The Sky parental controls system recommends that customers leaving on the phishing and malware protection even if disabling all the other elements, but as of 22:30 on Sunday 26th January 2014 this is leading to all HTTP access to code.jquery.com being blocked for Sky customers with the parental controls returning an access denied page.

code.jquery.com may not sound like a mainstream website, as it is really aimed at web and javascript developers but it is pretty common for websites to link to the released javascript (.js) files for jquery and a host of other tools on jquery.com as the site is a CDN for these files, the result being that it is possible many sites may not be performing as expected today.

The advice appears to be for Sky customers to log into their web account, and in the Sky Broadband Shield section turn off the Phishing/Malware filter, or alternatively disable the shield completely.

We will update as and when we hear of any changes and why code.jquery.com has been blocked, i.e. how did it end up categorised as a phishing domain.

Update 8:45am Sky still appears to be blocking code.jquery.com and all files served via the site, and more worryingly is that if you try to report the incorrect category, once signing in on the Sky website you an error page.

We suspect the site was blocked due to being linked to by a properly malicious website, i.e. code.jquery.com and some javascript files were being used on a dodgy website and every domain mentioned was subsequently added to a block list.

For any webmasters affected by the blocking, the solution is to switch to a locally hosted copy of the file, or utilise another CDN e.g. Google jquery CDN.

Update 9:45am It appears that the jquery CDN is unblocked once more on Sky connections where the phishing filter that is part of the parental controls system was enabled.

Update 5:30pm Our enquiry with Sky has elicited a response"“JQuery was temporary blocked this morning having been misclassified. Our review process kicked in shortly afterwards and the site was unblocked just over an hour later." Sky also note they identified the problem at 8:30am, and resolved it by 9:45am. As for why code.jquery.com was categorised as Malware nothing has been confirmed but Sky are talking to Symantec who provide the contest list and updates.

Norton ConnectSafe sounds like a simplified system of what Sky has implemented but since the free service requires you to just change your DNS servers it may prove useful for webmasters as a way to check whether their site is blocked.

Floorplan Light Switches

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I got tired of light switches that contained a long, one-dimensional linear array of switches mounted on a vertical wall controlling a two-dimensional placement of lights that were placed on a horizontal plane.  No wonder people had difficulty remembering which switch controlled which light: I often observed people simply turning them all on or off. 

See the figure for a typical, confusing linear array of light switches. (This is figure 4.4 of my book, the Design of Everyday Things, revised edition, 2013: DOET.)

Why not solve the problem by arranging the light switches in what I have called a "natural mapping" between the controls and the lights. Arrange the switches in the same spatial configuration as the lights, and then mount the switches on the same spatial plane as the lights. Because switches are usually mounted on a vertical wall, whereas lights are usually located on a horizontal plane, either standing on the floor or on tables or mounted on the ceiling, the switches should be placed on a horizontal plane.

Why not arrange the switches on a floor plan of the space, so it would be easy to determine which switch worked which light? I built two such arrays of switches, one for my home and one for my research laboratory.  I used a sloping plane rather than horizontal to make it easier to mount (the slope reduced the extruding surface and made the plan easier to read, but having a slope made it easier to understand the orientation). I published the story and the results in the first edition of The Design of Everyday Things (then called Psychology of Everyday Things) 25 years ago. In 1988.

See the image below which shows the floor plan, the close to horizontal plane for the switches, and the "You are here" X on the floor plan top help people orient themselves. (This is Figure 4.5 of DOET, 2013.) 

When I revised the book, I repeated the story and asked why nobody had ever followed up on the suggestion? I gave the story of my failed attempt to convince the CEO of a smart-home company to pay attention to the idea.

Ilja Golland, a German reader of DOET, just sent me the URL for a "floor plan light switch" designed by Taewon Hwang (evidently in 2011).  Hwang is identified by one website as a "Civil Engineer at Hyundai Asan, S. Korea." See the figure.

Hwang seems to have been unaware of my earlier example, and he only solved half the problem: he still mounts his switches on a vertical surface. His switches seem to be only meant as a concept sketch (much as mine), and I can find no further information about either Hwang or commercial production of the switch.  if some commercial company does decide to adopt it, I hope they place the switches on a horizontal plane (or at least a sloping one). They won't be able to patent the idea: my public disclosure in 1988 means there is prior art. Actually, the publicity surrounding Hwang's designs thereby makes it unpatentable (at least in the United States).

(Do a web search for "floorplan light switch" and see the publicity his design received.)

I'm delighted that someone else seems to have independently thought of the idea (half the idea). In fact, not only am I disappointed that no commercial maker of electrical panels and light switches has thought of following up on this idea, but that no other people have "independently" invented it. 

Lately, I have been getting a lot of questions about Healthcare.gov. People want to know why it cost between two and four times as much money to create a broken website than to build the original iPhone. It’s an excellent question. However, in my experience, understanding why a project went wrong tends to be far less valuable than understanding why a project went right. So, rather than explaining why paying anywhere between $300 million and $600 million to build the first iteration of Healthcare.gov was a bad idea, I would like to focus attention on a model for software-enabled government that works and could serve as a template for a more effective U.S. government.

Early in my career as a venture capitalist, we invested in Skype and I went on the board. One of the many interesting aspects of Skype was that it was based in Estonia, a small country with a difficult history. Over the centuries, Estonia has been invaded by many countries including Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and, most recently, the Soviet Union. Now independent but well aware of their past, the Estonian people are humble, pragmatic, and proud of their freedom, but dubious of overly optimistic forecasts. In some ways, they have the ideal culture for technology adoption: hopeful, yet appropriately skeptical.

Supported by this culture, the Estonian government has built the technology platform that everyone wishes we had here. To explain how they did it, I asked an Estonian and one of our Entrepreneurs in Residence, Sten Tamkivi, to tell the story. His response is below.

— Ben Horowitz, co-founder and partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz

***

Estonia may not show up on Americans’ radar too often. It is a tiny country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population. As a friend from India recently quipped, “What is there to govern?”

