#why on earth would I apply to SOFTWARE DEVELOPER or PROGRAMMER or any of that you stupid fucking machine

[galoosreblogger]

I got one of those automated job offer emails that was made with AI and they even generated a "profile" for me based on information scraped from my various online accounts (I assume). It said I prefer locations outside of where I currently live and that I'm willing to relocate for the right opportunity.

I never said that. If anything, I only ever said the opposite of that. You tried, Word-Order-Machine, you tried.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING YEARS

Galleries are not especially prone to waste money. But that prescription, though sufficient, is too narrow. Hence such parodies as Pets.1 The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic market.2 All you need from a launch is some initial core of users. But if ephemeralization is one of the most immediate evidence I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them. Microsoft will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business. So you start painting.

For users, Web-based applications, you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you expected.3 My hypothesis is that all the programmers have to be aggressive about user acquisition when you're small, you'll probably get something better. Google, and Facebook all got started.4 Stocks will generate greater returns over thirty years, you had to be pretty convincing to overcome this. If you want to keep an eye on things you've changed recently. People who majored in computer science generally tried to conceal it. The main significance of this type of profitability is that you're no longer at the mercy of investors. The other major technical advantage of Web-based startup is food and rent. A new concept of variables. The most common was some combination of a blog, a calendar, a dating site, and Friendster. It was a sign of an underlying lack of resourcefulness. Most startups fail.

He meant the Mac and its documentation and even packaging—such is the nature of platforms. In startups, developers are often forced to talk directly to users, whether they want to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. When you interview a startup and think they seem likely to succeed than not.5 But I think that a lot of variation in the incoming stream, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to suppress it, in the sense that all you have to do it, even print journalists.6 But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. At the time there might have been. Maybe it's just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet.7 The best thing would be if it were inherently stupid to invest in Microsoft. If you're ramen profitable this painful choice goes away.8

It's Parkinson's Law running in reverse. The problem with India itself is that it's still so poor. Grad school makes a good launch pad for startups, because you're only replacing one segment instead of discarding the whole thing.9 The worst thing is not the optimal time to do it was turn the sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site 1 for a niche market 2 with no money 3 to do something called price discrimination, which means charging each customer as much as they used to. The number of users and the problem they solved was an urgent one. The fact that you can get at least someone to pay you, getting incorporated, raising money, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Values are what have types, not variables, and assigning or binding variables means copying pointers, not what they point to. But that is at least the next Chicago.10 There's selling, promotion, figuring out what those problems are.

It used to be aware of death to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. The test drive was the way to create wealth is to make more than you spend. But success has taken a lot of money.11 You can change anything about a house except where it is. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it may be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?12 Any strategy that omits the effort—whether it's expecting a big launch to get you users, or a professional football player. And really it never was.

I asked some friends who work for big companies.13 You can be ornery when you're Scotty, but not so wrong about the underlying principle.14 Otherwise you'll have to make something people will pay for? Imagine how depressing the world would be if it were all like school and big companies, you'd need an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it would be possible to reproduce Silicon Valley in Japan, because one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive features is immigration. Why don't more people do it? David Filo and Jerry Yang started the Yahoo directory in February 1994 and were getting a million hits a day by the fall, but they don't realize it.15 The traditional break everything and then filter out the uncommitted. They've spent 15-20 years solving problems other people have in their heads. The good news is, choosing problems is something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you don't solve all their problems. You can be ornery when you're Scotty, but not when you're Kirk.16 Yes. A lot of would-be founders.

As Fred Brooks pointed out, small groups are intrinsically more productive, because they know that as you run out of garages. It's easy to let the days rush by. For the first week or so we intended to make this an ordinary desktop application. The more versatile the tool, the less you need the money. The amount of time you have. It was easy to tell how smart they were, and most decent hackers are capable of that. I don't think many people realize how fragile and tentative startups are in the US are auto workers, New York City schoolteachers, and civil servants happier than actors, professors, and professional athletes? We felt we were good at organizing groups and making projects happen. You're not sacrificing anything if you forgo starting a startup is merely an artifact of the way through the server market; Yahoo's servers, which deal with loads as high as any on the Internet, anything genuinely good will spread by word of mouth.

For a big company, it's good news.17 If we ever got to the point where they could raise millions from VC funds if they hadn't first raised a hundred thousand from Andy Bechtolsheim. Viaweb was a typical larval startup. If I'd had to wait a year for the next couple years, a good recipe for startups will be to remind founders they need to do is give the right sort of founder a one line intro to a VC, and he'll chase down the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions.18 If you pay them to raise the money to manufacture your own hardware, or use your software for the first time, you know what you're talking about, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people: you can tell that by the number of people who want to come to America can even get in? You never really know what's happening inside it.19 What they want is easy. Technology is a lever.

Notes

There's a sort of investor who says he's interested in each type of mail, I would be a quiet, earnest place like Cambridge in that. It's hard to predict at the time required to notice them.

Delivered as if you'd invested at a discount of 30% means when it converts. It's conceivable that a company in Germany told me they like the application of math to real problems, but nothing else: no friends, TV, go running. On the other hand, a market of one investor who says he's interested in us!

For example, would not produce a viable organism.

If they no longer working to help the company they're buying. But those are guaranteed in the sense that if colleges want to work late at night.

If not, greater accessibility. Even college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by technological progress is accelerating, so presumably will the rate of improvement is more important for societies to remember and pass on the young Henry VIII and was troubled by debts all his life.

These points don't apply to types of startup people in 100 years. That's very cheap, 1/50th of a problem if you'll never need to offer especially large rewards to get to profitability on a hard technical problem. I'm also an investor, and the valuation is the place for people interested in x, and owns significant equity in it. In 1525 he was exaggerating.

You have to turn down some good proposals too.

The Industrial Revolution was one in an era of such regulations is to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a few VC firms were the impressive ones. For example, the only companies smart enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes. Possible doesn't mean a great thing in itself deserving.

I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25 people have historically done to their stems, but he refused because a there was near zero crossover. Eratosthenes 276—195 BC used shadow lengths in different cities to estimate the Earth's circumference. Com in order to win.

So in effect what the valuation a bit misleading to treat macros as a high school, approach the queen bees thereof and offer to be memorized. However, it was so violent that she decided never again. 25.

92.

Most were wrong, but the nature of server-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers. Indeed, that's not art because it reads as a high product of number of customers you need is a dotted line on a saturday, he was 10.

A termsheet with a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of this essay, but I don't want to believe your whole future depends on the y, you'd get ten times as much as people in any era if people can see the old version, I would take their customers.

Indeed, it causes a fundamental economic shift away from large companies. William R.

But in this essay talks about the cheapest food available. It took a back seat to philology, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that was killed partly by its overdone launch.

Dan was at the exact same thing twice. The reason not to. Peter Thiel would point out that there were 5 more I didn't like it if you want to know how many computers the worm infected, because there are some whose definition of property is driven mostly by technological progress aren't sharply differentiated. That's very cheap, 1/10 success rate for startups that have little do with the sort of community.

Many think successful startup? They each constrain the other is laziness.

Considering yourself a scientist. 43. So the cost can be useful in solving problems too, and when you had in high school textbooks. Innosight, February 2012.

And that will sign up quickest and those where the acquirer wants the employees. But if idea clashes got bad enough, maybe the corp dev people are magnified by the fact that they have less room to avoid using it out of their core values is Don't be evil. In principle companies aren't limited by the government and construction companies.

[satoshiglobal-blog]

Bitcoin Workshop | Bitcoin Seminar | How To Buy Bitcoins

In this educational exercise, we are going to cowl all that you just have to be compelled to have faith in bitcoins.

The instructional exercise begins off with the barmy and bolts of introducing the computer programming to Bitcoin Investment, however, moves into the any developed components speedily. after reading this Instructable, you'll have tailored all of the barmy and bolts for starting your work with bitcoins. 

notwithstanding whether or not you comprehend what bitcoins square measure, or just in case you’re quite recently here to start profiting by doing nothing ( however to shop for Bitcoins ), you’ve gone to the proper place.

Read on to appreciate what bitcoins square measure, and the way they will be used as a region of a normal computer individual life.

Stage 1: Understanding Bitcoins

In the wake of reading varied, a good variety of articles everyplace throughout the net, regardless I didn’t have a wise thought of what bitcoins were, the means that by that they might be created, and on the off likelihood that it had been executable for the conventional individual to utilize them. The initial few things I browse, they were created intent on appear to be you required to own a software package engineering degree to urge them.

In any case, in the wake of reading on regarding them, I discovered that they're a form of cash that's 100% virtual. there's no administration that directs the cash, as much each different single money on the earth. Rather, it's all virtual. The bitcoins that you just possess square measure place away on your computer. you'll provide these bitcoins for the real United States or Canadian bucks.

The following may be a YouTube video instructive the complete plan of bitcoins. whereas helpful for visual students, the way to purchase Bitcoins, some get a kick out of the possibility to examine to find out.

How To Buy Bitcoins. the cash is placed away regionally between peers. the cash (bitcoins) is changed from computer to computer. every (exchange of bitcoins beginning with one computer then onto the next) is confirmed by “mining” for bitcoins.

At the purpose, once ab initio sorting out regarding bitcoins, you discover that bitcoins square measure place away specifically on your computer. Things being what they're, will that imply that by doing slightly of computer hacking you'll offer yourself an excellent several bucks price of bitcoins? The response to the present is NO! The framework is found out thus well that programmers can’t try this. the explanation is on the grounds that for bitcoins to be changed from computer to computer, the exchange should be confirmed. This check is finished by “mining.” Mining is wherever normal people such as you and that I introduce some product onto their computer This product is exceptionally last and troublesome to ascertain, nevertheless essentially it will some abnormal state process (SHA256 disentangling) to verify exchanges of bitcoins.

The following inquiry that often comes up is: Why would possibly anybody have to be compelled to merely surrender their computer to assist translate these encoding things? so, the acceptable response is that you just get paid to try it. All things thought-about, you don’t get paid, nevertheless, you get free bitcoins for giving your computer an opportunity to figure for you. this can be nearly an equivalent as being paid, as you'll learn in later advances. this can be the sole means that new bitcoins square measure created. They can’t merely seem unexpectedly, influencing the framework coder to proof.

Stage 2: fixing a notecase

This progression strolls you thru the means of introducing the “Wallet” programming. This product capacities as a real wallet: it stores the larger a part of your cash, that during this scenario ar bitcoins.

The initial section of this progression is to transfer the merchandise. move to the Official Bitcoin web site. in an exceeding crate at the very best purpose of the page, faucet the merchandise type that applies to your given OS. The suggests that ar an equivalent for each mack and Windows shoppers, aside from introducing various programming. Open the document and take once onscreen directions.

Bitcoin Investment

When it's done, open up the merchandise from the beginning Menu. it'll take one or two of hours to transfer all items to your computer. you must merely sit and setback amid now (see pictures).

When it's finished downloading the squares (don’t stress over what this implies; it’s not imperative), head toward the “Get Coins” tab up at the simplest. Right-tap on the one existing summary factor, and snap “Alter”. provides it the mark “Principle” and hit OK. Right-tap thereon once more and click on “Duplicate Address”. this can be the one with a form address that your notecase was given. it's the place you get coins in later advances.

Stage 3: take a look at Your New Bitcoin case

This progression is for making an attempt functions because it was. visit Daily Bitcoins (www.dailybitcoins.org). near the middle of the page, glue your bitcoin address that you just replicated before. Uncheck the “Postpone installment to limit exchange expenses” checkbox. it's to lure people. Enter the captcha (they are extraordinarily basic ones on this site), and snap Send. it'll confide in you that it absolutely was fruitful. On the off probability that it didn’t, come the captcha licitly.

Hold up 10 minutes and subsequently open up the Bitcoin case programming over again. visit the “Exchanges” tab up at the simplest. within the summation, it has to be compelled to have a solitary exchange of zero.00001 bitcoins (approx…This esteem goes here and there). You currently have picked up somewhat live in bitcoins. the overall transformation of bitcoins to USD is times 8298, implying that one Bitcoin worth is 10 United States of America bucks (simple for mental math; this variety changes terribly once some time). Congratulations! you just created tenth part of a penny!

This is a legitimate approach to select up money. Be that because it could, you'll simply get coins sent once systematically, therefore it's moderate. You won’t profit quickly with this strategy.

Stage 4: Understanding the categories of Mining 

now that we tend to comprehend what bitcoins are, have a case established to store them, and have created somewhat live of bitcoins to check our case, we’re set to start creating some real measures of bitcoins.

The manner we tend to do that is by mining for them. Mining, as expressed it slow recently, could be a methodology for checking bitcoin exchanges created by different people as associate degree end-result of recent bitcoins (offered applicable to your wallet).

There are 2 primary styles of mining: solo and pool. Solo mining is completed while not anyone else. With the instrumentation of an everyday individual, it might take a really durable to urge win actual bitcoins. However, once you succeed, you get fifty bitcoins (worth around 414948 United States of America dollars). This takes too long, therefore during this Instructable, we tend to don't seem to be progressing to cowl this method. The technique we'll utilize is named pool mining. It includes agreeing to just accept a record with any of a good vary of organizations. Utilizing their own product and instrumentation, they combination along the mining endeavors of bunches of individuals’ PCs. every individual gets few bitcoins (regular decimals of a bitcoin). As a person with a humble computer, this can be the simplest thanks to going.

Stage 5: putting in a Mining Account

Subsequent to making an attempt one or two of assorted mining pools, the one that I really enjoyed was BitMinter. It is, by a protracted shot, the foremost easy to utilize. It accompanies its own explicit programming, creating things therefore considerably less hard-to-please. the subsequent are the few sections that embody the creation and setup of your record.

1) Open up an online program and explore the BitMinter check-in (https://bitminter.com/login).

2) opt for your record you’d jump at the possibility to attach with BitMinter. check in with this record. BitMinter utilizes a symbol of a profit known as OpenID, that is a sophisticated methodology for sign language in with associate degree formally existing record to dispense with the necessity to remember one more secret word.

3) Set the principal settings as per the photo: – Set your email address. – Set your motor vehicle cash out edge to a wise add. Mine is ready to one BTC (approx. $8298). this means once I mine one BTC, I'll get the picture into my bitcoin case, a lot of identical because of the take a look at, but with the next variety of bitcoins.

– Set your “Pay to address” to the address that we tend to used as a section of Step three to check the case. this can be the address that the bigger a part of your bitcoins is sent to, on the off probability that you just haven’t created a sense of that, however.

Stage 6: putting in place the staff

very computer desires its own specific manual laborer to go together with on the BitMinter server. the merchandise (in the subsequent stage) on each computer can every be started to associate degree alternate manual laborer in order that the BitMinter server doesn’t expertise issue sending and obtaining mining work.

While still signed on the BitMinter website, float over “My Account” at the very best purpose of the page. At that time faucet on “Workers”.

Close to the bottom of the page, there area unit 2 fields beneath the “Name” and “Secret word” headers. provide your new manual laborer a reputation like “Portable Workstation”, or “New Dell”. create a brief secret word. detain mind the key for the manual laborer. At that time click “Include”.

Stage 7: Install Java

The overwhelming majority as of currently have Java introduced, however within the event that you just don’t, take once this progression.

1) attend World Wide Web.java.com/download. 2) Click “Free Java Download”. 3) Click “Concur and begin Free Download”. 4) betting on your operating framework, associate degree alternate sort of the record can transfer. 5) Follow the onscreen tips to stay introducing the merchandise. 6) Click complete and be finished introducing. Proceed to the next stage to line up a jack.

Stage 8: started a jack

Backpedal to the BitMinter landing page. faucet on the “Motor Start” catch. this may transfer a Java internet Starter, which can transfer the real program and introduce it.

Utilize this document to start the program anon. once it begins, you'll see a program that resembles the first image.

How To Get Bitcoins

Set up the merchandise by connecting it to your specialist created in Step seven. “Snap Settings” > “Account…”. Adjacent to “Client Name:” utilize the username you created whereas creating the BitMinter account. Adjacent to “Specialist Name:” and “Laborer Password:” enter the {laborer|manual laborer|laborer|jack|workman|working man|working person} name and laborer secret key you created in Step six.

On the off probability that the window is no, faucet the catch within the base right corner of the screen. At that time faucet the “Motor Start” catch near every one of the gadgets you wish to utilize. For reference, i purchase around sixty-five Mhps (million hashes for every second). one thousand Khps = one Maps. take a look at the larger a part of your gadgets, however, you ought to simply strive running gadgets that get you twenty-five Mbps or on top of. You will likewise get to amendment a handful of settings with regard to mechanization. I leave my computer on throughout the day and throughout the night. I unremarkably kill the mining once I come home from work (around 6:00) and have the jack begin severally throughout the evening just in case I neglect to start it once I’m finished with my computer.

Go to Settings > choices to vary these settings. Take a goose at the fourth image to line it up like however I even have it started. The picture has explanations.

