Am I the only person who looks at things like the new displays with laser projection onto the retina and immediately starts wishing he could buy a pair of glasses that would be a cross between Geordi Laforge vision (360 degree wraparound, with infra-red and light-amp enhancement, just for starters) and holo-projection of computer interfaces? In no more than 5 years, you'll be able to buy hardware like that (all the pieces exist, and they just need a little shrinking to be viable).
That's the ultimate projection of "Weak" cyborging, just a more advanced version of the optical aids I've had to wear since I was a child in order to have normal visual acuity. And frankly, the idea of taking the first step past that to "Strong" cyborging (the same thing, but wired to my optic nerve instead) doesn't bother me much. Nor does the idea of having a direct link of some sort to do math problems for me (just removing all the clunky limitations of a calculator).
In fact, I don't start getting uncomfortable about the idea of cyborging myself until we're talking about storing "memory" in there. Having a perfect recall of every line of code I've ever seen would be handy, but do I want to save a text conversion (or even full audio/video) of every conversation I ever had? Actually, probably I would, if I could, although I'd feel cautious at first.
I *want* to be a cyborg, in truth. My only bitch about the coming man-machine interfaces is that it's unlikely they'll find a way to turn my physical body into a disposable peripheral before it wears out on me. Why not? How is it any less natural to store a memory of what I see in silicon that I keep internally than to keep it on videotape? Give me a perfect memory, the ability to solve any mathematical problem I can define "in my head", the ability to "see" everything around me, or even tele-project my perceptions. I'll take all of it, and love it.
When will I cross the line from being a human using artificial aid to being a machine with biological components? Ask me in about 30 years. Maybe I'll still consider the question worth answering
Refusal to vote can itself be a political statement. 48% of Americans didn't care enough to even vote in the last election, that says *something* about our political process.
Me, I was in a state that was going to Bush no matter what, so I voted for the first time ever...for Nader.
I came *this* close to having been born too early. I was a serious geek in Junior High school, I would have been the classic A/V room nerd except for one little catch: My school had a few Apple ]['s used for admin work.
I fiddled with them, learned the basics of programming, did some repairs. It was a hell of a lot of fun, but there really wasn't that much I could do, since I only got a few hours a day with them when I was lucky, and I had almost zero information on how they worked. I persevered, managed to find a couple of books and magazines, and stole time from classes to the point where I would have failed 8th grade if I hadn't moved to another city first and my records got "lost" (did I mention that these same Apple ]['s were used to store school records?). Anyway, the next year I was in a school with no computers and wound up on the football team, grew up to work in construction and then joined the Air Force as an electronics tech.
It's hard to describe what discovering the Internet while I was in the Air Force was like. Imagine you have this overpowering thirst, and all you have to drink through is a little cocktail straw. That was what my entire life had been like for me and learning, there was so much capacity for information in my head, and I couldn't even come close to satisfying it. The things I wanted to know weren't in the library, or if they were they were in this incredibly cryptic academic language I couldn't follow.
In 93, that changed completely. Here was an incredible amount of information at my fingertips, and people who understood it and were willing to explain it to me. It was like going from that cocktail straw to a 4 inch firehose: For the first time in my life, the only limit on how much I could learn was how fast I could read and how long I could stay awake.
I was still young enough to make the switch back to my geek roots, but I have to wonder, if I had been a few years older when the Internet came around to something the public could reach, what would have happened? How many bright kids, without the money to go to college or the discipline to work their way through, lapsed into discontented mundanity like I almost did?
Now, kids like I was don't have to deal with the conformity-hammering pressures that turned me into a jock and a construction worker. While still young enough to have flexibility of mind, and the physical support of their parents, they get access to this *incredible* resource, in which they can find out literally *anything*. So you get kids like Lebed and company, who can reach their full potential, and that potential turns out to be phenomenal.
Do they lack maturity? Yeah, they do. Only time and mistakes can confer maturity. That's not the important question. the important question, is maturity neccessarily the enemy of flexibility and capacity to absorb information? When these kids *do* grow up, will they be supplanted by a new batch and become the old guard? Or are we at a transition point of history, from one where most of our best and brightest are stunted by their upbringing to one where we can expect a *lot* of people who are extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgable, comfortable with change, *and* have the advantages that experience gives?
I officially became old the other day. I walked into a shoe store and looked at these shoes that could have been props from a sci-fi movie, and realized that I would feel completely ridiculous wearing them. It has to make me wonder: Right now, I'm working on the cutting edge, but in five years am I going to be looking at a 20-something who knows things about what the world has become I can't understand? Will that 15 year-old now, 20-something then, find himself equally supplanted in 10 more years?
It's been said that experience is nothing more than the opportunity to practice your mistakes. Is that joke going to become a truism?
This is just a variant on the problem that comes up in a lot of IP law issues these days: The complainants can shop for their forums. In this case, they lobbied for a very strict Trade Secrets law that was specifically written to protect CSS in California (where the movie industry swings a lot of weight), and are now asserting that they may apply that law anywhere in the US if violations involve the internet.
The implications of this are just a reiteration on a small scale of the issues raised by the equivalent international agreements: Those who desire to restrict access to information are trying to leverage their control of local law-making bodies into the capacity for universal enforcement, because in a wired world if they can't enforce it everywhere, they can't enforce it at all.
Once upon a time, if you didn't like the way your local power structure ran things, you could leave. In some cases that might be very difficult, but it was always possible. Under "Universal Enforcability", everything on the Internet is theoretically subject to the *most* restrictive laws that can be found anywhere else on the internet.
The logical consequences have been pointed out before: Political speech of all but the blandest sort would be almost impossible, because between them virtually every possible ideology is deeply offensive or threatening in at least *one* nation on the planet. If US laws on pornography apply to the world then websites in Denmark (where 17 year-olds can legally be displayed, that's child porn in the US) have to be shut down. But if US laws apply, then so do Saudi Arabian laws, and even bikini "cheesecake" pinups are illegal. If French and German laws about display of a swastika apply, then so so those of Singapore, where "flipping the bird" at someone is potential jail time.