What makes this tiny country interesting in terms of governance is not just that the people can elect their parliament online or get tax overpayments back within two days of filing their returns. It is also that this level of service for citizens is not the result of the government building a few websites. Instead, Estonians started by redesigning their entire information infrastructure from the ground up with openness, privacy, security, and ‘future-proofing’ in mind.

The first building block of e-government is telling citizens apart. This sounds blatantly obvious, but alternating between referring to a person by his social security number, taxpayer number, and other identifiers doesn’t cut it. Estonia uses a simple, unique ID methodology across all systems, from paper passports to bank records to government offices and hospitals. A citizen with the personal ID code 37501011234 is a male born in the 20th century (3) in year ’75 on January 1 as the 123rd baby of that day. The number ends with a computational checksum to easily detect typos.

For these identified citizens to transact with each other, Estonia passed the Digital Signatures Act in 2000. The state standardized a national Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which binds citizen identities to their cryptographic keys, and now doesn’t care if any Tiit and Toivo (to use common Estonian names) sign a contract in electronic form with certificates or plain ink on paper. A signature is a signature in the eyes of the law.

As a quirky side effect, this foundational law also forced all decentralized government systems to become digital “by market demand.” No part of the Estonian government can turn down a citizen’s digitally signed document and demand a paper copyinstead. As citizens opt for convenience, bureaucrats see a higher inflow of digital forms and are self-motivated to invest in systems that will help them manage the process. Yet a social worker in a small village can still provide the same service with no big investment by handling the small number of digitally signed email attachments the office receives.

To prevent this system from becoming obsolete in the future, the law did not lock in the technical nuances of digital signatures. In fact, implementation has been changing over time. Initially, Estonia put a microchip in the traditional ID cards issued to every citizen for identification and domestic travel inside the European Union. The chip carries two certificates: one for legal signatures and the other for authentication when using a website or service that recognizes the government's identification system (online banking, for example). Every person over 15 is required to have an ID card, and there are now over 1.2 million active cards. That’s close to 100-percent penetration of the population.

As mobile adoption in Estonia rapidly approached the current 144 percent (the third-highest in Europe), digital signatures adapted too. Instead of carrying a smartcard reader with their computer, Estonians can now get a Mobile ID-enabled SIM card from their telecommunications operator. Without installing any additional hardware or software, they can access secure systems and affix their signatures by simply typing PIN codes on their mobile phone.

As of this writing, between ID cards and mobile phones, more than a million Estonians have authenticated 230 million times and given 140 million legally binding signatures. Besides the now-daily usage of this technology for commercial contracts and bank transactions, the most high-profile use case has been elections. Since becoming the first country in the world to allow online voting nationwide in 2005, Estonia has used the system for both parliamentary and European Parliament elections. During parliamentary elections in 2011, online voting accounted for 24 percent of all votes. (Citizens voted from 105 countries in total; I submitted my vote from California.)

To accelerate innovation, the state tendered building and securing the digital signature-certificate systems to private parties, namely a consortium led by local banks and telecoms. And that's not where the public-private partnerships end: Public and private players can access the same data-exchange system (dubbed X-Road), enabling truly integrated e-services.

A prime example is the income-tax declarations Estonians “fill” out. Quote marks are appropriate here, because when an average Estonian opens the submission form once a year, it usually looks more like a review wizard: “next -> next -> next -> submit.” This is because data has been moving throughout the year. When employers report employment taxes every month, their data entries are linked to people’s tax records too. Charitable donations reported by non-profits are recorded as deductions for the giver in the same fashion. Tax deductions on mortgages are registered from data interchange with commercial banks. And so forth. Not only is the income-tax rate in the country a flat 21 percent, but Estonians get tax overpayments put back on their bank accounts (digitally transferred, of course) within two days of submitting their forms.

This liquid movement of data between systems relies on a fundamental principle to protect people’s privacy: Without question, it is always the citizen who owns his or her data and retains the right to control access to that data. For example, in the case of fully digital health records and prescriptions, people can granularly assign access rights to the general practitioners and specialized doctors of their choosing. And in scenarios where they can’t legally block the state from seeing their information, as with Estonian e-policemen using real-time terminals, they at least get a record of who accessed their data and when. If an honest citizen learns that an official has been snooping on them without a valid reason, the person can file an inquiry and get the official fired.

Moving everything online does generate security risks on not just a personal level, but also a systematic and national level. Estonia, for instance, was the target of The Cyberwar of 2007, when well-coordinated botnet attacks following some political street riots targeted government, media, and financial sites and effectively cut the country off from Internetconnections with the rest of the world for several hours. Since then, however, Estonia has become the home of NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has become one of the most vocal cybersecurity advocates on the world stage.

There is also a flip-side to the fully digitized nature of the Republic of Estonia: having the bureaucratic machine of a country humming in the cloud increases the economic cost of a potential physical assault on the state. Rather than ceasing to operating in the event of an invasion, the government could boot up a backup replica of the digital state and host it in some other friendly European territory. Government officials would be quickly re-elected, important decisions made, documents issued, business and property records maintained, births and deaths registered, and even taxes filed by those citizens who still had access to the Internet.

The Estonian story is certainly special. The country achieved re-independence after 50 unfortunate years of Soviet occupation in 1991, having missed much of the technological progress made by the Western world in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. -'80s, including checkbooks and mainframe computers. Nevertheless, the country jumped right on the mid-’90s bandwagon of TCP/IP-enabled web apps. During this social reset, Estonians also decided to throw their former communist leaders overboard and elect new leadership, often ministers in their late-20s capable of disruptive thinking.

But then again, all this was 20 years ago. Estonia has by many macroeconomic and political standards become a “boring European state,” stable and predictable, if still racing to close the gap with Old Europe from its time behind the Iron Curtain. Still, Estonia is a start-up country—not just by life stage, but by mindset.

And this is what United States, along with many other countries struggling to get the Internet, could learn from Estonia: the mindset. The willingness to get the key infrastructure right and continuously re-invent it. Before you build a health-insurance site, you need to look at what key components must exist for such a service to function optimally: signatures, transactions, legal frameworks, and the like.

