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Fle3 is also a fairly mature and nice-looking solution. You deal with object databases instead of sql, which is a little harder to maintain and host though. But this product has been around for a long time and has some cool features

For the real solution, media moguls might refer to Chernin's first rule of survival -- the one about consumers wanting control, choice and convenience. Logging onto the Net and quickly downloading your favourite show in HDTV fulfills that principle. Until makers of entertainment can satisfy this desire, the piracy fight is likely to keep getting bloodier.

Ads could be inserted with an overlapping, rolling, three-week schedule, for example - at any time there'd be - say - three different torrents of the same show, differing only in ad contents. The ad contents would get updated on a weekly bases then, thus serving fresh ads all the time, while not breaking away too far from the well-working torrent distribution model. It's been said many times before: all other industries would be overjoyed by getting free distribution of their product - how long until the TV industry figures out how to do ads online and start providing free highquality downloads?

By the way, you can watch a recording (in various formats) of Larry Lessig's interesting and entertaining talk on Free Culture in Helsinki in May 2004 here.

We're on a technological plateau. The next real leap, the next real difference in how we play games via sensory suits or neural inputs or whatever, is still too far away and too expensive.

Yes, a fair amount of time will likely pass before the next technological innovation that makes a significant change in computer based games, and even more time will pass before that technology is cheap enough that it's widely distributed.

That said, the computer game industry seems to me to be subset of the larger game industry more than of the technology industry. The reason that game designers are different from demo designers is that a game is not indended to display how a creative person can push the limits of technology in an appealing way; rather games are intended to be fun to play. There might be a "holy crap, how did they do that?" element to a computer game, but that's not really the point.

Take MMORPGs, for example. A technological advance was required for these games to be possible, but they're not popular because networking technology is cool...they're popular because they're a new, fun kind of game to a lot of people. (And yes, I know that they're basically not new in any sense, either from a game design or technology perspective, but you know what I mean.) In all the cases that I've seen, in fact, the gee-whiz graphics factor has been noticeably lacking...the cool technology is invisible from a gameplay perspective.

The SIMS became absurdly popular for a while. Pretty FPS games were big before that. "You Don't Know Jack" had its day in the sun. Myst and its knockoffs ruled the world ages ago, and we haven't even come close to far enough back to hit the Age of Atari discussed in the article. In all these cases, the popular game or games presented something new, or offered it in an intriguing new way...technology almost always played a role in that, but in my opinion the tech was rarely the primary factor. Gameplay, basically, rules.

Hmmm...I started this post about three hours ago and just now got back to it. Eh, you all get the idea of my ravings...no point in finishing it... :)

This reminds me of this. It is called Mixed Reality Pong.

Mixed Reality Pong is a mixed reality version of the classic "Pong" game. The aim of the game is to score goals by hitting a virtual ball over the other end of the game area protected by the opponent player. The game counts the goals the players have scored, and they can agree to play either for a limited amount of time, or until either of them has scored a certain amount of goals.
The players can play the game with their hands or other real-world objects. The game physics simulate the behaviour of a real ball, except that the virtual ball doesn't slow down at all.

considering that half-life's INITIAL release date was november 97 (1 month BEFORE the actual release date of quake 2) i doubt it was entirely based on the quake II engine. Probably designed with the quake I enginge and ported to the quake 2 enginge (fancy graphics).


Half-Life history

I'll see your karma whoring, and raise you, umm... several:
dotLRN, built on the OpenACS toolkit.
The Future Learning Environment, built on Zope.
The Open Archives Initiative is also interesting for academic information archival projects. Also eprints.org for GPL software for creating archives.

A lot of so-called "distance learning" projects focus their efforts on multimedia transmission - so that a picture of a person talking on screen can be transmitted... big whoop. The projects listed above focus on discussion and content sharing, which is where I think online education will really thrive.

There are quite a few open source learning management systems. Check:

Future Learning EnvironmentZope based, probably among the more mature.

Campus source is a whole raft of GPLed online learning software, mostly PHP + MySQL/PostGreSQL. The English version of the site is a bit screwed, so it's worth hitting the "Deutsch" button if you can grok it. Thorough stuff.

The CO3 group of learning systems Again, a whole group of learning environments, each with its own strengths. Declaration: these were developed by colleagues of mine.

EduZope Only just started, but is looking very good. Zopebased. But you knew that ;)

Now a bit of shameless self-promotion. Have a look at the CETIS website for most anything to do with education tech.

FLE3 is an open source web-based learning environment meant specifically to support CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning). Very cool.

(Slightly off-topic, but...)

My father back in the 50's, on the other hand, got stuck with this new game called "Adventure". Plugh. (One of his roomates at MIT helped write it.)

Given the plugh reference, I would point out that Crowther and Woods wrote Adventure in the early Seventies. (Reference 1: T he Craft of Adventure, chapter 2 [P DF]) (Reference 2: A History of 'Adventure'). So, it's a little improbable that the Adventure of plugh fame was available in the 50's =)

(You can play it on-line at any of several locations these days, including here and here.)