The alternative is that the laws of the most *permissive* jurisdiction apply, which would in practice mean everything was allowed (which is what we've gotten used to). That's unacceptable to those that would control what people would see and know.
In the long run, I'm pretty sure we're screwed. I don't see a meaningful stopping point on the slippery slope, and "Everything is permitted" will *not* be tolerated world-wide when you get to extreme cases like kiddie-porn and the manufacturing process for Sarin. Once you draw the line, it will keep sliding downhill until your only hope to stay out of prison is to either provide no information, or hope you never get noticed by a jurisdiction that thinks that those pictures of your girlfriend are obscene because she's wearing shorts and a halter-top. Oh, and you're a girl, too.
Of course, when studio execs are being hauled into foreign courts for violating local speech restrictions, they might start to think this precedent isn't such a great thing. But right now, they are spending a lot of money trying to cut their own throats.
Wasn't MS claiming, all through the run-up to the trial, that they *couldn't* accede to the demands of the anti-trust team because there wasn't any way to unscramble the egg, the OS and IE were completely integrated?
Now they are claiming that the location of the relevant function calls right next to each other in the source code is something they did to help the *users*? Errmm, excuse me, but even a Windows *developer* doesn't care about the location in code of the function calls, only whether they are well documented in how you call them (which is a whole different rant). What the hell would a *user* care?
Basicly, it looks to me like they're trying to avoid admitting they scattered IE functions throughout un-related code in order to bolster their original claims, now that those claims have been found to be bogus and that was upheld on the appeal.
It *is* equivalent to patenting mathematical formula, and in fact you can patent math.
Somewhere between the RSA encryption algorithm, an extremely complex application of prime number factoring, and "One Click", a painfully obvious way of setting up an online shop, there has to be a line we can draw, that can be clear to someone who isn't an expert (since the USPTO has few software or math experts).
Sorry, should have been clearer. The people un the TiVoUnderground forum where it was announced were pronouncing this would be the death of TiVo hacking, as the company would now get aggressive about preventing it. I was just wondering how feasible it would be to bypass TiVo and just use parts from people who think they're *selling* me parts, rather than leasing them to me.
I've done some more checking, Hauppage has a real sweet card with built-in MPEG2 hardware compression and a IR remote, but it's Windows only (not a problem for me, but people get religious about it around here, and they way Bill is going lord only knows when he'll hard code watermark recognition into the OS). Anyway, my point is, rather than play these silly games with them over how I can use my hardware, and pay them for the privilege, why not just cut them out of the loop?
What would it take to create a bare-bones TiVo equivalent? Not anything fancy like Indrema tried to be, but the bare minimum (for the hardware, make the software an open source arrangement)? Seems like what you'd need would be:
1) A commodity-grade CPU and mobo, like a 400 Celeron (or equivalent Duron, I don't care). About $100.
2) A TV In/Out card that also contained a tuner (support having two tuning circuits, but lets assume only one for now). STB lists one at $129.
3) A network card (many of the most promising software expansions of the system would be dependant on transparent access to the internet). $20, max.
4) A hard drive. Maybe use some dockable approach? Anyway, you can get a 20 gig retail for $100.
5) A case and 200W power supply. $30 if you use a standard PC mini-tower.
Seems like that would be it. What are we talking, maybe $380 in parts (most of that for the Tuner cards)? And you could probably get most of that stuff cheaper.
Why not? Compared to an entire operating system that is ported to just about every platform in the freaking world, this is a trivial problem. Just Keep It Simple, Stupid, don't attach all the freaking bells and whistles to the hardware, make that as simple as possible and then use software to leverage that capability.
People don't want yet another game console that is also a TiVo, nor do they want a really complicated system that requires them to learn how to code C.
Most non-geeks can't figure out why open source is anything they should give a damn about, and couldn't care less if big media is locking them out of things they never even knew were possible. But put a Open Source turnkey TV recording device in their hands without any built-in crippleware, and god help the poor bastard that tries to take it away after they've gotten used to what it can do.
Silly Valley is quickly becoming an intellectually inbred creative vacuum, with about as much of a grip on reality as Hollywood. Hollywood gets away with it because in the end glitz and unreality is what they're selling. At the end of the day, either your techy toy does something useful, or it doesn't.
Cost of living and associated salary pressures *alone* can eat your startup alive there. And it's an Internet/Overnight Delivery age, there's just not much to be gained from being there. However, it may take a while for the vulture capitalists to realize they are pouring half their investment down a rathole by putting it into an SV company. Once they do, unload your real estate there quick.
Sorry, all you Cyber-Anarchists, but the judge was right on part of this. Just as there is no "Expectation of privacy" when you use a phone that isn't yours (say, for example, the phone in a jail), there was no such expectation for someone using someone else's station.
However, the ruling on the validity of downloading the data looks specious to me, it is *directly* equivalent to using a access code to get messages off of an answering machine without a warrant. Even if you only tape the messages, you need a warrant *first*.
Anarchy Online: Cyberpunk themed, but still mostly an RPG.
Neocron: Also SciFi, more FPS style of gameplay.
WW2 Online: Realism-heavy Land-Air combat in a World War Two setting.
Sovereign: Massively Multiplayer RTS, think Total Annihilation in a persistent universe with hundreds of players (like a modern version of the original Empire, if you can remember it, the one you played by Telnet).
Jumpgate: Space Sim.
There's others, ranging from a driving game (Motor City Online) to persistant universe, massively multiplayer versions of Black and White or The Sims. Lum the Mad keeps a collection of the ones that have gotten any significant attention or backing. The one I'm working on is a fantasy RPG, but the choices will be branching out soon.
Some, like Anarchy Online or DAoC, will be out in a few months, others are a year or more out.
As others have pointed out, to have these virtual societies make it to the New Yorker, about as mainstream as press gets, is a sort of a vindication.
I'm about as extreme a geek as you're going to find, and I make my living working on these games now (cheap plug).