Ultimately, the states that create these kinds of environments will be best positioned to attract the world’s increasingly mobile citizens. 

Inmates sit in the county jail in Williston, N.D. on July 26, 2013.Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Allegations of rape and sexual assault involving prison inmates are increasing, and nearly half of those assaults are committed against prisoners by correctional officers, according to a new report issued by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Prison and jail administrators reported 8,763 cases of alleged sexual abuse of inmates 2011, representing an increase of 4 percent from the 8,404 that were reported in 2010 and an 11 percent jump from the 7,855 cases reported in 2009, the report said.

The report released late last week defined sexual victimization as any non-consensual sexual acts, abusive touching, threats and verbal sexual harassment. It involved surveying federal and state prisons, private prisons, local jails, military prisons and jails located in Indian country, all of which hold a collective 1.97 million inmates.

The issue of prison rape has received heightened attention since Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, a federal law calling for prisons and jails to keep detailed records of incidents of rape to be published by the government annually.

This year’s report, which crunched data from 2011, said that 10 percent of the cases reported that year were “substantiated,” meaning that they were confirmed to have happened after an investigation was launched.

That means 90 percent of the cases reported by inmates but were not substantiated. The report did not clarify whether those cases had also been investigated and then dismissed.

Some 49 percent of the incidents that year involved prison staff members committing what the report called “sexual misconduct,” or otherwise sexually harassing inmates, with the other 51 percent of cases comprising inmates assaulting fellow inmates.

Among the substantiated staff-on-inmate cases in 2011, 54 percent were committed by women, the report said. From 2009 to 2011, 84 percent of the substantiated staff-on-inmate cases involved a sexual relationship with a female staff member that “appeared to be willing,” compared to 37 percent of the cases involving male staff members during the same time period. The report noted, however, that regardless of whether the sexual relationship between an inmate and a correctional officer was consensual, it was illegal.

In the cases of sexual assault or “willing” sexual relationships with staff members, more than three-quarters of the correctional officers resigned or were fired, and just 45 percent were arrested or prosecuted.

Women prisoners appeared to experience disproportionate numbers of sexual assaults; while they represented 7 percent of state and federal prison inmates from 2009 to 2001, 22 percent of inmate-on-inmate cases involved women, as they did among 33 percent of staff-on-inmate incidents.

Two-thirds of the inmates who had been sexually assaulted by other inmates received medical examinations, and one-third were given rape kits.

The report did not indicate whether the increased incidence of alleged rapes and sexual assaults in prisons and jails might have been due to more reporting by inmates, or to heightened awareness of the problem by prison staff.

BJS statistician Allan Beck, who was a co-author of the report, told Reuters that a study from May 2013 (PDF) conducted by the same agency came up with much larger numbers, tallying some 80,000 inmate allegations of sexual abuse or assault during 2011 and 2012.

“Of course we find much higher rates of sexual victimization through inmates' self-reports than what comes through in the official records," he told Reuters.

Originally found on ConversionXL.com

In a study by Google in August of 2012, researchers found that not only will users judge websites as beautiful or not within 1/50th — 1/20th of a second, but also that “visually complex” websites are consistently rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts

Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites — those with layouts commonly associated with sites of its category — with simple visual design were rated as the most beautiful across the board.

In other words, the study found the simpler the design, the better.

But why?

In this article, we’ll examine why things like cognitive fluency and visual information processing theory can play a critical role in simplifying your web design & how a simpler design could lead to more conversions.

We’ll also look at a few case studies of sites that simplified their design, and how it improved their conversion rate, as well as give a few pointers to simplify your own design.

What is a Prototypical Website?

If I said “furniture” what image pops up in your mind? If you’re like 95% of people, you think of a chair. If I ask what color represents “boy” you think “blue”, girl = pink, car = sedan, bird = robin, etc.

Prototypicality is the basic mental image your brain creates to categorize everything you interact with. From furniture to websites, your brain has created a template for how things should look and feel.

Online, prototypicality breaks down into smaller categories. You have a different, but specific mental image for social networks, e-commerce sites, and blogs — and if any of those particular websites are missing something from your mental image, you reject the site on conscious and subconscious levels.

If I said “Online clothing store for trendy 20-somethings” you might envision something like this:

image credit

This follows the “online clothing store” prototype so closely, that it shares many attributes with the wireframe for an online clothing store that sells hip-hop clothing.

image credit

Neither lacks originality, and it’s unlikely they “stole” from each other. Instead they’re playing into what your basic expectations are of what an e-commerce site should be.

What do you Mean By Cognitive Fluency?

The basic idea behind cognitive fluency is that the brain prefers to think about things that are easy to think about.

That’s why you prefer visiting sites where you instinctively know where everything is at, and you know what actions you’re supposed to take.

Cognitive fluency is an stems from another area of behavior known as The Mere Exposure Effect, which basically states that the more times you’re exposed to a stimulus, the more you prefer it.

image source

Again, the rules are the same online.

It’s “familiar” for blogs to have opt-ins on the right sidebar, or e-commerce sites to feature a large hi-resolution image with an attention grabbing headline & the company logo on the top left hand side of the screen.

If your visitors are conditioned to certain characteristics being the standard for a particular category of site, deviating from that could subconsciously put you in the “less beautiful” category.

Here are a handful of e-commerce sites. See if you notice any similarities.

Warning: Whatever you do, for the love of GOD, don’t take what I’m saying as “do what everyone else is doing.” If you’re not careful, you could really hurt yourself that way.

It’s important to know what design choices are prototypical for a site in your category, but it’s more important to find evidence that supports those design choices resulting in some sort of lift.

A lot of designers make bad choices. Without doing the research, you could make them too. For example, many e-commerce sites use automatic image sliders to display products, but study after study shows that automatic sliders tank conversions.

What Happens When You Meet Basic Expectations? — A Case Study

In the three images above, everything you’d expect from an ecommerce site is exactly where it’s supposed to be. Even if you’ve never been to the site, there’s inherent “credibility” to the design.