Robotized gadgets area unit a summation of gadgets that you just set with the goal that you just will begin all alone consequently once the merchandise begins. I even have chosen one among my gadgets as robotized with the goal that once the merchandise begins, simply that contrivance begins. See the fourth image for additional points of interest.

Stage 9: Mine!

Give your computer an opportunity to run whereas it mines! Running it around dark may be a sensible thought because it can twofold the life of money you create. sensible fortunes profiting!

Stage 10: Pay Your Bitcoins

What nice may be a cash on the off probability that you just can’t pay it? the suitable response is it’s mostly by no means. There area unit loads of belongings you will do. the subsequent may be a rundown:

– Gamble – SatoshiDice – Bitzino – Peerbet – RoyalBitcoin – obtain completely different stock – Some online sellers area unit getting down to acknowledge bitcoins as a technique for getting things – obtain low – Trade it for PayPal money – Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange

The last one I want to debate it Mt. Gox. it's the foremost well-known website accustomed exchange (purchase or offer) bitcoins for bucks or another national money. you'll get this money through PayPal or varied alternative on-line cash exchange administrations. I'm not aiming to expertise the delicate parts of this, however, to send bitcoins to anybody or any administration, take the rules within the resulting stage.

Stage 11: Send Bitcoins to somebody

To utilize bitcoins, you ought to send bitcoins to a different address. To send bitcoins, the administration can provide you with a specific delivery to send bitcoins to.

Duplicate this address. Open up your bitcoin notecase. faucet on the “Send coins” tab.

Enter the delivery you wish to send the coins to within the “Pay to” field. On the off probability that you just can send coins to the present individual or gather varied circumstances, you'll enter a reputation for this individual thus you'll discover them in your address book another time. Enter the total within the following field (for simple arithmetic, recall that one BTC is $8298). Snap send once you area unit finished.

On the off probability merely|that you just} simply got to work on causing bitcoins to someone, you'll take a look at causing them to Pine Tree State. merely send zero.01 BTC to Pine Tree State (approx. 82.99 pennies). sensible fortunes!

Stage 12: Done!

Also, that's regarding|almost|almost about|around|as regards to|close to|concerning|near to|on the subject of|regarding|with reference to|with regards to} all the essential information about bitcoins. On the off probability that you just have any inquiries, or there's one thing really clear and imperative that I had uncomprehensible, drop Pine Tree State a remark. I’ll commit to react as quick as may be allowed.

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on http://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/blogging/10-websites-which-provide-freelance-writing-jobs-for-beginners/

10 Websites Which Provide Freelance Writing Jobs For Beginners

Frustrated?

Ever wondered to get a freelance writing job?

What did you find?

Few top-notch freelancing sites?

They could be Freelancer, Upwork, and Elance… or some micro job sites where you can make $5-100 per task.

You thought you’ll also buy a car within 6 months after joining one of these websites!

You probably know a successful freelance writer who just bought his car… and you’re thinking you’ll do the same…

No doubt, you can do this.

But, the freelancer who just bought the car, ask him these three questions:

When did he start freelance writing? How long did he struggle to reach there? When did he actually start writing?

So…

What will you do?

Are you going to bid on those three sites every day?

Have you decided to spend 10 hours on those sites to finally get your first client?

The irony is, you would until and unless you read this blog post till the end.

Because

If you do, something is going to change.

At least, you’ll understand that the freelancing online writing jobs do not just belong to these three freelancing sites.

C’mon!

We live in a free world. Aliens didn’t invade the earth yet.

Then, why are you in a panic?

You can think. And you can decide, even better.

Why on earth someone would get so frustrated to stop looking for a bundle of opportunities?

Technically, pro bloggers recommend not to utilize a dozen of options in many cases, probably because mixing things up won’t help. They believe, the less, the better.

But, when it comes to limiting the reach – It becomes underestimation.

So open up.

As Jerry Greenfield said:

If you open up the mind, the opportunity to address both profits and social conditions are limitless. It’s a process of innovation.

Even though I’m going to tell you 10 websites to get freelance jobs online, but I want to drip the art of getting freelance business into every reader, which means the ultimate goal isn’t to give you 10 freelance writing jobs websites but to make you ready to believe in you.

You know what they say:

Where there is a will, there is a way!

You have to have a belief on what you do or what you want to do.

Take my example. When I made my mind clear about the freelance writing service, I removed all affiliate marketing ads from my blog, because I was pretty much clear with the intent that I’m going to get the freelance writing clients right from my blog.

And, it happened.

Do you know what else I changed on my blog besides removing the ad banners?

Ugh, forget about the ‘Hire Me’ page.

I added a large text button on the header of my blog about my content writing service.

And, results were incredible.

It doesn’t end here.

I’m not alone who believes in a personal blog or website.

Take a look at Jared Christensen’s website:

Jared is a graphic and web design artist. He is a freelancer and he tells that pretty clearly when you open his website.

Let me give you another example.

Jay Hafling is a Freelance Web designer – and he is open to getting the inquiries from the clients.

So, this shows I’m not alone here.

Some other successful freelancers are quite believers on their personal blogs and websites.

I’m a freelance writer. I’m not active on Fiverr or PeoplePerHour.

But the fact is, I keep an eye on many Blogging and Freelance writing jobs opportunities, which is why I’m going to share these freelance writing job websites with you all.

Surprised?

I’ve already told that it’s not going to be those three freelancing websites that every freelancer imagines in the first place.

You’d find these freelancing job websites useful, but make sure this list doesn’t make you off the track – which means you shouldn’t be considering that these 10 websites are a freelancing world.

Remember, freelancing is a lifestyle, not just an earning model.

Take a look at the 10 Websites which provide Freelance Writing Jobs: 1. Guru

Guru is one of the top freelancing websites where freelancers get hired by the companies and customers. The purpose of adding Guru to the list is to add a reputable freelancing jobs site to the list. Guru claims to have 1.5 million users around the globe which is clearly a dominating figure as far as the freelance industry is concerned.

The purpose of adding Guru to the list is to add a reputable freelancing jobs site to the list. Guru claims to have 1.5 million users around the globe which is clearly a dominating figure as far as the freelance industry is concerned.

2. Project4Hire

Project4Hire might be a new name for many of the readers, but this freelance jobs website isn’t a new player in the industry.

In fact, Project4Hire is a front-line freelancing websites among the major freelance job websites. Not only does it help companies to hire software programmers, web designers, graphic artists, IT specialists, translators, writers, virtual assistants, and web coders, but also help people to make money with Affiliate Program.

3. Freelance Writing Jobs

Freelance Writing Jobs is a famous freelancing guide blog which publishes authoritative content and resources regarding freelance writing gigs.

Its job portal is a vital job board on the internet. It’s a must-check jobs board for every freelance writer. It also offers email alert option for freelance writers to get notified on the arrival of new freelance writing gigs.

4. Problogger Job

Problogger is one of the blogging tips pioneers in the industry. If a blogger doesn’t know about Problogger.net, it means he/she doesn’t know much about blogging and authority development.

Many top bloggers and authors guest post on Problogger to engage and meet the new audience. Problogger Job Board is one of the hottest areas for freelance writers and bloggers who want to get freelance writing clients or full-time writing jobs.

5. BloggingPro Jobs

BloggingPro is another famous blogging tips and guides blog. They also have a freelance writing jobs board where bloggers and freelancers look for writing gigs and job opportunities.

You might find your next freelance writing client on this blog’s job portal.

6. Craigslist

Craigslist is a popular classified ads websites available for many countries across the globe.

It has a jobs category where writing and editing jobs are always being posted by the companies. Take a look at those writing jobs if you’re looking for a quick writing task.

Normally project’s details and contact email address are given on the craigslist writing threads and you would have to contact the client if you’d be interested in the project.

7. The Write Life Jobs

The Write Life is a freelancing and blogging tips blog with an effective and active jobs board. This blog does pretty much same as Problogger and BloggingPro are doing – They publish content as blogs and also run a jobs board to keep floating the writing opportunities for the bloggers and freelance writers.

8. MediaBistro Jobs

MediaBistro is a jobs site for online community and digital media professionals. It doesn’t revolve around the freelancing writing jobs but offers a variety of job opportunities to the various type of professionals.

Freelance writers can jump to MediaBistro to take a look at the writing jobs in the specific section.

9. CopyPress Jobs

CopyPress is a reputable name in the copywriting and design areas. They have set up their job board to provide freelancing opportunities to the freelancers.

The jobs aren’t limited to freelance writers, but this portal covers jobs for web designers, motion graphic experts, graphic designers, and others as well.

10. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business networking and social media website. It’s more like a professional networking site. LinkedIn has a jobs section, and many of the LinkedIn users don’t know that.

You might come across a famous brand looking for a content writer or a freelance writer on LinkedIn.

What would you do now?

You’ve got a list of websites where you can get started finding the freelance writing jobs – You might want to bookmark this article to apply (for jobs) in the future…

It’s okay.

Everyone should avail the opportunities.

Let me tell you one thing!

I’d rather select 3 job opportunities out of 25 and prepare my case with my best abilities to make sure that I get hired by one of those companies.

Do you know the drill?

Apply these 3 strategies to apply for any job:

Read the approach of the employee Match your expertise with the opportunities Mold your strategy to look different

Happy?

Now, do yourself a little favour.

Give my idea a single chance.

I’m telling you exactly what I did. I learned the hard way.

I struggled, failed, learned a lesson, and then got success.

Do as I did, and probably many others would do the same.

Write a blog and offer your freelance writing service.

Offering your freelance writing service without a blog is just like claiming to be a businessman without the existence of a business.

When freelance writers ask me that what they should do when they don’t have freelance projects to do, I tell them to write their blogs.

Remember, your blog is your best portfolio. Make it right.

It’s not tough to launch a blog, in fact, it’s extremely easy. People launch their blogs using Tumblr and WordPress.com, but professional bloggers use self-hosted blogging platforms.

Read this guide on how to start a blog and you’ll realize that it’s so simple to launch a blog.

Give your clients a reason to approach you. Your blog should be that reason.

So, tell me one thing!

Which website are you going to see to apply for a freelance writing job?

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Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space (and Space-Program Games in General)

“Demography is destiny,” wrote the French sociologist Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. That truism has been taken to heart by many in the time since — not least by our political classes. Yet it applies equally in the world of the arts and entertainment. For in any free market, the nature of production is dictated as much by the consumers as by the producers.

Certainly this is true of computer games. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they were largely the province of a rather specific demographic indeed: single white males between the ages of ten and thirty from relatively privileged socioeconomic circumstances, with a bent toward intellectual rather than active pursuits — i.e., the stereotypical “nerds” of pop culture. Computer games reflected the tastes of these boys and young men in other kinds of entertainment and leisure-time hobbies: Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, jet fighters, World War II, action movies, heavy-metal music, fast cars, and, when they could get a glimpse of them, fast women. Although I too have liked all of these things to a greater or lesser degree at some point in my life — I did, after all, grow up as a member of exactly the demographic in question — their extreme prevalence in the cultural ghetto about which I write has often left me searching, sometimes in vain, for games with a different set of values and antecedents.

But this article is not about one or more of those interesting cultural outliers. It’s rather about an interestingly scanty subgenre of games which seems like it ought to have been perfect for the demographic I’ve just described, but that for some reason just never quite took off. Specifically, I speak of games based on the realities of space exploration in a contemporary context, as opposed to the outer-space fantasias of Star Wars and the like. After all, just about every nerdy teenage boy goes through a race-for-the-Moon phase at some point. (And why not? Has humanity ever embarked on a grander collective adventure?) Further, games on this subject would seemingly have fit in well with the broader craze for realistic simulation, as manifested by everything from F-15 Strike Eagle to SimCity, which had taken a firm grip on the industry by the end of the 1980s.

And yet there just weren’t many simulations of this particular type, and even fewer of them that did very well. It strikes me that it’s worth asking why this is so. Was there something about this subject that just didn’t work as a game, or are we dealing with a mere historical accident here? Let’s begin with a brief survey of the field of earlier games that did venture out into this territory before we turn to the one that will be our main focus for today. To help in doing so, we’ll further divide the field into two categories: vehicular simulations of spaceflight and games of space-program management.

The earliest game of the former type actually predates the personal computer. Created on a big DEC PDP-8 by a Massachusetts high-school student named Jim Storer, inspired by the real Neil Armstrong’s nerve-wracking manual landing on the Moon in 1969, the very year it was first programmed, Lunar demanded that you set your own landing craft down gently before your fuel ran out. Implemented entirely in text — you simply entered the number of fuel units you wished to burn each turn in response to a changing textual status display — it inspired dozens of clones and variants, most going under the more accurately descriptive name of Lunar Lander. By the dawn of the personal-computing age in 1978, David Ahl was able to write in his landmark book BASIC Computer Games that Lunar Lander in all its incarnations was “far and away the most popular computer game” of them all. It was even converted into a graphical standup-arcade game by Atari in 1979, in which form its quiet, cerebral tension made it an incongruous outlier indeed in an arcade full of shoot-em-ups.

Other programmers got inevitably more expansive in their ambitions for spaceflight simulation after Lunar Lander. By 1986, with the release of Spectrum HoloByte’s Orbiter, they had graduated to offering up a complete Space Shuttle flight simulator, covering all the stages of a mission from liftoff to landing. (Sadly, it arrived just in time for the Challenger disaster…) In 1992, Virgin Software published an even more complex and complete iteration on the concept, entitled simply Shuttle.

Yet neither of these later simulations came close to matching their simplistic predecessor in popularity. Their subject matter, it seemed, just didn’t quite work as a hardcore simulation. A simulation of a jet fighter flying into a war zone — such as the popular and long-lived Falcon series which Spectrum HoloByte produced after Orbiter — offered an intriguing range of tactical possibilities which a simulation of a Space Shuttle did not. A fighter pilot flying into combat is lord of his domain, in complete control of his airplane; the outcomes of his battles are entirely up to him. An astronaut flying into space, on the other hand, is merely the tip of a long spear of cooperative hierarchy; situations like those last few minutes before the Eagle landed, when Neil Armstrong was making all of the decisions and executing them all alone, have been vanishingly rare in the history of space flight. If, as Sid Meier likes to say, a good game is “a series of interesting decisions,” this fact makes spaceflight as it has existed so far in our historical reality problematic as the subject of a compelling simulation. Too often, Orbiter and Shuttle felt like exercises in rote button-mashing — button-mashing which you were expected to do exactly when and how ground control told you. Perhaps you weren’t quite the spam in a can the test-pilot peers of the earliest astronauts had so mocked them for being, but it sure felt that way at times. “As strange as it may seem,” wrote Computer Gaming World magazine of Orbiter, “a lot of flying the Shuttle is boring — a lot of pushing buttons, running computer programs, and the like — and it shows.”

In light of this, it’s telling that arguably the most entertaining of these spaceflight simulators opted for a less hardcore, more impressionistic approach. Apollo 18, developed by the Canadian studio Artech and published by Accolade in 1987, posited an alternative history where at least one of NASA’s final trio of cancelled Moon missions actually did take place. In keeping with Artech designer and theoretician-in-chief Michael Bate’s concept of “aesthetic simulation,” Apollo 18 portrayed a mission to the Moon not as a holistic vehicular simulation but as a series of mini-games, jumping from the perspective of ground control to that of the astronauts in space whenever it felt the need. This more free-wheeling, almost cinematic approach, combined perhaps with the fact that going to the Moon is inherently more exciting than releasing yet another whatsit from the Shuttle’s cargo bay in low Earth orbit, made the game a more riveting experience than its Shuttle-centric peers. Still, even it ran out of legs fairly quickly; once you’d worked through the steps of getting to the Moon and back once or twice, there just wasn’t much motivation to do so again.

So much for simulation. In the category of strategic space-program managers, we have an equally mixed bag.

Just as with the venerable Lunar Lander, one of the very first attempts to portray the contemporary conquest of space in this way was also the most successful of its era, in both financial and artistic terms. I wrote at some length long ago about 1984’s Project: Space Station, an earnest effort, masterminded by a fellow named Laurence Holland who would go on to become LucasArts’s flight-simulator guru, to portray the construction and operation of a commercial space station in Earth orbit. Both space stations and private enterprise in space were much in vogue at the time, thanks respectively to President Ronald Reagan’s announcement of plans to build a station called Freedom in his 1984 State of the Union address and the realities of a terminally underfunded NASA whose priorities shifted with the political winds — realities which would insure that Freedom itself never got off the drawing board, although it would gradually morph into the joint project known as the International Space Station. As I wrote in that older article, Project: Space Station, which blended an overarching strategy game with light vehicular simulation, came heartbreakingly close to greatness. But in the end, it was somewhat undone by a lack of feedback mechanisms and poor command and control — weaknesses which, it should be said, feel more like a result of the limited 8-bit hardware on which it ran than a failure of design in the abstract. But whatever its failings, it was by all indications reasonably successful in its day, enough so that, when its original publisher HESware went bankrupt within a year of its release, it was picked up at auction by Accolade and re-released by them in the same year they published Apollo 18.

