04.29.06
Posted in Social Media at 10:13 am by
Bloodspell is a machinima (meaning a movie made from a video game) tale that has just released its first episode. On the homesite the creators explain just why they released 10,000+ hours for free:
We make movies. When we’ve made our movies, we’d kinda like people to see them.
There’s no evidence to show that “piracy” hurts artists’ incomes.
(And don’t get me started on the term “piracy”. Piracy is finding some innocent family or trawler crew, threatening them with guns, forcibly boarding their boat, terrorising them, stealing their goods, and murdering them. It’s not copying a f—ing CD.).
You can download the episode here.
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Posted in Social Media at 9:52 am by
As you might have heard by now, Nintendo has announced the ‘official’ name for its next generation console. Previously code named ‘Revolution’, the little silver box with the one-handed controler will be called Wii (pronounced Wee).
The reaction in most English speaking countries has been pretty bad – as are the puns (’Would you like to play with my Wii?’). And of course the hard-core testosterone crowd really hate it. I do have to hand it to Nintendo, however – they’re are definately playing by their own rules.
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04.23.06
Posted in Social Media at 3:45 pm by
As the Tony Wilson character says in 24 Hour Party People, “Let a thousand Macunians bloom”. The online storage industry seems to have taken that mantra to heart. Yahoo has long had a service called Briefcase that allowed Yahoo members to push and pull files from an online repository. Google is also rumored to have a massive online drive somewhere in its labyrinthian skunkworks. However, experts believe that is a 2007 launch, at best. Amazon, quick to remind people that they do more than geegaws, recently talked about their ‘grid storage web service‘. Sure, Amazon’s service is more for software mashup creators who don’t have the resources for their own server farm. But its not inconcievable that someone tries to build a form of personal file backup on top of it.
That brings us to Microsoft. As part of their recent online services push they’ve announced an online file storage service. As Mary Jo Foley writes:
Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data,” according to Fortune. “With Live Drive, all your information—movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever—could be accessible from anywhere, on any device.
While universal browser access to one’s personal information would be quite nice I’m hesitant in seeing this take off. Yahoo and Microsoft, after all, were both companies who handed over bulk database records to law enforcement looking for terroist needles in a haystack. That, however, was just search histories. What if these companies were asked to hand over the personal stored files of their users? Would they?
Further, what happens to neat little independent storage efforts like Fluxiom (watching the demo video is definately recommended) when the 800-lb gorillas are getting ready to fling poo?
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Posted in Social Media at 10:55 am by
http://mutednoise.com/pics_support/BizWeekChung.gif Gracing the cover of the current issue of Business Week is Anshe Chung, Second Life land baronness. What is a game avatar doing in a business periodical? It might have something to do with the fact that Anshe’s rumored income from the virtual world is north of six figures. The cover Rob Hof story is online and while it doesn’t break any new ground for those in the know (the ‘golly, you can make money!’ angle is getting really old) it serves as a decent primer.
Terra Nova, the ivory tower group, uses the article and the mass acceptance it symbolized as a jumping off point for all kinds of interesting questions. For example:
1) Are virtual worlds now mainstream?
2) Anshe’s page on Wikipedia has been the source of much controversy (currently it sports the rarely seen ‘protected from editing until issues are resolved’ properties). Do imaginary characters deserve a Wikipedia entry? Are avatars important enough for encyclopedia like coverage? Is it too self-promotional?
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Posted in Social Media at 9:22 am by
The Chaos Communication Congress is an annual get together of tinkerors, hackers, and phreakers. While the 2005 event is over the conference materials have been made available for anyone with a BitTorrent client. This amounts to nearly 150 hours of cool geek-a-licious topics including:
* Community Mesh Networking
* Learning JavaScript with Google Maps
* Paper Prototyping Workshop
* Fuzzy Democracy
and much, much more! All files in MP4 format.
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Posted in Social Media at 9:08 am by
We’ve had a few different threads about the battle for network neutrality. The elevator summary is that broadband carriers, people like Qwest, AT&T, and Verizon, want service providers, like Google, to pay them for preferential treatment. It’s an ugly can of worms that would undermine a little guys ability to compete.
SavetheInternet.com is a new activism site dedicated toward seeing the net remains neutral. From their homepage:
Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesnÂ’t speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.