With a high level of fluency, a site will feel familiar enough that visitors don’t need spend mental effort scrutinizing and can instead focus on why they’re on your site in the first place.

When the experience is dis-fluent however, you feel it immediately. Take online tie retailer, Skinnyties.com, who didn’t really look like an e-commerce site until their redesign in October 2012.

Before:

After:

A few key changes that lead to huge results:

• Follows prototypical e-commerce layout themes
• Much more “open” with whitespace.
• Images feature a single product with high-resolution pictures & contrasting colors.

Check out the full case study on this particular redesign, as it shows what is truly possible when updating a site to “fit in” with current prototypical standards.

These are the results of the redesign are staggering for only 2.5 weeks after the launch:

The redesign itself, while pretty, isn’t doing anything groundbreaking. It plays exactly into the expectations of what a modern online clothing retailer should be. It’s “open”, responsive, and has a consistent design language across all of the product pages.

But when contrasted with the old site, it’s very clear that the lack of these common elements were preventing buyers from making purchases on the site.

What Visual Information Processing Has To Do With Site Complexity

In this joint study by Harvard, University of Maryland, and University of Colorado, researchers found strong mathematical correlations for “aesthetically pleasing” between different demographics — For example, participants with PhD’s did not like high colorful websites — but there were no guidelines that emerged for universal appeal.

The only thing that was universal was that the more visually complex a website was, the lower it’s visual appeal.

(Sidebar: if you wish to take the test, you can do it here)

Why Simple is Scientifically Easier To Process

The reason less “visually complex” websites are considered more beautiful is partly because low complexity websites don’t require the eyes and brain to physically work as hard to decode, store and process the information.

Basically, your retina converts visual information from the real world into electrical impulses. Those impulses are then routed through the appropriate photoreceptor cells to transmit the color and light information to the brain.

The more color and light variations on the page (visual complexity) the more work the eye has to do to send information to the brain.

Every Element Communicates Subtle Information

image source

This is why it’s important when designing a website to remember every element –typeography, logo, and color selection — communicates subtle information about the brand.

When these elements don’t do their job, the webmaster often compensates by adding unnecessary copy and/or images, thus adding to the visual complexity of the website, and detracting from the overall aesthetic.

Optimizing a page for visual information processing — specifically simplifying information’s journey from eye to brain — is about communicating as much as you can in as few elements as possible.

While that’s an article all on it’s own, consider MailChimp’s logo redesign as food for thought.

When they decided make the brand grow up, they didn’t add the usual “we’ve been doing email since 2001, 3 million people trust us, here’s why we’re awesome, blah blah blah”

Instead, they tightened up the writing, simplified the website — the top headline simply reads “Send Better Email” — and added an even simpler explainer animation of the core product.

Even though this was part of a bigger growth strategy, the results are still impressive, over a million new users have been added since June, when the new logo was first debuted.

”Working Memory” & The Holy Grail of Conversion

What all this simplicity is leading to is what happens once visual information finds it’s way to the brain.

According to the famous research of psychologist George A Miller of Princeton, the average adult brain is able to store between 5-9 “chunks” of information within in the short term, working memory.

Working memory is the part of your brain that temporarily stores and processes information in the course of a few seconds. It’s what allows you to focus attention, resist distractions, and most importantly, guides your decision making.

image source

Everything we’ve been talking about up to this point is to reduce the amount of “noise” that makes it’s way into the working memory.

On a “low complexity, highly prototypical website”, the 5-9 “chunks” the working memory tries to process are things like guarantees, product descriptions, prices or offers. When the working memory can stay focused on fixing the problem, it will try and solve the problem as quickly as possible.

Deviation Causes Disengagement

When you deviate from a person’s expectations — the price was higher than expected, the color scheme and symmetry were off, the site didn’t load fast enough, the photos weren’t high enough resolution — the working memory processes those disfluent “chunks” instead of what matters.

That’s because the working memory calls the long term memory to use what it already knows to perform the task. When the long term memory can’t aid in processing the information, flow is broken& the working memory disengages and moves on.

That’s why it’s vital you understand your visitor’s level of exposure — not just for sites in your category, but to websites in general -If you want to “hack” their working memory with design.

The blogs they read, the sites they shop on, their browser, age, gender & physical location, all hint at how will impact their level of familiarity on first impression.

Conclusion

If the visitor can’t rely on their previous experience, they’re not thinking about how innovative your site is. They’re just left wondering why things aren’t where it’s “supposed to be.” Not the best frame of mind if you want them to buy stuff.

Bonus: 7 Things To Do When Planning A Simpler Site.

1. Research your audience and the sites they visit the most. Look for case studies on design changes from said sites & how those resulted in improvement is key areas.

2. Create a mashup of all those “working” components for your own site.

3. Obey the rules of cognitive fluency when you lay out your design. Put things where your visitors have grown accustomed to finding them.

4. Rely on your own colors, logo, and typeface to communicate clearly and subtly. Don’t add copy and/or images unless it communicates something your visitor actually cares about.

5. Keep it as simple as possible — one large image vs a bunch of little ones, one column, instead of three — utilize as much white space as possible.

6. Double check to make sure your site fits the public expectation in pricing, aesthetics, speed, etc.

7. Remember that “prototypical” doesn’t mean that every aspect of your site should fit that mold.

Don’t think of your site as some unique snowflake piece of art. Instead make it a composite of all the best stuff.

Your visitors will love you for it.

Featured image credit

For more great research based, action oriented content check out ConversionXL.com

U.S. businesses have never had it so good.

Corporate cash piles have never been bigger, either in dollar terms or as a share of the economy.

The labor market, meanwhile, is still millions of jobs short of where it was before the global financial crisis first erupted over six years ago.

Coincidence?

Not in the slightest, according to Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs:

Companies have not been unable to raise prices much because of the economic recovery has been fragile. But they’ve still managed to boost profits beyond anything ever seen before because they’ve got away with employing as few workers as possible at as low a rate as possible.

