10.30.05
Posted in Social Media at 1:41 am by
One of the biggest barriers to developing Massively Multiplayer Online Games has been cost – with incredible complexity comes comes an incredible price tag – $30 million or more. As a result the companies that can develop in this space end up playing it safe: elves and dragons for everyone. It is only very recently that companies have expanded to other genres.
Sun has promised to change all of this – yep, Sun, the fading tech giant. What qualifies them for developing game backends?
Sun’s chief gaming officer, Chris Melissinos explains, “I argue that we’ve been the principle architect of the largest massively multiplayer online game in the world. It’s Wall Street. If you took a look at all of the mechanics that go in to building an online trading system, they’re almost one-for-one, the same functions needed to build an MMOG. Except we’ve done it with more redundancy, reliability and scalability than pretty much anyone else.”
And it’s with that experience that Sun has been quietly applying resources toward building what it considers to be the most versatile and scalable MMOG middleware ever conceived. With the imaginative working title of Sun Gaming Server, the first SDK’s will be delivered for free to developers in the first half of 2006.
It’s intriguing and the promise of simplifing the underling plumbing and, thus, freeing up developers to focus soley on their game is big. It remains to be seen, however, if Sun can execute on this bold plan. Past history has not been so kind.
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Posted in Social Media at 1:25 am by
One of the most difficult things about software copyright law is the sheer number of licenses out there. Microsoft recently cleaned up its ecology of free software licenses and they got a big Kudos from Lawrence Lessig:
Last week, Microsoft made a major announcement that will benefit the ecology of free and open source software licenses significantly. As described here, Microsoft has abandoned a ton of licenses, focusing its efforts on just three core licenses. Two of these three licenses — the MS-Community License (MS-CL), and the MS-Permissive License (MS-PL) are technically “free” licenses under the FSF’s definition of free. The third MS-Reference License (MS-RL) is a view-only license, not quite free, but valuable nonetheless.
Good to see these steps. Now if we could continue to have more clarity and interoperability between free licensing schemes, everyone would benefit.
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Posted in Social Media at 1:18 am by
When does copyright get ugly? When it is used as a tool to suppress discussion. Two Groups in Kansas are trying to use published papers to demonstrate that evolution is a controversial theory (thus giving so called Intellegent Design a toe in the educational door). Now scientists who wrote those papers, understandably pissed off that their explorations of evolutionary theory are being used to prop up really contreversial stuff, are denying usage claiming copyright protection. Wendy, the legal maven-ette, breaks it down:
Copyright is not about endorsement or agreement, and it’s not a right to stop criticism, even ill-considered criticism. Quotation can be fair use even in a context the original author abhors — that’s precisely when we need fair use most, we on all sides of a political debate.
The organizations are free to broadcast their loud disapproval of the uses to which their publications are being put, and free to sue for misrepresentation if false statements or positions are put into their mouths, but asserting copyright rights seems a heavy-handed way to win a battle of ideas.
I agree completely. Let the arguments stand (or fall) on their own merits. If the idea, as was said on tonight’s Saturday night live, that ‘Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church’ is to win out, so be it. If the body of scientific evidence can’t counter that we’ve got bigger problems.
(Just in the interest in full disclosure – I’m much more God and the holy hosts than Flying Spagetti Monster. However, I can’t abide junk science, especially that that preys on people’s need to belong to something greater than themselves.)
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Posted in Social Media at 1:03 am by
Google has done many things: but is fulfilling Turing’s vision for computation power one of them? It’s a pretty heady piece that’s linked to but it does point out just what is possible when we start building AI (artificial intellegence) on top of Google’s awsome search:
My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”
Again, it’s some very steep reading. And what would an article about AI be without an ominous conclusion?
“When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”
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10.27.05
Posted in Social Media at 1:48 am by
Ah, the dangers of virtual living – carpel tunnel, eye strain, and full on server crashes. This past Sunday some creative individual brought the virtual world of Second Life to a complete halt. The game allows any member to create objects, known as prims, and script them together in various ways. Most creations are visually appealing but benign – a shiny outfit, a cozy cottage, etc.
However, according to Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture somebody was launching 5.4 billion objects into the air at once – all 3D spheres. The results? Server resources to render got used up and servers, each representing landmasses with the residents on them, began winking out like high-rises in a blackout.
The story briefly mentions that a few permanent bans were handed out. But I really have to wonder if this is the beginning for some serious trouble in Second Life. It’s strength is that anyone can start with nothing and create nearly anything – there aren’t any controls or checks – the very thing that makes the word unique is also what enables these attacks to occur. What happens when creative mischievious types decide not to do denial of service (DOS) style attacks in game but SPAM? I can see it now – 10,000 randomly floating spheres with ‘Viagra’ and a scriptable hyperlink on them dotting the horizon.
