digitaldust

Part of a 6 week look at massively multiplayer online games, last weeks article was on the social aspects of game design. A goo dround up of the trials and tribulations of the last few years, but little hint of the future or any underlying principles. Except, don’t try to design and balance, don’t try to allow create an open system and hope for anarchic stability. So what do you do…?

There seems to be an ever increasing amount of research around the concept of fame, or at least the New Scientist seems to be publishing more of it. Here’s a news piece about how fame is not fair.

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury from the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the fame of “ace” pilots who fought for Germany during the World War I by comparing the number of web pages that now mention each pilot with the number of planes that the pilot shot down.

They discovered that rather than being directly proportional, the fame of the pilots actually increases exponentially with the number of planes they shot down. This means that fame is not distributed fairly among the 393 pilots in the sample.

I’ve had a couple of long conversations with a friend (who’s yet another new scientist reader) about this and she was getting riled about the unfair nature of this. These power law things are part of human nature, and even more fundamentally part of very basic natural science.

The New Scientist has an article about a new PC based unit that’s the size of a pack of cards.

The Modular Computing Core is being launched on 7 November by Antelope Technologies, a Colorado-based start-up. The device is a single portable unit into which all the essential computing components are crammed. At 76 by 127 by 19 millimetres (5 x 3 x 3/4 inches), the MCC is not much bigger than a deck of cards.

This core unit can then either be slotted into a docking station to be used with a screen and keyboard as a desktop computer, or into small portable “shell” with a touch-sensitive screen, turning it into a handheld computer.

Inside the MCC is a 1GHz microprocessor, 256 MB of RAM and a 10 or 15 GB hard drive. It will also run a full version of Microsoft’s XP operating system, instead of the stripped-down operating systems used by handheld computers.

Like an iPod for applications. Or if it had a little hi-powered graphics card you could use it for a very portable games machine. Though then you wouldn’t want to stick it in your shirt pocket as it would probably burn your nipples.

It seems endemic at the moment redesigning one’s blog and I’ve been forced into it now. Fucked up my templates a bit when moving servers and I’ve just implemented the plain style from moveabletype with some stuff hacked out.

Seems that even though the back end of my blog now runs like greased lightning the templates somewhere along the line got a bit stuffed up. I can’t find any up to date offline versions of the old template and this half finished clanster style template has overwritten my index template.

Long story about renaming paths, and for the life of me I dont know why it’s reverted to this particular version. Must have been the last version since I started using file based templates. Well, I’ve been meaning to get around to a redesign, maybe this will be the impetus.

A friend of mine who works at a game publisher just gave me a copy Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad - which has to be said with a really bad southern American accent. I’ve not played it yet, but it occurred to me that the US hasn’t copyrighted any of the gulf conflicts. I’m sure they ought to, so they can make money off the IP, charge royalties on all the product licenses. It may not pay off the entire gulf war bill, but with all the gulf war spin off products it might go part of the way.

Maybe when people do get in to wars they will think twice… does it have a good marketing angle? Angola or the Balkans - not very exciting. Big desert battles, much more exciting. Books, movies, games, the works.

I can’t sleep, not too sure why, maybe it’s the slight hangover, maybe it’s cause I’m too cold or because my brain is too busy. Probably a combination of all three. I thought I would brain dump what I was thinking about, have a warm cup of tea and get rid of at least two, if not all three of my problems at once.

I’ve not talked to anyone yet about this. But I have these grandiose schemes to unwire Broadway Market with some kind of lilypad meshAP type setup. The Forum of the Future. (Forum in the proper Latin/Roman sense of the word)
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Ant, who sometimes makes funny noises behind me showed this sonic wire thingee to me yesterday. It makes noodling around with sound a tactile experience. Visual spaghetti for the musically inclined. There’s a visual demo of the full software that the guy has made, and a stripped down java applet that you can play with. Best thing I’ve seen on the web since Sodaplay.

The best comment I’ve seen about this is that it’s “Traveling meets Art meets Trainspotting.”

the Degree Confluence Project attempts to take a picture of every single location where whole number latitude and longitude lines cross.

He He. You just have to look at it.

Someone looking for this guy stumbled onto me

250 bucks an hour!!