11.25.03
Posted in forum archive at 5:05 pm by
Remember Jon Johansen (can a name be more Norwegian)? He was the guy back in 1999 that created DeCSS, or the technique that circumvented DVD copy protection so that he could watch movies on his Linux computer. Well, he’s back for an encore:
Late last week, programmer Jon Johansen posted a small program called QTFairUse to his Web site, with little in the way of instruction and even less explanation. But during the next few days, it became clear that the program served as a demonstration of how to evade, if not exactly break, the anticopying technology wrapped around the songs sold by Apple in its iTunes store.
Hear that stampeed? That would be the lawyers a-comin’ runnin’.
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11.20.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:24 pm by
Right now what would probably be best if you guys could go through and list all the things that are broke, act funny, or in general a little strange. Even if it seems obvious (like the ‘Learn more’ link not linking to anything) include it. I’ve got a mental picture what’s up and what’s not, and there is some slight references in the documentation, but having a fresh eyes go through and note everything would be great. Sign up but there is no email? Bug it…
Start with the non-public homepage:
http://musicmogul.biz/index2.cfm
After a few days I’ll go through and see how my list compares. Then, with the bugs documented, we can decide how we’ll approach fixing them and in what order.
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11.17.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:25 pm by
I got this question from Raisin in an Email:
I looked over the document, wondered about a couple of things:
Are there factors other than the charts that determine what your artists earn? Such as media crossover, for example?
Crawling and parsing several sites to give a truer idea of ‘current artist earning potential’ is definately a long term goal. For example, I think it would be in the game’s best interest to crawl a site like MTV.C, taking note of the number of times a certain Artist’s name is mentioned in new articles, forums, etc. It follows that artists that are ‘hot’ would be the most discussed.
If the entire web was built upon XML this wouldn’t be that hard to do. It would involve downloading the site’s schema and then grabbing the info. Unfortunately the number of sites that provide XML access, or even RSS feeds, for these purposes are relatively small. This means that a custom agent must be built for each site that we wish to mine. This bot must be customized for the particular way that site automatically generates its content. For example, after careful study it was determined that Billboard encloses all artist information in a custom set of tags:
[code:1:dafaf2bcb4]<FONT face=geneva,arial size=-1>artist name here,album name here</FONT>[/code:1:dafaf2bcb4]
Using that information, we tell the agent to search the site and save all text between the <FONT ...> and </FONT> into an array. A later process takes that array and breaks down the artist and album info into different fields, being careful to discared all names with 'Soundtrak', 'Featuring', or 'Various Artists' in the info (to reduce database entry complexity and avoid having compilations like WOW 18 appearing in the listings).
Sorry, that got king of long. Point is, only after the other systems are up and running I'd like to expand to other sources to 'round out' the artist earnings.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 5:50 pm by
These things are totally up to you guys if you want to read them. While I do have tones of material (ok, maybe 50MB) of stuff I could put up I thought this stuff might be the most pertinant right away:
Chris Taylor’s Example Game Spec Documentaion (Word Doc)
Everquest Economics – Important study for any game with an Economy (pdf)
How to Keep Score in a Multiplayer Environment (html)
Player Motivations in Games (html)
I’d love to hear any comments you guys might have.
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11.14.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:50 pm by
This is the Music Mogul Spec Document. It is meant to be a living document frequently updated as various aspects of the project are updated.
*Comments on one or all of its parts should be brought up in their own threads.
*As changes are needed the Spec Document thread will be unlocked, updated, and relocked to keep the document on topic and current. If changes are made after discussion in another thread the thread will be linked to from the changed portion of the spec document.
*Each individual section will have its own post so that individual pieces of the document can be referenced in other threads.
*The format of the following document is based on the Game Design Document created by Chris Taylor, founder of Gas Powered Games. He was the primary lead on such games as Total Annihilation and Dungeon Siege.
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11.12.03
Posted in forum archive at 4:09 pm by
Since Red Hat announced that they’re now only going to make OS’s for big boys, they have left the open source end user with Fedora, their stripped down Linux variant. From the initial reviews, it looks as if all the dev time will be going toward the paying parent project.
I wanted to install the Macromedia Flash plugin and I first downloaded the tar.gz version which installs its two files via a bash script. Problem was, the script wouldn’t run correctly. It would tell me over and over again that the directory I was trying to install is not valid (I tried both the existing /usr/lib/mozilla and /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4.1, no joy). I wonder, didn’t Red Hat’s QA actually test common proprietary software that many of its users will want to install? I mean, by my estimation there are not more than 10-15 commonly-installed popular proprietary applications in this category, so it should be no big deal to test them all. Anyway, the story doesn’t end there. I read the script itself and saw that all it does is copy these two files (.xpt and .so) to the right directory and changes permissions with chmod 755. So, I did it by hand, logged out and back in again, and still none of my browsers would work with the plugin (plugins are enabled).
Ugh. It’s almost enough to make a Window’s user snigger.
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11.09.03
Posted in forum archive at 1:53 pm by
I just ran across an, hereto, unknown subcategory of games known as PBeM’s (Play By eMail). Nato and I had done some work on what I realize now was a PBeM game (Takamo) but I had no idea that the genre was big enough to warrant its own acronym.
So anyway, I discovered the PBeM game Typhon Station while following a link off of PVPonline. It appears to be a PBeM game based on Star Trek, of which the front page claims there are a lot of (I got lost just reading the introduction – I don’t think the game was meant to those who attempt to keep themselves sanatised of Star Trek geekdom).
So how about it? Does anybody here play these sort of games? Ever tried one? What did you think?
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11.04.03
Posted in forum archive at 7:38 pm by
…would anybody hear it? Seriously, I’ve got several tracks that I’m going to be releasing soon and I’d like to know the best way to do it. Here’s what I’m looking at:
-MP3:
Pro: It’s universal, everybody understands how to download/play one
Con: The decade old codec offers lousy compression; higher bandwidth for lower quality
-WMA:
Pro: Great compression. Almost universal because it’s bundled with Windows
Con: It’s a ‘closed’ format. And some people avoid anything Microsoft like the plauge
-Ogg Vorbis:
Pro: Excellent compression. Open source. Lots of tools available.
Con: Really hasn’t spread outside the geek niche. People may have to install their own plug-ins.
-RMA:
Don’t make me laugh. I just put this up here to keep anyone else from mentioning it.
So how about it? What format works best for you? I want to have a small file size and reach the most number of people. Do you use Ogg? Would you install a plug-in if new mutednoise releases were available in ogg format?
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