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| Politics Is Obama Setting a Trap for Republicans? Nah, he's just trying to ensure his place in the history books. Like most days. Posted Tuesday, Mar 12, 2013, at 10:45 PM ET  In politics and human relations, it's best to be skeptical of uncharacteristic generosity. When my son offers to do the dishes, I know I'll find something broken somewhere in the house soon enough. When an email from a distant acquaintance starts on a chatty note, I prepare for the Big Ask. In only the most well-adjusted marriages would a spouse's surprise gift of flowers not stir the least bit of suspicion in their mate. So it is only fitting that Republicans are suspicious of President Obama's warming trend. One minute he's dismissing us and the next he's picking up the tab for dinner? In short, goes the theory, Obama's charm offensive is a trap. The president is putting on a good face for the public in order to set up his opponents for the 2014 elections. When no budget deal is reached, the president will be able to say that he tried but the Republicans rebuffed him and should be thrown out of office. This suspicion would be natural in a normal relationship, let alone one as poisoned as the relationship between the president and the GOP. But to stay intact this theory must survive at least two challenges. It misunderstands President Obama's ambition (he cares more about his legacy than he does Congressional Democrats) and it suggests Obama learned nothing from his first several years in office when he attempted the strategy Republicans are accusing him of, and failed. We know ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate The Paul Ryan Promise What Is the Answer to That Stupid Math Problem on Facebook? The Slate Guide to Crime: How to Drink in Public | Advertisement  |
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Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Politics: Is Obama Setting a Trap for Republicans?
Arts: Day of the Dolphin Is Real?
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| Brow Beat Day of the Dolphin Is Real? Posted Tuesday, Mar 12, 2013, at 07:46 PM ET  This morning, BoingBoing flagged a strange story out of the Ukraine: Military scientists in that country have been training dolphins to kill enemy divers (and also detect mines), and three of those killer dolphins have escaped. It's worth reading everything you can about this story, of course, but this is also a good time to ponder an extremely unlikely question: How prescient was The Day of the Dolphin? Loosely based on a novel by the French writer Robert Merle, the 1973 film was directed by Mike Nichols, of all people, and starred George C. Scott. (Roman Polanski was set to direct the movie, supposedly, but pulled out after his wife was murdered by the Manson family.) With a script by Buck Henry, who co-wrote The Graduate and adapted Catch-22, The Day of the Dolphin had a surprisingly strong pedigree for a film about a scientist who teaches dolphins how to talk only to see them turned into trained assassins set to kill the president of the United States. Less surprisingly, perhaps, the results were not well received. Pauline Kael called it "the most expensive Rin Tin Tin picture ever made," an "elaborate exercise in anthropomorphic tearjerking, which turns the dolphins into fishy human babies." Apparently the movie ends with—spoiler alert—one of the dolphins "protesting love for Pa," the Scott character, as he "forces the whimpering babies to leave their home forever." Still, after today's news, it is time to add The Day of the Dolphin to ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate The Paul Ryan Promise What Is the Answer to That Stupid Math Problem on Facebook? The Slate Guide to Crime: How to Drink in Public | Advertisement |
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My SimCity City Thrived Offline For 19 Minutes
March 12th, 2013Top StoryMy SimCity City Thrived Offline For 19 MinutesBy Stephen Totilo
I switched off my Internet to see how long I could keep on playing. It didn't last long, but what I discovered intrigued me. Prior to the official release of SimCity, I'd already seen that the game could run offline if a signal dropped. I play the game on a laptop (a powerful one!) and my WiFi signal at home isn't always so hot. So, when I was playing on a press server a few days before release, I'd get a pop-up indicator telling me the network connection was lost. I could keep merrily building my city, and, when the connection came back, there were no hitches. The folks behind SimCity have long maintained, however, that their game is made to be played online. That requirement isn't just DRM, they say. It's for gameplay—for simulating parts of the inter-city gameplay, for doling out challenges. They say this all the time, up to and including last Friday, when SimCity studio boss Lucy Bradshaw told the website Polygon: "With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud." This, she explained, is why an off-line is currently a no-go for her team at Maxis. "It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team." The game has been running better and better this week. The new servers have made connections easy. So an offline mode isn't as direly needed. But, can this game, as it is designed, really not tolerate offline play? Yesterday, I tested this assertion. I started playing my city, the mining mecca known as Newer Landland City. I turned off WiFi and then tried to zoom out, check the region and zoom into one of the other cities in my region. Connection lost. Booted to the game's