At least in one major camp of design thought, more than making games we are engineering social constructs. It's not so much that the social evolution in these games is unexpected, as that it's incredibly hard to predict. Sometimes real-world parallels work (the Tragedy of the Commons in UO's closed economy) and sometimes they don't (player justice has always tended towards anarchy, when traditional social theory says it should work).
Actually, the level of attention to these games from mainstream society is steadily growing, a while ago there was a sports story about how one baseball player was particularly pleased with a game winning home run because the pitcher had once let the batter's character die in EverQuest.
My current project is funded by a major Movie and TV show financial group, has a TV show in development, and will have product placement in several major films. Now *that's* mainstream.
Well, I picked up this article late, which makes for a nice segue: I was late getting into games, as well. 28 years old when I got my first job, as a GM for EverQuest. If there's a rung on the ladder below QA, it's customer service, only in MMOG's would it even be a stepping stone.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, there are a *lot* of ways to get into the business, ranging from years of college study to chance meetings at the right time. "How" you get in isn't really the issue.
*Lots* of people want to be game designers. Working on games is to the IT industry what being a novelist is to a journalist. Sure, the pay typically sucks, and you've got to be prepared to deal with bullshit politics and merciless finances, but in the end, you work on *games*. And they *pay* you for it.
You've got to be smart, you've got to be well-read, you've got to be articulate, but most of all you have to be *dedicated*. 18 months of 18 hour days will shake all the romance right out of you, if after the shiny wonderfulness of working on games has burned out you can't still look at it and say "I can't imagine doing anything else," stay in the corporate IT world.
Study *everything*. You need programming skills (practical experience making production software, not just classes and theory), management skills (designers are as much managers as dreamers), business skills (unless you understand counting beans, you'll never understand why a decent game on time and in budget completely blows away a "good" game that was late and over budget), artistic skills (not neccessarily to *do* art [I can't draw a circle] but to discuss it in terms an artist can understand), knowledge of aesthetic principles (elegance is elegance whether you're looking at polygons, oil paintings, C++ code, or bridges), psychological theory and practice (at the most basic level, good gameplay is behaviourist "Scheduled Reinforcement"), and depending on what kind of game you want to work on any of many, *many* other fields. Then go back and play games, good and bad, and see how they fit with what you've studied.
It has to be your passion, and then you have to temper that passion with practicality. You can *work* on games by being a specialist (and you'll need to do that first in most cases), to do a good job of designing them you need to be an intellectual omnivore.
Most of the hardware industry is operating on razor-thin margins, single-digits is not unusual. Most of the money is made at the extremes: Chip-makers and retailers, everybody in the middle has learned that people won't pay extra for good service, but they'll run halfway across the country to save a buck.
That worked fine when the people doing it were tech-savvy or capable of getting that way, you saved money by doing your own tech support (reading FAQ's, running diagnostics, actually picking up a screwdriver or fiddling with your DIN switches). You were either computer literate, got that way in a hurry, or at least knew somebody that was. Now we're getting "ordinary consumers", who expect rock-bottom prices *and* somebody to hold their hand.
You can't have it both ways. We're going to wind up splitting the industry down the middle, one market for the digerati and one for the hoi polloi. The split may not be formal, but it's already there: Show of hands, whose computer contains mostly OEM parts? I've "upgraded" my current system to the point that the only original parts are the frame and the reset button.
Err, for obvious reasons HavenCo doesn't discuss who their clients are, but consider the political and diplomatic muscle it took for them to reach their current status. Consider how much money just maintaining the physical plant and all that armed security (armed with what? Don't even ask)entails. Think about what sorts of entities would *already* be taking advantage of a "data haven".
Then ask yourself if you really think it would be that easy to roll over Prince Roy, or cut off Sealand. In the leagues they play in, "big media" is small potatoes.
--Dave Rickey
Other posters are quite correct when they point out that the physical constraints (superconducting magnets, strong RF fields, etc.) may keep these computers from ever being used in PC formats. There are theoreticals that might get around that (organic superconducters, faraday cages, even some advanced applications of Stealth technology), but all seem less tractable than quantum computing itself.
If it works out that Q-Comps are both *incredibly* more powerful in raw capacity (likely) and require special facilities (also likely), then we'll see a return to the architectures of the 70's and 80's, when Iron was Big and the Glass House was king.
In such an architecture, distributed platforms would be used to handle UI and interpretation, and the processor time to brute-force the calculations would be rented. A lot of the paradigm we've come to take for granted is very recent, and would have to be rethought in such an environment. Just as an example: Q-Comps could have the raw power to accurately simulate the physics of an FPS with hundreds of simulataneous players down to a microscopic level. Then an abstract of that could be transmitted to the players. Welcome to the Holodeck, boys.
McCain: "The 'Main Street' retailers... see customers come to the store to locate items... only to leave and order the items over the Internet just to escape the sales tax."
This is such crap. People don't pay shipping fees to avoid sales taxes, if they are doing anything *remotely* like what he's talking about, it's because they can pay shipping and *still* get it cheaper than retail. "Main Street" retailers are whining because they can't compete on *price*, not because taxes have any significant effect on competition.
Me, I just bought a P3-933 from a retailer. Why? Because after paying for shipping, it would have cost me exactly the same online, and I would have had to wait 2 days for it to come, minimum.
Anyone actually *checked* Napster, lately? I just put in a search for "Britney Spears" (no, I didn't actually want any, it was just the first current pop artist name that came into my head) and got a full list, basicly everything she's done.
Looks like new entries with all the same properties are being added as fast as old ones are being taken out. The judge is going to be *pissed*, Napster isn't actually filtering anything.
It's quite possible when Napster said it was impossible for them to filter, they weren't blowing smoke, they literally *can't* eliminate the songs even when they are in plain view, because as soon as the filter goes through and scrubs, somebody logs in and adds it to the list again.
I've been around, *and* I'm new. I came in with the unwashed hoards in September of '93, an AOL user (Gasp!) who discovered the Internet through Usenet access.
Okay, I'm a quick study, after a few months (and a change to a regular ISP) I was participating in the discussions on the defining problem of the time: Spam. That was the first skirmish in the war between net.culture and those just out for the bucks, anyone want to say we won that one?
