Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera

by Bryan Peterson

I have to say, I highly recommend this book. As a beginner photographer with a shiny new SLR and a bevy of bad photos already under my belt, I'm just beginning to feel like I'm grasping the basics - and anything I've grasped I owe to this book.

I've been going through it, one exercise a day, for a few days now, and I'm learning something every single time. Friendly, first-person writing, and a patient writing style that's both rich in anecdotes and in photographic example.

If you're new to photography, or like me struggle to understand the relationship between ISO speed, aperture size, and shutter speed, I can't recommend this book enough.

£7.89

On unit testing:

As to your real question, the idea of immediate compilation and "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely, when I'm feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be "mocked up."

...and multiprocessing:

I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Titanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

Multithreading and multiprocessing aren't going away. Unit tests aren't some optional artefact, a crutch of the weak and/or stupid. Knuth is wrong. Think I'm taking this out of context? Read for yourself.

Mass Effect Limited Edition (Xbox 360)

by Microsoft

Great game. Really, honestly, great game. An inch from "bestest game ever". So close to flawlessness...

Yet so far. The positive, I have no doubt, you have already read. Greatest RPG ever, huge expansive world. Slightly linear plotline, but well architected and with lots of scope to personalise the experience, and I'm sure you've heard the comment that "no two players will experience the same game". For all the warm fluffiness, go read Kotaku, Gamespot, IGN, or any other of the 8 million "me too" reviews that all espouse on how wonderful the game is. Heaven knows I read them before I bought the game.

And it's allmostly true. And you'll walk away from it better for having played it, because it really is a beautifully choreographed experience.

Naturally, however, there's a "but".

I played it with a friend; and throughout the game, we made jokes about the huge time delays on texture pops, and reminded each other to save, save, save the game. Between that and the sheer repetitiveness of the sidequests (which almost made them worth not bothering with, were it not for a handful of them that have really great storylines embedded in them) there are defintely flaws in the gem.

Cedric Beust, a fellow Googler and well known for his tireless work on TestNG, writes a blog article that points out something I think has been obvious to a lot of hardcore developers for a long time; that static typing isn't always such a bad thing.

The bottom line is actually fairly simple: nothing beats a dynamic language to write a prototype, but if you know that the code will have to be maintained and that it will be in use for several years, the initial cost of using a statically typed language is an investment that is very quickly amortized...

First and foremost, did Rockstar Games' Manhunt 2 deserve an AO rating from the ESRB, and a ban for sale in the UK. .Like any good fiction writer, I'd like you to suspend your belief for a moment - let's say it did. After all, the BBFC, being a film body that therefore has to rate every porn and snuff film that crosses the border, spends the great majority of its time watching and rating content that really does deserve adult rating. One might even argue that if anyone's going to be a half-decent judge, it's probably the BBFC - after all, unlike the ESRB in the US, their remit doesn't begin-and-end at games, they cover film, and therefore have more material on which to judge the nuances of acceptability and create uniformity in attitude; the ESRB only covers software. It's important to also note that in Britain there is an equivalent to the AO rating that the BBFC could have used, Restricted 18+ - they chose instead to ban it outright, a rarity for the modern BBFC Ultimately, my real point isn't about whether or not Manhunt deserves AO - my point is about the subject of AO. Even if it didn't cross the line, it's clear that Rockstar intends to straddle it.

Second, and the real question to ask yourself: should Sony and Nintendo publish an AO-rated game at all?. Sony and Nintendo say no, grassroots is equivocal, and the astroturf has been a solid yes. Ultimately, however, it is the answer to this question that makes the argument over the first question so important to everyone; an AO rating, in the eyes of some, therefore amounts to "censorship". In the case of the BBFC in the UK, the game was indeed outright censored, the decision was not left up to Sony and Nintendo. As the BBFC took the decision away from Sony and Nintendo, though, let's leave the BBFC's ban out - whether or not the BBFC ought to ban the game is a problem for the UK and the UK population. Whether or not adult titles ought to be published by Sony and Nintendo is ultimately an entirely different question, and the answer has a material impact on the way games, in the future, will attempt to push the envelope of acceptability.

So what are the implications of a world where AO titles are published? And what might it mean outside of the United States? In Japan, where nudity and sex in anime are utterly commonplace, games can often get away with much more adult content than you would see in anywhere in the West and would be considered porn in the United States; yet Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 3 was banned for sale to minors in Japan. That same game only got an M rating (suitable for 17+) in the U.S. The U.S. seems to have a nearly (up until now, at least) bottomless stomach for violence, but considers sex taboo; Japan inverts the entire situation. Europe kind-of walks the middle line between the two, with some regions of Europe being more tilted towards Japan's mentality (Germany, for example, where the violence in games often results in bans, but where darstellungen are known, by name, within the general populace).

In addition to fundamental differences in social norms with regard to where the line on "adult" content is drawn, each region - Japan, Europe, the U.S. - have markedly different viewpoints on freedom of speech and how that freedom interacts with the rights of society. In the UK, there is no codified 'bill of rights' - you have no freedom enshrined in a constitution to pin an interpretation on, merely historical precedents and the European Commission's Court of Human Rights. Further astray from U.S. shores, the line blurs again. A defense of "free speech" gets you exactly nowhere as a games publisher with a global reach; those words mean completely different things depending on where you are, and the power of those words is notably weaker off American soil (for better or worse).