title screen. I turned my WiFi back on and returned to Newer Landland City (henceforth referred to as NLC). I laid down some roads. I probably zoned more residential, because my cities always need more residential. While I was doing this, I was running Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4, a program that scans your computer's network usage and shows which applications are talking to the network. You can run this, too, and probably should, because I'm not able to tell you a whole lot about the activity I saw. Most of it is Greek to me. What I can tell you is that SimCity.exe connected to Amazon IP addresses in Ireland—presumably Amazon servers used to network the game. For the most part, my game, running on North America East 3, connected to this IP address. Ireland servers? North America East? Who knows how this works! What I do know is that it seemed like my game was talking to the network a lot, several times a minute. If my city talked to the network that much, then, turning off the WiFi, I expected to see some catastrophes pretty soon. I did not. I could continue to lay down roads. I added a recycling plant. I upgraded it. Five minutes into being offline, I got a notification about a neighboring city. Fifteen minutes into being offline, I was notified that my garbage trucks had successfully serviced a neighboring city and made some money off it. The buildings in NLC seemed to be rising and falling just fine without the network. But what of my exports? NLC is a mining metropolis (well, more like a mining manor), and we export ore and coal. About 18 minutes in, my factories were full. My exports weren't going out. Because of the lack of an online connection? Or due to my mining facilities working overtime? I'm not sure, because, 19 minutes in, I got the alert you can see atop this story. The game had decided enough was enough. I had to quit to the main menu. I then restored my Internet connection, returned to my city and it successfully synched to the region. What if I had refrained from exports? Could my city have lasted longer? What if I had been playing at standard speed instead of triple-fast cheetah speed? My colleague, Mike Fahey, who runs an education city in the same region on the same server tried to repeat my test while playing at normal speed. He hit the same wall as I did in about 20 minutes. Last week, I posted the same question about the possibility of an offline mode to Bradshaw that Polygon and others did. Over the weekend, I got a reply. Me: "SimCity uses its online connection to connect player cities and support online challenges, but it seems clear now that some sort of offline mode would appease many fans. Is EA going to enable this option for the game?" Bradshaw: "Online connectivity as a creative game design decision was infused into the game's DNA since its inception and so we're fully committed to delivering against that experience first. A significant portion of the GlassBox Engine's calculations are performed on our servers and off of the player's PCs. It would take a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game so that all of those functions are calculated locally without a significant performance hit to the player." I don't make video games. Maxis does. EA does. I can't tell how many things were going wrong in my city during the 19 minutes when I played it offline. I don't know how many calculations weren't occurring. And, for the record, I enjoy playing the game online with friends in my region. Those 19 minutes nevertheless provide a glimpse at an alternate to what we've been required to experience with the new SimCity. I've played an offline version of this game that looked great and seemed to run pretty well. Imagine if we could get more of that. |
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I've Been Using Evernote All Wrong. Here's Why It's Actually Amazing
March 12th, 2013Top StoryI've Been Using Evernote All Wrong. Here's Why It's Actually AmazingBy Whitson Gordon
Any time we talk about Evernote, a good number of you say the same thing: you've tried it time and time again, but you could never really "get into it." I was in the same camp, but after reading the other side's experiences in this article and its comments, I decided to give it another shot. If you're like I was and haven't yet experienced the greatness of Evernote, here are some things you should try. The More You Add, the More Useful Evernote BecomesLet's start with the most important trick: In order to see why everyone likes Evernote, it's important to take advantage of everything it has to offer (rather than use it as just another note taker). Reader ppdd says it best:
So, if you want to give Evernote another shot, try putting everything in it that you want to hang onto. The more you add, the more useful Evernote becomes. Here are a few examples of what you could do. Use the Web ClipperI always thought Evernote's web clipper extension was pointless. If I needed to reference articles for later, I'd just save them in my browser's bookmarks folder or drag them to my desktop. However, that didn't allow me to make notes on an article, or save it with other related notes on that project. Evernote solved that problem perfectly.
Test Case: Buying a New GrillI just moved into a new apartment, and I need to buy a new grill. After a bit of searching, I found a few I liked but wasn't ready to buy. I used the Web Clipper to throw its product page into a note under a new notebook, entitled "Wish List." Now when I come into some extra money, I can open up Evernote and see my top picks at the top of my "Wish List" notebook.