Nope, we lost. Didn't matter, we adapted.
We adapted because this *isn't* a revolution, other than in the sense of "The Industrial Revolution". It's a cultural paradigm shift as profound as the invention of the steam engine (which happened in England, BTW), the printing press, *writing*, or even organized religion.
And here's the thing: Cultural paradigm shifts can lead to greater freedom, but history shows they lead to freedom only for those that are positioned to take advantage of it.
Organized religion made the priests a power the king had to deal with as equals. Writing empowered the bureaucracy, without them the king couldn't govern. The printing press empowered those who could read and write, suddenly it was much harder to control what people knew, and that created the intelligencia. Sail empowered the merchant class, suddenly they were more than a resource to be taxed. Each stage added more people to the ranks of the privileged, more people sharing a larger pie.
Even the last stage of the Indsutrial Revolution: Consumerism, was an improvement. A wage-slave has a *much* higher quality of life than a subsistence-farming peasant. Consumerism empowered the worker, and vastly enlarged the "middle class".
And this revolution will be by and for the digerati. An electronic global village needs its High Priests of electronics, and the next wave of elect will be those that can grasp the technical knowledge needed to keep the Information Age going.
This is a good thing. Not utopian, not perfect, but good. More people will have more power. The current powers see the digerati grabbing for a slice of the pie, and don't yet realize the pie is growing. Or they do see it, but they want all of it for themselves.
Doesn't matter. Power will pass into the hands of the people who know enough to create it. The digerati will triumph in the long run because without them, the pie can't get bigger. Not Utopia, just better than what came before.
And in related news: The RIAA announced their new standard for digital music, which they want to replace all CD's. It's a 500 meg disc called DataPlay, and everything stored on it (including any recordings you make yourself) is secured with an encryption system called "ContentKey".
Near as I can tell, from a consumer's view the new format has only 1 thing going for it: It has a case for the disc, which will presumably mean fewer scratches. Yet somehow the industry expects it to replace CD's the same way (and even faster) than CD's replaced LP's. Fat freaking chance, unless they render CD's obsolete by not releasing any more.
Of course, a cynic would point to the Line In/Line Out jacks on his computer sound card and stereo, and tell them they were wasting their time.
You want to go *way* out there into the "gray area"? Try this link. What you find there is a no-nonsense description of oral sex technique. Dunno about you, but if I had known that stuff when I was 16, I would have been *very* popular. My mother would have been horrified, my father probably would have pointed me to the site.
Fact is, porn gets boring, unless you're a sex addict. After a while even scat lesbian midget bondage porn isn't worth more than a raised eyebrow. The kids aren't going to get injured by what's out on the net any more than I was by stealing my dad's Playboys and playing "Doctor" with the girl next door.
What these kids *are* going to be is more educated. With very little effort, they can get the cold hard facts about STD's, the dangers both physical and emotional of promiscuous sex activity, anthropological studies of human courtship behaviour, and the details of sexual technique.
There's an old joke, more true today than ever:
Father: "Son, we need to have a talk about sex."
Son: "Okay, dad. What do you want to know?"
Trying to censor your children's access (as oppsed to guiding and directing it) simply isn't going to work. The most you can accomplish is "As the twig is bent, so shall the tree grow." Problem is, that ain't going to be a very healthy tree. Hot-house plants don't do well in open gardens.
It's long been said that all power issues from the barrel of a gun (before that they said "the point of a sword").
Well, in the modern, globalized, media-filled world, all power issues from the barrel of a pen. The pen that writes stinking big checks to political candidates. Even bigger checks to political parties (volume discounts). Checks to battalions of lawyers. It's the Golden Rule, he who has the gold makes the rules.
--Dave Rickey
The RIAA and MPAA are the classic "Hollywood Parasites", they get between the talent and the money, and most of it sticks to their fingers.
You want to put them out of business tomorrow? The magic word is "disintermediation". Find a way that Napster-like software users can pay the artists *directly*, and the parasites will dry up and blow away.
Right now the RIAA and MPAA, in spite of the fact that they are talentless scumbags who live by sucking the creative life out of everything and everyone they touch, have the moral high ground because the artists, who *are* entitled to compensation for their work, don't get any from Napster-doanloaded works. The winning strategy will be the one that exploits internet distribution and still lets the artist get paid.
Now, do you want to keep digging your heels in and trying to get everything for nothing, and let the parasites figure out how to set that up so they still get their cut, or do you want to actually accomplish something? Figure out how to do that, and the artists not only won't walk out on your when at the MTV awards, they'll *give* you an award, even if they have to make up a category.
Want another example, more on point? Try "candy stripers" in commercial hospitals. The hospital is a profit-making organization, it sets their hours and appoints their supervisors, tells them what they can and can't do, trains them, gives them "compensation" in the form of uniforms and meals. Yet they're still unpaid volunteers under the law.
--Dave Rickey
I'm the same Dave Rickey that was quoted in the article. I used to be the Asst. Head Gamemaster (paid in-game customer support) for EverQuest. I've been playing these games for basicly forever, and I now work for a different company (Mythic Entertainment) developing them. I've been playing these games about as long as they've been around.
I want to throw some numbers at you, so you can see how bad this is. It takes about 2000 manhours a month, *minimum*, to support a 1500 peak population game server for Customer Service (that is barely enough to keep complaints of poor service to a dull roar). Most of the issues that come up are minor ones, requiring few special "powers" in the game context, nothing you can't entrust to someone you have no real hold over (since you don't pay them, you can't really fire them). A paid CS rep costs about $15/hour between wages and overhead. 2000 * $15 = $30,000. Revenues from subscriptions for a server that will peak at 1500 players? About $45K. Before you go "Aha!", remember what else has to be paid for out of that, bandwidth and servers and miscellaneous overhead. By the time you figure it out, such a server would actually be *losing* $5-15K every month.
