success of Hawking's 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, has made him a curious kind of cultural icon. He wonders how many of the starlets and rock stars who mentioned the book on talk shows actually read it.
With his latest book, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam), he aims to remedy the situation with a plethora of friendly illustrations to help readers decipher such complex topics as superstring theory and the nature of time. The trick is translating equations into sentences, no mean feat. The pictures help enormously, though purists deplore them as oversimplified. I feel that any device is justified to span such an abyss of incomprehension.
When I entered Stephen's office at the University of Cambridge, his staff was wary of me, plainly suspecting I was a "civilian" harboring a crank theory of the universe. But I'd called beforehand, and then his secretary recognized me from years past. (I am an astrophysicist and have known Stephen since the 1970s.) When I entered the familiar office his shrunken form lolled in his motorized chair as he stared out, rendered goggle-eyed by his thick glasses -- but a strong spirit animated all he said.
Hawking lost his vocal cords years ago, to an emergency tracheotomy. His gnarled, feeble hands could not hold a pen. For a while after the operation he was completely cut off from the world, an unsettling parallel to those mathematical observers who plunge into black holes, their signals to the outside red-shifted and slowed by gravity's grip to dim, whispering oblivion.
A Silicon Valley firm came to the rescue. Engineers devised tailored, user friendly software and a special keyboard for Hawking. Now his frail hand moved across it with crablike speed. The software is deft, and he could build sentences quickly. I watched him flit through the menu of often-used words on his liquid crystal display, which hung before him in his wheelchair. The invention has been such a success that the Silicon Valley folk now supply units to similarly afflicted people worldwide.
"Please excuse my American accent," the speaker mounted behind the wheelchair said with a California inflection. He coded this entire remark with two keystrokes.
Although I had been here before, I was again struck that a man who had suffered such an agonizing physical decline had on his walls several large posters of a person very nearly his opposite: Marilyn Monroe. I mentioned her, and Stephen responded instantly, tapping one-handed on his keyboard, so that soon his transduced voice replied, "Yes, she's wonderful. Cosmological. I wanted to put a picture of her in my latest book, as a celestial object." I remarked that to me the book was like a French Impressionist painting of a cow, meant to give a glancing essence, not the real, smelly animal. Few would care to savor the details. Stephen took off from this to discuss some ideas currently booting around the physics community about the origin of the universe, the moment just after the Big Bang.
Stephen's great politeness paradoxically made me ill at ease; I was acutely aware of the many demands on his time, and, after all, I had just stopped by to talk shop.
"For years my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science," Stephen said. "It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin. The laws would break down at the point of singularity, of infinite density." Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity. Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.
I recalled that I had spoken to Stephen about mathematical methods of getting around this problem one evening at a party in King's College. There were analogies to methods in elementary quantum mechanics, methods he was trying to carry over into this surrealistic terrain.
"It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time," Stephen said. We discussed this a bit. Stephen had been using a mathematical device in which time is replaced, as a notational convenience, by something called imaginary time. This changes the nature of the equations, so he could use some ideas from the tiny quantum world. In the new equations, a kind of tunneling occurs in which the universe, before the Big Bang, has many different ways to pass through the singularity. With imaginary time, one can calculate the chances for a given tunneling path into our early universe after the beginning of time as we know it.
"Sure, the equations can be interpreted that way," I argued, "but it's really a trick, isn't it?"
Stephen said, "Yes, but perhaps an insightful trick."
"We don't have a truly deep understanding of time," I replied, "so replacing real time with imaginary time doesn't mean much to us."
"Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time," Stephen explained. "Along this axis, if the universe satisfies the 'no boundary' condition, we can do our calculations. This condition says that the universe has no singularities or boundaries in the imaginary direction of time. With the 'no boundary' condition, there will be no beginning or end to imaginary time, just as there is no beginning or end to a path on the surface of the Earth."
"If the path goes all the way around the Earth," I said. "But of course, we don't know that in imaginary time there won't be a boundary."
"My intuition says there will be no blocking in that special coordinate, so our calculations make sense."
"Sense is just the problem, isn't it? Imaginary time is just a mathematical convenience." I shrugged in exasperation at the span between cool mathematical spaces and the immediacy of the raw world; this is a common tension in doing physics. "It's unrelated to how we feel time. The seconds sliding by. Birth and death."
"True. Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch -- which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity."
"Not a great consolation," I said.
He grinned. "No, but I like the 'no boundary' condition. It seems to imply that the universe will be in a state of high order at one end of real time but will be disordered at the other end of time, so that disorder increases in one direction of time. We define this to be the direction of increasing time. When we record something in our memory, the disorder of the universe will increase. This explains why we remember events only in what we call the past, and not in the future."
"Remember what you predicted in 1980 about final theories like this?" I chided him.
"I suggested we might find a complete unified theory by the end of the century." Stephen made the transponder laugh dryly. "OK, I was wrong. At that time, the best candidate seemed to be N=8 supergravity. Now it appears that this theory may be an approximation to a more fundamental theory, of superstrings. I was a bit optimistic to hope that we would have solved the problem by the end of the century. But I still think there's a 50-50 chance that we will find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years."
"I've always suspected that the structure never ends as we look to smaller and smaller scales -- and neither will the theories," I offered.
"It is possible that there is no ultimate theory of physics at all. Instead, we will keep on discovering new layers of structure. But it seems that physics gets simpler, and more unified, the smaller the scale on which we look. There is an ultimate length scale, the Planck length, below which space-time may just not be defined. So I think there will be a limit to the number of layers of structure, and there will be some ultimate theory, which we will discover if we are smart enough."
"Does it seem likely that we are smart enough?" I asked.
Another grin. "You will have to get your faith elsewhere."
"I can't keep up with the torrent of work on superstrings." Mathematical physics is like music, which a young and zesty spirit can best seize and use, as did Mozart.
"I try," he said modestly.
We began discussing recent work on "baby universes" -- bubbles in space-time. To us large creatures, space-time is like the sea seen from an ocean liner, smooth and serene. Up close, though, on tiny scales, it's waves and bubbles. At extremely fine scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, sputtering into being, then dissolving. Arcane details of particle physics suggest that sometimes -- rarely, but inevitably -- these bubbles could grow into a full-fledged universe.
This might have happened a lot at the instant just immediately after the Big Bang. Indeed, some properties of our universe may have been created by the space-time foam that roiled through those infinitesimally split seconds. Studying this possibility uses the "wormhole calculus," which samples the myriad possible frothing bubbles (and their connections, called wormholes).
Averaging over this foam in a mathematical sense, smoothing its properties a bit, Hawking and others have tried to find out whether a final, rather benign universe like ours was an inevitable outcome of that early turbulence. The jury isn't in on this point, and it may be out forever -- the calculations are tough, guided by intuition rather than facts. Deciding whether they meaningfully predict anything is a matter of taste. This recalls Oscar Wilde's aphorism that in matters of great import, style is always more important than substance.
If this picture of the first split second is remotely right, much depends on the energy content of the foam. The energy to blow up these bubbles would be countered by an opposite, negative energy, which comes from the gravitational attraction of all the matter in the bubble. If the outward pressure just balances the inward attraction (a pressure, really) of the mass, then you could get a universe much like ours: rather mild, with space-time not suffering any severe curvature -- what astronomers call "flat." This seems to be so on such relatively tiny scales as our solar system, and flatness prevails even on the size range of our galaxy. Indeed, flatness holds on immense scales, as far as we can yet see.
It turns out that such bubbles could even form right now. An entirely separate space-time could pop into existence in your living room, say. It would start unimaginably small, then balloon to the size of a cantaloupe -- but not before your very eyes, because, for quite fundamental reasons, you couldn't see it.
"They don't form in space, of course," Stephen said. "It doesn't mean anything to ask where in space these things occur." They don't take up room in our universe but rather are their own universes, expanding into spaces that did not exist before.
"They're cut off from us after we make them," I said. "No relics, no fossil?"
"I do not think there could be."
"Like an ungrateful child who doesn't write home." When talking about immensities, I sometimes grasp for something human.
"It would not form in our space, but rather as another space-time."
We discussed for a while some speculations about this that I had put into two novels, Cosm and Timescape. I had used Cambridge and the British scientific style in Timescape, published in 1980, before these ideas became current. I had arrived at them in part from some wide-ranging talks I had enjoyed with Stephen -- all suitably disguised in the books, of course. Such enclosed space-times I had termed "onion universes," since in principle they could have further locked-away space-times inside them, and so on. It is an odd sensation when a guess turns out to have some substance -- as much as anything as gossamer as these ideas can be said to be substantial.
"So they form and go," I mused. "Vanish. Between us and these other universes lies absolute nothingness, in the exact sense -- no space or time, no matter, no energy."
"There can be no way to reach them," his flat voice said. "The gulf between us and them is unbridgeable. It is beyond physics because it is truly nothing, not physical at all."
The mechanical laugh resounded. Stephen likes the tug of the philosophical, and he seemed amused by the notion that universes are simply one of those things that happen from time to time.
His nurse appeared for a bit of physical cleanup, and I left him. Inert confinement to a wheelchair exacts a demeaning toll on one's dignity, but he showed no reaction to the daily round of being cared for by another in the most intimate way. Perhaps for him, it even helps the mind to slip free of the world's rub.
I sat in the common room outside his office, having tea and talking to some of his post-doctoral students. They were working on similarly wild ideas and were quick, witty, and keenly observant as they sipped their strong, dark Ceylonese tea. A sharp crew, perhaps a bit jealous of Stephen's time. They were no doubt wondering who this guy was, nobody they had ever heard of, a Californian with an accent tainted by Southern nuances, somebody who worked in astrophysics and plasma physics -- which, in our age of remorseless specialization, is a province quite remote from theirs. I didn't explain; after all, I really had no formal reason to be there, except that Stephen and I were friends.
Stephen's secretary quietly came out and asked if I would join Stephen for dinner at Caius College. I had intended to eat in my favorite Indian restaurant, where the chicken vindaloo is a purging experience, and then simply rove the walks of Cambridge alone, because I love the atmosphere -- but I instantly assented. Dinner at college high table is one of the legendary experiences of England. I could remember keenly each one I had attended; the repartee is sharper than the cutlery.
We made our way through the cool, atmospheric turns of the colleges, the worn wood and gray stones reflecting the piping of voices and squeaks of rusty bicycles. In misty twilight, student shouts echoing, Stephen's wheelchair jouncing over cobbled streets. He insisted on steering it himself, though his nurse hovered rather nervously. It had never occurred to me just how much of a strain on everyone there can be in round-the-clock care. A few people drifted along behind us, just watching him. "Take no notice," his mechanical voice said. "Many of them come here just to stare at me."
We wound among the ancient stone and manicured gardens, into Caius College. Students entering the dining hall made an eager rumpus. Stephen took the elevator, and I ascended the creaking stairs. The faculty entered after the students, me following with the nurse.
