91–98 of 98 posts
This is a pretty poor attempt at copying the NY Times design for their Snow Fall project ( http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne... ). It's lacking the top nav and the typography is terrible. Generally just lacks some polish and execution.
am i the only one who found this exciting? sure, the tone and content are puff-piecey, but reading between the lines they are doing some genuinely interesting things with data acquisition and centralised control, and proving that it works on a largish scale, with measurable (not to mention large!) savings in terms of money and energy.
Anything with Microsoft in the title is trollbait I guess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an exaggeration. While Seattle is painfully distant (painful really is the word for the 520 bridge) Bellevue is right next door. Bellevue is a city of 122k people, bigger than Ann Arbor. It's no great cultural center, but it's certainly more than just Microsoft people.
And unlike Ann Arbor it has neither the diverse industrial or academic base to provide for a diverse population. Bellevue is still largely an extension of Redmond, though admittedly not as thoroughly MSFT-dominated as Redmond proper thanks to some tech presence in Kirkland. Bellevue can hope to have the diversity of Ann Arbor when they import a state school and a few cornerstone employers that aren't Microsoft or Mic…
Redmond must suck a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many campuses have you seen, that are covered in that much concrete? While greenery is great, I'd rather be able to walk to a proper park than have it in the form of a glorified berm between parking lots.
You have clearly never been to the Microsoft campus. There's trees and green everywhere, and parking, for the most part, is in a parking building or underneath the buildings. There's actually very little overground non-enclosed parking. Hell, even the photo itself doesn't have that much exposed concrete apart from the buildings themselves. You can clearly see that there's a lot of greenery surrounding buildings.
Granted the images don't show any parking structures or buildings that appear to have integrated structures. So it's quite possible the images aren't representative of the build-out you're referring to.
And, aside from the ballpark, the 'greenery' surrounding the buildings is exactly the sort of glorified berm I'm talking about: that's hardly functional greenery. It's better than none, but far less desirable than a proper park with functional spaces for laying out, taking walks, playing frisbee or catch, etc.
Kudos to Microsoft for having the ballpark though, and more is due, if it's one of several such spaces. The rest of the campus though, as characterized in those pictures, does not look great.
All the technology stuff is great, but as for this being the city of the future? Pass! It's far to spread out. It's not very walkable. There's too much space dedicated to parking. etc. It fails almost every test for being a good city. It's basically a technology enabled suburb. Gross.
Not too different from a large college campus (the U of MD was like this, with approximately the same number of people on campus). It does put a damper on cross-group communication, but it's probably better than having a collection of skyscrapers. Also, Redmond doesn't like buildings more than 3 stories tall (their fire equipment can't deal -- why MS can't buy Redmond different fire equipment is beyond me).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically, they dominate the desktop OS and office suite markets.
They didn't need the "Technically" before.