Obviously, nobody is going to operate a game that is losing money. So what is going to have to happen is that CS will suffer. And the number one complaint from players of OLRPG's right now is that CS *sucks*. Always has been.
But it's more than that. This opens up a whole can of worms that the games industry *really* doesn't want to go near. For example, iD software released Quake 3 Arena with minimal included gameplay, essentially Deathmatch only, with the expectation that more sophisticated gameplay would be developed by the fans, volunteering their time to finish iD's game. Are those third-party authors now entitled to royalties from iD?
The "Volunteer" programs certainly didn't start out with the intent of getting free labor. They got started because their were roles the community needed filled, that could *not* be cost-effectively filled by paid personel, so people literally *begged* for the tools to fill those roles themselves. Giving them free accounts was just a "perk", it was never intended as compensation.
They still can't be cost-effectively filled by paid personnel. If profit-making enterprises can't use this volunteer labor, then these tasks simply aren't going to get done, and the communities will suffer as a result.
And that's an important distinction. These people are not volunteering to provide the game companies with free labor, they are volunteering to assist their community, which happens to center around a game. These communities can and do have an existence above and beyond the games they are based on. They can and have picked up in their entirety and change games. They can and do survive the the complete dissolution of their games.
You can volunteer to serve your community without pay, even though your community is not a charitable organization. It's legal for companies to adopt a mile or two of highway and have their employees out there picking up trash on their own time (it's even legal for them to make raises and promotions dependant on participation in this "volunteer" program). The armed forces pay *far* less than minimum wage to junior enlisted personnel. I'm not sure that it's possible to have the game communities given the same legal recognition that geographical ones have. But I certainly do believe they should have it.
This is far more complicated than "Greedy Corporation Exploiting Free Labor", no matter what lawyers trying to shake money out of deep pockets may say. Nobody required these people to perform a service for the community, and if the companies benefitted it was only as a side effect.
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That's the ultimate projection of "Weak" cyborging, just a more advanced version of the optical aids I've had to wear since I was a child in order to have normal visual acuity. And frankly, the idea of taking the first step past that to "Strong" cyborging (the same thing, but wired to my optic nerve instead) doesn't bother me much. Nor does the idea of having a direct link of some sort to do math problems for me (just removing all the clunky limitations of a calculator).
In fact, I don't start getting uncomfortable about the idea of cyborging myself until we're talking about storing "memory" in there. Having a perfect recall of every line of code I've ever seen would be handy, but do I want to save a text conversion (or even full audio/video) of every conversation I ever had? Actually, probably I would, if I could, although I'd feel cautious at first.
I *want* to be a cyborg, in truth. My only bitch about the coming man-machine interfaces is that it's unlikely they'll find a way to turn my physical body into a disposable peripheral before it wears out on me. Why not? How is it any less natural to store a memory of what I see in silicon that I keep internally than to keep it on videotape? Give me a perfect memory, the ability to solve any mathematical problem I can define "in my head", the ability to "see" everything around me, or even tele-project my perceptions. I'll take all of it, and love it.
When will I cross the line from being a human using artificial aid to being a machine with biological components? Ask me in about 30 years. Maybe I'll still consider the question worth answering
--Dave Rickey
Me, I was in a state that was going to Bush no matter what, so I voted for the first time ever...for Nader.
--Dave Rickey
I fiddled with them, learned the basics of programming, did some repairs. It was a hell of a lot of fun, but there really wasn't that much I could do, since I only got a few hours a day with them when I was lucky, and I had almost zero information on how they worked. I persevered, managed to find a couple of books and magazines, and stole time from classes to the point where I would have failed 8th grade if I hadn't moved to another city first and my records got "lost" (did I mention that these same Apple ]['s were used to store school records?). Anyway, the next year I was in a school with no computers and wound up on the football team, grew up to work in construction and then joined the Air Force as an electronics tech.
It's hard to describe what discovering the Internet while I was in the Air Force was like. Imagine you have this overpowering thirst, and all you have to drink through is a little cocktail straw. That was what my entire life had been like for me and learning, there was so much capacity for information in my head, and I couldn't even come close to satisfying it. The things I wanted to know weren't in the library, or if they were they were in this incredibly cryptic academic language I couldn't follow.
In 93, that changed completely. Here was an incredible amount of information at my fingertips, and people who understood it and were willing to explain it to me. It was like going from that cocktail straw to a 4 inch firehose: For the first time in my life, the only limit on how much I could learn was how fast I could read and how long I could stay awake.
I was still young enough to make the switch back to my geek roots, but I have to wonder, if I had been a few years older when the Internet came around to something the public could reach, what would have happened? How many bright kids, without the money to go to college or the discipline to work their way through, lapsed into discontented mundanity like I almost did?
Now, kids like I was don't have to deal with the conformity-hammering pressures that turned me into a jock and a construction worker. While still young enough to have flexibility of mind, and the physical support of their parents, they get access to this *incredible* resource, in which they can find out literally *anything*. So you get kids like Lebed and company, who can reach their full potential, and that potential turns out to be phenomenal.
Do they lack maturity? Yeah, they do. Only time and mistakes can confer maturity. That's not the important question. the important question, is maturity neccessarily the enemy of flexibility and capacity to absorb information? When these kids *do* grow up, will they be supplanted by a new batch and become the old guard? Or are we at a transition point of history, from one where most of our best and brightest are stunted by their upbringing to one where we can expect a *lot* of people who are extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgable, comfortable with change, *and* have the advantages that experience gives?
I officially became old the other day. I walked into a shoe store and looked at these shoes that could have been props from a sci-fi movie, and realized that I would feel completely ridiculous wearing them. It has to make me wonder: Right now, I'm working on the cutting edge, but in five years am I going to be looking at a 20-something who knows things about what the world has become I can't understand? Will that 15 year-old now, 20-something then, find himself equally supplanted in 10 more years?
It's been said that experience is nothing more than the opportunity to practice your mistakes. Is that joke going to become a truism?
--Dave Rickey
The implications of this are just a reiteration on a small scale of the issues raised by the equivalent international agreements: Those who desire to restrict access to information are trying to leverage their control of local law-making bodies into the capacity for universal enforcement, because in a wired world if they can't enforce it everywhere, they can't enforce it at all.