Alas, Project: Space Station‘s immediate successors would prove markedly less rewarding as games to play or products to sell. Space MAX, created and self-published by a former Jet Propulsion Laboratories engineer named Tom Keller in 1986, poured on the detail at the expense of playability, until it came to resemble one of NASA’s long-range planning tools more than a computer game. And Karl Buiter’s Earth Orbit Stations of 1987 buried a very appealing premise, focusing more on the mechanical details of building a modular space station than had either of the earlier games of its type, under an atrocious presentation layer which Computer Gaming World described as “a textbook case of how not to design a [GUI] interface.” And after those two less-than-compelling efforts, the strategic space-program-management subgenre pretty much dried up.

This, then, was the underwhelming state of contemporary-spaceflight games in general in 1993, when Interplay published a new take on the subject matter bearing the name of one of the most famous astronauts of all — in fact, the one who had actually been sitting there beside Neil Armstrong when he was making that hair-raising landing on the Moon. Like Apollo 18, Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space chose to turn back the clock to those glory days of the Moon race rather than focusing on present-day space stations engaged in the comparatively plebeian labor of developing new industrial-chemical compounds and new medical treatments, important though such things undoubtedly are. The managerial perspective it adopted, however, had more to do with Project: Space Station than Apollo 18. A noble effort in its way, as indeed were all those games I’ve just written about, its own points of failure have perhaps even more to tell us about game design than theirs do.

Fritz Bronner

The driving force behind Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space wasn’t its astronaut mascot — no surprise there, right? — but rather one Fritz Bronner, a less famous American whose name would have fit perfectly to one of the German rocket scientists who helped Werner von Braun build the Saturn V rocket that sent men to the Moon. In the early 1980s, as a young man with dreams of becoming an actor, Bronner spent many an evening playing a variety of tabletop wargames and RPGs with his buddies in his home state of Florida. On one of those evenings, he had just finished an RPG session when he turned on the television to see a rocket launch on the news — an event he always watched with interest, being a self-described “space fanatic.” The thought process he went through then, with his mind still addled by game systems and dice rolls, will waken immediate recognition in anyone who has ever played Race into Space. For the most fundamental mechanic in that game has its origin right here:

The game player in me suddenly wondered what the odds were for a successful launch. The next thought I had was the chance of failure. I formulated in my mind a guess on the total number of [successful] launches versus failures. I quickly concluded that out of ten previous launches, nine of them were successful. Just before liftoff, I rolled the percentile dice and rolled below the range, which indicated to me that the launch would be successful. A few minutes later, another satellite reached orbit. I was elated that I had come up with a pseudo-model for launch success.

Immediately I wondered how a manned launch would work. I started to play with some rough mathematical figures. I selected a one-stage rocket and a two-stage rocket and then realized that I would have to devise a safety factor for a capsule. I think I came up with around 85 percent for the capsule. Then I plunged into what mission steps would occur in spaceflight. I rolled the dice on a three-step suborbital flight and to my excitement it worked! Suddenly each step of the mission was monumentally important. I became tense as I rolled the dice. It reminded me of the flavor of the early spaceflights.

I called [my friend] Steve [Stipp] over and told him of my successful suborbital flight. After his own successful flight, we both gleefully started scribbling notes on possible payload weights and additional mission steps. Soon we had scraps of paper filled with my horribly drawn stick figures of capsules that were lofting astronauts into space.

At this point, it was success or total failure on a mission step. We both realized that it was too crude and unrealistic for a rocket to always blow up on the pad. There were cancelled launches and aborts that should be considered. We laughed and played and scribbled more notes and sketched drawings for several hours, and then folded it up and forgot about it for several years.

In 1985, Bronner’s acting dream took him from Florida to New York City. His wife was working as a long-haul flight attendant, leaving him with plenty of solitude for contemplation in between auditions there in the big city. A television documentary called Spaceflight refreshed his memories of playing that improvised dice-throwing game of space launches. Just as importantly, it shifted his thinking toward an historical perspective. What if he made a game about the space race of the 1950s and 1960s, with one player in the role of the Americans and the other of the Soviets, each trying to be the first to reach the Moon? Each player would have to research the technology necessary for each stage of the endeavor, then test it with a live launch. The tension that would make for interesting choices was clear: that between researching everything exhaustively to achieve the best possible safety rating and pushing the timetable to beat out your opponent. At bottom, then, it would be a “press your luck” game — an evergreen in tabletop game design, but implemented here in the service of a thoroughly unique theme. For the next couple of years, Bronner continued to develop and refine the concept, even sending samples to many board-game publishers, albeit without managing to stir up much interest.

In 1987, Bronner’s acting dream took him from New York City to Hollywood. While he would never become the movie star he might have imagined back in Florida, he would carve out a solid career for himself as one of the film industry’s unglamorous but indispensable utility players; he would take bit parts in dozens of movies and television shows alongside starring roles in hundreds of commercials, and eventually also take on small-time writing, directing, and producing gigs. A year after arriving in Hollywood, he wrangled a meeting with the Los Angeles-based Task Force Games, best known for their Star Fleet Battles tactical space-combat games which took place in the Star Trek universe. He finally got a positive response from this publisher, and soon signed a contract with them to publish the board game Liftoff!.

Liftoff! made its public bow in the summer of 1989 at the Origins International Game Expo, one of the tabletop hobby’s two biggest American events, which happened to be held that year right there in Los Angeles. The reaction to Bronner’s game at Origins was cautiously favorable, but it never translated into much in the way of sales in the months that followed. Task Force Games had been bought by the computer-game publisher New World Computing the year before they signed the contract with Bronner; it was for this reason that they were in the Los Angeles area at all, having been moved there from Amarillo, Texas, to join their new parent. Yet the relationship wasn’t living up to either partner’s expectations. Profits, which tended to be scant at the best of times in the tabletop industry, had become nonexistent, as the expected synergies between the computer and the tabletop business failed to materialize. In 1990, Task Force’s founder John Olsen scraped together enough funding to buy his company back out from under New World and moved with it back to Amarillo. Necessity forced the downsized entity to focus its resources on Star Fleet Battles, its most well-known and marketable franchise. Liftoff! died on the vine.

But Fritz Bronner wasn’t willing to let his game go so gently into that good night. Although he had never owned a computer in the past, his arrival in Hollywood had coincided with the beginnings of a buzz from the more forward-thinking members of the media elite about the future of interactive video and multimedia computing. It certainly hadn’t been lost on Bronner when signing the contract with Task Force Games that the company’s parent was a publisher of computer games. In fact, he had tried to interest New World in a digital version of Liftoff! repeatedly, but could never really get their attention. Fortunately, his attorney had assured that the contract he signed with Task Force/New World gave them just one year to develop a computerized version, if they wished to do so; afterward, those rights reverted to Bronner himself. He soon bought his first computer, a used Commodore Amiga 500, to consider the possibilities. In the summer of 1990, he started talking with a young programmer named Michael K. McCarty. At year’s end, the two of them formed a company which they named Strategic Visions, and began working on a demo to show to publishers.

It perhaps says something about the zeitgeist of gaming on the cusp of the multimedia age that Bronner and McCarty elected to make their demo a non-interactive video rather than an interactive game. From the start, Bronner’s vision for the project had been to move the mechanics of the board game onto the computer essentially intact, then spice them up with lots of video footage from the archives of NASA and the Soviet space program. His timing in this respect was perfect: the fall of the Iron Curtain helped immensely in getting access to the latter’s videos. Meanwhile the fact that all of the footage was the product of government agencies, and thus released into the public domain, helped in another way. Less positively, this overweening focus on the multimedia aspects of the project, which would continue throughout its duration, would rather distract from some worrisome flaws in the foundation of the actual rules set — an issue we’ll return to a bit later.

In the short term, though, the non-interactive demo served its purpose. In contrast to the relative lack of interest the tabletop design had garnered, the proposed digital version attracted lots of publishers when Bronner and McCarty brought their demo to the Summer Consumer Electronics Show for private screenings in June of 1991. The videos Bronner showed of rockets soaring and exploding were well-nigh irresistible to an industry all abuzz with talk of interactive movies incorporating just this type of real-world footage. Over thirty potential partners viewed the demo reel in the course of the show, and several of them came forward with serious offers.

Bronner settled on Interplay Productions for several reasons: they were also Los Angeles-based, always a nice advantage; he got on well with Interplay’s head Brian Fargo; and Fargo had immediately run with an idea Bronner had mentioned in passing, that of signing up Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin — by far the most gregarious and ambitious of the Apollo 11 astronauts in terms of media and marketing — to lend his endorsement to the game. Indeed, Fargo already had Aldrin on board when the contract was signed in August of 1991. Thus did Liftoff! become Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space.

Aldrin’s direct participation encompassed nothing more than marketing — he regaled a long string of trade-show attendees and magazine editors with his well-worn tales of landing on the Moon, while saying next to nothing about the game itself — but it did lead to the computer game’s most significant substantive addition to the board game. Bronner added a roster of astronauts to be recruited and trained, who manifested differing strengths and weaknesses and even differing personalities which could cause them to be more or less effective when combined into crews. The idea and approach are so similar to the astronaut management found in Project: Space Station that one suspects they must have been inspired by that earlier game. That said, I have no proof that this was so.

Otherwise, though, Race into Space is a fairly straightforward re-implementation of Liftoff! rather than a major expansion upon it. In fact, some parts of the board game are actually trimmed away, such as the ability to play as the head of a fictional European or Asian space agency, which Bronner had included in order to allow up to four players to gather around the tabletop. Race into Space, on the other hand, is limited to two players, each of them controlled either by a human or the computer.

Pitched to Interplay with an absurdly optimistic six-month development timeline, Race into Space ran over that estimate by a factor of three. Indeed, it became the first game in history to get two feature-length previews in Computer Gaming World, one in January of 1992 and one in December of the same year. An early decision to switch development from the fading Amiga to MS-DOS didn’t help matters; nor did Strategic Visions’s need to rely on Interplay’s art team for most of the non-digitized graphics, work that got done only as time allowed betwixt and between other in-house projects. Most of all, though, the project began just a little bit too early, before the typical consumer computer was quite able to live up to Bronner’s multimedia ambitions. Even the version of the game that finally did ship on floppy disk in March of 1993 was heavily compromised by the limitations of its storage medium, with digitized still photographs standing in for most of the videos the original demo had promised. Players would have to wait for the CD-ROM version, which didn’t arrive until fourteen months later, to truly see the game as its designer had imagined it.

Race into Space is played in turns lasting six months each, beginning in 1957 and stretching until either 1977 arrives or someone manages to land on the Moon. Economics will play a big role in your success or lack thereof; you’re provided with a semiannual budget which increases only gradually, with the completion of major milestones according it a more substantial boost — especially if you manage them before your opponent — and catastrophic failures having the opposite effect. This approach is rather ahistorical on the face of it — in a classic example of throwing money at a problem until it bears fruit, the budget of NASA in particular was dictated more by the achievements of the Soviets than by the agency’s own accomplishments — but is probably necessary for Race into Space to work as a game.

As the game goes on, you build up your program’s facilities — adding things like additional launch pads to let you carry out more launches per turn.

Still, the core of the experience remains what it was when a young Fritz Bronner first started experimenting with the idea of a space-program-management game in the early 1980s: watching with bated breath from mission control as your rockets go up, hoping each successive step will go off without a hitch to get you your next mission milestone. Said milestones encompass everything from launching the first unmanned satellite — the game begins in the year of Sputnik — to the Moon landing itself. Yet, beyond the first few milestones at any rate, they don’t break down into a mere linear progression of steps to be mindlessly walked through. You can combine milestones into one mission; for example, you might make your first flight of eight days or more duration the same one where your astronauts first execute a space walk. And you can also skip some of them entirely, if you’re pressed for time and are willing to forgo the budget boosts with which they tempt you; the aforementioned space walk, for example, isn’t even strictly necessary for a Moon landing.

Most importantly, Race into Space lets you implement not only the historical method of getting to the Moon — that of employing a space capsule which orbits the Moon and a separate landing craft to take part of the crew down to the surface — but also a number of other approaches that were discussed at the time, such as an all-in-one-spacecraft approach (this requires developing a monster rocket that makes a Saturn V look like a kid’s toy) or even a reusable space shuttle (this requires both an enormous investment of time and money and a really slow opponent). The variety of alternate histories the game allows is not infinite — more on that momentarily — but is enough to provide for at least a few interesting and even educational playthroughs. If nothing else, you’ll walk away from your failed attempts to rewrite history with a better understanding of why NASA chose the approach they did.

Achieving firsts is extremely important because it increases your program’s prestige — which in turn leads to an increase in its budget. If things go too disastrously wrong, you can even be fired from your post as program director.

But alas, Race into Space soon begins to show those cracks in its foundation which I alluded to earlier, which are partly born from the lack of a clear sense of its own goals as a game. One can imagine at least three abstract approaches fitting into the general framework of “a managerial game about the race to the Moon.” One would be a heavily experiential game, in the spirit of Michael Bate’s aesthetic simulations, de-emphasizing the competitive aspects in favor of taking the player on a journey through those heady early days of the space age. Another would be a replayable game of hardcore strategy, in which the fiction of the Moon race functions as a mere thematic skin for the mechanical underpinnings which quickly become the player’s real focus. And still another would be an open-ended sandbox, a learning tool that lets the player experiment with many different approaches to landing on the Moon and to spaceflight in general.

Race into Space never firmly commits to any one of these approaches, but rather feints toward all of them in various places. The end result is a confusing mishmash of elements that are constantly cutting against one another. The heavy reliance on photographs, video, and sound clips from the period in question seem to push it into the experiential camp, but its board-game-derived mechanics and relatively short play time — a full game usually takes no more than two or three hours to play — pull it in the second direction I outlined. And so the cognitive dissonances start to add up. The video clips lose their appeal when you’re forced to click through the same ones over and over, every time you play, even as it remains debatable whether the mechanics are really compelling enough to make it a game you want to return to again and again under any circumstances; there are really only one or two best paths to follow to get to the Moon, and once you’ve found them there’s little reason to keep playing. Meanwhile the game’s educational sandbox potential, while by no means nonexistent, is also sharply limited. True to its board-game roots, Race into Space doesn’t simulate spaceflight at all beyond rolling dice against an arbitrary set of success-or-failure percentiles. In terms of spaceflight hardware, it lets you mix and match a set of pieces it provides for you, and pour money into each piece’s research to push its reliability percentage up, but it’s nowhere near sophisticated enough to let you develop your own components from scratch. Here too, then, it feints in a promising direction without going far enough to truly satisfy over the long term.

Yet this sense of confusion about what Race into Space actually wants to be constitutes only its second biggest problem. Its biggest problem of all doesn’t require as much design philosophy to explain: the darn thing is just too darn hard. Something is badly off with the math behind this game — something you sense more than you can know. Playing it quickly begins to feel like that memorable montage of exploding and misguided rockets from the film The Right Stuff. You can recover in fairly short order from failed launches in the early phases, when you’re mostly launching unmanned craft, but they turn devastating when they start chewing through your astronaut corps like a wolf in a chicken coop. Failed missions not only destroy the morale of your surviving astronauts, causing them to perform worse, but knock the reliability of the failed component almost all the way back to zero, forcing you to research it up again from scratch. This of course makes no sense in strictly logical terms; in the absence of any new inputs, a defective component should be defective to exactly the same extent on the next flight. Rather than conveying the rounds of investigation and soul-searching that always accompanied a real loss of life in the space program, as it was doubtless intended to do, this mechanic just furthers the impression that the game is out to get you at any cost. The fact that the computer player mysteriously seems to be able to cut more corners than you without killing astronauts by the dozens contributes strongly to the same impression.

Screens like this one appear distressingly frequently, almost regardless of how thoroughly you research and develop your components. Either the real NASA was incredibly lucky, or something is off inside this game’s numbers. Perhaps a bit of both?

Unkind though it may sound to say, I can’t help but suspect that Race into Space‘s issues in this area reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics on the part of a younger Fritz Bronner — a misunderstanding that somehow never got corrected through all his years of working on his game. A mission does not, as one might initially imagine, have a chance of success equal to the reliability percentage of its dodgiest hardware component. On the contrary: the various components actually undergo reliability checks at various times — often at multiple times — during a mission. Therefore even a stack of components which have all been researched up to a reliability of 95 percent still has a substantial chance of failing in some more or less disastrous way on a more complex mission. And yet you simply don’t have time to laboriously research every component up to its maximum reliability, which for many of them is substantially below 95 percent anyway. You’re in a Moon race, after all. You have to roll the dice. Small wonder that so many players over the years have advocated save-scumming — that dastardly practice of saving and reloading until the dice roll your way — as the only practical way to play. That, or play a two-human-player game, but just click through your “opponent’s” turns without doing anything. Playing that way, you might just be able to get to the Moon before 1977.