Oh what a wonderful world…. 
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Posted in Social Media at 1:23 am by
Europe and Asian cell phone users have had slick MP3 phones for years. When Motorola and Apple announced that would be jointly working on an iTunes phone for US audiences geeks gushed greatly – the cool factor of the iPod combined with the cool of the new Motorola Razor? How could this go wrong?
Apparently, quite a bit. Wired magazine has a very thorough look at why the ROKR phone failed (and oh boy, this thing was doomed from the start):
The Motorola team soon discovered that working with Apple means making compromises. A key part of the iTunes package, for example, is FairPlay, Apple’s digital rights management software. Ostensibly, DRM exists to benefit the music companies, but it’s an equally handy control mechanism for the tech outfits that develop it – companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Apple. FairPlay would set limits on the new phone: It couldn’t play music from any major online store but iTunes. It couldn’t hold more than 100 songs. “It’s obvious why Apple is doing this,” says Patrick Parodi, head of the Mobile Entertainment Forum, an industry trade group. “They don’t want to cannibalize the iPod.”
Plenty more in there about corporate arrogance, turf wars, and how a great idea goes to crap when everybody tries to get their piece.
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10.26.05
Posted in Social Media at 12:59 am by
Stanford University, a major educational institution and host to the very cool distributed computing project Folding@Home have now announced they’d be releasing content on iTunes. Educational lectures, sports programming, etc – it’s all going to be available as part of the iTunes bundle. Why? For the public good, of course.
I uninstalled Quicktime awhile ago. When I went to install it again the download site was going to force me to also apply iTunes. I surfed away in a huff then but this almost makes the bundling ok.
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Posted in Social Media at 12:51 am by
In an announcement that certainly got my attention, Comedy Central announced that they would be starting a broadband video channel, called MotherLoad November first. As a big, big fan of the Daily Show and Colbert Report but not a cable tv or dish subscriber, I couldn’t be happier:
Initially the site called MotherLoad will have five distinct channels and offer more than 450 video clips, with roughly 50 to 80 new clips added per week. The site will include short three-minute clips from original Comedy Central shows, including “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”
It will also offer original content developed especially for the Web site. This will include titles such as “I Love the Thirties,” “Odd Todd” and “Meet the Creeps.” Each weekday, comedian Greg Giraldo, host of the network’s “Friday Night with Greg Giraldo,” will anchor a one-minute roundup of what’s new on the site.
I’m a little bummed that the clips will only be 3 minutes – but a little John Stewart is better than no John Stewart (or at least that’s what the kids are calling it these days).
A final thought: with all the online video services popping up on the net I find it interesting that Comedy Central chose to build its own. True, the rumored Google Wallet (competitor to Ebay’s PayPal) is keeping Video Google from prime time – but still – I’m surprise there are so many major players reinventing the wheel here.
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10.25.05
Posted in Social Media at 5:59 pm by
iMesh, the reincarnated P2P app, is set to launch. iMesh has been around for awhile but shadowy deals in backrooms ($4.1 million paid to major labels to stave off a Grokster-like lawsuit) have kept it alive long enough to release a new version. The record industry has bestowed its blessing on the new software but why consumers would choose it is beyond me:
Paying $6.95 per month you get
1) the ability to download tracks off the Gnutella network, so long as they arent listed as major label property (so… why is there p2p at all? how many obscure non-label cuts do you really expect to find?)
2) download a select list of major label content that will be ’stuck’ to your PC – forget trying to move it to other devices like an iPod or, heaven forbid, your work machine.
3) a grafted on ‘myspace’ like social networking features – because everybody loves their tunes with a side of teenage drama
Whoopie-freaking-do. I expect equally spectacular features from Mashboxx, which is launching later this year (but hey, at least that has two x’s in the title – it ust be cool, right?).
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Posted in Social Media at 5:41 pm by
Ok, so maybe I didn’t come up with that title all on my own – I’m stealing it whole-heartedly from John Battelle who is riffing on the old video game Zero Wing. It’s all about the rumors running rampant regarding Google’s web-based database (apparently called GoogleBase). Ah well, when a shoe fits as snugly as Google’s at the moment, what can you do?
Details are sketchy and are coming from people who are able to see bits and pieces while the url happens to be up. What seems to be consistant is that GoogleBase will be a web based repository for stuff that is taggable. I’m not sure how this exactly qualifies as a database – kind of sounds like a cross between del.icio.us with the GMail Drive extension.
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