Once upon a time, if you didn't like the way your local power structure ran things, you could leave. In some cases that might be very difficult, but it was always possible. Under "Universal Enforcability", everything on the Internet is theoretically subject to the *most* restrictive laws that can be found anywhere else on the internet.
The logical consequences have been pointed out before: Political speech of all but the blandest sort would be almost impossible, because between them virtually every possible ideology is deeply offensive or threatening in at least *one* nation on the planet. If US laws on pornography apply to the world then websites in Denmark (where 17 year-olds can legally be displayed, that's child porn in the US) have to be shut down. But if US laws apply, then so do Saudi Arabian laws, and even bikini "cheesecake" pinups are illegal. If French and German laws about display of a swastika apply, then so so those of Singapore, where "flipping the bird" at someone is potential jail time.
The alternative is that the laws of the most *permissive* jurisdiction apply, which would in practice mean everything was allowed (which is what we've gotten used to). That's unacceptable to those that would control what people would see and know.
In the long run, I'm pretty sure we're screwed. I don't see a meaningful stopping point on the slippery slope, and "Everything is permitted" will *not* be tolerated world-wide when you get to extreme cases like kiddie-porn and the manufacturing process for Sarin. Once you draw the line, it will keep sliding downhill until your only hope to stay out of prison is to either provide no information, or hope you never get noticed by a jurisdiction that thinks that those pictures of your girlfriend are obscene because she's wearing shorts and a halter-top. Oh, and you're a girl, too.
Of course, when studio execs are being hauled into foreign courts for violating local speech restrictions, they might start to think this precedent isn't such a great thing. But right now, they are spending a lot of money trying to cut their own throats.
--Dave Rickey
Now they are claiming that the location of the relevant function calls right next to each other in the source code is something they did to help the *users*? Errmm, excuse me, but even a Windows *developer* doesn't care about the location in code of the function calls, only whether they are well documented in how you call them (which is a whole different rant). What the hell would a *user* care?
Basicly, it looks to me like they're trying to avoid admitting they scattered IE functions throughout un-related code in order to bolster their original claims, now that those claims have been found to be bogus and that was upheld on the appeal.
--Dave Rickey
Somewhere between the RSA encryption algorithm, an extremely complex application of prime number factoring, and "One Click", a painfully obvious way of setting up an online shop, there has to be a line we can draw, that can be clear to someone who isn't an expert (since the USPTO has few software or math experts).
--Dave Rickey
I've done some more checking, Hauppage has a real sweet card with built-in MPEG2 hardware compression and a IR remote, but it's Windows only (not a problem for me, but people get religious about it around here, and they way Bill is going lord only knows when he'll hard code watermark recognition into the OS). Anyway, my point is, rather than play these silly games with them over how I can use my hardware, and pay them for the privilege, why not just cut them out of the loop?
--Dave Rickey
1) A commodity-grade CPU and mobo, like a 400 Celeron (or equivalent Duron, I don't care). About $100.
2) A TV In/Out card that also contained a tuner (support having two tuning circuits, but lets assume only one for now). STB lists one at $129.
3) A network card (many of the most promising software expansions of the system would be dependant on transparent access to the internet). $20, max.
4) A hard drive. Maybe use some dockable approach? Anyway, you can get a 20 gig retail for $100.
5) A case and 200W power supply. $30 if you use a standard PC mini-tower.
Seems like that would be it. What are we talking, maybe $380 in parts (most of that for the Tuner cards)? And you could probably get most of that stuff cheaper.
Why not? Compared to an entire operating system that is ported to just about every platform in the freaking world, this is a trivial problem. Just Keep It Simple, Stupid, don't attach all the freaking bells and whistles to the hardware, make that as simple as possible and then use software to leverage that capability.
People don't want yet another game console that is also a TiVo, nor do they want a really complicated system that requires them to learn how to code C.
Most non-geeks can't figure out why open source is anything they should give a damn about, and couldn't care less if big media is locking them out of things they never even knew were possible. But put a Open Source turnkey TV recording device in their hands without any built-in crippleware, and god help the poor bastard that tries to take it away after they've gotten used to what it can do.
--Dave Rickey
Silly Valley is quickly becoming an intellectually inbred creative vacuum, with about as much of a grip on reality as Hollywood. Hollywood gets away with it because in the end glitz and unreality is what they're selling. At the end of the day, either your techy toy does something useful, or it doesn't.
Cost of living and associated salary pressures *alone* can eat your startup alive there. And it's an Internet/Overnight Delivery age, there's just not much to be gained from being there. However, it may take a while for the vulture capitalists to realize they are pouring half their investment down a rathole by putting it into an SV company. Once they do, unload your real estate there quick.
--Dave Rickey
However, the ruling on the validity of downloading the data looks specious to me, it is *directly* equivalent to using a access code to get messages off of an answering machine without a warrant. Even if you only tape the messages, you need a warrant *first*.
--Dave Rickey
Neocron: Also SciFi, more FPS style of gameplay.
WW2 Online: Realism-heavy Land-Air combat in a World War Two setting.
Sovereign: Massively Multiplayer RTS, think Total Annihilation in a persistent universe with hundreds of players (like a modern version of the original Empire, if you can remember it, the one you played by Telnet).
Jumpgate: Space Sim.
There's others, ranging from a driving game (Motor City Online) to persistant universe, massively multiplayer versions of Black and White or The Sims. Lum the Mad keeps a collection of the ones that have gotten any significant attention or backing. The one I'm working on is a fantasy RPG, but the choices will be branching out soon.
Some, like Anarchy Online or DAoC, will be out in a few months, others are a year or more out.
--Dave Rickey
I'm about as extreme a geek as you're going to find, and I make my living working on these games now (cheap plug).
At least in one major camp of design thought, more than making games we are engineering social constructs. It's not so much that the social evolution in these games is unexpected, as that it's incredibly hard to predict. Sometimes real-world parallels work (the Tragedy of the Commons in UO's closed economy) and sometimes they don't (player justice has always tended towards anarchy, when traditional social theory says it should work).
