> Robbie Bach (Chief Xbox Officer): I said, okay, well then, let’s not do it.
> Ed Fries (VP, Game Publishing): And then somebody says, “What about Sony?”
> Jeff Henshaw (Software Design): Microsoft had owned the den and the office. And the thought of Sony owning the rest of the home is offensive to Bill [Gates].
> Ed Fries: Bill kinda pauses, and he thinks, and he says… “I think we should do this.” And Ballmer’s like, “yeah, we should do this!” And then they start getting excited and it starts going back and forth. “We should do this!” “We should let these guys do this!”
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that Microsoft and Google were so bent on competing with each other for its own sake (Bing, ChromeOS) that they allowed Apple to dominate the next generation of computing with the iPhone. This seems like another part of the same story.
I like this. I like walking, and I already walk quite fast, but I'd like to see more while I walk. (Though, as I'm thinking about it right now, I might also just consciously practice walking faster.)
I don't find these knobs any less irritating then the knobs in other music software. Sliders are the perfect way to change numbers with a mouse or a touchscreen. I don't understand why music software sticks to a level of skeuomorphism that has been abandoned in every other field.
> Small groups and charisma counted for more than ideas. Individuals generated more real motion than systems. History was no more than a kind of “gossip”.
Say an alien spaceship landed in China. It has 30 aliens on it. The aliens are weak and small. They have no weapons and carry no diseases. They breed at rates similar to humans. They are bringing no new technology. No other ships are coming. There’s no trick—except that they each have an IQ of 300. Would you bomb the spaceship to kill these aliens?
It would be easier to play with this if you could adjust the variables with a slider and if the simulation happened immidiately when the variable was changed. No need for a button.
The texts are hard to read in these tiny boxes. Maybe you could have one page for every model where the text is displayed on one side and the simulation on the other side.
I'm always weirded out by how much attention Torvald's rants get. It seems a bit like the joy people get from watching a talent show and listening to the host insult the singers.
I think it's because most software developers have experience working with assholes. Commenting on someone famous who's being an asshole is a natural way to vent.
I've come accross this website a few times but only now clicked on the hamburger menu and then on "how to use" to learn that learned that you had to zoom in and click on a "button" (some kind of polygon approximating a circle?) to listen to the music. I think I tried clicking on the titles before and concluded that it didn't work.
So, they could still take Google's payment and they would still have to pay taxes on it?