The high table is literally so. They carefully placed Stephen with his back to the long, broad tables of undergraduates. I soon realized that this is because watching him eat, with virtually no lip control, is not appetizing. He follows a set diet that requires no chewing. His nurse must chop up his food and spoon-feed him.
The dinner was noisy, with the year's new undergraduates staring at the famous Hawking's back. Stephen carried on a matter-of-fact, steady flow of conversation through his keyboard.
He had concerns about the physicists' Holy Grail, a unified theory of everything. Even if we could thrash our way through a thicket of mathematics to glimpse its outlines, it might not be specific enough -- that is, we would still have a range of choices. Physics could end up dithering over arcane points, undecided, perhaps far from our particular primate experience. Here is where aesthetics might enter.
"If such a theory is not unique," he said, "one would have to appeal to some outside principle, which one might call God."
I frowned. "Not as the Creator, but as a referee?"
"He would decide which theory was more than just a set of equations, but described a universe that actually exists."
"This one."
"Or maybe all possible theories describe universes that exist!" he said with glee. "It is unclear what it means to say that something exists. In questions like, 'Does there exist a man with two left feet in Cambridge?,' one can answer this by examining every man in Cambridge. But there is no way that one can decide if a universe exists, if one is not inside it."
"The space-time Catch-22."
"So it is not easy to see what meaning can be given to the question, 'Why does the universe exist?' But it is a question that one can't help asking."
As usual, the ability to pose a question simply and clearly in no way implied a similar answer -- or that an answer even existed.
After the dining hall, high table moved to the senior common room upstairs. We relaxed along a long, polished table in comfortable padded chairs, enjoying the traditional crisp walnuts and ancient aromatic port, Cuban cigars, and arch conversation, occasionally skewered by a witty interjection from Stephen.
Someone mentioned American physicist Stephen Weinberg's statement, in The First Three Minutes, that the more we comprehend the universe, the more meaningless it seems. Stephen doesn't agree, and neither do I, but he has a better reason. "I think it is not meaningful in the first place to say that the universe is pointless, or that it is designed for some purpose."
I asked, "No meaning, then, to the pursuit of meaning?"
"To do that would require one to stand outside the universe, which is not possible."
Again the image of the gulf between the observer and the object of study. "Still," I persisted, "there is amazing structure we can see from inside."
"The overwhelming impression is of order. The more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws. If one liked, one could say that this order was the work of God. Einstein thought so."
One of the college fellows asked, "Rational faith?"
Stephen tapped quickly. "We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics."
Walnuts eaten, port drunk, cigars smoked, it was time to go. When we left, Stephen guided his wheelchair through the shadowy reaches of the college, indulging my curiosity about a time-honored undergraduate sport: climbing Cambridge.
At night, young men sometimes scramble among the upper reaches of the steepled old buildings, scaling the most difficult points. They risk their necks for the glory of it. Quite out of bounds, of course. Part of the thrill is eluding the proctors who scan the rooftops late at night, listening for the scrape of heels. There is even a booklet about roof climbing, describing its triumphs and centuries-long history.
Stephen took me to a passageway I had been through many times, a shortcut to the Cam River between high, peaked buildings of undergraduate rooms. He said that it was one of the tough events, jumping across that and then scaling a steep, often slick roof beyond.
The passage looked to be about three meters across. I couldn't imagine leaping that gap from the slate-dark roofs. And at night, too. "All that distance?" I asked. My voice echoed in the fog.
"Yes," he said.
"Anybody ever miss?"
"Yes."
"Injured?"
"Yes."
"Killed?"
His eyes twinkled and he gave us a broad smile. "Yes." These Cambridge sorts have the real stuff, all right.
In the cool night Stephen recalled some of his favorite science fiction stories. He rarely read any fiction other than science fiction past the age of 12, he said. "It's really the only fiction that is realistic about our true position in the universe as a whole."
And how much stranger the universe was turning out than even those writers had imagined. Even when they discussed the next billion years, they could not guess the odd theories that would spring up within the next generation of physicists. Now there are speculations that our universe might have 11 dimensions, all told, all but three of space and one of time rolled up to tiny sizes. Will this change cosmology? So far, nobody knows. But the ideas are fun in and of themselves.
A week after my evening at Cambridge, I got from Stephen's secretary a transcript of all his remarks. I have used it here to reproduce his style of conversation. Printed out on his wheelchair computer, his sole link with us, the lines seem to come from a great distance. Across an abyss.
Portraying the flinty faces of science -- daunting complexity twinned with numbing wonder -- demands both craft and art. Some of us paint with fiction. Stephen paints with his impressionistic views of vast, cool mathematical landscapes. To knit together our fraying times, to span the cultural abyss, demands all these approaches -- and more, if we can but invent them.
Stephen has faced daunting physical constrictions with a renewed attack on the large issues, on great sweeps of space and time. Daily he struggles without much fuss against the narrowing that is perhaps the worst element of infirmity. I recalled him rapt with Marilyn, still deeply engaged with life, holding firmly against tides of entropy.
I had learned a good deal from those few days, I realized, and most of it was not at all about cosmology.
I think its interesting that one of the (arguably) greatest minds of our time has such physical difficulties. I'm impressed that he is able to have such stimulating conversations with other people (albeit other highly regarded intellectuals) without them getting distracted by the weird syntehsized voice.
Now, this is marginally on topic, but is someone like Hawking an argument for or against evolution by means of natural selection as it occurs today? To the best of my knowledge, he has yet to have children, but still, being married there is always the potential. In prehistoric times, a man suffering from his affliction would have no chance at reproducing, thus eliminating his genetic material from the gene pool. So I guess he material is still in the gene pool, because of the potential to reproduce...
Anyway, Hawking is a great man and if he contributes anything applicable to the regular Joe Citizen's daily life, it should be the fact that a man should not be judged by his appearance, the brightest minds may lay inside deceptive shells.
I can see the logic in their argument, as I too would be quite pissed if I didn't see any money from the sales of something that I created. I've wondered for a long time how artists felt about used book sales, because in their mind it might just as well be someone selling illegal copies of their creations.
But, on the other hand, I haven't bought a book or CD new in the past 4 years or so. This is in protest of the collaboration and price fixing between publishers. I figure if they try to screw me, I'll find a legal way that hurts them in the pockets. So the ban on direct linkage, while it may appear to be a good idea for the authors, will only hurt the effectiveness of their site. I'll just end up going to half.com or Amazon anyway, and ignore their site completely.
Anyway, if the authors want more money/any money at all from used book sales, they should publish themselves, because the large publishing houses would hardly like to share a new source of income. I'd be glad to buy a book new even if it did cost a little more from an author who publishes independently a la Edward Tufte.
Since I am forced to use Windows at work, for a long time IE was the best choice. The "page widening posts" by our friend Klerck I tried Mozilla, and I didn't like it, so I settled on Opera. I'd much rather use something open source to redeem myself for the sins of using an MS OS, so hopefully Mozilla will great improve (and soon).
I believe the problem is usually with bandwidth limitations and not with the actual web server. For instance, a site may be limited to 128 Kb/s up, so it would take a minimal amount of requests to saturate the pipe. I would think most of the servers linked to other than major sites are in the T1 range with around 1 Mb/s, so the bandwidth shouldn't be all that much of a problem unless there are more than a few thousand people accessing at the same time... which there usually are.
Another problem is bandwidth capping, similar to the article on Time-Warner article yesterday. To prevent things like the/. effect from breaking the bank, companies may put hourly limits on bandwidth usage, and when it is exceeded the site is inaccessible.
I can only speculate about the magnitude of the effect, but/. does have over 250,000 unique hits a day. So anywhere between 5 and 25% will follow the links to the target servers. Which puts it in the range of around 12,500 to 62,500 hits within a few hours. Of course, this all depends on the article and I'd be inclined to say something on the front page would attract many more hits than something hidden away such as the article on USPTO advisory nominations.
Who knows, this may set a new trend for rectruiting firms in Alaska. Work in Alaska by day, live in cheap Siberia by night! On paper, a 56 mile commute doesn't seem so bad... they'd only tell you that it's over a field of ice floes after you sign the deal. Of course, this section of Alaska probably has less than a burdgeoning tech industry.
props to Conan O'brien for his 1337 script writing skills (Season 4 Episode 12- "Marge vs. The Monorail" was his crowning achievement as a producer of The Simpsons).
I wonder what would happen when one of these jets flies over a southern California beach? I'd certainly hate to be an attractive woman in a bikini attracting the leering eyes of the pilots...
What are the chances of this hitting somebody? People say the chances are slim to nill, and just recently a significant piece of equipment came down and I didn't here about anyone getting hit. But a couple years ago NASA printed an article that the odds of someone being hit by the falling Iridium debris were about 1 in 250. By my count, this is the third potentially hazardous satellite entry in as many years, leading me to believe that eventually, someone will be hit.
This seems remniscent of amazon's patent on 1 click purchasing. If anything, it goes to show that what we think is a common sense idea is "innovative" according to business folk. I'm sure google could work their way around it by either calling it something else or developing a new and better alternative method.
In order of importance, here are the top five numbers to look at when choosing between LCD and CRT:
Dimensions, Refresh rate, Colors, Response time, and Power consumption.
While I would agree these are all important, why are response time and refresh rate not linked together? I.E., a crappy refresh rate (50Hz) combined with a crappy response rate (60 ms) could possibly lead to trouble. Also missing are contrast and brightness, two more very important aspects.
Okay, so her name may conjure up more images of Texas cityscapes and Hakeem Olajuwon than sex, but one glance at this absolute knock-out will turn your head around. Porn Star Houston is a luscious curve-meister who started out in the business in 1995 as a dead ringer for Bo Derek, from the top of her corn-rowed head to the toes on her 34D-25-35 figure. She then moved on to a close-cropped bleach blonde look, but Houston's certainly no less alluring for the change. Houston's high cheekbones and wide, slyly knowing eyes give away her Norwegian background, but between the sheets she's 100% pure American sexual predator.
Houston was working at the Hollywood Tropicana when producer Peter Davy spotted her oil-wrestling skills on one of his frequent talent hunts. The veteran of nude layouts and exotic dancing proved a natural porn queen, her supremely stacked frame and raw attitude serving as utter turn-ons. Houston got into porn at the age of 27, and although she may be a bit older than most pornstresses her energy and enthusiasm never flag. Fans looking for an introduction to this sultry sexstress should check out her work in 'Russian Roulette' or her incendiary work in 'Angels In Flight.' A performer who's much more into men than women, Houston is one of the hottest, best-looking additions to the ranks of hardcore in recent years.
Houston on Stern; Stern: "Good Luck With Your Labia"
Houston was on Howard Stern Wednesday morning to talk about her labia, or what's left of it after a reduction surgery, and the fact that it's up for bid on eroticbid.com. But the subject quickly veered to the "buried alive" bukkake she did last year at the Extreme Adults-Only Vacation in Mexico.
Stern said he didn't get the bukkake-thing or the male audience that digs it, but tried to explain it to his audience and not so well at that. Stern noted that bukkake started in Japan and that guys pleasured themselves with a woman's face.