Compare and contrast these two charts:

So, corporate profits are their highest ever and wage growth is near its lowest in half a century. But don’t expect the transfer of that cash from businesses to workers to start any time soon, says Hatzius:

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a wildly successful protocol. However, the HTTP/1.1 message format ([HTTP-p1], Section 3) is optimized for implementation simplicity and accessibility, not application performance. As such it has several characteristics that have a negative overall effect on application performance.

In particular, HTTP/1.0 only allows one request to be outstanding at a time on a given connection. HTTP/1.1 pipelining only partially addressed request concurrency and suffers from head-of-line blocking. Therefore, clients that need to make many requests typically use multiple connections to a server in order to reduce latency.

Furthermore, HTTP/1.1 header fields are often repetitive and verbose, which, in addition to generating more or larger network packets, can cause the small initial TCP congestion window to quickly fill. This can result in excessive latency when multiple requests are made on a single new TCP connection.

This document addresses these issues by defining an optimized mapping of HTTP's semantics to an underlying connection. Specifically, it allows interleaving of request and response messages on the same connection and uses an efficient coding for HTTP header fields. It also allows prioritization of requests, letting more important requests complete more quickly, further improving performance.

The resulting protocol is designed to be more friendly to the network, because fewer TCP connections can be used, in comparison to HTTP/1.x. This means less competition with other flows, and longer-lived connections, which in turn leads to better utilization of available network capacity.

Finally, this encapsulation also enables more scalable processing of messages through use of binary message framing.

HTTP/2 uses the same "http" and "https" URI schemes used by HTTP/1.1. HTTP/2 shares the same default port numbers: 80 for "http" URIs and 443 for "https" URIs. As a result, implementations processing requests for target resource URIs like http://example.org/foo or https://example.com/bar are required to first discover whether the upstream server (the immediate peer to which the client wishes to establish a connection) supports HTTP/2.

The means by which support for HTTP/2 is determined is different for "http" and "https" URIs. Discovery for "http" URIs is described in Section 3.2. Discovery for "https" URIs is described in Section 3.3.

GET /default.htm HTTP/1.1
Host: server.example.com
Connection: Upgrade, HTTP2-Settings
Upgrade: h2
HTTP2-Settings: <base64url encoding of HTTP/2 SETTINGS payload>

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 243
Content-Type: text/html
...

HTTP/1.1 101 Switching Protocols
Connection: Upgrade
Upgrade: h2
[ HTTP/2 connection ...

This specification defines a number of frame types, each identified by a unique 8-bit type code. Each frame type serves a distinct purpose either in the establishment and management of the connection as a whole, or of individual streams.

The transmission of specific frame types can alter the state of a connection. If endpoints fail to maintain a synchronized view of the connection state, successful communication within the connection will no longer be possible. Therefore, it is important that endpoints have a shared comprehension of how the state is affected by the use any given frame. Accordingly, while it is expected that new frame types will be introduced by extensions to this protocol, only frames defined by this document are permitted to alter the connection state.

 0 1 2 3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
 | [Pad High(8)] | [Pad Low (8)] | Data (*) .
 +-+-------------------------------------------------------------+
 . Data (*) ...
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Padding (*) ...
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+

 0 1 2 3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
 |X| Priority (31) |
 +-+-------------------------------------------------------------+

 0 1 2 3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
 | Error Code (32) |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+

 0 1 2 3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
 |Identifier (8) | Value (32) ...
 +---------------+-----------------------------------------------+
 ...Value |
 +---------------+

 0 1 2 3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
 |X| Promised-Stream-ID (31) |
 +-+-------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Header Block Fragment (*) ...
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+

 0 1 2 3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
 | |
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 | |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+

 0 1 2 3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
 |X| Last-Stream-ID (31) |
 +-+-------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Error Code (32) |
 +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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 +---------------------------------------------------------------+

 0 1 2 3
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
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HTTP/2 is intended to be as compatible as possible with current web-based applications. This means that, from the perspective of the server business logic or application API, the features of HTTP are unchanged. To achieve this, all of the application request and response header semantics are preserved, although the syntax of conveying those semantics has changed. Thus, the rules from HTTP/1.1 ([HTTP-p1], [HTTP-p2], [HTTP-p4], [HTTP-p5], [HTTP-p6], and [HTTP-p7]) apply with the changes in the sections below.

 GET /resource HTTP/1.1 HEADERS
 Host: example.org ==> + END_STREAM
 Accept: image/jpeg + END_HEADERS
 :method = GET
 :scheme = https
 :authority = example.org
 :path = /resource
 accept = image/jpeg

 HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified HEADERS
 ETag: "xyzzy" ===> + END_STREAM
 Expires: Thu, 23 Jan ... + END_HEADERS
 :status = 304
 etag: "xyzzy"
 expires: Thu, 23 Jan ...

 POST /resource HTTP/1.1 HEADERS
 Host: example.org ==> - END_STREAM
 Content-Type: image/jpeg + END_HEADERS
 Content-Length: 123 :method = POST
 :scheme = https
 {binary data} :authority = example.org
 :path = /resource
 content-type = image/jpeg
 content-length = 123
 DATA
 + END_STREAM
 {binary data}

 HTTP/1.1 200 OK HEADERS
 Content-Type: image/jpeg ==> - END_STREAM
 Content-Length: 123 + END_HEADERS
 :status = 200
 {binary data} content-type = image/jpeg
 content-length = 123
 DATA
 + END_STREAM
 {binary data}

 HTTP/1.1 200 OK HEADERS
 Content-Type: image/jpeg ===> - END_STREAM
 Transfer-Encoding: chunked + END_HEADERS
 TE: trailers :status = 200
 content-length = 123
 123 content-type = image/jpeg
 {binary data}
 0 DATA
 Foo: bar - END_STREAM
 {binary data}
 HEADERS
 + END_STREAM
 + END_HEADERS
 foo: bar

Google is shelling out $400 million to buy a secretive artificial intelligence company called DeepMind.

