Where Are You (Courtesy Xkcd)
Raphael Dyen
Now, back to Nick's question.[5]This is nowhere NEAR the record for "most boring digression into world record trivia." That record was recently challenged by IBM computer capable of producing millions of boring pieces of trivia per second, but the machine narrowly lost to reigning human champion Ken Jennings.
It must be said that there is no better way to stop a party conversation than by announcing your job as an academic publisher. Nobody really knows what we do. In this sense, researchers are no different from anyone else. The truth is that they want to publish their research and access research from others, but do not particularly care to understand the dynamics of publishing and library services. This would be just one step too far in an already overloaded and stressful life. The survey offers us glimpse of where we should be focusing our energies.
In summary, perhaps the fundamental question that librarians, scholarly societies and publishers should ask themselves is what help can we provide to researchers that they really need, but are not receiving currently? Below is a figure from the Ithaka survey that reveals a number of areas where the faculty we serve clearly need us to step up and help.
Hello all hackers from HackerNews. We noticed a new MMO was released by n01se and xkcd yesterday (September 26th, 2012) with multiple users flying around with a balloon figure. If you got stuck, you can click your balloon guy and turn into a ghost to seamlessly move through the landscape unhindered by mortal barriers like trees and hills.
Note that in order to switch from the non-scaled Node.JS server to PubNub, we had to come up with a solution to replace the server side with a full 100% client side solution. Therefore, we built an RFC 6455 WebSocket Client that works with all users and browsers. By doing this, you are actually connecting to a PubNub Edge Node nearest your location, creating a fast, low latency connection. Now you can relax, sit back and play a real MMO courtesy of PubNub.
Munroe now spends his days crafting jokes that riff on programming code, math equations and nerd culture, using stick figures to get his point across. The 25-year-old graduate of Chesterfield's Mathematics and Science High School at Clover Hill has spoken about xkcd at Google headquarters, as well as several national conferences and conventions, and he put out his first book, xkcd: volume 0 , in September.
The collection, which assembles more than 150 of Munroe's strips, moved 5,469 copies in its first week of release; the first printing of 10,000 has sold out as of this writing. "His book has been selling well," says Alexis Ohanian, founder of breadpig, a Web site that sells what he describes as "geeky" items, including the xkcd book, which is published through his site.
Ohanian describes Munroe's fans as "geeks," the sort of folks who gave xkcd a lot of its early exposure at another of Ohanian's creations, reddit, an online news site where readers' votes determine what goes on the front page.
"I'm lucky if I can squeeze out a decent math/physics/Internet joke once a month, and he does it every few days. He's clearly smarter than me," says Bill Amend, FoxTrot 's creator. "The fact that he thought to use stick figures and I didn't drives me insane with envy around deadlines." Amend featured xkcd in a FoxTrot installment where he fantasized about converting his own strip to a webcomic. "I've spoofed a fair number of newspaper comics over the years and thought it would be fun to do the same with some of the webcomics I enjoy," he says. "I thought my xkcd joke turned out pretty well. I'm waiting for Randall to steal it."
One of Munroe's high-school buddies, Derek Radtke, is now his business partner at xkcd , handling the technology aspect of the business out of the apartment they share in Somerville, Mass. During their high-school years, the two spent their spare time building radio-controlled submarines, none of which, according to Munroe, "worked real well."
When he entered Christopher Newport University, Munroe waffled between physics and engineering but eventually chose physics as his major. In 2005, the summer before his graduation, he accepted an internship at NASA's Langley Research Center, where he worked on a virtual-reality project. In 2006, a few months before graduation, he went back to NASA as a contractor, working on robotics. "I was learning as I went along," he says. "It wasn't something I was too into. It took me a while to realize I wasn't having a lot of fun. I was working with a lot of middle-aged engineers, and I didn't relate to them."
Munroe has known how to market xkcd from the beginning. He encouraged people to post his comics on their Web sites for free, embedding them with a link back to his own site. "That's how it spread," he says. "There are tens of thousands of Web sites that have xkcd embedded in them."