"But she's buried in the sand...or confined so her head is only sticking out of the ground....guys decorate her," said Stern grappling for the essence of bukkake. Stern was reminded that it was Houston who chose the buried alive twist. "The Japanese will bury you in the sand or tie you up," Stern observed. "Then they drink from a cup which makes me want to barf it up."
Stern said he didn't get the whole idea because Houston's "a good-looking broad - she's sexy." He asked her how she got involved in the bukkake.
"Metro wanted to produce it and we were down at the Extreme vacation," Houston noted. "It seemed like the thing to do." Houston said about 25 guys participated and informed Stern that bukkake was the degrading of women. Stern wanted to know what the martini glass [filled with cum] was all about. Houston said she didn't even remember slurping anything out of a glass. Pursuing the degradation line of questioning, Stern wanted to know if crapping or peeing could be involved, butHouston said she was into none of that stuff.
Stern said he might have to make a bukkake film. "I've never seen anything like it," he said. "But as much as I dig you, I'd rather see you getting banged or with another chick." Stern said he preferred to see Houston tied to a wall where she's being tortured. "But not hurting you..." Houston told him she's done bondage before.
"I like watching bondage and reading about it," said Stern who went on to describe "the best porno" he ever saw. "It's this big fat ugly guy [Bill Majors] torturing this chick. It's so good. It's so real."
"Once they tie you up the law is they can't spank you hard?" Stern wanted to know. Houston said you can be spanked. "But there's no penetration usually in bondage," she added. "That's the rule." Houston told him she's been aroused during bondage sessions. "If it's done right and they're not out to hurt you... It almost starts feeling like a massage."
Stern announced that Houston would be in New York until Saturday at Legz' Diamond's Burlesque Theatre [ 231 West 54th Street, Fourth Floor]. During a press conference also scheduled for today at the theater, Houston, along with representatives from eroticbid.com, would be answering questions and providing photo ops. Along with her labia, eroticbid.com also has other Houston memorabilia as well including an autographed breast implant, her outfit from the Houston 500, some of her costumes from other films, the prom dress she wore last year when she was dating high school seniors, and other personal items..From there, Stern announced that Houston would be at the Dollhouse in Columbus, Ohio.
The discussion got around to Houston's prom date last year with Bradley, a high school senior. Houston said she started dating him because she liked him but broke up with him because he was too controlling.
Stern heard that, at one point, Bradley actually moved in with her. "He moved in for three weeks," Houston admitted. "The original plan was for him to get a job and figure out school and get a car and start his life in Los Angeles...He was going really slow at it. He wasn't doing what I felt he should have been doing more of. I felt that he needed to get his stuff more together."
Bradley moved back home, according to Houston. "He's a good guy. He'll figure it out and get it together. He's very smart." Houston hedged on the Bradley relationship question. "I haven't had sex with him in awhile," she said. Houston also mentioned that she had been partying in New York earlier this week with a celebrity hat designer named Ivy Supersonic. "She makes amazing hats. She really does."
After her labia reduction, Houston noted that her sensations were much better. She said a couple of millimeters were cut off in the procedure. "I wanted my implants and I wanted my labia saved," she said. Subsequently, she had the labia trimmings preserved and had them put into a lucite sculpture. Stern said he was afraid to look at the sculpture because he might get nauseous. Houston said his show was the first official unveiling.
"Do you really think there's a man out there who's going to pay good money for labias?" Stern asked. Houston said she thought so. "It's like a piece of art now. It's a sculpture and it's on a marble stand." She said that and her implant are on the auction block on eroticbid.com.
Bidding for the labia, according to her, would start at $1500 and the breast implant is $500. "Crazy," Stern said. An armed guard then brought the labia into the studio. "That is hideous," Stern said, commenting on the sculpture. "They look like little sea horses. It actually looks like boogers. Who's going to buy that? That's really vile. I'm going to throw up." Houston reminded him that memorabilia is huge. "If it was Mr. Spock's labia, then I'd want to bid on it," Stern retorted.
Houston said she also likes her new boobs now that they're softer and hang more naturally. "They look great," Stern told her. Houston said her old breasts came under her chin. Squeezing the new ones, Stern said he couldn't even feel the implant. "Those are nice; they feel great. Those are pretty."
Houston also promoted her upcoming anal gangbang, worldsbiggestgangbang.com with Nicole Sheridan. "We have a new girl, Nicole Sheridan, that we've signed under Metro," she explained. "Her and I are actually going to be like a bangoff, competing against one another, who can do the most anal."
"That's an exciting format," Stern replied sarcastically. Houston explained that this would be a circus-style event. "We're going to have a big tent and Ron Jeremy will be the ring master." Stern wanted to know why Jeremy's always involved and Houston informed him that Jeremy's also with Metro. "The public loves him," she said. Stern commented that he fast forwards anytime Jeremy shows up in a movie.
When it comes to anal, Houston says she can beat Sheridan because she has more experience. Stern asked her how she intends to get ready. Houston said by practicing and resting up. "You get your backside ready." Applications are now being accepted, she said [on the website].
Against charges that her 620 man gangbang was full of baloney, Houston said, "I was there and it was very real." The subject then shifted to money. Stern wanted to know what a top girl in the adult business would make. "What's a good yearly salary for a porn star?" Houston wouldn't give a figure but said it was pretty high. "I have a big overhead- my home, my mortgage all that stuff." She said she also invests her money.
"I'm having fun and doing really well," she said and speculated under questioning that she "might" be a millionaire. However, she said dancing, not movie making, was the big moneymaker for her. "I get paid a lot per show, now," she said. "I put on pretty good shows. That's where my heart is." When asked, she said she gets paid more than a $100 for a lap dance. "You find a way to get them off," Stern speculated about her lap dance customers.
To a caller-in, Houston said she was in a lot of pain after recovering from the labia operation and that it took about a month to heal. By inference she suggested that Brad took care of her after the surgery in more ways than one.
Another caller-in said the labia auction was pretty revolting and asked her would she ever go to the Bunny Ranch. "I love those people," Houston said. "I'm good friends with the owner, but I'm not ready for that, yet." Robin Quivers wanted to know what was the difference between going to the Bunny Ranch and doing a gangbang. "Not really much," Stern answered.
A follow-up caller suggested that the adult industry was going to turn on Houston like it did with Brooke Ashley. "She came up HIV positive and the industry dumped her, the caller said. "Her movies are still making money."
"She didn't use a condom," Houston replied. "That's her own deal. But also one of the gentlemen who was in her gangbang was also positive and was falsifying his tests. We have that all nipped in the bud."
Another caller suggested that Houston's record wasn't sanctioned to which she took the opposite stance, "It's been in tons of magazines," she noted. Another caller named Thomas claimed his sister knew Houston and that according to the sister, Houston didn't get paid much. "You're saying you make so much money, but from what she says, you're lying."
"How does she know what I got paid?" Houston wanted to know. "I don't know...yeah," the caller replied.
IIRC the Nomad Jukebox as well as other portable MP3 players are Linux based. The only thing stopping them from having ogg support is a lack of interest- I think if enough people request support for it, creative will do something about it. The original Jukebox didn't support wma, but with lobbying from Microsoft, they released a firmware patch that added that ability.
Erin, I wanted to do this in this most potentially embarassing way possible, and I figured doing it here and now, in front of a quarter of a million strangers was as good a way as any. I love you more then I can describe within the limits of this tiny little story. We've been together for many years now, and I've known for most of that time that I wanted to spend my life with you. Enough rambling. Will you marry me?
I've had this problem as well. It would be easy to solve if you could just delete all the messages, but with a service like hotmail, you are actually prevented from receiving new messages when you file size limit is exceeded.
I think this is mostly caused by idiot spammers who find an open relay but don't know how to setup their spamming software properly. I've found that doing a DNS lookup on the originating server and notifying the admin listed in the WHOIS db is generally enough to end the spam fairly quickly, and usually I will get a response with an explanation.
But, the punishment for this should be more harsh than for just regular spam. They are effectively DOS'ing my inbox, causing incoming emails to bounce and possibly losing me business.
I think the beauty of Klerck's page widening abilities is the fact that it made many of those of us who browse/. at -1 experiment with other browsers rather than suffer with IE. I, for one, tried out Opera, but I couldn't stand the advertising and the fact that they wanted me to pay for it, so I settled on Mozilla. This sounds similar to Opera's strategy except it won't involve a third party. Also, my ISP, ATTBI, included configuration software with their CD to install to get my connection working. Since I already had IE, all I installed was the configurator. Loe and behold, the installation process reconfigured IE to display "provided by ATTBI" in every browser window! This might not be a new thing, but it definitely is a disturbing trend.
Actually, many higher level educational institutions have "bullshit requirements" that make you leave earlier. For example, the University of California is largely subsidized by taxpayer $$, resulting in tuition fees that only cover about 1/3 the actual cost. Meaning the longer you stay at the school, the more taxpayer $$ is spent on you, so the UC's want you to graduate as quickly as possible, or at least give them their money and get the hell out of there. IIRC, the maximum number of units is 240 at the quarter based schools and somewhat lower at the semester based. Go beyond that, and you're out of there.
One issue I have with this decision is the fact that it was made in the given political climate. After the power deregulation and the ensuing blackouts that occurred, there seems to be a sort of pro government regulation of utilities attitude in the air. I wonder how much this has to do with it. People look at Gray Davis and realize he jeopardized his political career just for being office during the deregulation, so regulation has got to be a good thing, right?
One of my friends was trying to use my computer the other day, and he kept complaining that the flickering of the monitor made his head hurt. I couldn't tell what he was talking about, so I switched from between 60, 75, and 85 Hz. The higher refresh rates still bothered him a little, but not nearly as much as 60 Hz.
Then I pulled out my notebook with a 13.3 " TFT display, and he said it didn't bother him at all. So I think LCD displays are easier on the eyes that CRT, even if they are less accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Can it be? Is this company really attributing some of its success to the open source community? While this is not like a company like Intel or HP saying they couldn't have done something without the help of the open source community, it is definitely a step in the right direction. Once we get the proper recognition, we will be on our way to attaining mainstream popularity.
PROFILE
Captain Xbox
The inside story of how Seamus Blackley and a team of renegades persuaded Microsoft to build a video game console.
By Dean Takahashi
April 11, 2002
Bill Gates was showing off his new baby. It was March 2000, and thousands of people packed the room at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California, and the event was broadcast on TV worldwide. Standing on a dark, cavernous stage, Mr. Gates talked about the future of video games. He pulled a black shroud off a table and there was the machine, a shiny chrome box in the shape of the letter X, with a big green jewel in its center. "The modest tag line here is the future of console gaming," he said.