Google confirmed the deal after Re/code inquired about it, but declined to specify a price.

Based in London, DeepMind was founded by games prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, along with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

This is in large part an artificial intelligence talent acquisition, and Google CEO Larry Page led the deal himself, sources said. According to online bios, Hassabis in particular is quite a talent, a child prodigy in chess who was later called “probably the best games player in history” by the Mind Sports Olympiad.

DeepMind has only a landing page for a website where it describes its business as building learning algorithms for simulations, e-commerce and games. Profiles on LinkedIn indicate the company is about three years old.

Sources said Founders Fund is a major investor in DeepMind, along with Horizons Ventures. Skype and Kazaa developer Jaan Tallinn was an investor and advisor (not a founder, as we initially described him).

Other Google AI experts include Jeff Dean and Anna Patterson. The company also recently hired Geoffrey Hinton part-time.

Update: Though DeepMind may not be a household name in tech, sources in the artificial intelligence community describe the company as a formidable AI player and say it has been aggressively recruiting in the space. One source said DeepMind has a team of at least 50 people and has secured more than $50 million in funding. This person described DeepMind as “the last large independent company with a strong focus on artificial intelligence,” and said it competed with companies like Google, Facebook and Baidu for talent.

Multiple sources said the company has been developing a variety of approaches to AI, and applying them to various potential products including a recommendation system for e-commerce.

After much deliberation, the winners of the Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition are finally selected. There are two different award categories. The winners of the first category are those submissions that produced the largest error with the smallest amount of source code. These entries contain a multiplier number, which is just the size of the error message divided by the size of the source code. The second category is artistic merit.

Some of the code samples shown will overflow when displayed on the web. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Biggest error, category Anything

Name: Turtles all the way down
Author: Ed Hanway
Multiplier: 5.9 billion

This entry is the best implementation of the most common pattern, the double include self. Here’s what it looks like:

#include ".//.//.//.//jeh.cpp"
#include "jeh.cpp"
`

This implementation produced almost six times the amount of error messages of the second best entry of the same type.

Biggest error, Category Plain

Name: y u no backreference?
Author: Chris Hopman
Multiplier: 790 million

The rules permitted includes in the plain category, so obviously the double include was used in this category as well.

#include "set>.cpp"
#include "set>.cpp"

Biggest error, category Bare Hands

Name: Const Variadic Templates
Author: Marc Aldorasi
Multiplier: 657 million

The bare hands category did not allow for any use of the preprocessor, which lead most people to use recursive or variadic template initiations. This entry was the most compact of the lot.

template<class T,class...>class C{C<T*const,T,C>a;C<T,C>b;};C<int>c;

Best cheat

Name: What's perl?
Author: Chris Hopman

There were several interesting cheat attempts in this competition. For example did you know that in C++ digraph expansion happens after line continuation expansion? We sure did not.

Many tried to exploit a division by zero bug in the verification script. One submission even had a patch for this, which tried to changed the evaluator script to make their entry evaluate to infinite error. The best cheat went in a completely different direction, however.

The actual code consisted of only one space. Since this entry was in the anything category, it was accompanied by a list of header search directories. That file looked like this.

/usr/include; perl -e "@c=\"x\"x(2**16); while(1) {print @c}" 1>&2

When passed to the C++ compiler invocation line, this allows the shell code to escape the test harness sandbox. Extra credit for using Perl, which is the only language less readable than C++ templates.

Most surprising

Name: templates and nested classes are not best practice
Author: Aaron Grothe

This piece of code looks innocent but explodes in a completely unexpected manner. We also tested this with Clang, which detects correctly the missing semicolon, after which it anyway tries to evaluate the infinite template recursion and eventually segfaults. This entry gives a glimpse on the kinds of issues an IDE’s code completion engine needs to guard against.

template<class T>class L{L<T*>operator->()};L<int>i=i->

Most lifelike

Name: Bjarne's nightmare
Author: Victor Zverovich

Suppose you are given a task of adding some new functionality to an existing code base. You have been told that the guy who wrote it was “really smart” and that his code is of “enterprise quality”. You check out the code and open a random file in an editor. It appears on the screen. After just one microsecond of looking at the code you have lost your will to live and want nothing more than to beat your head against the table until you lose consciousness.

This entry could be that code. We’re glad we only needed to measure it rather than to understand and alter it.

#include <map>
#include <algorithm>
template<class T,class U>void f(T,U u){std::vector<std::vector<T>>v;auto i=end(v);find(i,i,u);find(i,i,&u);U*p,**q,r(),s(U);find(i,i,&p);find(i,i,&q);find(i,i,r);find(i,i,&r);find(i,i,s);find(i,i,&s);}template<class T>void f(T t){f(t,0);f(t,0l);f(t,0u);f(t,0ul);f(t,0ll);f(t,.0);f(t,.0l);f(t,.0f);f(t,' ');f(t,L' ');f(t,u' ');f(t,U' ');f(t,"");f(t,L"");}int main(){f(0);f(0l);f(0u);f(0ul);f(0ll);f(.0);f(.0l);f(.0f);f(' ');f(L' ');f(u' ');f(U' ');f("");f(L"");f(u"");f(U"");}

Barest hands

Title: whatever
Author: John Regehr

This entry does not have any template definitions or include recursion and yet it put up an admirable fight. This serves as an important reminder to all of us: when used correctly even the simplest of tools can be used to build impressive results.

struct x struct z<x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(x(y,x(y><y*,x(y*w>v<y*,w,x{}

Epilogue

We would like to thank all people who participated in the competition. We hope that all participants as well as you readers have enjoyed this experience.

The final question now remaining is whether there will be a second TGCEEC next year?

The answer to this is simple: yes, if you, the people, demand it.

Till we meet again.

written on Monday, January 27, 2014

The python packaging infrastructure has long received criticism from both Python developers as well as system administrators. For a long time even the Python community in itself could not agree on what exactly the tools to use were. We had distutils, setuptools, distribute, distutils2 as basic distribution mechanisms and then virtualenv, buildout, easy_install and pip as high level tools to deal with this mess.