So, what falls into "AO" in other media? Content of a sexual nature. Rape. Snuff video and torture. Again, I ask you not to as whether Manhunt deserved that rating - let's assume it did.

Where, exactly, is the place for AO/R18 content in mainstream gaming? Sony and Nintendo draw the line at AO/R18, insisting that AO content will not be published. The line, ultimately, is at AO not because of violence, but because of sex and porn. If I made a sex-with-girls simulator, should Sony allow that to be sold? Given that each Rockstar game finds a way to push closer to the thin red line between M and AO, shouldn't we have expected it to be crossed sooner or later?

However, the idiots at Privacy International have decided to feed the trolls at Slashdot, full to bursting with noise about how Google is going to sell out every user it ever had for the lowest dime. The tinfoil hats are out, light sabers are swishing through the air to the sound of numa numa...

What I can talk about is me. Those who know me sometimes argue that I do so exceptionally well, exceptionally often, and at length.

Do No Evil. One of the things that people tend to throw back at Google when they refer to them as the burgeoning evil is the idea that this is some kind of marketing slogan that we feed the world.

Those words aren't for you. They're for us.

Not a week goes by where someone doesn't end up using it in conversation. It's the litmus test - something we analyse all our own actions against to make sure that we're adhering to the ideals we believe in. It gets applied at every level, in every gathering, at every launch. It's something we all care about, and it's something we all believe in. It's the ground rules for anything that we do, and it's used, on the ground, by googlers regardless of what area they work in or what they do. It's been one of the best things about being at Google - everyone, at a fundamental level, knows that it's not enough to do good; that you have to not do evil.

We are what we do. If people would stop for a moment and ask around, they probably know someone who works at google. Given the prevalence of things like Facebook, I wouldn't be surprised if any internet user over the age of 13 knows a Googler within about three degrees of separation. If you really care this much about privacy, if you're really sitting there in a tinfoil hat wondering whether the sky is falling, go and find one of us. Talk to us about what it's like working at Google. Ask us how much we care about privacy. Ask us to what lengths we're willing to go, personally, to make sure that our Do No Evil motto is never knowingly violated.

The fact is, folks, that I believe in Do No Evil as much as I believe in Google. If I didn't believe in it, I wouldn't be working here - hell, I wouldn't be able to work here. And I know I'm not alone - we all feel this way. That's why the motto works - because we all believe in it, top to bottom. Companies aren't really nameless, faceless, amorphous entities; they're made up of people.

I Do No Evil. I with others, help ensure that others Do No Evil. Others like me, and there are tens of thousands of us now, do the same, every day. We, the people of Google, are Google, and we believe in these words.

Because they are ours.

Lev Manovich, at the Tate website, describes it thusly:

But if we simply limit ourselves to describing the work as it appears visually, we will miss the crucial characteristics of the social data browser constructed by Levin. We need to consider how the data presented in The Dumpster was obtained and processed before it was presented to us. Using a variety of methods, Levin and his collaborators have filtered the huge data space of online blogs isolating the postings from 2005 where teenagers narrated their breakups. The result was 20,000 postings describing 'confirmed' breakups. These postings were subjected to further analysis in order to derive various metadata about them: reasons for the break-up, who broke up with whom, the age and sex of the author, as well as their emotional state. Most of this metadata was not explicitly contained in the postings but is inferred with a high degree of probability by the project's authors.

Crackdown (includes Halo 3 beta invitation) (Xbox 360)

by Microsoft

Let's start with the basics. I bought Crackdown for the Halo Beta. There, I've said it. I feel better. I could have given a rat's arse about the game the Beta was packaged in, I wanted early access to Halo 3 multiplayer. Who would have guessed when I hit that preorder button that the game might actually be worth playing?

£32.97

Oh, it's not the little stuff, like sorting out all the personal crap - it's the small-but-hugely-important things. Like coffee.

Now, for me, coffee is hugely important. Google has a huge, steaming monster of a coffee machine, and it can make absolutely amazing coffee... if you care. You can get coffee that's freshly ground in the grinder, test to make sure you've filled up to the right level, tamp it down with as much force as you care to use, stick it into the machine and out comes liquid heaven.

Or you can do what I just witnessed: some PA sticking two coffee cups under a double that was half-full, that she didn't bother to tamp, and when they didn't look like there was enough coffee, just run another single through the same one. No crema. It looked like dishwater.

And milk? Don't expect frothy, steamy goodness. No. She sat there with the cappucino jug under the steamer, at the bottom of the milk, and left it there for the time it took me not only to make my own coffee but to steam my own latte. What came out of her jug was flat, lifeless, and had basically been boiled into nothingness. In went the frothless milk onto tasteless coffee.

If I ever, ever get a PA, I want them to like me. If I get coffee like that, I'll know I did something wrong with my life.

And its ability to drag-in non-gamers is truly amazing. Matt is now, and has been for the last hour or so, in the spare room with the Wii, playing vs. Pete, who came over last night. I played through Wii Play (s'ok, good fun, but nothing spectacular) and Wii Sports (Tennis is GOD), and played about an hour of Zelda.

Microsoft Racing Wheel with PGR3 (Xbox 360)

by Microsoft

A great wheel. That's the most important thing to walk away with from this Project Gotham Racing with Wireless Wheel combo. One of the best experiences I've had to date with the 360. A quality product, a unique experience, and, for once, worth every pence.

£79.99