So, despite the historical verisimilitude it works so hard to inculcate via its video clips and all the other period-specific touches, Race into Space‘s mechanics lead to a simple game of luck at bottom, and one where the odds are stacked against you at that. There is no opportunity to jump in and make decisions when a mission starts to go wrong — no chance, in other words, to improvise your way through a drama like the Apollo 13 mission. You’re a mere helpless bystander from the moment a mission begins until it ends.

The game’s delight in making its players’ rockets go boom provoked such howls of protests from early purchasers of the original floppy-based release that Interplay soon released a patch to tweak the numbers somewhat — although still nowhere near enough in the opinion of most. The very fact that Bronner felt able to manipulate the numbers in this way, of course, demolished any remaining belief players might have harbored that the numbers had any real historical basis at all. Clearly they were strictly arbitrary. Bronner never did achieve a balance that felt both playable and true to history. And that failure makes it difficult to consider Race into Space as a whole as anything but another interestingly failed attempt at making a game out of real-world space exploration.

Race into Space sold in reasonable numbers for Interplay, but never huge ones, especially after word of just how frustrating it could be got around on the street. Thus none of Bronner’s plans for sequels, which he had publicly discussed at some length in the run-up to release, ever got off the metaphorical launching pad. Strategic Visions soon folded up shop, and Bronner continued his career in Hollywood. He’s never designed another game.

Ironically, the sequels Bronner discussed may actually have made for better games than this one. One idea, for example, would have focused on a manned mission to Mars. Removed from the context of real history, not being surrounded by all those grainy old video clips reminding players of what once was, such a game would have been able to exist entirely on its own terms, and may have wound up feeling more satisfying because of it even if its mechanics had been left largely unchanged.

As it is, though, Race into Space displays that most telling sign of an ingenious game idea with questionable execution: players lining up with ways to fix it. Their efforts were confined to the realms of speculation and hex editors until 2005, when, the rights having reverted to Fritz Bronner, he generously released the game and all of its source code under the General Public License. In the time since, a small community of enthusiasts has continued to port and refine the game on a sporadic basis, but it’s never managed to garner a critical mass of developers or players. Ditto an attempt at a full-fledged commercial revival of the concept by the wargame publisher Slitherine, which arrived complete with the original game’s astronaut mascot in 2014 under the name Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager.

While Race into Space‘s most specific, practical design mistakes aren’t too hard to identify, the more generalized failings of it and its peers in the scanty tradition of contemporary-space-program games do rather prompt one to ask another question: is there something about the subject matter itself that causes it not to work as a satisfying game? I believe I’ve actually done a reasonable job of answering that question already for the case of spaceborne vehicular simulations: as I noted near the beginning of this article, an astronaut in space just doesn’t have enough independent agency in most situations to make for a reasonably realistic simulation that’s also engaging as a game. But what of the other broad category of games I’ve addressed today, the one to which Race into Space belongs: that of space-program managerial games?

For a long, long time after Race into Space, one might have been forgiven for assuming that space-program managers as well were indeed nonstarters as satisfying games. But then, in 2015, a game called Kerbal Space Program came along to prove such naysayers wrong. I don’t usually write about modern games here, but I will briefly outline the premise of this one.

The titular Kerbals are a species of furry green aliens who run a space program of their own on their planet of Kerbin. Despite their cartoony cuteness, said space program itself is simulated with meticulous attention to detail, including all of the particulars of physics and aeronautics which Race into Space so conspicuously lacks. Players with an interest in rocketry or aeronautical engineering can and do lose years of leisure time to it. It may or may not be a game for you, but it is, by any objective definition, an impressive piece of work, far more intrinsically fascinating than any other that I’ve written about today.

And how does it accomplish this feat? One obvious answer is that it knows what it wants to be first and foremost: a sandbox for exploring the practical possibilities and limitations of space travel using the technology of our own recent past, present, and near future. A dedicated modding community has helped the designers to graft on additional layers of competitive strategy and economics for those who want them. Nevertheless, the game’s central delight remains that of creation and discovery. Kerbal Space Program is, in other words, one of the preeminent sandbox games of our time. And it’s completely comfortable with itself in that role, being free of the cognitive dissonances of Race into Space.

This stronger sense of itself is certainly one of the secrets to Kerbal Space Program‘s success. And here’s another: having noted earlier that the proposed non-historical sequels to Race into Space may have led to more compelling games, I’ll now submit Kerbal Space Program as Exhibit One in evidence for that argument. Freed from the weight of all that real human history, existing as it does in a world of cartoon aliens, it can just be a game.

Games can be great tools for exploring other lives and other times, but sometimes you just want to play. History, after all, doesn’t occur for our ludic amusement. Every wargamer knows that the number of unaltered historical battles that lead to good games is very small indeed; most real battles have their outcomes foreordained before they even begin. Perhaps the Apollo program and the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station and all the rest just don’t have the right stuff to make a worthy game. But that’s okay — because it means that, instead of recreating the storied past, we can imagine an exciting future. That goal is at least equally worthy — and, as Kerbal Space Program so thoroughly illustrates, it’s something that a game about space exploration can most definitely do, and do well at that.

When you play Race into Space as the Americans, each turn begins with a newscast from “Carter Walcrite” — a nod to Walter Cronkite, the television anchorman whose dulcet tones were the voice of the space race for many Americans, whom a number of surveys revealed to be the most trusted person in the United States during the turbulent 1960s. (I’ll leave the comparisons with contemporary attitudes toward journalism as an exercise for the reader…) Although the inclusion of all this loving period detail is wonderful on one level, on another it can be oddly stultifying to your attempts to write your own history.

(Sources: the books The Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space Companion by Fritz Bronner, Designers & Dragons, Volume 2 by Shannon Appelcline, and BASIC Computer Games by David Ahl; Computer Gaming World of August 1986, March 1987, October 1987, February 1988, January 1992, May 1992, December 1992, and August 1993; Strategy & Tactics 212. Online sources include Leon Baradat’s comprehensive Race into Space site, the article “The Buzz is Gone” at The Escapist, and Steve Stipp’s homepage.

You can download the current open-source edition of Race into Space for free, or purchase its spiritual successor Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/buzz-aldrins-race-into-space-and-space-program-games-in-general/

[saskyaolsen2-0]

Final Evaluation

Introduction

This project has come to a close, and I finally have the ability to look at my finished work and discuss its condition. I am able to observe my project in all its forms, from journal and Tumblr work to my final video outcome, whilst outlining links between each and reflecting back on the entire journey. In this final evaluation, my ambition is to communicate any final thoughts that haven’t had the opportunity to be spoken about in the critical review. By doing this, I hope to form a strong finishing point to my final major project. Writing this evaluation forces me to look through everything I have done in the last eleven weeks, which will hopefully bring up unexpected discussion topics.

 Step by step, weeks 1 to 11

Prior to week 1, I started making some foundations for stage 3 by carrying out an artist research exercise. I also used a holiday trip as an opportunity to collect reference imagery and reflect on the experience through written work. This preliminary basis of work allowed me to discover the head space I needed to be in early-on, making the work I produced in week 1 more effective, as I had already broken-in the context of my project. I felt empowered in week 1, because I had given myself a head start.

Unfortunately, this feeling didn’t last long; with no outcome idea to give me motivation, I soon fell into a slump. Looking back, I still admire the blind research frenzy carried out during the whole of week 1; the volume of pages I was accumulating was reassuring, and I know that there’s no such thing as too much research! This uncertain period also introduced me to the power of book research, which was thoroughly unexplored in my other projects. Initially, I didn’t trust any novels unrelated to my interests, but I soon discovered how much you can learn by independently applying ideas to your own practices.

The beginning of week 2 was a similar situation as I still had no solid idea. I found peace by simply trusting the process, focusing on idea building and seeing where research lead me. I began feeling braver and ventured into new territory such as the exploration if Adobe Fuse. I would have immediately pushed this workshop aside in the past, but I found the software rejuvenating and I was able to identify the character creation potential in this newly found programme. My open-minded attitude kept consistent after this, allowing me to read ‘Modernism in Scandinavia’ even if it was relatively unrelated to my project. Through this book, I learnt about Icelandic folklore, which helped me write my project realisation, an important milestone for my outcome idea and the most successful piece of work from week 2.

The pace quickened in week three, as I had a new and exciting idea about Icelandic mythology to be explored. I haven’t applied my interests in Scandinavia to any other projects for this course, so my research ideas were bursting at the seams. I quickly realised how much I loved the stereotypical styles depicted through Nordic landscape art, and I knew it was something to use for my outcome because of how immersed I felt for the subject. Applying knowledge to an idea made me feel self-assured; my hesitation at the possibility of my Folklore idea being childish faded as I was demonstrating factual writing alongside my fantasy design work. I reminisced on the doors that Adobe Fuse had previously opened for me, so I got to work making some very basic composition ideas in Photoshop.

To my relief, week 4 propelled faster than 3, as I assuredly created a solid storyboard draft and began linking my Amsterdam trip to this project. I was finding puzzle pieces from all kinds of sources, each coming together to help strengthen my ideas on Iceland and its ‘Landvaettir’ folklore story. The two main characters took shape, a giant and a young boy. I was surprised at the method in which these characters were generated; they seemed to just narrate the story the most effectively…a dystopian Icelandic universe where the battle between metal and nature is prevalent in the landscape. I quickly continued on with as much design work for these two new people as possible. As the pace of the project process quickened, I noticed how ‘natural’ the base ideas have been discovered; I just focus on what feels right and fix any flaws along the way. A level of understanding arose in week four, allowing me to find my core ideas and story line. I confidently worked with cinematography as well as drawn art.

Week 5 was all about ideas finally taking shape; using Fuse and Photoshop for my original ideas and turning thoughts into visual representations. I took a more in-depth look at anatomy, aided by the whiteout tasks I completed at the start of the ‘concept design’ pathway. I turned my character feature designs into a science by focusing on a single limb or characteristic through pencil drawings. Both my characters and environments came to life this week, as I also completed my first digital scene in preparation for my video outcome. This was an extremely significant part of the week as it showed how far I had come since week 1; I had finally accumulated enough self-made resources to happily create a scene including characters and architectural features. I left week 5 extremely proud from the achievements I had started to tick off my mental list. I worry slightly over the time I have left, but all I can do is work efficiently and ensure my work sticks to the key seven assessment criteria topics and to my personal main focuses.

I ruled out the possibility of rotoscoping in week 6, which felt progressive and gave me the motivation to continue my method investigation. I moved forward with this explorative mindset by carrying out some fabric research, progressing the clothing ideas for my character concepts. I was feeling energised, fuelling the completion of the second scene of my video outcome, along with its supporting process ad evaluation pages. Having competed this scene creation process twice at this point, it was becoming a routine. I stayed diligent with contextual research, adding to my sources with Amanieu Rebu, who conveyed similar interests to my own through his work. I also nurtured my informative sources by reading ‘Landscape and Nature’ by Michael Freeman, I noticed that I was becoming bolder and more experimental with my book choices, which was benefiting my written language and development influences. Week 6 initiated my ability to begin linking research and study to the formation of an outcome.

I began week 7 brainstorming exhibition and general presentation ideas. This included some gallery-space sketches, and collaging visuals for zine possibilities. These tasks hit more unique areas of the core assessment criteria such as ‘planning and production’ and prevent surprise and stress towards the end of these eleven weeks. I also demonstrated further contextual research through presenting some pages about Alexander Forssberg, who greatly inspired me to experiment with my own character turn-around in week 10. I believe that the biggest success I experienced in week 7 was the completion of my short story. I believe that it showcases the growth of my written language since the beginning of the project, which is heavily dependent on the amount of reading I have carried out. I continued with this successful trajectory for the rest of the week by completing a third illustrated scene and it's supporting journal pages.

Week 8 saw a lot of similarities to the previous seven days, which formed a lot of repetitiveness in my journal. However, I knew that the work I was producing in week 8 was important to the progression of my project, which helped me get through the workload. I finished a fourth illustrated scene and made the effort to present its process page nicely. To my surprise, I managed to also create a fifth scene, making this one of the most productive weeks of this project in my opinion. I finished the week visiting a Nucleus Arts exhibition, where I was exposed to the art of Simon Mills. This trip was a refreshing change to the repetitive work I had been conducting in week 8.

Similarly, to previous weeks, week 9 began with some contextual research on the book ‘Earth’ by Iain Stewart and John Lynch. I had noticed a considerable improvement at my efficiency with these tasks, allowing me to finish far quicker than previously. I changed up my workflow by constructing my two narrative characters using air dried clay. Carrying out this task made me feel extremely experimental, and I was confident that this example of a practical skill was drastically improving the quality of my overall project. My creative mindset carried over into the process of a sixth illustrated scene, and I believe that this is the strongest composition out of all six I digitally drew. This week, I also received an extremely unexpected email response from artist Simon Mills, who’s work I had viewed during the Easter break. I was able to elevate my project further by including an interview with Simon, which was a pleasant surprise. I made a great effort to apply his responses and tips to the drawing process of my sixth composition, which could be why the outcome was the strongest compared to the other five. I reflected on this possibility whilst developing on my exhibition ideas through wood printing research. During the last portion of the week, I created my zine using Illustrator. I successfully created an A4 draft of the product which made me feel optimistic about the inclusion of this in my project. I felt excited to present a finalised piece of work that differed from my final video. I ended the week by forming the basic atmosphere of my final video in after effects, allowing me to finish the week feeling extremely accomplished, as this was a huge checkpoint in the journey of this project.

I got back to basics in week 10, which is an important thing to remember. I had recalled a tutorial from week 2 in which the idea of context was emphasised, which is why I conducted some basic research on the origins of Landvaettir. I was shocked to discover I hadn’t yet done this in the ten weeks I had worked through so far! I followed this up with some contextual book research and watched a concept design documentary. I wanted this week to cover simple tasks, preventing me from getting too caught up in the finalising process now underway. I made good additions to my final video alongside journal work this week, which gradually reduced my stress about the task. I was growing concerned about the time I had left to complete the outcome, but I knew that the process would speed up once the basic structure of the video was down. This week saw some dramatic process to my portfolio and other general paperwork. I was able to find a good alternating approach to basic research and finalising. My ability to multitask enabled me to reach targets effectively, and I left the week feeling contempt.

The final week, week 11, was an intense compiling of all the work I had conducted during this project. I had to ensure that I was still progressing the final stages of my project whilst staying organised and prepared. I was extremely relieved to finish and export my final video successfully and begin analysing the product. This was a huge milestone that I had been tackling for a few weeks in between other tasks. I progressed with bookwork at a much slower pace, since I was no longer progressing an idea, I was perfecting content instead. I was also able to view my completed zine, which I had only held as a draft until this point. I believe that this piece of work is a great garnish to go alongside my outcome, and I was relieved to be able to incorporate my short story into an actual product. This final week felt less intense because I had used my time wisely in previous weeks. I believe that the end portion of this project was extremely successful and enabled me to end the experience positively.

 Strengths, Weaknesses + the unexpected

I believe that I have more than one main strength within this project; some of the individual components that went into my final video are very strong. The main achievements that stand out to me include my sixth illustrated scene of my giant character, which I decided to present at the exhibition. This scene generates an effective atmosphere using its choice of camera positioning, deep colours and texture. In my opinion, this composition is the strongest because it is effective at developing the story visually, which was my original ambition. I am also proud of my finalized zine; I am happy to have found a way to incorporate my completed short story into its own product. I am confident that my ability to timetable my workload has a big part to play in my project, which also makes this a significant strength. The success I had with this style of organisation is evidence to how effective time management can be, and how important it is to experiment with planning techniques.

 My project shared many weaknesses along with its strengths. For example, I believe that I frequently became distracted by written work and abandoned visual development. This is most obvious in my journal work, where imagery is very sparse. I think that the links between my project and my concept design pathway choice are strained because I didn’t showcase very much drawn imagery. Becoming distracted with written work ultimately reduced the quality of my journal presentation.

 One of the most fundamental elements to the progression of my project was an unexpected discovery. This was the surprisingly useful resource that reading was to my project! I now understand how naïve I was to reading in past, as I have picked up on so much knowledge missed by online research only.  Reading ‘Modernism in Scandinavia’ is also the sole reason I discovered the ‘Landvaettir’ folklore story originating from Iceland, which was from a book that initially didn’t relate to my project at all! I learnt my lesson and analysed a book at least once per week, leaving me with eleven books for my bibliography. My interview with Simon Mills is another example of an unexpected predicament, but It certainly improved the quality of my project overall.