As distribution formats before setuptools we had source files and for Windows there were some binary distributions in form of MSIs. On Linux we had bdist_dumb which was historically broken and bdist_rpm which only worked on Red Hat based systems. But even bdist_rpm did not actually work good enough that people were actually using it.

A few years ago PJE stepped up and tried to fix the initial distribution problems by providing the mix of setuptools + pkg_resources to improve distutils and to provide metadata for Python packages. In addition to that he wrote the easy_install tool to install packages. In lack of a distribution format that supported the required metadata, the egg format was invented.

Python eggs are basically zip packages that include the python package plus the metadata that is required. Even though many people probably never built eggs intentionally, the egg metadata is still alive and kicking and everybody deploys things through setuptools now.

Now unfortunately a few years ago the community split in half and part of the community declared the death to binary distributions and eggs. When that happened the replacement for easy_install (pip) stopped accepting eggs altogether.

Fast forward a few years later. The removal of binary distributions has become noticed very painfully as people started more and more cloud deployment and having to recompile C libraries on every single machine is no fun. Because eggs at that point were poorly understood I assume, they were reimplemented on top of newer PEPs and called wheels.

As a general information before we dive in: I'm assuming that you are in all cases operating out of a virtualenv.

$ python setup.py bdist_wheel

importosfromsetuptoolsimportsetupfromsetuptools.distimportDistributionclassBinaryDistribution(Distribution):defis_pure(self):returnFalsesetup(...,include_package_data=True,distclass=BinaryDistribution,)

$ pip install package-1.0-cp27-none-macosx_10_7_intel.whl

$ pip install --no-index --find-links=path/to/wheels package==1.0

pip wheel --wheel-dir=path/to/wheels package==1.0

#!/bin/sh
WHEEL_DIR=path/to/wheels
DOWNLOAD_CACHE_DIR=path/to/cache
rm -rf $DOWNLOAD_CACHE_DIR
mkdir -p $DOWNLOAD_CACHE_DIR
pip wheel --use-wheel -w "$WHEEL_DIR" -f "$WHEEL_DIR" \
 --download-cache "$DOWNLOAD_CACHE_DIR" package==1.0
for x in "$DOWNLOAD_CACHE_DIR/"*.whl; do
 mv "$x" "$WHEEL_DIR/${x##*%2F}"
done

$ virtualenv devpi-venv
$ devpi-venv/bin/pip install --ugprade pip wheel setuptools devpi
$ ln -s `pwd`/devpi-venv/bin/devpi ~/.local/bin
$ ln -s `pwd`/devpi-venv/bin/devpi-server ~/.local/bin

$ devpi-server --start

$ devpi use http://localhost:3141
$ devpi user -c $USER password=
$ devpi login $USER --password=
$ devpi index -c yourproject

$ export PIP_INDEX_URL=http://localhost:3141/$USER/yourproject/+simple/

$ devpi use yourproject
$ devpi upload --no-vcs --formats=bdist_wheel

setup(...classifier=['Private :: Do Not Upload'],)

This entry was taggeddeployment, python and thoughts

Pop quiz: Who has been the most influential and powerful person in pop music over the last 20 years? Britney Spears? Madonna? Michael Jackson? Beyonce? Simon Cowell? Sure, these people have all been extraordinarily successful, but what if we told you that there's one man whose musical accomplishments easily trumps all of these artists? And what if we told you that most people have probably never even heard of this person and definitely wouldn't recognize him walking down the street? Sounds impossible right? Well, if at any point in the last 20 years you've heard a song from The Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, N'Sync, Kelly Clarkson, Taylor Swift, Ace of Base, Katy Perry, Celine Dion, Bon Jovi, Adam Lambert, Carrie Underwood, Pink, Justin Bieber… then you've unwittingly been subject to the creations of a Swedish born musical genius who goes by the name of Max Martin. Believe it or not, over the past 15-20 years Max Martin has been the brains, ears and talent behind virtually every hit pop song that has been released to the screaming masses. He's personally responsible for churning out more Billboard singles than Michael Jackson and Madonna COMBINED. And since he is essentially unrecognizable to the average person, that might make him the most famous, non-famous person on the planet. This is his story.

Who is Max Martin?

This past April, the Backstreet Boys celebrated the 20-year anniversary of their career by being inducted into the Hollywood Hall of Fame. On hand to give remarks was an un-remarkable looking man named Max Martin. Martin, with his Seth Rogen-esque neck beard and hair down to his shoulders, wrote many of the BSB's hit songs. During his speech, Martin reminisced fondly of his first encounter with the Boys. He met the future superstars in a hip Stockholm restaurant back in the mid-nineties. He told them he was excited to hear them sing in the studio later that evening. In response, the band stood up and serenaded him on the spot. "I got the goosebumps. It was amazing". For millions of people around the world, this would have been the event of a lifetime. But for Martin, it was just another day in the life.

So who is Max Martin aka Martin Karl Sandberg? Was he a huge rock star in Sweden? Not really. A powerful record executive? Nope. A Svengali-like manager who knows all the secrets to success in the music business? Hardly. If he was any one of these things, it would be hard to explain why the most popular song produced by his own band, "It's Alive", has fewer than 1000 views on Youtube today.

Max Martin – Life Story

Max may not have gotten super famous with his hard rock band "It's Alive", but he did receive two important gifts from the experience: 1) When the band recorded their first only album, they hired a producer named Denniz PoP and Denniz is the person who suggested that "Martin Karl Sandberg" should change his name forever to Max Martin. 2) While recording their album, Max astutely learned all the tricks of the producing trade from Denniz. In an interview years later, Max explained: "I didn't even know what a producer did. I spent two years – day and night – in that studio trying to learn what the hell was going on."

