Category: Technology

SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check – Valleywag

SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check – Valleywag

As someone who was very involved in the second wave of virtual worlds on the internet (it depends if you count Habitat or MUDs as the first wave or not), I’ve watched them periodically come up and die again with amusement. It was always obvious the first time around, that it wasn’t a technology problem. Sure, Alphaworlds, Black Sun, Microsoft Virtual Worlds and V-Chat (my project) could have looked better or been slightly more responsive, but their main failings weren’t polygon counts. The main failings were all about having no reason to exist. none. They were novel, they were amusing for a short time, but they didn’t really bring much to the table that wasn’t there before. In the end it was just providing a new way of text chat. Adobe Atmosphere came out, gave me and the V-World’ers I know a laugh, and then died looking for a market.

Then came Linden Labs. Especially when the first details came out, I was really unimpressed. It seemed like a technology built by cyberhippies with nothing new to offer except some vague notions of on-line togetherness. I read some articles about it, and then ignored it, expecting it to go away soon. It persevered though and grew. They took their economy seriously and started selling real estate and making it possible for people to easily make a living within world (neither of these things was their idea, both have been done before). They started making large deals and announcing incredible usage (not profit) numbers. Of course, it is all a sham. The above article does a nice job skewering the Linden Labs numbers. Does this mean Second Life is a failure? Nope, even their (corrected) meager numbers are quite nice. Does this mean that Second Life is the first viable (long term) virtual world? Well, depends on if you want to count the on-line RPGs. Those were successful and have been around a lot longer. The question is if a purpose-less (non-game) virtual world can make it.

I guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out.

Amazon makes an unintended funny…

a message from Amazon about items in my shopping cart:

Please note that the price of The High Price of Materialism has increased from $10.85 to $11.32 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

Please note that the price of The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need has increased from $10.40 to $10.79 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

Please note that the price of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture has increased from $10.20 to $10.65 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

crazyness

So, I’m staying a nice hotel in the self-proclaimed capital of Silicon Valley. Of course, they have hot and cold running internet (wireless and wired!), but there is no outlet with 10 feet of the desk (where the wired internet is). Unless, of course, you move the bed away from the wall and unplug the clock.

morons

Which Vista Edition is Right for You?: The Vista Editions

ExtremeTech has this super scary matrix to help you figure out which version of Vista you should buy.
Which Vista Edition is Right for You?: The Vista Editions

Now, there are two ways to look at this diagram. One is Microsoft is Stupid and the other is Microsoft is Evil. Having all these different versions is going to do nothing but confuse customers. How many times has this lesson been proven?

The Microsoft is Stupid argument goes like this: Microsoft is being good intentioned, meaning to let users pick the features they want for the price they want. This gives Microsoft customers a lot of options and options are always good, right? Having worked there for eight years, I know that the ‘soft isn’t as evil as most folks think. More, bumbling and not aware of its own size and influence. Kind of like the St. Bernard that is continually knocking things over. The folks in Vista marketing didn’t quite get the fact that the differences between all the different versions only make sense to a Software Design Engineer with a degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. Now, when my mom goes to the store to buy her copy of Vista, she’ll just stare at them for an hour and then call me, an Engineering Manager with a degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon. While I understand the differences between the various versions of Vista, I’m gonna hafta figure out how to explain it to her. Good luck on that. “You don’t need disk encryption” “why not?” etc… Maybe this won’t matter ’cause most folks will just get the version of Vista that Dell slaps on their new machines and only the ones who care will upgrade. We’ll see.

Now, The Microsoft is Evil argument will have a lot of traction, especially on Mac fan websites and Slashdot. The argument is this: when faced with such a daunting set of options, most folks will just go for Ultimate, ’cause that must be the good one, right. No need to figure out which has what, just get the one with everything. This plays into American’s love of supersizing and Hummers. Now, when I said that Microsoft wasn’t as evil as most people thought, I should have added as a whole. There are some absolutely evil bastards working there who are just as plotting and evil as most people think. So, I think that the evil argument has some weight as well.