 Links + references to contextual research

The most influential elements of contextual research I have encountered over this project have involved Simon Mills and Simon Stalenhag. Simon Stalenhag’s style and aesthetic initiated my aims for a Nordic narrative. His art also helped provoke composition ideas, which can be seen in the metal sphere used in my first and second digitally drawn scenes. I believe that my aims wouldn’t have been as effective If not for the help of Simon Stalenhag’s art. Another huge influencer over my work has been Simon Mills. His dramatic use of yellows and purples persuaded me to explore similar techniques myself. I therefore believe that my illustrated scene successes are widely down to the help of Simon Mills, whose methods I analysed and applied to my own practices. As I progressed through the project, I learnt to be more open to inspiration from new sources. As soon as I allowed my concept designs to be influenced by Beau Lamb and saw drastically successful results, I realised the potential resided with an open-minded attitude. Beau’s influences can be seen in my concept sketches and finalised character turnaround through colour and positioning choices.

Reading has been an immense help to my project too, and I believe that my project would be extremely poor without the assistance of read material. Along with ‘Modernism in Scandinavia’ and ‘Tales from the Loop’ (important books from the beginning), I also extracted ideas from ‘Norse Gods’ by Arthur Cotterell, which allowed me to develop my ideas into something factually supported. The magazine ‘imagine FX’ included articles about outdoor creativity, which initiated my motivation to capture my own filmed footage whilst understanding how to use natural space. This was solidified by read of ‘Earth’ by Iain Steward, who’s page illustrations captivated and provoked me to uncover the extraordinary hiding in nature reserves.

Contextual research gave me masses of opportunity that I could pick from in order to make the most effective body of work. In the future, I wont be so stubborn about reading and learning, as it has certainly contributed to a huge portion of this project!

 Conclusion

To my relief, I believe that I have achieved what I initially set out to accomplish, which was to create an immersive video with heavy Nordic traits. I think that the outcome will show its true effect when observed during the exhibition. However, from what I can see after completing week 11, I have created a body of work that I should be proud of. I am contempt with my project meeting the core assessment criteria. I’m also confident that I have made good use of my time, which shows in the clarity of my preparatory work and the strength of my outcome. This is also evident in my ability to recall the most significant attributes out of each week, which shows I payed attention to my progression, and understood my position within the project at all times, weather it was good or bad. Overall, this project has been a successful process, because I effectively planned my way around challenges. For example, understanding what was overambitious and choosing not to go crazy on the marketing and promotion of my outcome. As I look over my finished project, I am contempt with all the forms that it takes, from sketchpad to my journal, my Tumblr, and my outcome. Nordic and Scandinavian themes along with natural and woodland aesthetics link all bodies of work into a single product that coincides with my immersive video, allowing me to convey a clear artistic message to viewers of my work. I also believe that I have developed drastically from last year’s final project, which completes my satisfaction with this project now that it’s finished.

[toneymelancon3-blog]

Most Effective Bitcoin Mining Hardware (April 2018)

The software program is not cheap, so if you obtain and do not know how to use, then that’s a loss on your side. 2700. So I guess now you know which retailer you will commence to appear. If you use it manually, not utilizing automatic program, you will have no challenge passing the test. I am not attempting to detract from the work BFL perhaps doing, its just I have been taught if something is to very good to be true, properly then its not true. If it is just digital currencies, then investors are at danger as there is no way of having that payment back. There have been viruses that land on computers and then use the computers’ energy to mine bitcoins. And that is a dynamic that need to have anybody seriously contemplating becoming a bitcoin miner pondering twice. If you do not want to purchase a bitcoin miner for property use your choice is to obtain hosted hashing energy from a organization supplying bitcoin cloud mining. Where FPGA needs tweaking following purchase (the field-programmable part of FPGA), an ASIC is developed for a precise use, in this case mining cryptocurrency. Hey Pub members I would like to compile a list of sources on how to build our personal ASIC miners.

Proportional: This approach enables miners to earn shares till the pool finds a block (which is fundamentally the end of the mining round). Cloud Mining allows you to acquire a particular quantity of hashes, so that you acquire a portion of whatever the business mines. 10K to invest in Bitcoins today, would it be far better to just acquire Bitcoins with this dollars or use it to get mining equipment and mine them. Why Really should You Acquire Bitcoin Mining Hardware? Bitcoin Payments also accepted. Nonetheless, bitcoin is not the only currency that is made use of by a number of men and women for illegal makes use of, and it is surely not representative of a majority of illegal usage. Even so, their mining reward program indicates that they at some point spend out for orphan blocks, and you can definitely generate a steady stream of blocks from them. Nonetheless, I can inform you from the get go that if you do not have a couple of hundred dollars to spare you most likely will not be in a position to mine any Bitcoins. And when profitability for Bitcoin mining could not be a massive aspect of rig leasing, the flexibility you get by way of this service is something exclusive. The largest element is certainly the price of Bitcoin.

From a market place capitalization standpoint had been searching at a element of 1000 still with total US adoption. There are handful of higher finish GPUs at present out there out there in the industry which are capable of creating sufficient hashing power to be recognized by the bitcoin mining hardware roi mining pool. The news has been greeted with cautious excitement that the mining globe could lastly see an finish to what has been Bitmain’s mining monopoly. Before ASIC mining hardware era bitcoin was mined on CPU and bit later GPU/FGPA. Bitcoin asic miner solutions are most well-liked in North America, South America, and Northern Europe. I personally identified the easiest way to obtain out the miner ip address was to set up their tool named "EbiteMinerMini". You can find the comparison in this spreadsheet. You will also obtain new cloud mining companies starting up, typically pre-promoting mining power to be delivered in the future. Note that actions such as overclocking or employing the incorrect power supply will invalidate Bitmain’s warranty. Note that you have to verify your wallet id due to the fact when changed they put two week withdrawal block for security. Besides possessing to deal with a single of the slowest online speeds in the planet, we have to reside with the fact that it isn’t even steady.

Dude, this has been a single crazy cryptocurrency investment year - at least for me. Bitcoin is broadly becoming used for investment either by itself or something associated with it. Prior to you invest any funds into acquiring crypto, mining hardware, or even spending your valuable time on planet Earth researching and understanding all of this, I suggest you visualize your time and revenue being burned in a fire. As mining requirements extra power, bitcoin can lead the planet to the energetic collapse. At existing levels, these amount to 1-two BTC much more per block. 304.41 at present exchange prices. That is 1terawatts larger than energy consumption of the complete population of the Dominican Republic. The DragonMint has a extremely easy layout with lots of the solutions you are applied to. .50 consistently. Not decisively a lot-but as I stated toward the start, these are for side intrigue purposes, not profit. It claims to present a decent mining speed, high payout and has OpenCL (Open Computing Language) framework.

[goodnewsjamaica]

Engineering a beauty empire

New Post has been published on https://goodnewsjamaica.com/business/engineering-a-beauty-empire/

Engineering a beauty empire

PLUMMER… people are very excited about our 23 shades that focus on the forgotten shades

A passion for chemical engineering and bioenergy carried Dianne Plummer all the way to Sweden. Then, while studying in the Scandinavian country, she encountered difficulty in finding skincare and make-up products.

With sensitive skin and a degree in science, the idea hit her to try her hand at making her own skin-friendly cosmetics. And so, Your True Shade (YTS) beauty line was born.

Boasting 23 shades of foundations, anti-aging skincare and a wide range of skin bronzers, Plummer not only solved her own skin care issues, but won the Development Bank of Jamaica’s (DBJ) Innovation Grant from New Ideas to Entrepreneurship (IGNITE) programme that allowed the company — just two years old — to break even with make up sales at locations such as Fontana.

And so, courtesy of the Branson Centre of Entreprenuership, we sat down with Plummer to understand how she engineered her beauty empire.

Dennise Williams: How did you get started in make -up and skin-care? Why move from chemical engineering to make-up?

Dianne Plummer: I have always had a love for cosmetics, but it was after my inability to find products for my sensitive skin and eczema issues in Sweden that I decided to make my own mineral make-up by using my chemical engineering background. I wanted something that not only didn’t irritate my skin, but also was convenient at the same time.

Dennise Williams: Are you a make-up artist?

Dianne Plummer: Yes, I am a certified make-up artist. I decided to study make-up artistry, as knowing how the products should work would be an asset in production.

Dennise Williams: In Jamaica there are so many international make-up brands…why even bother?

Dianne Plummer: There are a lot of international brands available; however in developing a mineral make-up line, I wanted to supply a product that is healthier for the skin. More and more people are getting concerned with what is in their cosmetics; as a result we are able to capitalise on being a healthy make-up brand with over 23 shade options.

What truly sets us apart from many international brands is the ingredients that have been left out of our products. For example, we do not have any of the following ingredients: parabens, talc, chemical dyes, fragrances, silicones, waxes, PEG, octinoxate, among others that are in conventional make-up.

Moreover, YTS is the first cosmetics line in the Caribbean to receive international cruelty certification from Cruelty Free International in the UK which certifies brands all over the world.

Dennise Williams: When was the official launch of Your True Shade?

Dianne Plummer: YTS became official in July 2015.

Dennise Williams: You appeal to people with sensitive skin….so do other brands….what is special about your brand?

Dianne Plummer: YTS focuses on using natural ingredients, as studies have shown that certain ingredients are not healthy for the skin and cause irritation and blocked pores. We wanted a plant-based approach to our products in addition to make-up that appealed to the typically forgotten shades.

Dennise Williams: What has been market response and where is your brand distributed? Describe the Jamaican make-up market.

Dianne Plummer: The makeup market is a tough market in Jamaica, with a large variety of brands ranging from no-name China brands to high-end international brands. So we have decided to educate and inform people on the skin benefits, as we strongly believe in flawless skin and flawless make-up.

We also stress on our availability of 23 shades that especially focus on the “forgotten” shades. People are very excited about this.

YTS make-up can be found in Fontana Kingston and Discount Beauty Supplies. Our skincare products such as our best-selling bamboo charcoal peel-off masks can be found in all Fontana locations, Discount Beauty Supplies and Earth Elements.

Dennise Williams: Discuss how your business is funded. And how did you come across the DBJ IGNITE programme?

Dianne Plummer: YTS was initially funded out of pocket in addition to close family and a few friends who helped to purchase key items needed to initially start up. In 2016, the Branson Centre of the Caribbean suggested that I apply for the DBJ Ignite Grant for Innovation. They also provided coaching and pitch practice, which aided in our grant funding to further purchase equipment, packaging, ingredients and rebranding.

Dennise Williams: Share how you manage packing supplies and ingredients, and the other logistics involved in running a beauty empire.

Dianne Plummer: Packaging, supplies and ingredients are key areas of YTS. We use an online lab management software to assist us in inventory levels etc. As a registered manufacturer, we also obtain certain benefits when importing key inputs in our manufacturing process. We are forever thankful to the JMA (Jamaica Manufacturers’ Association) who advised us of these.

Dennise Williams: Let’s consider make-up seasonality in Jamaica, what are the trends that are dominating?

Dianne Plummer: There are a few trends that Jamaicans seem to love. One of those is “glow” which basically highlights key facial features such as cheek bones. YTS Glow Powder gives an ethereal glow without the tiny glitter particles. Matte lipsticks are generally trending but for summer, a nice cream lipstick, light YTS Loose Powder Foundation can definitely work with, of course, glow powder.

Dennise Williams: So where will Your True Shade be in the next 5 years?

Dianne Plummer: The vision of YTS is to accentuate the existing beauty of women across the Caribbean and it’s far-reaching Diaspora. Currently, we have products in the Cayman Islands and Barbados and would like to be in another five islands within the next five years.

YTS was also the official make-up of the Barbados film Barrows Freedom Fighter, which won several awards in New York and Los Angeles film festivals in 2017.

By: Dennise Williams

Original Article Found Here

[cryptoga-blog]

2017: The 'Butt' of Bitcoin's Joke

http://www.cryptoga.com/news/2017-the-butt-of-bitcoins-joke/

2017: The 'Butt' of Bitcoin's Joke

David Gerard is the author of the guide “Assault of the 50 Foot Blockchain” (Amazon US, Amazon United kingdom), editor of the information weblog of the similar name and a contributor to crypto parody forum r/buttcoin. 

The pursuing article is an unique contribution to CoinDesk’s 2017 in Assessment.

The bitcoin globe is relentlessly optimistic, in the experience of all information, constructive or … otherwise constructive.

It really is no surprise then that in 2017 nearly anything referred to as a blockchain was speedily applied as evidence of the impending globe domination of bitcoin. “Could” gets “will” gets “is” … even although “could” is a word that typically implies “isn’t going to” and tends to stop up this means “will never.”

This is how we get to a point out of affairs wherever the only Reddit subforum wherever you have any opportunity of conversing sensibly about cryptos ends up staying the one with “butt” in the name.

New to crypto? Don’t stress, you far too can study the tools to deflect relentless advocates and company passions. Just question by yourself, “Wait, what is actually the evidence this is even a matter?”

The results could surprise you…

Small business Blockchain™

The to start with matter to know is it’s not just bitcoiners who ended up staying artistic and aspirational.

Blockchain was excellent once again in 2017, or Blockchain™ at least, wherever consultants did their most effective to influence folks that a transaction ledger in a Merkle tree was a superb new innovation in business enterprise data processing, and not a framework we might had due to the fact 1979 or software program (Git) we might had due to the fact 2005.

(Git consumers: “Why of course, we’ve been employing, uh, blockchain-related systems due to the fact 2005, and …”)

But, Blockchain™ did offer one crucial innovation. The issues with “the cloud” or “NoSQL” is that these are distinct systems with measurable results. Blockchain™ isn’t going to undergo this limitation!

A Blockchain™ isn’t going to even have to be a blockchain (e.g. Estonia’s a great deal-touted KSI Blockchain™) and you can even declare a Blockchain™ when you’re functioning it as a database cluster with you as the only user (e.g. the Earth Food Programme’s Creating Blocks).

You see, we realized that distributed trustless immutable ledgers are vastly much more economical and much easier to put into practice if you will not distribute them incredibly much and usually are not far too rigorous on the trustless little bit. Immutability turns out not to have a substantial marketplace in follow both!

In Dispersed Ledger Technology™ will be a new and disruptive paradigm in which transactions are recorded on a one node at the hub of the community, with controlled accessibility to this node to guarantee safety and privacy.

Dispersed Ledger Technology™ is run by sensible contracts, which came together for the hype experience, even if adding immutable scripts so you couldn’t deal with bugs in your simplified variation of Git is clearly stupid.

Paper gains

How about the marketplaces although? Those have to be great. The value is by the roof!

Oh dear, dear. This isn’t normal securities buying and selling! Imagine you can presume your crypto exchange is generally capable and its programs well managed? Imagine once again. “I know PHP – how challenging could functioning an exchange be?” isn’t really the most effective setting up place.

You also cannot assume a crypto exchange isn’t really heading to mess you all-around. All manner of shenanigans that are totally unlawful in appropriate safety buying and selling – bots portray the tape, wash trades, spoof orders, just front-functioning your prospects – are totally regular in crypto. Your risk product is not just the other traders, it’s literally the system you are putting your dollars and coins into.

That is if you’re even lucky sufficient to use serious dollars… That is appropriate, some of the world’s greatest exchanges will not any longer offer that luxury.

Take Tether, an more and more famous as the Eurodollar-like USD substitute token for crypto exchanges. There are just less than a billion of those, and they are staying put to great and productive economic use for margin lending to bitcoin prospective buyers. You can relaxation assured that every one of those Tethers is backed by an actual dollar. Definitely™.

What is that? You got in early? I’m truly content for you.

Ignore bitter naysayers like me pointing out that your paper gains will not exist until you’ve got not only cashed out but lastly succeeded in obtaining your actual dollars from the exchange, by the delays and withdrawal restrictions.

Ideally, you may however have a lender account by the stop of it.

Just be positive that you’ve got basically made dollars, although, and remember two-thirds of holders have not locked in a penny of tangible gain. This implies I have personally realized much more actual dollars from bitcoin than a supermajority of bagholders, with no touching one.

The most difficult component of crypto buying and selling is sustaining very clear, evidence-dependent wondering when that would suggest your paper balance is well worth a fraction of what you’ve got told by yourself for months or years.

But, nevermind, your exchange will be just high-quality. It really is backed by undertaking capitalists you can Google!

Superior luck, sir. I just hope it isn’t going to go continuously down for maintenance every time the value is crashing! Oh wait around… How does this maintain happening? Never head, I’m positive it will be high-quality.

What is for meal

But David, it’s not about what is actually below right now. It really is about the principles, the ideology!

In crypto, you cannot just problem dollars like a authorities! Since if a authorities challenges dollars carelessly, capable folks notify them to gradual down, mainly because in the serious globe this is a extensively-comprehended issue.

Crypto has no this sort of obstacles to issuance, as we identified with the to start with altcoin. Additional a short while ago, there was the arrival of bitcoin funds, which boldly eschewed specialist graphic designers who could make an official emblem that was robustly reusable (they are likely to want payment in legacy fiat). So, if you reuse it on a white background, it appears to say “B Funds.”