Actually, the level of attention to these games from mainstream society is steadily growing, a while ago there was a sports story about how one baseball player was particularly pleased with a game winning home run because the pitcher had once let the batter's character die in EverQuest. My current project is funded by a major Movie and TV show financial group, has a TV show in development, and will have product placement in several major films. Now *that's* mainstream.
--ave Rickey
In case you haven't figured it out yet, there are a *lot* of ways to get into the business, ranging from years of college study to chance meetings at the right time. "How" you get in isn't really the issue.
*Lots* of people want to be game designers. Working on games is to the IT industry what being a novelist is to a journalist. Sure, the pay typically sucks, and you've got to be prepared to deal with bullshit politics and merciless finances, but in the end, you work on *games*. And they *pay* you for it.
You've got to be smart, you've got to be well-read, you've got to be articulate, but most of all you have to be *dedicated*. 18 months of 18 hour days will shake all the romance right out of you, if after the shiny wonderfulness of working on games has burned out you can't still look at it and say "I can't imagine doing anything else," stay in the corporate IT world.
Study *everything*. You need programming skills (practical experience making production software, not just classes and theory), management skills (designers are as much managers as dreamers), business skills (unless you understand counting beans, you'll never understand why a decent game on time and in budget completely blows away a "good" game that was late and over budget), artistic skills (not neccessarily to *do* art [I can't draw a circle] but to discuss it in terms an artist can understand), knowledge of aesthetic principles (elegance is elegance whether you're looking at polygons, oil paintings, C++ code, or bridges), psychological theory and practice (at the most basic level, good gameplay is behaviourist "Scheduled Reinforcement"), and depending on what kind of game you want to work on any of many, *many* other fields. Then go back and play games, good and bad, and see how they fit with what you've studied.
It has to be your passion, and then you have to temper that passion with practicality. You can *work* on games by being a specialist (and you'll need to do that first in most cases), to do a good job of designing them you need to be an intellectual omnivore.
--Dave Rickey
That worked fine when the people doing it were tech-savvy or capable of getting that way, you saved money by doing your own tech support (reading FAQ's, running diagnostics, actually picking up a screwdriver or fiddling with your DIN switches). You were either computer literate, got that way in a hurry, or at least knew somebody that was. Now we're getting "ordinary consumers", who expect rock-bottom prices *and* somebody to hold their hand.
You can't have it both ways. We're going to wind up splitting the industry down the middle, one market for the digerati and one for the hoi polloi. The split may not be formal, but it's already there: Show of hands, whose computer contains mostly OEM parts? I've "upgraded" my current system to the point that the only original parts are the frame and the reset button.
You want service, be prepared to pay for it.
--Dave Rickey
Err, for obvious reasons HavenCo doesn't discuss who their clients are, but consider the political and diplomatic muscle it took for them to reach their current status. Consider how much money just maintaining the physical plant and all that armed security (armed with what? Don't even ask)entails. Think about what sorts of entities would *already* be taking advantage of a "data haven". Then ask yourself if you really think it would be that easy to roll over Prince Roy, or cut off Sealand. In the leagues they play in, "big media" is small potatoes. --Dave Rickey
If it works out that Q-Comps are both *incredibly* more powerful in raw capacity (likely) and require special facilities (also likely), then we'll see a return to the architectures of the 70's and 80's, when Iron was Big and the Glass House was king.
In such an architecture, distributed platforms would be used to handle UI and interpretation, and the processor time to brute-force the calculations would be rented. A lot of the paradigm we've come to take for granted is very recent, and would have to be rethought in such an environment. Just as an example: Q-Comps could have the raw power to accurately simulate the physics of an FPS with hundreds of simulataneous players down to a microscopic level. Then an abstract of that could be transmitted to the players. Welcome to the Holodeck, boys.
--Dave Rickey
This is such crap. People don't pay shipping fees to avoid sales taxes, if they are doing anything *remotely* like what he's talking about, it's because they can pay shipping and *still* get it cheaper than retail. "Main Street" retailers are whining because they can't compete on *price*, not because taxes have any significant effect on competition.
Me, I just bought a P3-933 from a retailer. Why? Because after paying for shipping, it would have cost me exactly the same online, and I would have had to wait 2 days for it to come, minimum.
--Dave Rickey
Looks like new entries with all the same properties are being added as fast as old ones are being taken out. The judge is going to be *pissed*, Napster isn't actually filtering anything.
It's quite possible when Napster said it was impossible for them to filter, they weren't blowing smoke, they literally *can't* eliminate the songs even when they are in plain view, because as soon as the filter goes through and scrubs, somebody logs in and adds it to the list again.
--Dave Rickey
I've been around, *and* I'm new. I came in with the unwashed hoards in September of '93, an AOL user (Gasp!) who discovered the Internet through Usenet access.
Okay, I'm a quick study, after a few months (and a change to a regular ISP) I was participating in the discussions on the defining problem of the time: Spam. That was the first skirmish in the war between net.culture and those just out for the bucks, anyone want to say we won that one?
Nope, we lost. Didn't matter, we adapted.
We adapted because this *isn't* a revolution, other than in the sense of "The Industrial Revolution". It's a cultural paradigm shift as profound as the invention of the steam engine (which happened in England, BTW), the printing press, *writing*, or even organized religion.
And here's the thing: Cultural paradigm shifts can lead to greater freedom, but history shows they lead to freedom only for those that are positioned to take advantage of it.
Organized religion made the priests a power the king had to deal with as equals. Writing empowered the bureaucracy, without them the king couldn't govern. The printing press empowered those who could read and write, suddenly it was much harder to control what people knew, and that created the intelligencia. Sail empowered the merchant class, suddenly they were more than a resource to be taxed. Each stage added more people to the ranks of the privileged, more people sharing a larger pie.
Even the last stage of the Indsutrial Revolution: Consumerism, was an improvement. A wage-slave has a *much* higher quality of life than a subsistence-farming peasant. Consumerism empowered the worker, and vastly enlarged the "middle class".