So, was the Vista version model the product of good-natured idiocy or soul sucking evil? Only Steve Ballmer knows.

Either way it is still stupid.

Adwatch: Zune Endless Cookie – Gizmodo

Holy crap gizmodo makes me laugh sometimes…

Here’s an ad that symbolizes the Zune’s song sharing with a cookie that is split for sharing with strangers, only to grow back, over and over again.

No one understands that after 3 days, the cookie DRM activates in your stomach, giving you a bleeding ulcer and diarrhea. Just kidding…about the cookie, not the DRM.

Adwatch: Zune Endless Cookie – Gizmodo

Sources confirm plans for a smaller, ultra-thin form factored MacBook Pro | MacScoop

Sources confirm plans for a smaller, ultra-thin form factored MacBook Pro | MacScoop

I am writing this from a 12″ PowerBook, which I dearly love. I find myself drifting more to my 17″ MBP these days, but mostly ’cause I use it for work, and that screen real estate does come in handy for coding. For sitting around surfing or reading the e-mail or doing anything on a plane, you can’t beat that sub-notebook size. I was bummed that Apple hadn’t introduced a new 12″ MBP, maybe my wish will be granted next month…

Wow, talk about a buzzkill…

A non-profit group has constructed a billboard in second life to let people know how many preventable child deaths they could have done something about while f’ing around in the non-real-world.

Second Life escapists told to wake up | The Register

In this case, I can sorta see both sides. It seems kind of trivial to be spending zillions of hours and some dollars in a role playing game when you could be fighting injustice in the real world. Yup, absolutely right. However, having an outlet from the horrors of real life is sometimes a necessity for our information-overload, news-drenched, overworking lives. I guess there is always a happy medium, isn’t there?

Google doesn’t use Google Docs

I was reading the following post from Niall Kennedy: Google Mondrian: web-based code review and storage, and one line stuck out: “Recently some design reviews have moved onto an internal version of Google Docs.” The thing that interested me about that is I’ve heard Jason Calacanis and others on The Gillmor Gang talk about using Google Docs for coporate data. Now maybe Google isn’t using the public docs because they are dogfooding new features before they are unveiled to the public. More scarily, maybe they are using an internal version because the public version isn’t secure or stable enough to host their important documents.

AppleInsider | Parallels preps major update to Windows virtualization software

(this is cross-posted on Digital-Motion, my new digital media blog, wish there was a nice way to do that automagically with wordpress)

AppleInsider | Parallels preps major update to Windows virtualization software

This is oh-so-very-cool. I have to run bootcamp on my mac book pro because I need to be using the full power of the GPU. This won’t completely obliviate that need, but it will mean that I won’t need to install XP twice on my little MBP so that I can pop into Outlook or IE if I need to without restarting. With the new version of Parallels, you can use your bootcamp partition as the root drive of your XP Parallels session. Also cool is that they’ll support other OSes nicely, which means you can drop a linux install on there too easily. This will be awesome for web designers because they won’t need to buy extra machines to validate stuff on. This may even get me back to installing some windows or liinux audio and video stuff again. There is a lot of freeware we mac folk miss out on.

I think this virtualization stuff is progressing exactly the way I want to see it. Next step is to find out how well the Macintels run Vista…

I wonder how long until either Apple or Microsoft buys Parallel Inc. The fact that they are located in Redmond probably speaks more to the fact that they are probably well staffed by former Microsofties than that they made their plan to be acquired at the beginning.

I would have loved this a couple of years ago.

In our last house, we had a neighbor who was pure evil. Since I am good at heart, more or less, I never gave him the rich thrashing he deserved (with the exception of calling the cops when he would destroy our property or peep in our windows). I did dream of having something like this though:
ThinkGeek :: The ThinkGeek Annoy-a-tron

Something like this is perfection for that person that deserves no joy in their lives and that can be driven slowly insane.