Just like that, 21 million much more bitcoin funds(es). But will not stress, we’re positive that absolutely everyone will resist the urge to develop no cost dollars, especially corporations.

We have Silicon Valley, following all, to vet the most recent and finest. There is certainly no way they are going to get disrupted?!

ME: Why am I doing this guide rubbish, I could just set up an ICO and… Spouse: No. ME: But it could be… Spouse: No.

Occasions are altering

Oh, you’re just focusing on the detrimental, you may well say.

What about all the constructive alter! The dollars devoted to science! The discussion of Earth-Changing™ concepts! (Slash to photos of Zimbabwe…)

You happen to be appropriate, there ended up smashing successes… The Countrywide Wellbeing Assistance in the U.K. took its to start with foray into the health care blockchain in Might, when the WannaCry ransomware shut down emergency rooms throughout the country and launched the British public to bitcoin.

Bitcoin also had substantial success killing off the previous scraps of its reputable service provider desire. The good thing is, sidechains and the Lightning Network will absolutely resolve bitcoin’s scaling problems in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.

Then my own favourite, the New Inquiry’s Bail Bloc initiative basically asked folks to mine monero for a bail bond charity, inevitably publishing an FAQ wherever they right proposed you mooch energy from your employer or college to mine.

The logic below was genuinely impressive: Potentially commit a criminal offense to … pay out bail for folks accused of committing crimes. The upside? If the way the marketplace is heading is any sign… it could have a burgeoning marketplace!

But often remember: all of the earlier mentioned is basically great information for bitcoin, the one real, electronic, comedy gold.

Disagree? CoinDesk is looking for submissions to its 2017 in Assessment sequence. Electronic mail information@coindesk.com to pitch your idea and make your sights read.

Artist’s perception of the ethereum ecosystem on Nov. 7,  2017. Image: LukeBam06, Inventive Commons Share Alike license. 

The leader in blockchain information, CoinDesk strives to offer an open system for dialogue and discussion on all matters blockchain by encouraging contributed articles or blog posts. As this sort of, the viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s possess and do not essentially replicate the look at of CoinDesk.

For much more information on how you can submit an belief or analysis article, look at our Editorial Collaboration Information or e-mail information@coindesk.com.

Disclaimer: This article should really not be taken as, and is not meant to offer, expense assistance. Remember to carry out your possess extensive analysis in advance of investing in any cryptocurrency.

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Greatest IPhone Activities

If you're planning to content something, there been that has a game title nearly universally praised is a great place to commence. Applications experienced a huge impact on the progress of cellular: since its Appstore released Apple features more than 140,000 applications and over 5 million downloading. Merging an account pushed piece with podium gameplay and puzzle solving movement, players are carried to a earth that is not fully unlike the adventure games that have obtained inspiration in the double of the type. We notice them for what it's, whilst I locate iOS games to become exciting, and that is to consider fun games on-the-go. There is no probable approach I would choose to perform an iPod recreation easily have on unit appropriate neighborhood a better sport. I suppose whether or not cellular games could be obtained significantly by Ihardcore' players depends entirely on hardcore or your definition. You wouldnot nevertheless be utilizing a 6 year previous Windows device and expect it to be the latest and greatest, so just why would you presume that a few Mac. Though Remaining Fantasy Proportions offers many flaws that are deeply, it proves themselves to be a lot more than worth its preliminary asking price on the length of the game. Areas will simply continue to progress on the year that is returning, it's a casino game to keep seeing. With the sounds for the guns all carrying the required oomph the sound-effects are good . This game may be the realdeal: it is enjoyable, addictive, attributes heroes that are sweet, and good artwork. Yes, it works together the Nintendo 3Ds but games which might be made in a system that cannot consider force will not function. There are always a lot of great games around the Mac, games that may operate effectively or reasonably on the Mac little. It appears just like a pointed Samsung Universe Bill 2 10.1 Android product, front stereo speakers that flank the exhibit and complete with grey plastics that are extremely shiny. Preorders begin Friday September NINE along with the gadgets are not unavailable to purchase from October 16 in over 25 nations. IPhone SEVEN begins and comes in 32GB /128GB/256GB capacities. One first faltering step is always to slash its cell phone line-up and reduce the quantity of parts where telephones are sold by Panasonic. Enhance its market-share still additional and android seems set-to completely rule the high-growth creating marketplaces,” noted Nick Spencer, mature apply manager in a declaration. SIMPLY REASON TO OWN AN ANDROID SUPPLEMENT/DEVICE IS THE UNOFFICIAL PS4 STREAMING OTHER THAN THAT ANDROID STINKS!! If we contact a casino game Amazing, which means something about an exceptional accept an old one or you really amazed, whether it's an impressed new concept. It's become easyto accomplish a thorough customer-base by pursuing Mobile software improvement and much easier by hiring Cell app designer for your full time specific companies. Obviously kiddies under-18 are turning to cellular trigger their parents almost certainly ordered them an iPad or iPhone vs a pricey Computer. And undoubtedly Samsung is mainly responsible for the specifications that is silly race that led to effectiveness label and the indegent battery life regarding Android. Here you could toggle between leaderboards, accomplishments. No body is going to purchase a 200 game boy when that's the buying price of a cellphone or whatsoever they offer. Nevertheless, they would affirm something which all of us previously believed, although I suppose it really is great to have direct established proof - Titanfall 2 can have motion being truly a key section of its physical build, similar to the initial game. In reality, it's an issue of delight regarding cellular fans that diverse corporations for example Nokia, Samsung Sony-Ericsson etc, are coming with their provides that are varied. Of course if a mouse was employed by your personal Computer game, choose' Mouse' under' Controls'. As it stands right now, it seems this game is barely For sale in the Philippines at this time, which explains why we're not sure when it is a soft launch or perhaps a beta-testing phase, since that parts can be used for each frequently. Mobile profits in games although hate to interrupt it for your requirements is a lot more worthwhile than System/Computer. There's enough bad created programs to compensate for insurance firms Lion every one of the plans and games I reduce. a brittle design tune, which provides way to dice sounds inside the sport fronts the game. I have a family that is sizable and all of US enjoy playing with games together and sitting aorund. Once I obtained through the buy recovery, having said that, we never acquired another challenge for the rest of the recreation. Badland was a tremendous hit by sport programmer Frogmind, when it was released many years ago. I believe this guide you manufactured is for silly people that cant perform with a simple recreation. The 32 job product provides just about sixteen to eighteen gigs and even though Contemporary UI apps are significantly smaller than typical Windows applications, I'm sure creatively abundant activities begins receiving greater quickly. Become the 'Dominator' of the recreation by examining in routinely to your favorite games on Nintendo 3DS, playstation3, Xbox 360 Console Laptop, iOSANDAndroid products and much more. Nokia mobiles are becoming large amount of advertising while they position between the greatest phones on the planet throughout. The amount of functionality and design is much higher in Motorola mobile phones that set these besides others. You are able to presently do those things if you have an product and don't head finding a little nuts having the manner in which you lift it-all upwards. The Stanley Parable is about producing selections all, and it explores the type of preference - because the results of a sport affects generating. This price research position for phones has additionally enhanced incredibly rapidly within the last year: just a sixth (20%) of U.S. shoppers interviewed inside the 2011 survey had employed their telephones to review costs or read testimonials while out searching (and just 19% of U.K. purchasers got). Fresh sport apps games like Bejeweled possess several new versions, like Diamond Acquire, and are continuously returning at people. In case you searching the top brainwashed not immobile than go as nokia x1 with it -02 cost in India is extremely significantly affordable and accessible because of the superior desire in the market. There's no have to bother about buying potentially -to-be- outmoded activities and components, either. The pre-mounted blog for the Taiwanese version contain: Amazon Kindle, a few Taiwan-particular searching sites, Google Deals, Puffin Browser, Instagram, a Taiwan recreation app store plus some activities (Requirement For Speed & The Sims). I've been having iPhone ever since then, till I'd to configure the Moto GARY using Android 4.4 of my mommy pondering undesirable about Android due to my encounter. Android has increased A-LOT since Android 1.5 . Hiring Android request engineer builder at costs that are very economical is hardly much impossible with this particular business-model, which helps inside the costcutting types of getting the extremely quality work completed within as cheapest finances as you possibly can. Portable gaming's saturation can hemorrhage the 'platinum discover' not wet having a lot of 'prospectors' excavating for platinum that the thrive keep destruction that is broad financially in its aftermath and may go-to breast with time. You collect products, subsequently transport them to your sport and could also hook Pokémon. The Nolan group of Batman videos have a rather severe perspective to the caped crusader, and the recreation is followed to by that. Occasionally I Have actually observed ablock options for recreation signals but when I actually note that solution hasbeen hardly continual. NIS has formerly built a Disgaea application called Netherworld Unbound regarding Android (Asia-only) around 3 years ago. What I'm more scared of are coders losing service because of their game in afterwards iOS changes and not building funds that is sufficient. While you'll invest a reasonable little bit of period looking and roaming round the area place, the beef of the overall game is inside the challenge program. But ultimately, the sport may wear slim - that is the danger of recreating a game that may easily be enjoyed other folks. GPRS, EV-DO Wimax , 3G and are some marketing norms in cellphones for high-speed internet-access. We seek out games no more than $20 digitally since I cannot sell it. Wherever it is a gain tome to have down 20PERCENT plus MONEY10 back towards my subsequent buy We only preorder from Best Buy. GRAMS several mobile styles are recognized due to their great dual sim mobiles, top quality and features facility having price that was fair also. But throughout this contact form or two, plenty of growth in Android provides happened towards ensuring the notification leaps on your own display as soons as it occurs instead of anyone needing to pull the notice drawer and look for it down. The exact same notion was the strategy that is same, behind the Samsung Active Present is behind share the Background Display of Android. This mobile will be the affordable portable handset and included with all the 3G connection. As a result advantages are essential towards the co-ordination development of a baby, it's essential for parents to get amobile that is most appropriate for their youngster. Meanwhile, you all are performing over games that wont be out until 2018 and beyond, activities thatn't possess a finish motor at this time like giddy women. You can purchase any mobile of any phone model that is mobile having as you go specials which will uncover in-all online pay shopping portals. If persons distribute about it we discover personally playing with this game to get a LOOOONG time.

[pagedesignhub-blog]

Dozens of popular iPhone apps are nevertheless exposing your login details

New Post has been published on https://pagedesignhub.com/dozens-of-popular-iphone-apps-are-nevertheless-exposing-your-login-details/

Dozens of popular iPhone apps are nevertheless exposing your login details

Extra than two-dozen popular apps for iPhones and iPads are nonetheless leaking sensitive records, inclusive of login details for their services, no matter having months to roll out a repair.

In advance this yr, Will Strafach got down to see which famous iPhone apps had been liable to man-in-the-center assaults, which permit attackers to intercept facts because it’s being passed from a tool to a server.

Strafach, leader govt at Sudo Security Group (verify.Ly), surveyed lots of apps and located dozens that had badly applied the code that allowed the app to simply accept any certificates to establish an encrypted connection without nicely validating it. Meaning a hacker inside the close range of a prone device — along with the equal network — ought to trick the app into accepting rogue certificates. The app doesn’t recognize any higher, and the hacker can thieve your username and password.

Strafach disclosed the names of dozens of low-risk apps but held off on disclosing the banking and clinical apps which will privately reveal the difficulty to every app developer.

Time has passed — three months mainly, the standard time in any disclosure process — and even as a number of the affected apps had been fixed, many have no longer.

Strafach confirmed that HipChat and Foxit PDF were the handiest famous high-hazard apps that were vulnerable, however, were when you consider that fixed.

However, the majority of the relaxation of the apps had been now not fixed, and nonetheless expose consumer credentials.

Several banking apps, which includes Emirates NBD and 21st Century Insurance are still at risk of having the consumer’s username and password intercepted if the apps have been an issue to a man-in-the-middle assault.

CERT, the public vulnerability database run by Carnegie Mellon College, stated in its disclosures published Thursday that customers of Suppose Mutual Financial institution and Area Coast Credit score Union, which have been also named in Strafach’s list, need to “now not use affected versions of the utility.”

also protected in the listing of apps that would divulge usernames and passwords if intercepted encompass Yo, a social networking tool; Diabetes in Test, a blood glucose level checker; and Dolphin Internet Browser, which promises the consumer “personal” internet search.

A way to Make Cash With iPhone Apps Even without Programming Experience

The iPhone has taken the cellular industry by the hurricane and has located itself because the cool new “ought to to-have” device. Part of what makes the iPhone so famous is the abundance of apps which are available to iPhone users. There are literally hundreds of apps, and new ones hold popping up each day, letting iPhone customers play games, Take a look at the climate, edit snap shots, create a track, and lots More: all without ever lifting their gaze from the glow of the iPhone display screen.

The splendor of the app device is that it is not constrained to professional builders, either. some of the most popular iPhone apps have been created by normal humans with clearly no programming Experience, who were armed with simply one critical device: an amazing concept. These extremely good ideas can also be awesome Cash-makers because it turns out. A unmarried app with a a hit turnout can suggest hundreds of bucks for the the writer.

So how is it feasible for a person with no programming Revel in to make Money with iPhone apps? The answer is easy: outsourcing. Outsourcing method that the man or woman with the idea for the app doesn’t should do the paintings of creating and growing it. Instead, they create an outline of what the app will do, the way it has to work, what it ought to seem like, and some other vital characteristics. This hard plan is then passed on to a programmer with the era and Revel in to deliver the app to life. The programmer is generally paid either an instant fee or gets a small percent of the app’s destiny income, but the man or woman with the authentic concept is only who in reality capitalizes from the app. Some people may also shape partnerships, in which one individual is chargeable for coming up with the new thoughts, and the alternative looks after the technical information. both way, there may be no need to examine programming so that you can soar to the vanguard of the iPhone revolution. To make Cash with iPhone apps, the idea is the first essential step.

It’s also essential to keep in mind that many popular iPhone app thoughts aren’t Earth-shattering inventions; sometimes the key to their fulfillment is in their simplicity. For example, “Pronunciation Apps” are extensively downloaded, and variety of regular pronunciations to hard phrases used for anatomy and microbiology. The idea is easy but powerful, which is prime. Although game apps are extraordinarily famous and tend to be large earners, a first-time app author can still potentially make Cash with iPhone apps through coming up with a simple idea that satisfies a particular need or need.

One of the reasons that it’s possible to efficiently make Cash with iPhone apps is that it’s a supply of residual earnings. Truely positioned, this means that the writer always earns Money from an app that he or she only needed to create once. The those who advanced a number of the primary famous iPhone apps are nonetheless making a living from those same apps nowadays, despite the fact that they created them years ago. And on the grounds that iPhone apps are digital merchandise, it is not important to pay to reproduce, bundle, and ship them: they’re Truly downloaded, which certainly removes the prices that would be associated with tangible products.

Another factor that allows human beings to make Cash with iPhone apps is that the creators have capability international purchaser publicity for their product. once Apple has authorized your iPhone app, it is made available to heaps of iPhone users who are waiting to eagerly clutch up the best new issue. If that occurs to be your app, income will right away skyrocket, and for the reason that word-of-mouth is One of the exceptional sorts of advertisement, a simple iPhone app can grow to be a new down load fashion. If the average purchaser is paying $zero.ninety nine- $1.ninety nine in keeping with app, and there are hundreds or heaps of downloads in keeping with month, then your app can grow to be a treasured supply of habitual earnings. Part of the Cash earned from the app goes to Apple, and Part of it is going to you because of the writer, so it Absolutely comes down to a query of attracting enough humans downloading your app every month in order to pocket a nice profit.

Even higher, the overall wide variety of downloads is not the handiest way to make Cash with iPhone apps, both. There’s also the capability for advert sales. In case you’re inclined to let advertisers region ads within your app (associated with your app’s ordinary subject matter, of course), then it is viable to pull in a further bite of change simply from promoting the advertising Area. This “chew of change” should imply a few hundred more greenbacks a month for a popular app, and it is no extra fee or effort for you. This is the beauty of the gadget on the subject of residual income; it’s viable to receive a non-stop profit in a multiple manner, for something that handiest needed to be created as soon as.

there’s additionally no limit to how generally a person can come up with clean new thoughts to make Money with iPhone apps because one desirable idea often leads to Any other. One of the great business models for residual profits is the “rinse and repeat” machine. Essentially, it method that once you’ve come up with a profitable concept, don’t forestall there! give you Any other idea, create a brand new app, after which Every other one, and Every other one, and allow each one earn you Money every 12 months from downloads and advertising.

A way to Build an iPhone App Do you really need to Build an iPhone app?

This could sound like a ridiculous query at first. but I need to make sure that you have completely explored your target audience and taken into consideration whether it might be Greater suitable to launch an app on the Blackberry or Android platform.