Offstage, Jonathan "Seamus" Blackley was worried sick. "I was under so much stress, it was remarkable I didn't explode," he recalls. The renegade program manager who was one of several co-creators of the Xbox, Mr. Blackley was a main character in an internal Microsoft insurgency that convinced Mr. Gates to spend an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion to enter the video game business. This was Mr. Blackley's spotlight moment. He and a small band of fellow renegades had convinced Mr. Gates that Microsoft had to field a non-PC box that didn't run Windows, that the company had to go into the money-losing hardware business, and that it had to defeat Sony's PlayStation 2 game console or surrender any hope of controlling technology in the living room.
Feigning confidence, Mr. Blackley walked on stage. He draped a leather jacket emblazoned with the acid-green Xbox logo over Mr. Gates's shoulders, then proceeded to wow the audience by showing on a big screen what the Xbox could do. With a controller in hand, he set off animations ranging from hundreds of Ping-Pong balls bouncing all over a room to a computer-animated woman practicing martial arts with a giant robot.
Everything went great until it looked like the demo froze. Backstage, Mr. Blackley's friends had a moment of horror when the action stopped on the screen; they thought the machine had crashed. That was all they needed: jokes about how Microsoft's blue screen of death--references to the familiar crashing of Windows--would now be part of video games. But Mr. Blackley had only pressed the Pause button, and he finished the demo without a hitch. The enthusiastic crowd showered him with applause.
The shiny box that Mr. Blackley had helped midwife from conception to delivery became Microsoft's weapon to take on Sony and Nintendo in the video game business and to make games the company's premier entertainment medium.
"We've put quite a budget behind this one, and we're going to break through in a very big way," Mr. Gates concluded to the audience of game developers. More than the marketing promises from the world's richest man, however, it was Mr. Blackley's demos that made this proposition credible.
The X-Man
Until the Xbox, few people outside the industry knew much about Mr. Blackley, but he was a familiar figure to many at the Game Developers Conference. Easy to spot in a crowd, Mr. Blackley is in his early 30s, stands 6 feet, 2 inches tall, weighs 190 pounds, and has the build of a linebacker. He has close-shorn red hair and wears studs in his ears. Raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he has mastered an eclectic mix of topics including cars, physics, jazz, and history. A friend describes him as "one of the first cool people I met among the geeks" in the games business.
He stood out in another way, too. A year earlier he'd been at the same trade show--but under much different circumstances.
Back then, he met with Johnny Wilson, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine. Mr. Blackley's highly anticipated game, Trespasser: The Lost World, had just met with terrible reviews and lackluster sales. The game, which he undertook for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive, had been expected to propel computer games forward as an art form, but instead it became yet another example of the inferiority of games to movies. The gray-bearded Mr. Wilson was a kind of elder statesman among game journalists. He saw Mr. Blackley as an ambitious genius who had tried to break new ground, yet his magazine was one of those that panned the game.
The pair sat at the Microsoft booth at the end of the show, as workers were busy dismantling the exhibits. Mr. Blackley was mentally packing away his dreams. He had produced hit games before, and his intuition had never let him down, but now he worried that his career was ruined.
Mr. Wilson stretched out his hands to Mr. Blackley, and told him in a kindly voice, "Seamus, keep making games." The moment was too much for Mr. Blackley. He broke down in tears. "I figured no one would trust me to make a game again because I fucked up," he recalls. "It was an emotional disaster. It turned out, fucking up was a really good experience."
Mr. Blackley had learned one of the key lessons of being an entrepreneur: if you fail, get up and try again. The story of how Microsoft undertook the Xbox project mirrors the resurrection of Mr. Blackley. Though he wasn't the sole creator of the Xbox, his early collaborator, Ted Hase, gives him credit as the general who secured victory on the battlefield. And in November 2001, as Microsoft began selling millions of Xboxes, Mr. Blackley was the only original member of the team who was still involved in the project--a testament to the fierceness that can come from failure.
After the Trespasser debacle, Mr. Blackley took a job working on graphics technology at Microsoft on February 5, 1999. He had let down his idol, Mr. Spielberg, and he thought he craved the anonymity of quietly working on code. But Mr. Blackley wasn't one for sitting on the sidelines. Within days of joining the Redmond, Washington, giant, he changed course.
Sony had been touting the Internet-ready PlayStation 2 as a gadget that could eclipse the PC as the most useful digital appliance in the home. Many at Microsoft, from Mr. Gates down, mobilized in reaction.
Mr. Blackley teamed with graphics expert Otto Berkes, games evangelist Mr. Hase, and games marketer Kevin Bachus to explore the project before having obtained permission from their bosses--renegade behavior within Microsoft. This sort of behavior was tolerated by Mr. Gates and his lieutenants as long as the renegades were ultimately successful. The team proposed that Microsoft adapt the PC to be more like a console and, one by one, talked their superiors into supporting what they called Project Midway, so code-named because their machine would be midway between a PC and game console. It also raised memories of Americans beating the Japanese at the battle of Midway in World War II. It wasn't, perhaps, the most politically correct name for a project at a company that would need plenty of support from Japanese game publishers, but it was pure Mr. Blackley, who had the mind of a competitive gamer. He was so driven that he formed fast friendships with his comrades and quickly made enemies of his opponents. (The Midway project was later renamed the Xbox, after Microsoft's DirectX multimedia software, which runs the console.) He set aside his many interests--even breaking up with a longtime girlfriend--to devote himself entirely to the Xbox.
Mr. Blackley has a knack for getting people excited about new technology; he argued that equipping the game machine with the best technology from PCs would lead to the creation of new kinds of artistic expression. Game developers would use the Xbox to finally deliver the creative visions trapped in their heads. While Nintendo saw games as toys, and Sony viewed them as entertainment, Microsoft would come to regard them as art. And it would make a game console that was as easy to program as the PC, using the same familiar tools that developers had used for ages. That was in contrast to the unwieldy, untested tools that other console makers created for each of their new models. Also, Microsoft would take advantage of a PC's architecture, which computes images in a straightforward style, compared to the complex parallel processing of Sony's PlayStation 2, where programmers determine how to balance the processing load of each individual chip inside the machine. But unlike the PC, the Xbox would be a stable platform with uniform hardware. No more would developers have to make sure that their games ran on every conceivable graphics card or PC peripheral. Give the artists the platform they had always dreamed of, and they would flock to it, Mr. Blackley argued.
Boxing Match
The Xbox renegades made their pitch to Mr. Gates on May 5, 1999. In Microsoft's executive boardroom, they laid out their case. They faced opponents from the WebTV division of Microsoft. The rivals, backed by executives Craig Mundie and Jon DeVaan, believed PC technology was inferior to the PlayStation 2. They felt Microsoft should build a customized console around WebTV's technology, coming "up from the appliance" instead of "down from the PC" to battle Sony. They criticized the Xbox, loaded with a $55 hard disk drive, as too expensive for a machine that needed to sell at less than $300 in order to compete with Sony.
In one heated exchange, the WebTV team said the Xbox guys were clueless because they didn't have the presence of mind to include screws in their estimate of the cost of the console. But Mr. Blackley's team had rigged clever demos to show what the PC could do, and they appealed to Mr. Gates's own love of gadgetry; the Xbox team wanted to deliver a machine for the most enthusiastic gamers who don't really care how much they have to pay.
In that intense first meeting, Mr. Gates said that the goal was to contain Sony and grab a lasting foothold in the living room. Afterward, he asked both teams to keep going, but in the weeks that followed, Mr. Blackley enlisted crucial support from the game-development community. He invited star developers like Epic Games's Tim Sweeney to tell Microsoft brass that the Xbox idea was superior to WebTV. Arguments from developers--which Mr. Gates recognized had helped Microsoft triumph in the PC market--helped the Xbox team prevail. Microsoft's executives knew developer support was indispensable if the company was to succeed in the video game market.
Having a Ball
Mr. Blackley was almost giddy from the contact with Mr. Gates and Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer. He had participated in more meetings with the top dogs than any first-year Microsoft employee could ever hope to. In a meeting with the Xbox team a few weeks after the May 5 pitch, Mr. Ballmer started out bowling them over with one of his infamous monologues. He boomed, "The Xbox is the greatest fucking thing in the world! It's going to make billions! It's the greatest thing ever!"
Mr. Ballmer then hammered the team on its naÔve business model, but he offered a lot of encouragement in his own fashion. Once, when they were standing in line at the company cafeteria, Mr. Ballmer sneaked up behind them and bellowed, "It's the Xbox guys!"
"I almost peed in my pants," Mr. Blackley says. He looked over at Mr. Bachus, whose face went white, like someone who had just been caught in a crime. Mr. Blackley adds, "But at the same time, it was so motivating that he was showing everyone else there exactly who we were." As Mr. Ballmer moved closer, he joked more quietly, "Are you making any money yet?"
Even though the Xbox became a legitimate project at Microsoft, executive oversight caused angst for Mr. Blackley's cohorts. Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer weren't going to roll the dice and let Mr. Blackley run wild with the Xbox, as Steve Jobs had famously been allowed to do with the Macintosh at Apple Computer. In July 1999, Microsoft brought in Rick Thompson, the head of its hardware group, which sold 20 million mice a year, as well as a host of PC peripherals like joysticks and game controllers. He was joined a month later by J Allard, who had helped move Microsoft onto the Internet, to run the Xbox program. Suddenly, the Xbox renegades had lost control of their project and were forced to accept lesser roles: Mr. Blackley would assist game developers and create demos, and Mr. Bachus would sign up publishers to make games. Several team members, like Mr. Berkes and Mr. Hase, left the team and returned to their old jobs. Others left the company entirely. But Mr. Blackley and Mr. Bachus propped each other up and became servants to the cause; Mr. Blackley himself had no job to return to.
"Part of it was Trespasser," Mr. Blackley recalls. "I was not going to fail again. I decided I could react to Trespasser by making it make me stronger or weaker."
Mr. Blackley created a group of programming experts who could help developers finish their games, and he took charge of all demos of Xbox technology. He also worked with yet another group to create Xbox prototypes carved from blocks of solid aluminum, commandeering a lab set aside for Microsoft's toy division. Mr. Thompson set about trying to acquire a game publisher that would guarantee success for Xbox titles, but was unable to lasso the likes of Nintendo, Sega, and Square. Ed Fries, head of Microsoft's games publishing division, began approving Xbox titles but had to make sure they didn't eclipse the division's work on PC games. In a PC-focused company, it was still dangerous to neglect games for the PC.
Many of the Xbox team's original ideas were tossed aside, including the team's proposal that the Xbox run Microsoft's Windows operating system. Upon hearing this, Mr. Gates blew his top. But he eventually saw that Windows would only get in the way of developers creating great games.
On September 29, 1999, Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer signed off on Mr. Thompson's plan to spend $5 billion to $6 billion on the Xbox, with much of the money going to marketing and the costs of making the money-losing hardware. Mr. Allard and Mr. Blackley quarreled at first, but Mr. Blackley came to trust Mr. Allard's ability to sell ideas upward at Microsoft, and Mr. Allard said he gave Mr. Blackley "a lot of leash" to run wild with technical ideas.