Max Martin with Britney Spears

When "It's Alive" flopped at record stores, Martin immediately decided that he really belonged on the other side of the glass in a recording studio. He began assisting Denniz Pop as a sound engineer and song writer for all the incoming talent. One of the first projects that Martin collaborated on was fellow Swedish band Ace of Base and their 1995 album "The Bridge". This album eventually sold six million copies worldwide. As big of a success as that was, it was his next project that catapulted Martin to astronomical success. Impressed by his songwriting and producing work, an A&R executive from the record company Jive decided Max was the perfect person to work on the debut album of a fresh young boy band called The Backstreet Boys. Martin co-wrote the singles "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)," "As Long as You Love Me," and "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)", arguably the three most popular songs on the band's self-titled debut album. The album went on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Martin's career is the consistency with which he churns out the songs that find their way into the ears of millions of people around the globe. Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson, Pink, Avril Lavigne. More than half of the Backstreet Boys' 1999 album Millennium. The list goes on and on and on and on. Since 1999, Max has written or co-written 16 songs that hit #1 on Billboard. There aren't enough metaphors to properly describe his success. He's like the Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Roger Federer, Muhammad Ali, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt… of music. Here is a list of some of the biggest pop songs that Max Martin has written and produced:

Katy Perry: "I Kissed a Girl", "Teenage Dream", "California Gurls", "Roar", "Dark Horse"

Britney Spears: "Oops!… I Did It Again", "Stronger", "…Baby One More Time", "Till The World Ends"

Backstreet Boys: "Quit Playing Games With My Heart", "I Want It That Way", "Larger Than Life", "As Long As You Love Me", "Shape of my Heart"

Kelly Clarkson: "Since You've Been Gone", "My Life Would Suck Without You"

N'Sync: "Tearin' Up My Heart", "It's Gonna Be Me", "I Want You Back"

Taylor Swift: "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", "I Knew You Were Trouble", "22″

If you are a Spotify user, I compiled a playlist of Max Martin's biggest and most popular hit songs. To listen, just paste the following text into your Spotify search box:

spotify:user:bluetahoe99:playlist:0HYEI6ov3lAf87Y5EUKqdq

Max Martin ASCAP Awards

For Martin, it's the fun of the work that keeps him going: "If I did it because it was my job, and I only did it to make money, I don't think I'd still be doing it." Which isn't to say that the man behind countless hits hasn't found financial success. From the royalties and producing fees he has received from all of this fun he's been having, Max Martin has earned a personal net worth of $250 million dollars. That's right. He's worth a quarter of a billion dollars and you've probably never heard his name.

Max has won ASCAP's Songwriter of the Year award six times. His most recent #1 single is Katy Perry's "Roar" which has been nominated for several Grammys including Song of the Year. He also contributed to the album "Red" by Taylor Swift which has been nominated for Album of the Year. Whether you love the songs or hate them, whether you can admit that behind the corniness of "As Long as You Love Me" is a pop mastermind, or not, one thing is for certain: Max Martin isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe if the accolades and records keep piling up, people might actually start knowing his name and face!

Max Martin Articles

Max Savage Levenson

A recent East Coast transplant, Max is currently studying at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, where he reports on the eccentric music community of the Bay Area and the state of the Oakland School District. Before arriving in California, he lived in Baltimore and Paris, where he documented music on the page and on the screen. Follow him on Google+.

Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop game that introduced fantasy role-playing to most of the world, turns the big four-oh this weekend -- and it's showing no signs of slowing down.

While D&D is almost a recurring character on some prime time TV shows these days (hat tip to you, producers of "The Big Bang Theory"), it spent years as the calling card of the socially awkward. No matter how fun the game is, toting around bags of polyhedral dice and regularly consulting the Monster Manual for hit-point data was never a way to get in with the cool kids.

For fans, though, that never mattered. The journey into the game's imaginative world was a respite from the pressures of the real world, a chance to be the hero and save the day.

D&D wasn't the first game to explore role-playing, but it was the first to do so in a non-wargaming setting and the first to break big. Drawing upon the work of authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P Lovecraft, countless mythologies, and their own vivid imaginations, creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson launched the groundbreaking game on January 26, 1974, the best date we have for the game’s official birth.

The game hit its stride in the 1980s after the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which, between 1977 and 1979, led to three hardcover rulebooks that became indispensable to fans: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide and the Monster Manual. Further revisions came in 1989, 2000, 2003 and 2008.

To date, Dungeons & Dragons has generated well over $1 billion and has been played by over 20 million people. And that number's expected to rise this year thanks to the release of a new set of rules for the game -- the first update in six years.

The new take, called Tyranny of Dragons, is due this summer and will give players a chance to battle Tiamat, the five-headed queen of the dragons. A constant villain in D&D, Tiamat was also a key character in the memorable Dungeons & Dragons cartoon in the early 80s.

D&D's influence on pop-culture has been extensive. It was responsible for seminal video game franchises like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Pool of Radiance, and it influenced countless others, from Ultima to The Elder Scrolls. It was supported by a pair of magazines ("Dungeon" and "Dragon," naturally), and it's produced tens of millions of dollars in sales of dice, miniature characters, and other game tie-ins.

Like any new form of entertainment, it had its critics, too. With Satanic-looking demons, illustrations of topless female monsters, and a heavy emphasis on spellcasting, the game was opposed by some Christian groups, who claimed it was leading youth down the wrong path. Much like today's critics of video games, opponents sought to blame the game for many societal problems.

Psychologists later stepped in to disprove these theories, but not before Tom Hanks -- yes, THE Tom Hanks -- landed his first major lead role in the so-bad-it’s-good TV movie, “Mazes and Monsters,” in which he plays a geek who can’t separate reality from fantasy:

Despite the protests -- and the social stigma some people attached to playing D&D -- the game has continued to draw a huge audience, including celebrity fans like Mike Meyers, Vin Diesel, Stephen Colbert and even Dame Judy Dench. Actor/director Jon Favreau says the game gave him "a really strong background in imagination, storytelling, understanding how to create tone and a sense of balance."

Us too, Jon. In honor of the game's birthday, we're digging out our d20s and crumpled character sheets for a good, old-fashioned run through "The Keep on the Borderlands." How about you? Share some of your favorite D&D memories in the comments!

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