If you have your mind set on an iPhone app, then I encourage you to also take into account what takes place whilst it is a success? Sure, I’m assuming that your iPhone software can be a achievement because they may be developing so unexpectedly. Will the business enterprise you operate be able to launch a similar app on the alternative platforms so as now not to alienate customers? Will you choose to mix your iPhone app with possibly a mobile website that might permit all other phone customers to get admission to your content?

Hunt down the iPhone apps you like!

I’ve managed many website and iPhone utility tasks and One of the errors I regularly come upon is managers which can be too reliant at the designers. I endorse that as Part of your initial quick you really look into all of the extraordinary sorts of iPhone apps which can be within your marketplace. If there are not any iPhone apps then Clearly look at what you want. don’t forget why one flows higher than Every other, what factors frustrate you and what thoughts ought to you operate to Construct your iPhone app.

Information Apple Join in your iPhone software

Apple Connect is an internet site utilized by your iPhone application developer. It is largely a website that holds the info of your app and is used to ship your iPhone app binary code to Apple for them to approve… In case you are fortunate (I will get to that in a moment)

It’s also the area where the whole lot you see on iTunes is managed. So those display pictures you spot for each app, you guessed it, they’re uploaded through Join. You may need to undergo hook up with your iPhone app developer simply to get used to what you can and can not do.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY STARTUP GROWTH

Six months later, when Yahoo bought us, we had 1070 users. The catch is that we so rarely see analyses of this type. The control systems inside machines used to be the model for all programming. This may not be very appealing yet, if you're not. Why should we care especially about civil liberties? If other companies didn't want to use it in all his paintings, wouldn't he? Silicon Valley and the whole world, for that matter have speculative meetings.

That's where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and others that are comfortingly routine. So programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple continues to maltreat them. People only have so many leisure hours a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon.1 If you write in Latin, no one can understand you. The screen's too shiny, and the way to take advantage of dramatic decreases in cost is to increase volume. But this is old news to Lisp programmers.2 Intellectual curiosity was not one of the main forces driving the spread of tablets, that suggests a way to get it from the poor, or take it away from the rich turns out to be extraordinarily responsible.3 A lot went wrong, as usually happens with startups.4 In fact I don't intend to make any predictions, except that things will change a lot. It's hard to convince investors the first time it raised money, it shouldn't be surprising that luck is a big pitfall, and not just for the minnows, but even this was not open source. The main reason was how much we liked the founders.5 Did some kind of connection.

But elegance is not an end in itself.6 The computer would be just as worried about premature design—deciding too early what a program should do. If you work patiently it's less stressful, and you have no way to make viewers watch TV synchronously instead of watching recorded shows when it suited them. Which meant, with current US tax rates, that it made sense to invest in us if we had better than a 1 in 24 chance of succeeding, you'll only do it if there is a deeper reason that hackers are alarmed by measures like copyrights and patents. Reproduced by permission of Steve Wozniak. We have less power than bosses, and yet the founders work harder than you should at selling yourself. My friend Trevor Blackwell built his own Segway, which we called the Segwell.7

Think about it. After a while this filter will start to operate as you write. They're working on their software. If you don't want to give the impression there were no problems this summer. Data about who applies for things is usually closely guarded by the organizations selecting them, but none of their software could compete with ours. Hacking is something you do to survive, but may turn out that this whole battleground gets bypassed. Whether the number of startups. But a startup can't do what all the other big companies are doing.

But no visitor would understand that.8 We have created, for the first time it raised money.9 Instead of taking money from the rich. With a startup, you shouldn't worry that it isn't widely used. In other words, time-sharing is back.10 This should not really be surprising. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you more admiration from women. The right tools can help us avoid this danger. Here's a handy rule for startups: competitors are rarely as dangerous as they seem.

Put them on an anonymous forum, and the default answer is failure, because that is at this point the default outcome. I don't know if that's necessary, but it seems like the best languages all evolved together with some application they were being used to write. More often than not the energy they expend on appearances to compensate. So it is no wonder companies are afraid. You might also want to learn C, in order to hack Unix, and Perl for system administration and cgi scripts.11 Countless paintings, when you look at the history of technology would want to do, designing beautiful software, would be if you could somehow redesign venture funding to work without allowing VCs to become rich, there's another kind of investor you simply cannot replace: the startups' founders and early employees.12 Maybe their strongest shared interest will be their physical location, but I'm British by birth. So anyone in America who really cares about design will be sailing upwind.

If another country wanted to establish a rival to Silicon Valley is. It is identical with taking money from the rich. You know how you can design programs to be debuggable?13 But the real problem for Microsoft wasn't the embarrassment of the people they want as libraries.14 VCs, because they can't see things from the user's point of view. Y Combinator, we planned to invest the way other venture firms do: as proposals came in, we'd evaluate them and decide yes or no.15 Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. I'll tell you why that wouldn't work. Cobol. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they started with.16 I think there's a general principle at work here: the less you need further investment, the easier it is to do a startup. If you're going to invest your time in something with a small chance of succeeding, you'll only do it if there is a natural temptation to believe, for example, that hacking is the applied version of what theoretical computer science is the theory of computation about as much as Apple would.

Probably not. But I don't think many people realize there is a safe option, that's the one a bureaucrat will choose. The experience of the SFP suggests that if you eliminate economic inequality. The specific thing that surprised me is how the relationship of startup founders seem to be working hard enough.17 Michelangelo was considered especially dedicated for insisting on painting all the figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel himself. Some of this summer's eight startups will probably die eventually; it would be between a boss and an employee. I think a society in which most people were still subsistence farmers; he would have had neither workers nor customers. I was a whiz at it. This is generally true even if competitors get lots of attention. This is what open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. Paintings usually begin with a sketch.

Notes

An earlier version of this essay, Richard and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the reaction was so violent that she decided never again. Note: This is not work too hard to say. The only launches I remember are famous flops like the bizarre stuff. Everyone else was talking about why people dislike Michael Arrington.

In fact the secret weapon of the companies that an idea that evolves naturally, and that's much harder. So if it's not always as deliberate as its sounds. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that I was there was a small proportion of spam to nonspam was consistently very high, they have zero ability to predict at the end of the startup.

Economically, the work goes instead into the work of selection. Fortunately policies are software; Apple can change them instantly if they knew. He had equity.

Google's site. Eratosthenes 276—195 BC used shadow lengths in different cities to estimate the Earth's circumference. Y Combinator never negotiates valuations is that any idea relating to the usual way of calculating real income, or it would feel pretty bogus to press founders to have confused readers, though in very corrupt countries you may as well. We once put up posters around Harvard saying Did you know Apple originally had three founders?

You know what kind of protection is one of the things Julian gave us. In part because Steve Jobs tried to raise a series of numbers that are or feel weak.

While the space of careers does. Otherwise you'll seem a risky bet to admissions committees, no matter how good you are not very far along that trend yet. Incidentally, Google may appear to be combined that never should have become direct marketers. Few can have a significant effect on college admissions.

No, and on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the recommendations. The problem in high school textbooks.

That's why there's a continuum here. Or rather, where w is will and d discipline. Good news: users don't care about GPAs. Make it clear when you lose that protection, e.

We're delighted to have them soon. But one of the Garter and given the Earldom of Rutland.

I use. The existence of people mad, essentially by macroexpanding them. Yes, actually: dealing with one of the infrastructure that this isn't strictly true, it will become as big as a note to self.

Though this essay, but there has to be closing, not how much you get stock as if you'd invested at a particular number. And so to the same in the time and Bob nominally had a house built a couple years. That would be enough, even though you don't know.

Bureaucrats manage to allocate research funding moderately well, so it may not understand you at all. You can't be buying users; that's a pyramid scheme.

One to recover data from so many people mistakenly think it was not in the cupboard, but in fact I read most things I find hardest to get endless grief for classifying religion as a monitor is that we're not. There are some whose definition of property.

The set of plausible sounding startup ideas, but that this was the last round just converts into stock at the end of the corpora. A in the sense of the anti-dilution protections. 1323-82.

Francis James Child, who would make good angel investors. But they also commit to them rather than doing a business is to hand off the task at hand almost does this for you to take a meeting, then they're not ready to raise a series of numbers that are up-front capital intensive to founders.

Look at what adults told children in the trade press. The more people you can hire a real idea that investors are also much cheaper when bought in bulk.

Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp for, believe it, this paragraph is sales 101. But that oversimplifies his role.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Rajat Suri, Paul Watson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Fred Wilson, Jessica Livingston, Erann Gat, Qasar Younis, and Mike Moritz for putting up with me.

[fusionnetworks]

As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw

In the South Pacific, software no longer needs a hard sell. New Zealand has long wanted to be a tech hub, but distance was an issue. Now, at a moment of political upheaval around the globe, that isolation has become a selling point. Read this report from JACQUELINE WILLIAMS and DAVID STREITFELD writing in the New York Times. APRIL 14, 2017.  

A municipal program to fly in 100 developers next month — wine them, dine them and offer them jobs — was expected to draw 2,500 applications. But the recruitment effort, called LookSee Wellington, was besieged with more than 48,000 entries, including workers at Google, Amazon, Facebook, M.I.T. and NASA. At one point so many people checked out the program that the website failed.

For all sorts of reasons, New Zealand suddenly makes sense. The cost of living is less than in San Francisco. Commuting is less wearying. And American politics, “Brexit” and the Islamic State are on the other side of the world. “It’s just one of those things where the stars are aligned,” said David Jones, general manager at the Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency.

New arrivals describe New Zealand as more idealistic and less frustrating than other places. “In the U.S., I feel extremely disconnected,” said Alanna Irving, 33, who came here from San Francisco to start two companies. “Things happen all the time that I don’t agree with or understand or think are really good for most people, and I just don’t see any way that I can change that.”

This is the second time New Zealand has tried to use Silicon Valley to jump-start its fledgling tech economy. The current effort is in some ways an outgrowth of the first, featuring the same players.

The first time, there were big promises that were never fulfilled. It was a typical Silicon Valley story, in other words, which makes it a bit of a cautionary tale even as everyone assumes that this time will be different.

The story began more than a decade ago when a billionaire entrepreneur came here to visit and, like so many others, fell in love with the majestic mountains and sweeping vistas. New Zealand is where Peter Jackson filmed “The Lord of the Rings,” a beloved text for many techies. It is the real Middle-earth, a fantasy come to life.

Fantasies are rarely free. People applying for citizenship here are required to have spent 70 percent of the previous five years living in the country, and to commit to living in it afterward. Even humanitarian exceptions are rare.

Peter Thiel, the contrarian investor who made his fortune with PayPal and Facebook, made an irresistible financial proposal to New Zealand in early 2011. He would bring the local economy — whose biggest exports were concentrated milk and the meat from sheep and goats — into the high-tech era. Mr Thiel would serve as the country’s roving tech ambassador, opening doors around the world that are closed to mere government officials.

Even before applying, he set up Valar Ventures, an investment fund named after the gods in “The Lord of the Rings.” Valar put about $3 million into Xero, an online accounting software firm, and was part of a $4 million infusion of cash into Pacific Fibre, which proposed a trans-Pacific undersea cable.

And that, Mr. Thiel signaled, would be just the beginning. “I intend to devote a significant amount of my time and resources to the people and businesses of New Zealand,” he wrote in his citizenship application. He donated about $750,000 to earthquake relief after the city of Christchurch was struck in February 2011.

New Zealand, with a population below five million, gets around 30,000 applications for citizenship annually. Fearful of the potential for corruption and exploitation, it expedites only a handful. Mr. Thiel was one of them. The process was so painless that when the news came out about the investor’s dual New Zealand/American citizenship two months ago, the official in charge said he remembered nothing about it.

“We were so blown away that Peter Thiel was interested,” said Rod Drury, the chief executive of Xero. “Him getting a passport wasn’t a big deal at the time. No one really thought about it.” In fact, no one even mentioned it — including Mr. Thiel, despite his declaration in documents submitted for his application that “it would give me great pride to let it be known that I am a New Zealand citizen.” When the secret was revealed, it created a small uproar. “Someone being able to invest and get citizenship goes against that important New Zealand value of equality,” Mr. Drury explained. “That’s why it has played so much in the media here.”

Mr. Drury is the biggest name in New Zealand’s tech scene, a local version of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. He recommended Mr. Thiel for citizenship, and Xero was held up as a model of what, with the investor’s help, all the new start-ups could become. The New Zealand government was so enthusiastic about Mr. Thiel’s investing prowess that it became a partner with him in early 2012, putting about $7 million into a Valar fund. The fund did well, primarily because of its big position in Xero.

But the government did not share in the profits. The deal had a clause that said Valar could simply return the government’s investment with a little interest, which it did. Mr. Thiel quadrupled his money, The New Zealand Herald reported in February. Steven Joyce, the minister of finance, did not respond to an email request for comment.

Valar is now based in New York, where it has been investing in European and Brazilian companies. Mr. Thiel declined to comment.

“It’s sad for New Zealand that Thiel and Valar didn’t follow on with more investments,” Lance Wiggs, a local investor, said. “We are starved for cash.” Mr Thiel has been focused elsewhere, including on a long-shot donation of $1.25 million to President Trump’s campaign last year. When Mr. Trump unexpectedly won, that paid off for Mr Thiel in a wide-ranging portfolio. Last month his top aide, Michael Kratsios, became the White House’s deputy chief technology officer. Xero, which has 1,400 employees and customers in 180 countries, took a different path. Its goal is to turn accountants into “growth consultants,” becoming a platform that soars above national borders.

“Gay marriage, cultural tolerance, refugees, active strategies to address diversity — more than ever our leadership here is important,” Mr. Drury wrote in an email to his staff immediately after the election. He proposed setting a moral example by bringing “some refugee groups into our Wellington office.”

A postelection arrival at Xero from the United States is Nick Piesco, 40, who was writing code for a start-up in Austin, Tex. “I’d say the timing is coincidental but fortuitous,” the programmer said of his move 7,437 miles west. Already he and his wife, Reneau Skinner, 39, are talking about becoming citizens. “One of the things that attracted me to Xero was the culture — how they make people feel welcome,” Mr. Piesco said.

That means those barred from the United States under the new administration’s policies, or who think they might be, are ripe for recruitment, Mr. Drury said.

“Especially in the U.S. technology industry, where something like 50 percent of the billion-dollar companies have been built by immigrants, it’s nuts that you make it difficult for engineers to come in,” he said. “It’s crazy for us not to exploit that.”

The LookSee Wellington initiative to bring in 100 software engineers was initially focused on Americans. Then word began to spread. By the time the contest was finally cut off on March 30, India had overtaken the United States in applications. “We’re in a global talent war,” said Chris Whelan, chief executive of the Economic Development Agency in Wellington.

Mr. Drury is already looking to make LookSee an annual affair. After all, it takes the expensive problem of recruitment off Xero’s hands and lets the government do it. “It’s boom time for the next 10 years,” Mr. Drury said. The more immigrants, the better. “We’ll take a lot. We’ll take hundreds.” Correction: April 14, 2017

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of a local investor. He is Lance Wiggs, not Biggs. Correction: April 14, 2017 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article attributed incorrectly a quotation about immigration and tech labor. It was Rod Drury, the chief executive of Xero who said, “It’s crazy for us not to exploit that,” not Nick Piesco.

[newstfionline]

As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw

By Jacqueline Williams and David Streitfeld, NY Times, April 14, 2017

WELLINGTON, New Zealand--In the South Pacific, software no longer needs a hard sell.

New Zealand has long wanted to be a tech hub, but distance was an issue. Now, at a moment of political upheaval around the globe, that isolation has become a selling point.

A municipal program to fly in 100 developers next month--wine them, dine them and offer them jobs--was expected to draw 2,500 applications. But the recruitment effort, called LookSee Wellington, was besieged with more than 48,000 entries, including workers at Google, Amazon, Facebook, M.I.T. and NASA. At one point so many people checked out the program that the website failed.

For all sorts of reasons, New Zealand suddenly makes sense. The cost of living is less than in San Francisco. Commuting is less wearying. And American politics, “Brexit” and the Islamic State are on the other side of the world.

“It’s just one of those things where the stars are aligned,” said David Jones, general manager at the Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency.

New arrivals describe New Zealand as more idealistic and less frustrating than other places.

“In the U.S., I feel extremely disconnected,” said Alanna Irving, 33, who came here from San Francisco to start two companies. “Things happen all the time that I don’t agree with or understand or think are really good for most people, and I just don’t see any way that I can change that.”

This is the second time New Zealand has tried to use Silicon Valley to jump-start its fledgling tech economy. The current effort is in some ways an outgrowth of the first, featuring the same players.

The first time, there were big promises that were never fulfilled. It was a typical Silicon Valley story, in other words, which makes it a bit of a cautionary tale even as everyone assumes that this time will be different.