This isn’t just speculation — we’ve already seen what happens elsewhere when the Internet’s gatekeepers get too much control. Last year, Canada’s version of AT&T — Telus— blocked their Internet customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to workers with whom Telus was negotiating. And Shaw, a major Canadian cable company, charges an extra $10 a month to subscribers who dare to use a competing Internet telephone service.
I believe that the issue may be put to rest at the current moment. However, I also believe that the major telcos have had a taste of the low hanging fruit and aren’t about to let this go easily. Without consumer vigilance they just might try to sneak this through. Heaven knows others attempting to control their industry have tried that before.
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04.20.06
Posted in miscellaneous at 4:16 pm by
If you wouldn’t mind please take a moment and take the poll at the top of this page. I take for granted that most people don’t use RSS or an RSS reader on a daily basis (if ever). I know the mutednoise audience is more technically savvy than most but I’m curious what the adoption on RSS is. If you don’t use RSS… why?
I’m curious.
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Posted in Social Media at 4:02 pm by
Google has wasted little time in releasing their API (application programming interface) for Google Calendar. Incredible considering they went live little more it than a week ago. Within three hours of the announcement industrius developers had already created basic parsing engines for the XML (I’ve got some simple stuff worked up and running myself thanks to ColdFusion’s RAD (rapid application development) nature).
I fully expect Google Calendar mashups to be bigger than Google Maps. While the plotting nature was neat the need for geographical references are very specific. However, time-based plotting is incredibly relevent to every aspect of life (your geographical needs may be nothing more than the distance between the couch and the fridge – however what is done in that space may have time based qualities – unless, of course, the time was spent watching the paint fade).
I’ve gone ahead and made a public calendar labeled ‘mutednoise: Song of the Day’. If you add the calendar to your view you’ll see a fresh track of what’s powering da ‘noise on any given day. I’ll probably churn that time based data into a ‘traditional’ rss feed for posting and purisual on this site.
This is the link for the public calendar (right click and select ‘copy link’ and paste inside of your Google Calendar account to create the new calendar).
What ideas do you have?
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Posted in Social Media at 3:45 pm by
In the years after the Napster sparkle and fade (1999+) peer-to-peer (P2P) apps where touted as being the next killer app. Ivory tower types proclaimed that P2P was the silver bullet for any pressing problem: distributed storage, algorithmic processing, and even artificial intellegence. However, while the theoretical papers are definately there we really haven’t seen the applications to match. Sure, there were the ugly and legally dubious step-sisters of E-Donkey, Gnutella, and Kazaa. Skype uses some P2P aspects to enable peer to peer calling. But Skype is really not that much better than traditional IM voice chat.
Where are the life-changing peer powered apps we were promised? The editors of the IEEE’s Distributed Systems Site also wonder:
The hype raised enough curiosity among researchers and developers to apply P2P mechanisms to domains other than file sharing. Some early explorations were in distributed storage, content distribution, communication and collaboration, and to an extent even decentralized gaming. (We purposely exclude distributed-computing applications such as grid computing. Like P2P, these systems employ decentralization and incremental scalability, but their usage is often managed either at a single location or at multiple ones in a federated manner.) Reduced management costs per entity, absence of central points of failure, incremental scalability, a potentially larger resource pool, reduced individual scrutiny, and potentially higher fault resilience were the primary advantages over centralized solutions. However, except for a few real products such as Groove NetworkÂ’s Virtual Office for enterprise-wide collaboration, most of these efforts remain academic.
In fact, only the use of P2P networks for distributed storage and related services can match the level of interest file sharing has generated. Oceanstore, PAST (P2P archival storage), Pastiche, PeerStore, and CFS (cooperative file system) are among the notable academic projects that propose using P2P networks for universal access to or the archiving of content. Content distribution also received interest. Networks such as Akamai and BitTorrent optimize network usage for fast, efficient download of content by end hosts. Essentially, despite all the advances in developing core services, the application of P2P has remained well within the domain of content sharing. This field has yet to see revolutionary applications beyond what Napster demonstrated.
The Croquet Project would seem to be a step toward a peer to peer virtual world. Having played with that a bit, however, I find it slow, ugly, and lacking in documentation.
Does anybody know of some promising peer to peer apps that have yet to bubble to the surface? What are they? Or is P2P really only good for stealing the latest Gorillaz album?
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04.18.06
Posted in miscellaneous at 11:32 am by
OMG – its an adapter that lets you run up to 3 monitors from a single video out. I so want one:
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/media/th2go/screenshots/design/esri7_triple_big.jpg
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