And this revolution will be by and for the digerati. An electronic global village needs its High Priests of electronics, and the next wave of elect will be those that can grasp the technical knowledge needed to keep the Information Age going.
This is a good thing. Not utopian, not perfect, but good. More people will have more power. The current powers see the digerati grabbing for a slice of the pie, and don't yet realize the pie is growing. Or they do see it, but they want all of it for themselves.
Doesn't matter. Power will pass into the hands of the people who know enough to create it. The digerati will triumph in the long run because without them, the pie can't get bigger. Not Utopia, just better than what came before.
--Dave Rickey
Near as I can tell, from a consumer's view the new format has only 1 thing going for it: It has a case for the disc, which will presumably mean fewer scratches. Yet somehow the industry expects it to replace CD's the same way (and even faster) than CD's replaced LP's. Fat freaking chance, unless they render CD's obsolete by not releasing any more.
Of course, a cynic would point to the Line In/Line Out jacks on his computer sound card and stereo, and tell them they were wasting their time.
Fact is, porn gets boring, unless you're a sex addict. After a while even scat lesbian midget bondage porn isn't worth more than a raised eyebrow. The kids aren't going to get injured by what's out on the net any more than I was by stealing my dad's Playboys and playing "Doctor" with the girl next door.
What these kids *are* going to be is more educated. With very little effort, they can get the cold hard facts about STD's, the dangers both physical and emotional of promiscuous sex activity, anthropological studies of human courtship behaviour, and the details of sexual technique.
There's an old joke, more true today than ever:
Father: "Son, we need to have a talk about sex."
Son: "Okay, dad. What do you want to know?"
Trying to censor your children's access (as oppsed to guiding and directing it) simply isn't going to work. The most you can accomplish is "As the twig is bent, so shall the tree grow." Problem is, that ain't going to be a very healthy tree. Hot-house plants don't do well in open gardens.
--Dave Rickey
It's long been said that all power issues from the barrel of a gun (before that they said "the point of a sword"). Well, in the modern, globalized, media-filled world, all power issues from the barrel of a pen. The pen that writes stinking big checks to political candidates. Even bigger checks to political parties (volume discounts). Checks to battalions of lawyers. It's the Golden Rule, he who has the gold makes the rules. --Dave Rickey
You want to put them out of business tomorrow? The magic word is "disintermediation". Find a way that Napster-like software users can pay the artists *directly*, and the parasites will dry up and blow away.
Right now the RIAA and MPAA, in spite of the fact that they are talentless scumbags who live by sucking the creative life out of everything and everyone they touch, have the moral high ground because the artists, who *are* entitled to compensation for their work, don't get any from Napster-doanloaded works. The winning strategy will be the one that exploits internet distribution and still lets the artist get paid.
Now, do you want to keep digging your heels in and trying to get everything for nothing, and let the parasites figure out how to set that up so they still get their cut, or do you want to actually accomplish something? Figure out how to do that, and the artists not only won't walk out on your when at the MTV awards, they'll *give* you an award, even if they have to make up a category.
--Dave Rickey
Want another example, more on point? Try "candy stripers" in commercial hospitals. The hospital is a profit-making organization, it sets their hours and appoints their supervisors, tells them what they can and can't do, trains them, gives them "compensation" in the form of uniforms and meals. Yet they're still unpaid volunteers under the law. --Dave Rickey
I want to throw some numbers at you, so you can see how bad this is. It takes about 2000 manhours a month, *minimum*, to support a 1500 peak population game server for Customer Service (that is barely enough to keep complaints of poor service to a dull roar). Most of the issues that come up are minor ones, requiring few special "powers" in the game context, nothing you can't entrust to someone you have no real hold over (since you don't pay them, you can't really fire them). A paid CS rep costs about $15/hour between wages and overhead. 2000 * $15 = $30,000. Revenues from subscriptions for a server that will peak at 1500 players? About $45K. Before you go "Aha!", remember what else has to be paid for out of that, bandwidth and servers and miscellaneous overhead. By the time you figure it out, such a server would actually be *losing* $5-15K every month.
Obviously, nobody is going to operate a game that is losing money. So what is going to have to happen is that CS will suffer. And the number one complaint from players of OLRPG's right now is that CS *sucks*. Always has been.
But it's more than that. This opens up a whole can of worms that the games industry *really* doesn't want to go near. For example, iD software released Quake 3 Arena with minimal included gameplay, essentially Deathmatch only, with the expectation that more sophisticated gameplay would be developed by the fans, volunteering their time to finish iD's game. Are those third-party authors now entitled to royalties from iD?
The "Volunteer" programs certainly didn't start out with the intent of getting free labor. They got started because their were roles the community needed filled, that could *not* be cost-effectively filled by paid personel, so people literally *begged* for the tools to fill those roles themselves. Giving them free accounts was just a "perk", it was never intended as compensation.
They still can't be cost-effectively filled by paid personnel. If profit-making enterprises can't use this volunteer labor, then these tasks simply aren't going to get done, and the communities will suffer as a result.
And that's an important distinction. These people are not volunteering to provide the game companies with free labor, they are volunteering to assist their community, which happens to center around a game. These communities can and do have an existence above and beyond the games they are based on. They can and have picked up in their entirety and change games. They can and do survive the the complete dissolution of their games.
You can volunteer to serve your community without pay, even though your community is not a charitable organization. It's legal for companies to adopt a mile or two of highway and have their employees out there picking up trash on their own time (it's even legal for them to make raises and promotions dependant on participation in this "volunteer" program). The armed forces pay *far* less than minimum wage to junior enlisted personnel. I'm not sure that it's possible to have the game communities given the same legal recognition that geographical ones have. But I certainly do believe they should have it.
This is far more complicated than "Greedy Corporation Exploiting Free Labor", no matter what lawyers trying to shake money out of deep pockets may say. Nobody required these people to perform a service for the community, and if the companies benefitted it was only as a side effect.
--Dave Rickey