In January 2000, Mr. Bachus and Mr. Blackley hit the road. For about four weeks, they traveled across Europe, the United States, and Japan meeting with publishers and developers. The trip proved crucial to the Xbox's initial success. "If Seamus had not gone out and gotten those demos early, then Xbox might not have had the momentum to be taken seriously," says Michael Abrash, a graphics expert who worked for Mr. Blackley on the Xbox. "There was a critical period there when someone had to make the outside world and people inside Microsoft feel like this was a project that was going to keep going. He did that."
Staying on the job was tough. Other team members tired of the constant bickering and of the plodding pace of Microsoft's management as it explored alternatives, like buying Sega or Nintendo, during late 1999 and early 2000. The talks with Sega stalled because it wasn't yet ready to give up on its Dreamcast hardware, and Microsoft only wanted the Japanese company's software teams. Mr. Blackley and others felt these talks were needless distractions and that Microsoft should go it alone.
When Mr. Thompson's hardware designers chose to use graphics technology from a little-known startup called GigaPixel, Mr. Blackley once again enlisted outside game developers to steer Microsoft back to its favored, if more expensive, Nvidia graphics chips.
"You wouldn't believe how much time we wasted," Mr. Blackley says. The company had less than two years to field the Xbox so that it could get the machine to market without being hopelessly behind the pace of Sony and Nintendo. As new battles were waged, Mr. Blackley became the morale booster on the Xbox team.
Wine and Spirits
The evening after his big demo with Mr. Gates at GDC in 2000, Mr. Blackley and his exhilarated team celebrated at Scott's Seafood in San Jose, California, an upscale restaurant. They were so rowdy, shouting "Xbox! Xbox! Xbox!," that the maître d' almost kicked them out. As they were leaving, they all piled into one elevator. Mr. Blackley was the last to come diving in. The elevator was already sinking, and one of his drunken colleagues feared Mr. Blackley would be decapitated as the doors closed. Once Mr. Blackley was inside, the elevator promptly fell four floors to the ground. The team pulled open the doors and crawled out. The incident drew no official complaint from Redmond, but it triggered a gentle rebuke when top management read about it in the Wall Street Journal.
There were plenty of other moments when Mr. Blackley's flair for "morale building" activities got him into trouble. At one internal meeting, he showed an animation dubbed "Survival of the Fittest." It sported a couple of Microsoft's mascot characters at a shooting range. They fired weapons and eviscerated mascots like Sega's Sonic, Nintendo's Mario, and Sony's Crash Bandicoot. He was quoted in a newspaper as saying, "Playing video games is like masturbation; everyone does it but no one wants to admit it." Another time, he hired a couple of female models to pose as nurses during a rally so the Xbox game developers could ogle them. Redmond corporate culture didn't tolerate such shenanigans even though they were popular in the games industry. He also argued vociferously on behalf of his friends as they proposed games to Microsoft's approval committee, which had been dubbed "The Star Chamber" after an '80s movie that was itself named after a corrupt and secretive English court of law in the Tudor and early Stuart periods.
Yet his own team, called the Advanced Technology Group, saw Mr. Blackley as one of the few Microsoft people who understood gamers and game developers. The team included a wide variety of technical experts who helped developers improve their games and unlock the power of the Xbox hardware. They locked themselves behind closed doors in a separate part of campus and posted signs like "electrical closet" and "our confidential materials are bigger than your confidential materials" to keep unwanted visitors away. His group was so elitist it caused tensions with others, and Mr. Blackley, who got to appear with Mr. Gates on stage again at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2001, drew resentment from others who saw him as a clown or publicity hound. Yet Mr. Blackley's attitude went unchanged: you have to have fun if you're making a fun product.
Having fun got to be a chore. Mr. Blackley's good friend, Mr. Bachus, ran afoul of the Microsoft corporate climate. A few weeks before the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 2001, the game industry's biggest trade show, held each year in Los Angeles, Mr. Bachus resigned. "I didn't like my job anymore," he says. Mr. Blackley thought about resigning himself, but those inside and outside the company insisted he stay to keep the Xbox project alive. Things weren't rosy at the E3 trade show, where Nintendo surprised everyone with an impressive presentation of its GameCube console. The Xbox seemed to be losing steam.
Mr. Blackley was infuriated with the bad publicity at E3, where Microsoft's games got a cool reception. He yelled at his boss, Robbie Bach, about what went wrong at the show. Mr. Bach, to his credit, responded positively by asking Mr. Blackley to step in and fix the post-E3 image problem. Mr. Blackley set his team loose assisting the developers with the best games in the works. And he began yet another weeks-long tour for analysts and the media, showing off games as they came together.
Thirty-two months after embarking on their project, the Xbox team had done all it could do (last- minute cramming not withstanding) and was near the end of its journey. The console's fate then depended on marketing plans, advertising, and Flextronics, a contract manufacturer that would assemble each console.
As the November launch date approached, Mr. Blackley was the Xbox team member tagged for all the major press interviews because he was so persuasive. Game reviewers were also won over by substance. Mr. Fries's developers turned out polished titles like Halo, an alien-shooting game with stunning landscapes and a compelling story.
The Game of Love
The big launch finally arrived. On November 14 at 12:01 a.m., Mr. Gates handed over the first Xbox to a dedicated gamer who had waited for hours at the Toys 'R' Us store in New York City's Times Square. Mr. Blackley and his new girlfriend, Vanessa Burnham, were at the scene. He introduced her to Mr. Gates.
"You know, Seamus, I think she could help you get your act together," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley asked. "Something has to."
"You ought to marry her," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley replied.
"Yeah, absolutely," Mr. Gates said. "Here's a ring."
"I'll give it a shot, OK, cool," Mr. Blackley said. He got down on one knee.
"Vanessa, will you marry me?"
She laughed, then answered, "Yes."
"Thank you," Mr. Blackley said.
He rose and they kissed. Everyone in the store applauded. Mr. Blackley put the ring on Ms. Burnham's finger. John Eyler, CEO of Toys 'R' Us, presented a stuffed animal to her. Mr. Gates had been briefed, but he had ad-libbed the part about Mr. Blackley getting his act together.
Microsoft managed to sell 1.5 million Xbox machines and more than three times as many games by the end of December. In the U.S. market, it outsold Nintendo's GameCube by a hair and put some pressure on the market leader, Sony, which sold nearly 3 million units in the U.S. market during the same period.
The Xbox's success is far from assured, but so were its chances of making it to market at all. After all, it is a piece of hardware from a software company, albeit the most successful software company on the planet.
Yet for all of the personal capital Mr. Blackley expended, he calls it one of the most exhilarating times of his life. As coworker Drew Angeloff says, "Once you've worked on a game console, what else is there to do?"
For Mr. Blackley, the answer is to start something new that can fire his imagination the same way the Xbox did. When he joined Microsoft, he had wanted to return to his original mission of making games that would be recognized as artistic endeavors. He will inevitably get back to that work, whether he's working for Microsoft or not. His old buddy Mr. Bachus has since started a game production company (in stealth mode) that works with developers and offloads the risk of development from publishers. The odds are good the two men will find a way to work together again. Mr. Blackley has done a game console, but he is still haunted by his own failure to make an artistic game.
At a dinner one evening in Los Angeles, after the bulk of his work on the Xbox was done, Mr. Blackley posed a question that revealed the personal demons he still hadn't quite exorcised.
"Have I made up for Trespasser yet?"
The complete story of the making of the Xbox is chronicled in Dean Takahashi's book, Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution (Prima Publishing, April).
There May Be Trouble Ahead
by Alan Williamson
As Nat King Cole famously sang, we have to "face the music and dance..." This month's editorial is coming to you with a reader beware warning!
I've been engaged in some great debates over the last month on a variety of topics, but the one that has caught my interest is the old chestnut regarding the longevity of Java. Is it here to stay? If not, how long do we have? Quite rightly, it's being talked about and I've had the good fortune to brush shoulders with a number of big names in our industry who have given me their perspectives on the whole debate. I have my own feelings about where Java is headed and I do believe that if, as a community, we don't get our act together, we may have only five years left at the most. After talking to my counterparts, it would appear I'm being overly generous with five years.
What's happening? Well, it's our old friend C# and its relentless march toward the development community. Setting aside the old argument that due to Microsoft's dominance it may well win the day, it's interesting to look at other reasons why C# may win the battle. Let's blow away some misconceptions that you may or may not be aware of regarding this new kid.
Myth #1: C# is a Windows-only technology. .NET services alongside Apache on a Redhat box, seamlessly integrating into the rest of the network. This alone would be a major blow to server-side Java. It's also a subtle way for Microsoft to unofficially support the growing number of Linux seats without losing face (read www.halcyonsoft.com/news/iNET_PR.asp).
You could be excused for believing that, but did you know there's a major movement in the open source world to port the CLR (Common Language Runtime, i.e., their JVM!) to operating systems other than MS Windows? Linux, to name one. Imagine for a moment being able to run your
Myth #2: C# is an inferior Java clone.
This is the most dangerous one and the one you probably tell yourself in order to keep the scales tipped in Java's favor. The truth is, it's not an inferior clone; it's a different clone, with many arguing that the differences are minute to the majority of the developer community. It will be frighteningly easy for Java developers to move over to C# with no real headaches to contend with. I suspect this was always on Microsoft's mind when developing the language (read www.prism.gatech.edu/~gte855q/CsharpVsJava.html).
Myth #3: C# is for developing Web services only.
Most definitely not, and I have heard this one retorted back to me on a number of occasions. Ironically, this is the one area that could really hurt Java Ð on the client. As you know, Java has not made any significant headway in this space due mainly to its awfully slow Swing implementation. While the recent release of JDK1.4 has brought significant performance gains, it's still nowhere near the speed of its native Windows applications with respect to fast, snappy responses (although it must be said, the speed of a Swing application on a Mac OS-X does show what could be achieved). C# is the new building block for Windows applications, the next VB! And we know how many applications popped up when VB hit the market (read www.c-sharpcorner.com/WinForms.asp).
Okay, how many of you think I've abandoned all hope for Java and have gone to the dark side? I suspect some of you are questioning my loyalties at this precise moment, wondering if I'm fit to occupy my role as EIC. Well, don't panic, I'm merely being a realist and looking at it from all angles. You'd be the first ones to complain if I buried my head in the sand and just ignored the threat. We have to look at this together and come up with a strategy that will enable us to effectively take on C#. We'll be getting a lot of heat from all over and we need to be armed with the information and prepared to go back to the drawing board and reeducate the masses. Sadly, they are being led a merry dance by Pied Piper Gates.
Allow me to cite you an example of such blind ignorance and if this doesn't scare you, then I don't know what will. I was recently involved with the Scottish government, discussing technology and what have you, where naturally the topic of Microsoft was high on the agenda. Excusing the fact that these people took a certain pride in believing they knew what was going on and loved name-dropping, the phrase that caught me off guard was the following: "Java? No one is doing that now. Microsoft is no longer supporting it."