Don't Be Afraid to Create Lots of Notes and NotebooksI always tried to keep my notes to a minimum, so I didn't get buried under an endless amount of notes that I could never filter through. Evernote is better than this, though: it manages a multitude of notes easily thanks to notebooks, tags, and note links (see below). I found that most of my "notes" should have, in fact, been "notebooks," allowing me to store larger volumes of information with better organization.
Test Case: Troubleshooting a Finicky PCI have a home server that I love, but always seems to give me problems, so it's a "work in progress." Back in the day, I used to keep track of this project in one note, jotting down lines from log files, troubleshooting commands I wanted to run, links to research I wanted to do, and more, all jumbled together in one big block of text. Even with some subheadings and formatting, it was still very difficult to navigate. Now, I have an entire notebook dedicated to my home server. Right now, it has three notes:
Because I saved each article with the Web Clipper, I have the entire text of the article and the source link right there, plus any highlights and notes I've made in each. This is light years better for me than just pasting the links to each article, or trying to write everything down myself into one giant note. Plus, by creating an entire notebook, each note functions as an item in a to-do list, which makes finishing the project much easier. The bottom line: Don't be afraid to create a ton of different notebooks and a ton of different notes. Evernote equips you with the ability to easily handle thousands of notes, and what seems overwhelming will soon feel like the best organizational scheme you've ever had. Bonus Tip: Create a notebook called _INBOX, right-click on it, and make it your default notebook. That way, any new notes you send to Evernote show up in this inbox, at the top of your list of notebooks, ready for you to funnel into one of your other notebooks. Sift Through Notes with Saved Searches and TagsUsing tags always felt like a waste of time to me: tagging every note seemed like a chore, and serves the same purpose that filing notes into notebooks does. However, tags can be useful if you have notes that you think could fit into multiple notebooks—or are on the same subject—without getting overwhelming. You don't need to tag every note you have, and you only need a few really important ones. It basically makes your archive easier to search through with Evernote's advanced search operators. You can even then save those searches by clicking the little arrow next to the search bar, and pressing the magnifying glass.
Test Case: Filter Out Family MembersOur own Walter Glenn uses tags, albeit sparingly, to keep track of things across multiple notebooks. Both he and weblog Nerd Gap, for example, recommend creating a tag for each member of your family. That way, if you have notes across different notebooks that apply to someone besides you, it's easy to find them through a simple search. Nerd Gap explains:
Again, don't go overboard—Walter notes that tags are only really useful if you have a few that you really remember and use—but they can be a godsend once you start amassing thousands of notes. Check out Nerd Gap's introduction to tags and search for more ideas on how to use these features. Use Note Links to Jump Between Related StuffOnce you have more notes and notebooks than you know what to do with, Evernote can linking everything together so you don't have to search high and low for contextual information. Right-click on one of your notes and choose "Copy Note Link." Then, paste that link into another note for quick access later.
Test Case: Researching This ArticleWhen I write a long article (like this one), I create a notebook for that article. Then, I create a text note with a basic outline of how I want the article to look, with all its subheadings. As I research, I clip all relevant web articles to that notebook, highlighting all the important parts and cutting out the irrelevant stuff. Then, I'll copy each note's individual link, paste it in the article outline, and I'll have a general skeleton of what that article's going to look like, using just the stuff I've saved in Evernote. Walter notes that often, if he has a ton of notes in a notebook, he'll just create a "Table of Contents" note at the top, where he can dump links to all the notes in that notebook, organized however he sees fit. This can be particularly helpful if Evernote's sorting options don't really fit your needs.
Other Things You Can Put In EvernoteWe've talked a little bit about what you can store in Evernote, and I've given some examples above. But again: the more you put in, the more useful it becomes. Anything you need to save, put it in Evernote and see how it works. For example, you could use it to store:
...and of course, anything else you can possibly think of. Is this approach for everyone? Of course not. In fact, our own former Editor Adam Pash found the "everything bucket" model too limiting for him (and he he advocates Simplenote instead). Like most things, it depends on the kind of work you do and how your brain wants to organize that information. Sometimes, you just need a simple app with a bunch of text notes. Evernote can do that if you want—that's part of its beauty—but it isn't what makes Evernote special. If you've tried it over and over again and can't understand what the fuss is all about, focus its more specific features like notebooks, note links, and the web clipper. You might finally find the organizational nirvana you've been looking for. |
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