The book's publisher, Ohanian, a U.Va. grad, also helped kick-start Munroe's rise to fame when he put one of the cartoonist's early comics on the front page of reddit on Oct. 1, 2005. "It became a mainstay of reddit," Ohanian says. Links to xkcd strips at Boing Boing, the self-described "Directory of Wonderful Things," were another huge traffic generator for the strip.
Munroe started selling T-shirts related to xkcd while he was at NASA, and he says he was soon making more money than he did at his NASA day job, which he left after about a year. During Christmas 2006, his mom and his brother Ricky helped him ship the T-shirts from his home. "He was swamped with orders," she says.
Most cartoonists write to deadline, but Munroe often draws the strip the day before it goes online. "I have a bunch of ideas," he explains. "I sketch notes. I sit down for a few hours and take my favorite of those and draw it as a comic. I'm a perfectionist about where words get placed. I spend time getting everything lined up right."
He creates three comics a week. "I only have three funny ideas each week," he deadpans. "Sometimes I only have two funny ideas, and that week you get one bad joke." There are now more than 600 xkcd strips posted online.
The strip's name, xkcd , is not an acronym for anything, he says. "It's just a set of letters." It started as a screen name for his AOL account. He picked four letters that didn't mean anything or have any pronunciation. "I used that as my sign-in before the comics."
Ask MetaFilter is a question and answer site that covers nearly any question on earth, where members help each other solve problems. Ask MetaFilter is where thousands of life's little questions are answered.
This visual is written using the latest version of the SDK at time of writing (3.1.5) and available for download from its GitHub repository releases page. As chart.xkcd is relatively new and undergoing active development, I'm not planning to publish this to the marketplace at this time.
Thanks, @marcorusso! I wouldn't even know where to begin in reciprocating how amazing and inspiring yourself, Alberto and Daniele have been to me in upskilling with DAX and custom visuals development, so I'll start with "thanks" back!
The breakage is annoying but we could, at least in theory, end up in a situation where all distributions use the same /etc/tmpfiles.d configuration method. IMO that is worth a bit of pain. Particularly when the new method is better documented than the old one: I don't ever remember hearing about /lib/udev/devices until this discussion: for whatever reason Debian doesn't even use it, it has its own /etc/udev/links.conf file that explicitly says in its header that "This file does not exist. Please do not ask the Debian maintainer about it.", etc.
OTOH we could end up in the situation evoked by Maybe it's naive to be so optimistic, but a world where everything in is adopted by all distributions would be quite pleasant: a world where you could configure all this low-level stuff on any distribution without having to deal with all the pointless differences between them.
-new-configuration-fi... has more info about the rationale for all of this. Admittedly it's a long shot for the distributions that aren't adopting systemd as their primary init system.
(Log in to post comments) systemd 183 released Posted Jun 12, 2012 11:00 UTC (Tue) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
/dev is only one of the udev API's. libudev is another, as are the DBUS bindings.
The udev rules are another API (one that is constantly breaking too).
None of them should be considered second order APIs. If they exist they will be used by someone somewhere. If they break, someone will be annoyed. If they are constantly breaking more "someones" will be annoyed.
One thing that seems not everyone grasps is that Linux has probably more usage in customized systems than on desktops. udev was published as the rescue for this low-level plumbing, even on customized systems, because USB happened (needed to load modules on demand, creating/removing devices, etc). This systems could use other things (like mdev), but udev is the only one generic enough for most usages (mdev doesn't cover all modular cases).
Android decided to not use udev, but it will need to reinvent it (if it doesn't start using it) for the generic tablet cases (when tablets, maybe docked, replace laptops).
systemd 183 released Posted Jun 12, 2012 13:09 UTC (Tue) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
And finally, following our recent coverage of the heartless attack on a Knightscope droid designed to improve safety in public spaces, Popular Mechanics has compiled a list of the seven most notable robot beatdowns, which the machines will certainly remember when they take over the world. Absent from the list, however, was the sad tale of the Spirit rover sent to Mars in 2004 who never came home. Never fear, xkcd have got you covered if you want to know what became of the robot (hint: have tissues at the ready).
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