Wow! Talk about a major miscommunication. And this from someone who controls budgets for the technology sector in Scotland. Ironically, I believe he really thinks he has his finger on the pulse of technology. It's sheer ignorance like this that scares me the most. Microsoft has successfully planted and nurtured the seed in people's heads that just because it isn't supporting Java in Windows XP, Java is dead. I have to admit I was taken aback and quite flabbergasted when I heard that retort. I really didn't know where to go with that. So much background information was obviously missing that I wasn't too sure if I would come over as patronizing and whether, ultimately, they would understand.
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Ever since I started writing about this topic in my editorials, I've been hearing stories from you regarding similar misconceptions and it scares me. We have a beautiful language here in Java; it has achieved industry-wide support and is pushing forward with great velocity. What can we do to support it?
You do realize we need an anthem. All great causes have an anthem. Something for us to get behind and sing!!! Suggestions gratefully received. We need a Java song!
Until next month...
Author Bio
Alan Williamson is editor-in-chief of Java Developer's Journal. During the day he holds the post of chief technical officer at n-ary (consulting) Ltd, one of the first companies in the UK to specialize in Java at the server side. Rumor has it he welcomes all suggestions and comments.
The half-assed attempt at a console, also known as the X-Box, is surely just an investment for the future home entertainment systems created by Microsoft, but at the rate they're going there will not be enough cash on hand to take the losses normally associated with selling console systems.
It will be interesting to see how successful Microsoft will be with their current networking desires that follow their .NET and passport ideas, and whether or not these too will fail or just become immensely unpopular. Regardless, the deathly grip they hold on the OS market has yet to see a legitimate adversary, so it will be a long time before we see the complete downfall of Microsoft.
Stephen Hawking seemed slightly worse, as always. It is a miracle that he has clung to life for over 20 years with Lou Gehrig's disease. Each time I see him I feel that this will be the last, that he cannot hold on to such a thin thread for much longer.
Hawking turned 60 in January. Over the course of his brilliant career, he has worked out many of the basics of black hole physics, including, most strikingly, his prediction that black holes aren't entirely black. Instead, if they have masses equivalent to a mountain's, they radiate particles of all kinds. Smaller holes would disappear in a fizz of radiation -- a signature that astronomers have searched for but so far not found.
The enormous success of Hawking's 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, has made him a curious kind of cultural icon. He wonders how many of the starlets and rock stars who mentioned the book on talk shows actually read it.
With his latest book, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam), he aims to remedy the situation with a plethora of friendly illustrations to help readers decipher such complex topics as superstring theory and the nature of time. The trick is translating equations into sentences, no mean feat. The pictures help enormously, though purists deplore them as oversimplified. I feel that any device is justified to span such an abyss of incomprehension.
When I entered Stephen's office at the University of Cambridge, his staff was wary of me, plainly suspecting I was a "civilian" harboring a crank theory of the universe. But I'd called beforehand, and then his secretary recognized me from years past. (I am an astrophysicist and have known Stephen since the 1970s.) When I entered the familiar office his shrunken form lolled in his motorized chair as he stared out, rendered goggle-eyed by his thick glasses -- but a strong spirit animated all he said.
Hawking lost his vocal cords years ago, to an emergency tracheotomy. His gnarled, feeble hands could not hold a pen. For a while after the operation he was completely cut off from the world, an unsettling parallel to those mathematical observers who plunge into black holes, their signals to the outside red-shifted and slowed by gravity's grip to dim, whispering oblivion.
A Silicon Valley firm came to the rescue. Engineers devised tailored, user friendly software and a special keyboard for Hawking. Now his frail hand moved across it with crablike speed. The software is deft, and he could build sentences quickly. I watched him flit through the menu of often-used words on his liquid crystal display, which hung before him in his wheelchair. The invention has been such a success that the Silicon Valley folk now supply units to similarly afflicted people worldwide.
"Please excuse my American accent," the speaker mounted behind the wheelchair said with a California inflection. He coded this entire remark with two keystrokes.
Although I had been here before, I was again struck that a man who had suffered such an agonizing physical decline had on his walls several large posters of a person very nearly his opposite: Marilyn Monroe. I mentioned her, and Stephen responded instantly, tapping one-handed on his keyboard, so that soon his transduced voice replied, "Yes, she's wonderful. Cosmological. I wanted to put a picture of her in my latest book, as a celestial object." I remarked that to me the book was like a French Impressionist painting of a cow, meant to give a glancing essence, not the real, smelly animal. Few would care to savor the details. Stephen took off from this to discuss some ideas currently booting around the physics community about the origin of the universe, the moment just after the Big Bang.
Stephen's great politeness paradoxically made me ill at ease; I was acutely aware of the many demands on his time, and, after all, I had just stopped by to talk shop.
"For years my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science," Stephen said. "It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin. The laws would break down at the point of singularity, of infinite density." Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity. Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.
I recalled that I had spoken to Stephen about mathematical methods of getting around this problem one evening at a party in King's College. There were analogies to methods in elementary quantum mechanics, methods he was trying to carry over into this surrealistic terrain.
"It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time," Stephen said. We discussed this a bit. Stephen had been using a mathematical device in which time is replaced, as a notational convenience, by something called imaginary time. This changes the nature of the equations, so he could use some ideas from the tiny quantum world. In the new equations, a kind of tunneling occurs in which the universe, before the Big Bang, has many different ways to pass through the singularity. With imaginary time, one can calculate the chances for a given tunneling path into our early universe after the beginning of time as we know it.
"Sure, the equations can be interpreted that way," I argued, "but it's really a trick, isn't it?"
Stephen said, "Yes, but perhaps an insightful trick."
"We don't have a truly deep understanding of time," I replied, "so replacing real time with imaginary time doesn't mean much to us."
"Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time," Stephen explained. "Along this axis, if the universe satisfies the 'no boundary' condition, we can do our calculations. This condition says that the universe has no singularities or boundaries in the imaginary direction of time. With the 'no boundary' condition, there will be no beginning or end to imaginary time, just as there is no beginning or end to a path on the surface of the Earth."
"If the path goes all the way around the Earth," I said. "But of course, we don't know that in imaginary time there won't be a boundary."
"My intuition says there will be no blocking in that special coordinate, so our calculations make sense."
"Sense is just the problem, isn't it? Imaginary time is just a mathematical convenience." I shrugged in exasperation at the span between cool mathematical spaces and the immediacy of the raw world; this is a common tension in doing physics. "It's unrelated to how we feel time. The seconds sliding by. Birth and death."
"True. Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch -- which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity."
"Not a great consolation," I said.
He grinned. "No, but I like the 'no boundary' condition. It seems to imply that the universe will be in a state of high order at one end of real time but will be disordered at the other end of time, so that disorder increases in one direction of time. We define this to be the direction of increasing time. When we record something in our memory, the disorder of the universe will increase. This explains why we remember events only in what we call the past, and not in the future."
"Remember what you predicted in 1980 about final theories like this?" I chided him.
"I suggested we might find a complete unified theory by the end of the century." Stephen made the transponder laugh dryly. "OK, I was wrong. At that time, the best candidate seemed to be N=8 supergravity. Now it appears that this theory may be an approximation to a more fundamental theory, of superstrings. I was a bit optimistic to hope that we would have solved the problem by the end of the century. But I still think there's a 50-50 chance that we will find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years."
"I've always suspected that the structure never ends as we look to smaller and smaller scales -- and neither will the theories," I offered.
"It is possible that there is no ultimate theory of physics at all. Instead, we will keep on discovering new layers of structure. But it seems that physics gets simpler, and more unified, the smaller the scale on which we look. There is an ultimate length scale, the Planck length, below which space-time may just not be defined. So I think there will be a limit to the number of layers of structure, and there will be some ultimate theory, which we will discover if we are smart enough."
"Does it seem likely that we are smart enough?" I asked.
Another grin. "You will have to get your faith elsewhere."
"I can't keep up with the torrent of work on superstrings." Mathematical physics is like music, which a young and zesty spirit can best seize and use, as did Mozart.
"I try," he said modestly.
We began discussing recent work on "baby universes" -- bubbles in space-time. To us large creatures, space-time is like the sea seen from an ocean liner, smooth and serene. Up close, though, on tiny scales, it's waves and bubbles. At extremely fine scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, sputtering into being, then dissolving. Arcane details of particle physics suggest that sometimes -- rarely, but inevitably -- these bubbles could grow into a full-fledged universe.
This might have happened a lot at the instant just immediately after the Big Bang. Indeed, some properties of our universe may have been created by the space-time foam that roiled through those infinitesimally split seconds. Studying this possibility uses the "wormhole calculus," which samples the myriad possible frothing bubbles (and their connections, called wormholes).
Averaging over this foam in a mathematical sense, smoothing its properties a bit, Hawking and others have tried to find out whether a final, rather benign universe like ours was an inevitable outcome of that early turbulence. The jury isn't in on this point, and it may be out forever -- the calculations are tough, guided by intuition rather than facts. Deciding whether they meaningfully predict anything is a matter of taste. This recalls Oscar Wilde's aphorism that in matters of great import, style is always more important than substance.
If this picture of the first split second is remotely right, much depends on the energy content of the foam. The energy to blow up these bubbles would be countered by an opposite, negative energy, which comes from the gravitational attraction of all the matter in the bubble. If the outward pressure just balances the inward attraction (a pressure, really) of the mass, then you could get a universe much like ours: rather mild, with space-time not suffering any severe curvature -- what astronomers call "flat." This seems to be so on such relatively tiny scales as our solar system, and flatness prevails even on the size range of our galaxy. Indeed, flatness holds on immense scales, as far as we can yet see.
It turns out that such bubbles could even form right now. An entirely separate space-time could pop into existence in your living room, say. It would start unimaginably small, then balloon to the size of a cantaloupe -- but not before your very eyes, because, for quite fundamental reasons, you couldn't see it.
"They don't form in space, of course," Stephen said. "It doesn't mean anything to ask where in space these things occur." They don't take up room in our universe but rather are their own universes, expanding into spaces that did not exist before.
"They're cut off from us after we make them," I said. "No relics, no fossil?"
"I do not think there could be."
"Like an ungrateful child who doesn't write home." When talking about immensities, I sometimes grasp for something human.
"It would not form in our space, but rather as another space-time."
We discussed for a while some speculations about this that I had put into two novels, Cosm and Timescape. I had used Cambridge and the British scientific style in Timescape, published in 1980, before these ideas became current. I had arrived at them in part from some wide-ranging talks I had enjoyed with Stephen -- all suitably disguised in the books, of course. Such enclosed space-times I had termed "onion universes," since in principle they could have further locked-away space-times inside them, and so on. It is an odd sensation when a guess turns out to have some substance -- as much as anything as gossamer as these ideas can be said to be substantial.
"So they form and go," I mused. "Vanish. Between us and these other universes lies absolute nothingness, in the exact sense -- no space or time, no matter, no energy."
"There can be no way to reach them," his flat voice said. "The gulf between us and them is unbridgeable. It is beyond physics because it is truly nothing, not physical at all."