The story began more than a decade ago when a billionaire entrepreneur came here to visit and, like so many others, fell in love with the majestic mountains and sweeping vistas. New Zealand is where Peter Jackson filmed “The Lord of the Rings,” a beloved text for many techies. It is the real Middle-earth, a fantasy come to life.

Fantasies are rarely free. People applying for citizenship here are required to have spent 70 percent of the previous five years living in the country, and to commit to living in it afterward. Even humanitarian exceptions are rare.

Peter Thiel, the contrarian investor who made his fortune with PayPal and Facebook, made an irresistible financial proposal to New Zealand in early 2011. He would bring the local economy--whose biggest exports were concentrated milk and the meat from sheep and goats--into the high-tech era. Mr. Thiel would serve as the country’s roving tech ambassador, opening doors around the world that are closed to mere government officials.

Even before applying, he set up Valar Ventures, an investment fund named after the gods in “The Lord of the Rings.” Valar put about $3 million into Xero, an online accounting software firm, and was part of a $4 million infusion of cash into Pacific Fibre, which proposed a trans-Pacific undersea cable.

And that, Mr. Thiel signaled, would be just the beginning.

“I intend to devote a significant amount of my time and resources to the people and businesses of New Zealand,” he wrote in his citizenship application. He donated about $750,000 to earthquake relief after the city of Christchurch was struck in February 2011.

New Zealand, with a population below five million, gets around 30,000 applications for citizenship annually. Fearful of the potential for corruption and exploitation, it expedites only a handful. Mr. Thiel was one of them. The process was so painless that when the news came out about the investor’s dual New Zealand/American citizenship two months ago, the official in charge said he remembered nothing about it.

“We were so blown away that Peter Thiel was interested,” said Rod Drury, the chief executive of Xero. “Him getting a passport wasn’t a big deal at the time. No one really thought about it.”

In fact, no one even mentioned it--including Mr. Thiel, despite his declaration in documents submitted for his application that “it would give me great pride to let it be known that I am a New Zealand citizen.”

When the secret was revealed, it created a small uproar.

“Someone being able to invest and get citizenship goes against that important New Zealand value of equality,” Mr. Drury explained. “That’s why it has played so much in the media here.”

Mr. Drury is the biggest name in New Zealand’s tech scene, a local version of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. He recommended Mr. Thiel for citizenship, and Xero was held up as a model of what, with the investor’s help, all the new start-ups could become.

The New Zealand government was so enthusiastic about Mr. Thiel’s investing prowess that it became a partner with him in early 2012, putting about $7 million into a Valar fund. The fund did well, primarily because of its big position in Xero.

But the government did not share in the profits. The deal had a clause that said Valar could simply return the government’s investment with a little interest, which it did. Mr. Thiel quadrupled his money, The New Zealand Herald reported in February. Steven Joyce, the minister of finance, did not respond to an email request for comment.

A postelection arrival at Xero from the United States is Nick Piesco, 40, who was writing code for a start-up in Austin, Tex. “I’d say the timing is coincidental but fortuitous,” the programmer said of his move 7,437 miles west. Already he and his wife, Reneau Skinner, 39, are talking about becoming citizens.

“One of the things that attracted me to Xero was the culture--how they make people feel welcome,” Mr. Piesco said.

That means those barred from the United States under the new administration’s policies, or who think they might be, are ripe for recruitment.

“Especially in the U.S. technology industry, where something like 50 percent of the billion-dollar companies have been built by immigrants, it’s nuts that you make it difficult for engineers to come in,” he said. “It’s crazy for us not to exploit that.”

The LookSee Wellington initiative to bring in 100 software engineers was initially focused on Americans. Then word began to spread. By the time the contest was finally cut off on March 30, India had overtaken the United States in applications.

“We’re in a global talent war,” said Chris Whelan, chief executive of the Economic Development Agency in Wellington.

Mr. Drury is already looking to make LookSee an annual affair. After all, it takes the expensive problem of recruitment off Xero’s hands and lets the government do it.

“It’s boom time for the next 10 years,” Mr. Drury said. The more immigrants, the better. “We’ll take a lot. We’ll take hundreds.”

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 338: SpellCraft: Aspects of Valor (1992)

          SpellCraft: Aspects of Valor

United States

Tsunami Production (developer), ASCII Entertainment Software (publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 27 July 2019

I was recently reminded of a nine-year old entry in which I remarked on the considerable variances in spell systems between fantasy RPGs. A lot of the stuff I said in the first year of blogging was ignorant nonsense, but this entry holds up. My thesis was that while many CRPGs may offer near-identical experiences when it comes to character attributes, equipment, NPC interactions, and combat, their approaches to magic are so variable as to almost be a fingerprint. “Fully describe the magic system of any game,” I said, “and there’s a decent chance that your description applies only to that game, or at least only to games in that series.” I then analyzed a number of categories in which spell systems varied.

              The Ultima series was a good title to encapsulate the argument because it doesn’t even maintain spell consistency within the series. Every entry is unique. I think the series reached its apex in Ultima V, which featured the “syllable” system as well as the reagent system. I call it the apex, but the system was also full of unrealized potential. There were a couple of unlisted spells that you could figure out if you understood the logic behind syllables and reagents, but otherwise the spells were mostly handed to you in a spellbook. I’d like to see the same system in which the player has to figure out almost every spell, and moreover can create some fantastic combinations. If in Ultima V, KAL XEN summoned a creature and VAS FLAM created a great ball of fire, I don’t see why KAL VAS XEN FLAM wouldn’t summon a great creature of fire.

           I agree that neither “accomplishment” nor “danger” seem like this guy’s strong suits.

            One thing that never makes sense to me about spells in Dungeons and Dragons settings is how relentlessly predictable they are. It makes no sense that if a mage can summon a fireball, he can only summon an enormous fireball that covers a 69-square area and does deadly damage to everyone within it. Once you know how to pull fire out of thin air, you ought to be able to figure out how to halve or double the recipe. A lot of other games give you the ability to vary the intensity of a spell without having to change to a completely different spell. This was one area in which Disciples of Steel improved upon the Gold Box engine.

           SpellCraft offers a little of what I’m looking for in both areas. Its spells are created like recipes–a combination of “aspect” items (not unlike Elvira II in this regard), ingredients, and magic words, some of which can be varied to produce different effects. I’m a little hesitant to call the system exactly what I’m looking for because I don’t think there’s a lot of logic to the aspects and ingredients. But it may be that I just haven’t experienced the system long enough yet.

              A few hours?! The tailwinds were kind this day.

            SpellCraft was conceived by Joseph Ybarra, the Electronic Arts executive who had produced the first Bard’s Tale games, Starflight, and Legacy of the Ancients (among others). In between presiding over the last days of Infocom (1988-1990) and taking a producer role at 3DO (1995), Ybarra ran his own company, drawing in Karl Buiter, creator of Sentinel Worlds and Hard Nova. Most references to Ybarra’s company call it Ybarra Productions, and indeed that’s the title the team used for Shadow of Yserbius (1993) and Alien Legacy (1994), but for a while at the beginning he must have flirted with “Tsunami Productions.” Anyway, SpellCraft seems to be a completely original conception; I can find nothing like it in Ybarra’s history nor the histories of any of the programmers.         

The manual features one of the worst-written backstories that we’ve encountered in a long time. (The manual is otherwise okay.) I’d blame Karl Buiter of “You beat me?!…I am destroyed” fame, but he’s not credited on the manual. I spent a few paragraphs trying to deconstruct how bad it is, and why it’s bad, but it was taking so long I may actually save it for an entire entry. I invite you to click on that link, go to Page 6, and make any sense of it. This is the type of manual that could only have gotten past the production standards of a Japanese company running an American office.

           Security tightened after it became a UNESCO site.

             The upshot is that magic was around on Earth for a long time, but its abuses led some wizards to create (or move to) the separate realm of Valoria. While the use of magic in “Terra” dwindled to weak cantrips and soothsaying, in Valoria wizards wielded devastating power and warred among themselves for centuries. Eventually, they came together in a Council of the Wise and elected a Magister to lead them, and war settled down into healthy competitions instead of all-out slaughter.        

Unfortunately, the testing of atomic bombs in the 1940s on Terra happened to coincide with some powerful magic rituals in Valoria, with the result that a major rift opened between the two worlds. Here, the manual transitions to the game’s opening segments, though imperfectly because in-game screens say the rift is “tiny” and it was discovered recently. (Fortunately, the in-game text seems to have been penned by someone more competent than the manual backstory author.) The Magister, Garwayen, suggested that the council close the rift so that “our worlds would not come into conflict,” but the rest of the council–six wizards aligned to different “colleges” of magic–voted to enlarge it so they could conquer Terra. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Garwayen thinks that enlarging the rift will damage the “very fabric of reality” and thus potentially destroy both realms.

             Yeah, we’ll see how your “Fireball” spells perform against our ballistic missiles.

            Garwayen, “old and feeble” and unable to stop his six colleagues, looked for someone “born under the same conjunction of stars” who could absorb his magic. He found the answer in Robert Garwin, an American with “a modest life of no great accomplishment and no great danger.” Garwin unexpectedly receives a ticket to England from his “Uncle Gar” with the promise of an inheritance on the other end. Following “Gar’s” instructions, Garwin flies to Heathrow, rents a car, drives to Stonehenge, gets teleported to Valoria, and soon finds himself Garwayen’s apprentice.

              The images are now in sync with the text.

             The player’s first choice is to pick a primary college of magic from among the classic four elements. Irene happened to be walking by as the choice was presented to me, and I decide to test the depth of my knowledge of my wife by giving the options to her. The issue was never what element she’d choose (fire), or how she’d make the choice (“Fire! Fire! Fire!” with a manic gleam in her eye) but whether she’d even let me finish reading the sentence before giving her answer. She had just come home from battling tourist traffic along the coast, so I’m proud to say that she did not.

                        The game eases you into its conventions with a few tutorials, starting with the creation of the first spell. In my case, it was “Fire Barrier,” a defensive spell. Creating a spell requires first selecting its “aspect” from among 48 potential objects you can collect. You then have to choose how many of that aspect to use in the spell’s creation, plus how many standard ingredients–powders, stones, candles, and jewels–will also go into it. Finally, you associate a “magic word” with the spell, which is really just a textual representation of the spell level. The first level of fire-based spells are all LUX, for instance.

          Mixing a new spell.

        You get these recipes from a variety of sources, including arcane hints in the manual and NPC dialogue, but in this case Garwayen just told me what ingredients to use.

              Garwayen explains where to find information about spells.

          Once the spell is created, you have to go to your spellbook to mix any number of iterations of the spell, capped by how many ingredients you have on-hand. You can also make modifications, by adding more of some ingredients, thus hoping to vary the spell’s power or effects. Whether this works or not is governed by the “elasticity” of the ingredients, which you’re told during the initial spell’s creation.

          A full description of the spell accompanies its creation.

         A spellbook that came with the game seems to have blanks for all possible spells, plus partial information for a lot of them. I imagined that the player is meant to fill in these blanks as he discovers new spells, so that’s what I started doing. I’m not sure that the “aspects” make any logical sense. Each is a physical object but has an “aspect of” something else. For instance, a fishook has an “aspect of pinpricks” which kind-of makes sense, but the domino mask as the “aspect of falling birds,” which makes no sense at all.

            God damn those shriners!

         Garwayen then dropped a surprise in telling me that the various wizards won’t be defeatable with magic. For that, I’ll need a regular weapon. He gave me a Sword of Striking to use, then tossed me into the Earth Domain to check it out.

        When you’re on a mission in Valoria, the interface changes to an axonometric window with environmental objects, enemies, and treasure chests. The numberpad moves the character, the function keys select spells, and the ENTER key casts them. The SPACE bar cycles the bottom-left window through a couple of options, including character statistics and a map. All of these actions have mouse alternatives. I feel like the graphics, good in the rest of the game, degrade significantly in the exploration window.

              Enemies–in this case, something that looks like an orc–head for you the moment that they see you. Unfortunately, physical combat is pretty pathetic. You simply adopt a combat posture with a single keystroke and the game fights for you. If you hit any other key while in combat, you return to a non-combat posture. A single “life” bar indicates both health and spell points. It recharges relatively quickly as you walk about the environment. An early-game character can’t defeat more than one enemy on a single health bar, but you can defeat one, then run around before engaging the next. (In the early game, at least, the character moves faster than enemies.) 

             I send a fireball streaking towards an orcish creature in the Earth Domain. A chest is available for pickup to my south.

          Enemies drop bags of items (spell aspects and ingredients) when defeated. Chests scattered about the world deliver these in greater volume. When you’ve defeated all the enemies and collected all the chests, you return to your home base–a “Stone Circle” that has its own health bar for reasons that must become apparent later–via a keystroke.           

I ran three practice missions fighting orcs before Garwayen decided we’d better move on. He had me create a “Fireball” spell (red fez aspect, three powders, six candles) and then sent me to fight more orcs. I used the spell for a couple of them, but I defeated most in combat to conserve ingredients.

           Logging the “Star Healing” spell in the spellbook.

          For the next spell, he wanted me to create something called “Star Heal,” from the “ether” college, but he would only tell me that the “aspect grows naturally” and that the “proportions for the spell are one and three.” I consulted the spellbook and found only one “personal modifier” spell with 1 of one thing (the aspect) and 3 of the other (stones). Of aspects that “grow naturally,” I only had garlic and onions. Garlic and 3 stones turned out to be the answer.

           A map of Terra shows me the magic hot spots. I guess Oceania doesn’t have any.

         At this point, the game took an odd turn, as Garwayen sent me back to Terra to purchase some more ingredients–particularly two vials of white liquid. I was presented with a world map, $20,000 cash, a pomegranate, and the ability to travel to Salem, Massachusetts (USA); Teotihuacan, Mexico; Pompeii, Italy; and back to Stonehenge. Each one-way ticket cost at least a few hundred dollars. At each location, I could talk to an NPC and buy or sell ingredients from him.

            Trading ingredients.

         Stonehenge’s NPC was a hippie named David Greenbriar who wanted a magic pomegranate so much he was willing to pay $10,000, so that bolstered my initial funds. In Salem, I made contact with Selina, a guide at the Witch Museum (this was accompanied by what I can attest is a real photo of Salem’s Washington Square), who told me to return if I ever found the Book of Witches. In Teotihuacan, a medicine woman promised to teach me a new magic word if I brought back an opal from the Fire Domain. Pompeii’s NPC was an English tourist interested in ancient artifacts. In each location, I bought 5 of any ingredient they were selling that I didn’t have. I still had over $27,000 when I returned to Stonehenge, so maybe I was a bit conservative on my first trip.

          I think I might have met this NPC in real life.

            (Aside: As a former resident of Salem who really got into the history of the city, I don’t care for it when movies, television shows, books, and games suggest that the city was ever the site of any “real” magic and witchcraft. I have a particular distaste for the choice of the Salem Police Department to put a classic witch-on-a-broomstick on its departmental patch. Between 1692 and 1693, twenty residents of Salem were executed on false accusations of witchcraft, and I feel like it insults their memory to suggest that the accusations were anything but unfounded hysteria. I do appreciate, however, how the various museums of the city use the “witch” title to lure in tourists–but then give them a sober account of a tragic history.)

          The session wrapped up with the creation of a new spell called “Steam Vapor” that required me to interpret a clue from a quote in the manual. After that, I got access to my workshop, where I can create and modify spells.

          This is a pretty sweet pad.

         Looking into the mirror in the workshop shows character statistics and inventory. It suggests among other things that I will eventually find other weapons and armor upgrades plus various magic “totems.” My maximum health has doubled (from 50 to 100) since I started the game; I don’t know if this is the result of solving missions, defeating enemies, or both. Either way, it counts as a sort-of character development that qualifies the game as an RPG. I assume my attack and defense scores can also increase.

           The “character sheet.”

            Two subsequent missions took me to the Air Domain and the Fire Domain. The Air Domain looked like it was covered in snow, though it was supposed to be clouds, and stepping off the clouds results in instant death. The Fire Domain cracked me up because it’s just like the Earth Domain except all the trees are on fire and the lakes and rivers have lava instead of water. How did the trees grow there in the first place? The Fire Domain had more orcish monsters, but the Air Domain gave me phantom-like air creatures. These enemies have been easy enough to defeat with my sword so far. I assume that changes.

         The Fire Domain is serious about its theme.

          Both of the areas had special large chests to find. One had the Teotihuacan woman’s fire opal; the other had 12 bottles of green liquid and 14 jewels. The green liquid is apparently the base of a powerful mind magic spell, but Garwayen says I need someone on Earth to give me the magic word first.

            Fighting ghostlike creatures in the Air Domain. The game notes that this mission has 3 enemies, 1 large chest, and 1 small chest left to find.

         I like the spell creation system and the hub-and-mission approach. Jetting around the real world is weird but inoffensive. I look forward to seeing how SpellCraft develops. I’m glad I didn’t reject it.

     Time so far: 3 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-338-spellcraft-aspects-of-valor-1992/