The mechanical laugh resounded. Stephen likes the tug of the philosophical, and he seemed amused by the notion that universes are simply one of those things that happen from time to time.
His nurse appeared for a bit of physical cleanup, and I left him. Inert confinement to a wheelchair exacts a demeaning toll on one's dignity, but he showed no reaction to the daily round of being cared for by another in the most intimate way. Perhaps for him, it even helps the mind to slip free of the world's rub.
I sat in the common room outside his office, having tea and talking to some of his post-doctoral students. They were working on similarly wild ideas and were quick, witty, and keenly observant as they sipped their strong, dark Ceylonese tea. A sharp crew, perhaps a bit jealous of Stephen's time. They were no doubt wondering who this guy was, nobody they had ever heard of, a Californian with an accent tainted by Southern nuances, somebody who worked in astrophysics and plasma physics -- which, in our age of remorseless specialization, is a province quite remote from theirs. I didn't explain; after all, I really had no formal reason to be there, except that Stephen and I were friends.
Stephen's secretary quietly came out and asked if I would join Stephen for dinner at Caius College. I had intended to eat in my favorite Indian restaurant, where the chicken vindaloo is a purging experience, and then simply rove the walks of Cambridge alone, because I love the atmosphere -- but I instantly assented. Dinner at college high table is one of the legendary experiences of England. I could remember keenly each one I had attended; the repartee is sharper than the cutlery.
We made our way through the cool, atmospheric turns of the colleges, the worn wood and gray stones reflecting the piping of voices and squeaks of rusty bicycles. In misty twilight, student shouts echoing, Stephen's wheelchair jouncing over cobbled streets. He insisted on steering it himself, though his nurse hovered rather nervously. It had never occurred to me just how much of a strain on everyone there can be in round-the-clock care. A few people drifted along behind us, just watching him. "Take no notice," his mechanical voice said. "Many of them come here just to stare at me."
We wound among the ancient stone and manicured gardens, into Caius College. Students entering the dining hall made an eager rumpus. Stephen took the elevator, and I ascended the creaking stairs. The faculty entered after the students, me following with the nurse.
The high table is literally so. They carefully placed Stephen with his back to the long, broad tables of undergraduates. I soon realized that this is because watching him eat, with virtually no lip control, is not appetizing. He follows a set diet that requires no chewing. His nurse must chop up his food and spoon-feed him.
The dinner was noisy, with the year's new undergraduates staring at the famous Hawking's back. Stephen carried on a matter-of-fact, steady flow of conversation through his keyboard.
He had concerns about the physicists' Holy Grail, a unified theory of everything. Even if we could thrash our way through a thicket of mathematics to glimpse its outlines, it might not be specific enough -- that is, we would still have a range of choices. Physics could end up dithering over arcane points, undecided, perhaps far from our particular primate experience. Here is where aesthetics might enter.
"If such a theory is not unique," he said, "one would have to appeal to some outside principle, which one might call God."
I frowned. "Not as the Creator, but as a referee?"
"He would decide which theory was more than just a set of equations, but described a universe that actually exists."
"This one."
"Or maybe all possible theories describe universes that exist!" he said with glee. "It is unclear what it means to say that something exists. In questions like, 'Does there exist a man with two left feet in Cambridge?,' one can answer this by examining every man in Cambridge. But there is no way that one can decide if a universe exists, if one is not inside it."
"The space-time Catch-22."
"So it is not easy to see what meaning can be given to the question, 'Why does the universe exist?' But it is a question that one can't help asking."
As usual, the ability to pose a question simply and clearly in no way implied a similar answer -- or that an answer even existed.
After the dining hall, high table moved to the senior common room upstairs. We relaxed along a long, polished table in comfortable padded chairs, enjoying the traditional crisp walnuts and ancient aromatic port, Cuban cigars, and arch conversation, occasionally skewered by a witty interjection from Stephen.
Someone mentioned American physicist Stephen Weinberg's statement, in The First Three Minutes, that the more we comprehend the universe, the more meaningless it seems. Stephen doesn't agree, and neither do I, but he has a better reason. "I think it is not meaningful in the first place to say that the universe is pointless, or that it is designed for some purpose."
I asked, "No meaning, then, to the pursuit of meaning?"
"To do that would require one to stand outside the universe, which is not possible."
Again the image of the gulf between the observer and the object of study. "Still," I persisted, "there is amazing structure we can see from inside."
"The overwhelming impression is of order. The more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws. If one liked, one could say that this order was the work of God. Einstein thought so."
One of the college fellows asked, "Rational faith?"
Stephen tapped quickly. "We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics."
Walnuts eaten, port drunk, cigars smoked, it was time to go. When we left, Stephen guided his wheelchair through the shadowy reaches of the college, indulging my curiosity about a time-honored undergraduate sport: climbing Cambridge.
At night, young men sometimes scramble among the upper reaches of the steepled old buildings, scaling the most difficult points. They risk their necks for the glory of it. Quite out of bounds, of course. Part of the thrill is eluding the proctors who scan the rooftops late at night, listening for the scrape of heels. There is even a booklet about roof climbing, describing its triumphs and centuries-long history.
Stephen took me to a passageway I had been through many times, a shortcut to the Cam River between high, peaked buildings of undergraduate rooms. He said that it was one of the tough events, jumping across that and then scaling a steep, often slick roof beyond.
The passage looked to be about three meters across. I couldn't imagine leaping that gap from the slate-dark roofs. And at night, too. "All that distance?" I asked. My voice echoed in the fog.
"Yes," he said.
"Anybody ever miss?"
"Yes."
"Injured?"
"Yes."
"Killed?"
His eyes twinkled and he gave us a broad smile. "Yes." These Cambridge sorts have the real stuff, all right.
In the cool night Stephen recalled some of his favorite science fiction stories. He rarely read any fiction other than science fiction past the age of 12, he said. "It's really the only fiction that is realistic about our true position in the universe as a whole."
And how much stranger the universe was turning out than even those writers had imagined. Even when they discussed the next billion years, they could not guess the odd theories that would spring up within the next generation of physicists. Now there are speculations that our universe might have 11 dimensions, all told, all but three of space and one of time rolled up to tiny sizes. Will this change cosmology? So far, nobody knows. But the ideas are fun in and of themselves.
A week after my evening at Cambridge, I got from Stephen's secretary a transcript of all his remarks. I have used it here to reproduce his style of conversation. Printed out on his wheelchair computer, his sole link with us, the lines seem to come from a great distance. Across an abyss.
Portraying the flinty faces of science -- daunting complexity twinned with numbing wonder -- demands both craft and art. Some of us paint with fiction. Stephen paints with his impressionistic views of vast, cool mathematical landscapes. To knit together our fraying times, to span the cultural abyss, demands all these approaches -- and more, if we can but invent them.
Stephen has faced daunting physical constrictions with a renewed attack on the large issues, on great sweeps of space and time. Daily he struggles without much fuss against the narrowing that is perhaps the worst element of infirmity. I recalled him rapt with Marilyn, still deeply engaged with life, holding firmly against tides of entropy.
I had learned a good deal from those few days, I realized, and most of it was not at all about cosmology.
Now, this is marginally on topic, but is someone like Hawking an argument for or against evolution by means of natural selection as it occurs today? To the best of my knowledge, he has yet to have children, but still, being married there is always the potential. In prehistoric times, a man suffering from his affliction would have no chance at reproducing, thus eliminating his genetic material from the gene pool. So I guess he material is still in the gene pool, because of the potential to reproduce...
Anyway, Hawking is a great man and if he contributes anything applicable to the regular Joe Citizen's daily life, it should be the fact that a man should not be judged by his appearance, the brightest minds may lay inside deceptive shells.
But, on the other hand, I haven't bought a book or CD new in the past 4 years or so. This is in protest of the collaboration and price fixing between publishers. I figure if they try to screw me, I'll find a legal way that hurts them in the pockets. So the ban on direct linkage, while it may appear to be a good idea for the authors, will only hurt the effectiveness of their site. I'll just end up going to half.com or Amazon anyway, and ignore their site completely.
Anyway, if the authors want more money/any money at all from used book sales, they should publish themselves, because the large publishing houses would hardly like to share a new source of income. I'd be glad to buy a book new even if it did cost a little more from an author who publishes independently a la Edward Tufte.
Since I am forced to use Windows at work, for a long time IE was the best choice. The "page widening posts" by our friend Klerck I tried Mozilla, and I didn't like it, so I settled on Opera. I'd much rather use something open source to redeem myself for the sins of using an MS OS, so hopefully Mozilla will great improve (and soon).
Another problem is bandwidth capping, similar to the article on Time-Warner article yesterday. To prevent things like the /. effect from breaking the bank, companies may put hourly limits on bandwidth usage, and when it is exceeded the site is inaccessible.
I can only speculate about the magnitude of the effect, but /. does have over 250,000 unique hits a day. So anywhere between 5 and 25% will follow the links to the target servers. Which puts it in the range of around 12,500 to 62,500 hits within a few hours. Of course, this all depends on the article and I'd be inclined to say something on the front page would attract many more hits than something hidden away such as the article on USPTO advisory nominations.
Who knows, this may set a new trend for rectruiting firms in Alaska. Work in Alaska by day, live in cheap Siberia by night! On paper, a 56 mile commute doesn't seem so bad... they'd only tell you that it's over a field of ice floes after you sign the deal. Of course, this section of Alaska probably has less than a burdgeoning tech industry.
props to Conan O'brien for his 1337 script writing skills (Season 4 Episode 12- "Marge vs. The Monorail" was his crowning achievement as a producer of The Simpsons).
I wonder what would happen when one of these jets flies over a southern California beach? I'd certainly hate to be an attractive woman in a bikini attracting the leering eyes of the pilots...
What are the chances of this hitting somebody? People say the chances are slim to nill, and just recently a significant piece of equipment came down and I didn't here about anyone getting hit. But a couple years ago NASA printed an article that the odds of someone being hit by the falling Iridium debris were about 1 in 250. By my count, this is the third potentially hazardous satellite entry in as many years, leading me to believe that eventually, someone will be hit.
This would be a perfect way to listen to geeks in space!
This seems remniscent of amazon's patent on 1 click purchasing. If anything, it goes to show that what we think is a common sense idea is "innovative" according to business folk. I'm sure google could work their way around it by either calling it something else or developing a new and better alternative method.
Dimensions, Refresh rate, Colors, Response time, and Power consumption.
While I would agree these are all important, why are response time and refresh rate not linked together? I.E., a crappy refresh rate (50Hz) combined with a crappy response rate (60 ms) could possibly lead to trouble. Also missing are contrast and brightness, two more very important aspects.
Okay, so her name may conjure up more images of Texas cityscapes and Hakeem Olajuwon than sex, but one glance at this absolute knock-out will turn your head around. Porn Star Houston is a luscious curve-meister who started out in the business in 1995 as a dead ringer for Bo Derek, from the top of her corn-rowed head to the toes on her 34D-25-35 figure. She then moved on to a close-cropped bleach blonde look, but Houston's certainly no less alluring for the change. Houston's high cheekbones and wide, slyly knowing eyes give away her Norwegian background, but between the sheets she's 100% pure American sexual predator.
Houston was working at the Hollywood Tropicana when producer Peter Davy spotted her oil-wrestling skills on one of his frequent talent hunts. The veteran of nude layouts and exotic dancing proved a natural porn queen, her supremely stacked frame and raw attitude serving as utter turn-ons. Houston got into porn at the age of 27, and although she may be a bit older than most pornstresses her energy and enthusiasm never flag. Fans looking for an introduction to this sultry sexstress should check out her work in 'Russian Roulette' or her incendiary work in 'Angels In Flight.' A performer who's much more into men than women, Houston is one of the hottest, best-looking additions to the ranks of hardcore in recent years.
Houston on Stern; Stern: "Good Luck With Your Labia"
Houston was on Howard Stern Wednesday morning to talk about her labia, or what's left of it after a reduction surgery, and the fact that it's up for bid on eroticbid.com. But the subject quickly veered to the "buried alive" bukkake she did last year at the Extreme Adults-Only Vacation in Mexico.
Stern said he didn't get the bukkake-thing or the male audience that digs it, but tried to explain it to his audience and not so well at that. Stern noted that bukkake started in Japan and that guys pleasured themselves with a woman's face.
"But she's buried in the sand...or confined so her head is only sticking out of the ground....guys decorate her," said Stern grappling for the essence of bukkake. Stern was reminded that it was Houston who chose the buried alive twist. "The Japanese will bury you in the sand or tie you up," Stern observed. "Then they drink from a cup which makes me want to barf it up."
Stern said he didn't get the whole idea because Houston's "a good-looking broad - she's sexy." He asked her how she got involved in the bukkake.
"Metro wanted to produce it and we were down at the Extreme vacation," Houston noted. "It seemed like the thing to do." Houston said about 25 guys participated and informed Stern that bukkake was the degrading of women. Stern wanted to know what the martini glass [filled with cum] was all about. Houston said she didn't even remember slurping anything out of a glass. Pursuing the degradation line of questioning, Stern wanted to know if crapping or peeing could be involved, butHouston said she was into none of that stuff.
Stern said he might have to make a bukkake film. "I've never seen anything like it," he said. "But as much as I dig you, I'd rather see you getting banged or with another chick." Stern said he preferred to see Houston tied to a wall where she's being tortured. "But not hurting you..." Houston told him she's done bondage before.
"I like watching bondage and reading about it," said Stern who went on to describe "the best porno" he ever saw. "It's this big fat ugly guy [Bill Majors] torturing this chick. It's so good. It's so real."
"Once they tie you up the law is they can't spank you hard?" Stern wanted to know. Houston said you can be spanked. "But there's no penetration usually in bondage," she added. "That's the rule." Houston told him she's been aroused during bondage sessions. "If it's done right and they're not out to hurt you... It almost starts feeling like a massage."
Stern announced that Houston would be in New York until Saturday at Legz' Diamond's Burlesque Theatre [ 231 West 54th Street, Fourth Floor]. During a press conference also scheduled for today at the theater, Houston, along with representatives from eroticbid.com, would be answering questions and providing photo ops. Along with her labia, eroticbid.com also has other Houston memorabilia as well including an autographed breast implant, her outfit from the Houston 500, some of her costumes from other films, the prom dress she wore last year when she was dating high school seniors, and other personal items..From there, Stern announced that Houston would be at the Dollhouse in Columbus, Ohio.
The discussion got around to Houston's prom date last year with Bradley, a high school senior. Houston said she started dating him because she liked him but broke up with him because he was too controlling.
Stern heard that, at one point, Bradley actually moved in with her. "He moved in for three weeks," Houston admitted. "The original plan was for him to get a job and figure out school and get a car and start his life in Los Angeles...He was going really slow at it. He wasn't doing what I felt he should have been doing more of. I felt that he needed to get his stuff more together."
Bradley moved back home, according to Houston. "He's a good guy. He'll figure it out and get it together. He's very smart." Houston hedged on the Bradley relationship question. "I haven't had sex with him in awhile," she said. Houston also mentioned that she had been partying in New York earlier this week with a celebrity hat designer named Ivy Supersonic. "She makes amazing hats. She really does."
After her labia reduction, Houston noted that her sensations were much better. She said a couple of millimeters were cut off in the procedure. "I wanted my implants and I wanted my labia saved," she said. Subsequently, she had the labia trimmings preserved and had them put into a lucite sculpture. Stern said he was afraid to look at the sculpture because he might get nauseous. Houston said his show was the first official unveiling.
"Do you really think there's a man out there who's going to pay good money for labias?" Stern asked. Houston said she thought so. "It's like a piece of art now. It's a sculpture and it's on a marble stand." She said that and her implant are on the auction block on eroticbid.com.
Bidding for the labia, according to her, would start at $1500 and the breast implant is $500. "Crazy," Stern said. An armed guard then brought the labia into the studio. "That is hideous," Stern said, commenting on the sculpture. "They look like little sea horses. It actually looks like boogers. Who's going to buy that? That's really vile. I'm going to throw up." Houston reminded him that memorabilia is huge. "If it was Mr. Spock's labia, then I'd want to bid on it," Stern retorted.
Houston said she also likes her new boobs now that they're softer and hang more naturally. "They look great," Stern told her. Houston said her old breasts came under her chin. Squeezing the new ones, Stern said he couldn't even feel the implant. "Those are nice; they feel great. Those are pretty."
Houston also promoted her upcoming anal gangbang, worldsbiggestgangbang.com with Nicole Sheridan. "We have a new girl, Nicole Sheridan, that we've signed under Metro," she explained. "Her and I are actually going to be like a bangoff, competing against one another, who can do the most anal."
"That's an exciting format," Stern replied sarcastically. Houston explained that this would be a circus-style event. "We're going to have a big tent and Ron Jeremy will be the ring master." Stern wanted to know why Jeremy's always involved and Houston informed him that Jeremy's also with Metro. "The public loves him," she said. Stern commented that he fast forwards anytime Jeremy shows up in a movie.
When it comes to anal, Houston says she can beat Sheridan because she has more experience. Stern asked her how she intends to get ready. Houston said by practicing and resting up. "You get your backside ready." Applications are now being accepted, she said [on the website].
Against charges that her 620 man gangbang was full of baloney, Houston said, "I was there and it was very real." The subject then shifted to money. Stern wanted to know what a top girl in the adult business would make. "What's a good yearly salary for a porn star?" Houston wouldn't give a figure but said it was pretty high. "I have a big overhead- my home, my mortgage all that stuff." She said she also invests her money.
"I'm having fun and doing really well," she said and speculated under questioning that she "might" be a millionaire. However, she said dancing, not movie making, was the big moneymaker for her. "I get paid a lot per show, now," she said. "I put on pretty good shows. That's where my heart is." When asked, she said she gets paid more than a $100 for a lap dance. "You find a way to get them off," Stern speculated about her lap dance customers.
To a caller-in, Houston said she was in a lot of pain after recovering from the labia operation and that it took about a month to heal. By inference she suggested that Brad took care of her after the surgery in more ways than one.
Another caller-in said the labia auction was pretty revolting and asked her would she ever go to the Bunny Ranch. "I love those people," Houston said. "I'm good friends with the owner, but I'm not ready for that, yet." Robin Quivers wanted to know what was the difference between going to the Bunny Ranch and doing a gangbang. "Not really much," Stern answered.
A follow-up caller suggested that the adult industry was going to turn on Houston like it did with Brooke Ashley. "She came up HIV positive and the industry dumped her, the caller said. "Her movies are still making money."
"She didn't use a condom," Houston replied. "That's her own deal. But also one of the gentlemen who was in her gangbang was also positive and was falsifying his tests. We have that all nipped in the bud."
Another caller suggested that Houston's record wasn't sanctioned to which she took the opposite stance, "It's been in tons of magazines," she noted. Another caller named Thomas claimed his sister knew Houston and that according to the sister, Houston didn't get paid much. "You're saying you make so much money, but from what she says, you're lying."
"How does she know what I got paid?" Houston wanted to know. "I don't know...yeah," the caller replied.
IIRC the Nomad Jukebox as well as other portable MP3 players are Linux based. The only thing stopping them from having ogg support is a lack of interest- I think if enough people request support for it, creative will do something about it. The original Jukebox didn't support wma, but with lobbying from Microsoft, they released a firmware patch that added that ability.
Erin, I wanted to do this in this most potentially embarassing way possible,
and I figured doing it here and now, in front of a quarter of a million strangers
was as good a way as any. I love you more then I can describe within the
limits of this tiny little story. We've been together for many years now, and
I've known for most of that time that I wanted to spend my life with you.
Enough rambling. Will you marry me?
I think this is mostly caused by idiot spammers who find an open relay but don't know how to setup their spamming software properly. I've found that doing a DNS lookup on the originating server and notifying the admin listed in the WHOIS db is generally enough to end the spam fairly quickly, and usually I will get a response with an explanation.
But, the punishment for this should be more harsh than for just regular spam. They are effectively DOS'ing my inbox, causing incoming emails to bounce and possibly losing me business.
I think the beauty of Klerck's page widening abilities is the fact that it made many of those of us who browse /. at -1 experiment with other browsers rather than suffer with IE. I, for one, tried out Opera, but I couldn't stand the advertising and the fact that they wanted me to pay for it, so I settled on Mozilla. This sounds similar to Opera's strategy except it won't involve a third party. Also, my ISP, ATTBI, included configuration software with their CD to install to get my connection working. Since I already had IE, all I installed was the configurator. Loe and behold, the installation process reconfigured IE to display "provided by ATTBI" in every browser window! This might not be a new thing, but it definitely is a disturbing trend.
Actually, many higher level educational institutions have "bullshit requirements" that make you leave earlier. For example, the University of California is largely subsidized by taxpayer $$, resulting in tuition fees that only cover about 1/3 the actual cost. Meaning the longer you stay at the school, the more taxpayer $$ is spent on you, so the UC's want you to graduate as quickly as possible, or at least give them their money and get the hell out of there. IIRC, the maximum number of units is 240 at the quarter based schools and somewhat lower at the semester based. Go beyond that, and you're out of there.
One issue I have with this decision is the fact that it was made in the given political climate. After the power deregulation and the ensuing blackouts that occurred, there seems to be a sort of pro government regulation of utilities attitude in the air. I wonder how much this has to do with it. People look at Gray Davis and realize he jeopardized his political career just for being office during the deregulation, so regulation has got to be a good thing, right?
Then I pulled out my notebook with a 13.3 " TFT display, and he said it didn't bother him at all. So I think LCD displays are easier on the eyes that CRT, even if they are less accurate.
Swaine- http://www.swaine.com/tuesday.html Diversions- http://diversions.kaptiv-8.com/
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