"social networking is ultimately a marketing vehicle"
Social networking is quickly becoming a commodity, which makes it a prime target for an open source challenge. With a distributed network, a single site with under 10 users can operate within a larger network, which overcomes the network effect that centralized social networks require.
Most definitely. There was a Federated Social Web Summit in Portland in July, 2010, and more on the way. There's a federated social web mailing list, and now the beginnings of a W3C working group that many of us will be working together on. I can't say for sure how it will shake out in the end, because we're all taking different approaches to see which one sticks, but I can guarantee you that a common protocol is part of the process.
Appleseed, on that note, is built to be somewhat protocol agnostic, so we can support upcoming protocols, as well as multiple protocols simultaneously.
Appleseed has a main beta site, appleseedproject.org, and approx. 150 test nodes out in the wild. If you'd like an invite, just email invite@appleseedproject.org. It's still in beta, but new features are added regularly.
We've also been fundraising, if you'd like to donate, our fundraising ends in only 4 days, but every little bit counts:
Yeah, but it is perfectly fine precedent for WikiLeaks to judge that they aren't putting anyone at risk.
Less than 1% of the cables have been released. Wikileaks is working with around a dozen news services from around the world to sift through the data. Wikileaks gave The Pentagon the option to redact sensitive information, and they refused.
There has not been a full dump of the 250,000 cables, they have been slowly releasing them alongside the news agencies they're working with (New York Times, The Guardian, etc). What we've seen so far is only a small fraction of the cables.
The idea that Wikileaks has been indiscriminate with releasing the cables is simply not true.
U.S. federal government documents are not covered under copyright, so when you're talking about "ownership", there's no legal basis for this argument. Those documents, now leaked, are in the public domain. Wikileaks "owns" them just as much as anyone else.
Also, this part:
Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.
Is a really dangerous precedent for Amazon to set for themselves. If you're going to cancel members accounts based on not just the potential danger of known information held within, but on the possibility that information not yet discovered could potentially put someone in danger, that's making a decision based on an extraordinary amount of hypotheticals.
I want to be able to read my RPGs like a book sometimes.
All I've ever wanted was the option to keep the voice acting in Japanese, with English subtitles. It would go a long way to making modern RPG's more enjoyable, since I don't speak Japanese, and can't accurately gauge whether Japanese voice actors are as terrible as I'm sure they are.
But can someone explain to me why IPv6 didn't just extend the IPv4 format logically and stylistically? Why not just tack on more numbers? And all existing numbers could be assumed
For instance,
209.85.225.147
becomes
1.1.209.85.225.147
Instead, we break convention to use colons and hex, ie. 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf
It seems to me adoption could have been a lot quicker and less painless.
That was in May. Since then I've put out six revisions.
The thing is, although there was seemingly a stop in development (since 2008/2009, actually), I had never given up on the project. I had a notebook with all the ideas, sketches, mockups, etc. where I wanted to take the project. When Diaspora hit, I emailed them, offering to help. I never heard back, so I decided to push forward on Appleseed.
The pace may seem extraordinary considering I'm essentially the sole full time developer, with most help having come from designers and testers, and I handle a full time job on the side, while I do put in a lot of hours, things have moved along so quickly because I had gamed and spec'd out so much in the year prior.
Check out our roadmap, you'll see exactly where we're going.
You can also send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org for an invite to the beta test site. Here's a screenshot for people who don't want to bother signing up (apologies for FB hosting. we're working on that:)
This is basically a model of public intellectualism, and popular education. It has three components: 1. Creating a culture of learning which is not dependent on structure, but which is interwoven into life's fabric. 2. Pushing access to information to everyone, with no prejudices about who it will benefit best or who should be prioritized. 3. Encouraging a culture of healthy debate, humility, and a collective struggle for answers, instead of an individual struggle for superiority.
We're already seeing this on some level: Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, Amateur Astronomy, Open Courseware, etc. But I think it's not enough to just keep doing what we're doing, I would advocate that we need to go further. There is no reason that, for instance, a university doing research, no matter how obscure, should not be pressured to put their work online in an accessible fashion. Videos of conferences and presentations, notes, theses, etc. Beyond that, we need to actively break down prejudices about who benefits from this information. We cannot claim to know how people will use information, and determining the importance of their access based on condition, geography, poverty, gender, etc. should not be tolerated. Someone who does studies alternative energies should not dismiss the notion that a teenager living in Nigeria might not want to pour over everything they know, either in order to use that knowledge to create a DIY solar or wind generator, or to create something they hadn't even considered. We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.
And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
This is something I feel very strongly about, that the delineation between the academic and the non-academic, the intellectual and the non-intellectual, must be broken down and done away with. Here, then, is an RSA animate which talks about the structure of the current education system, and touches on the stratification within it.
Whew! There is *no* way kids will find a way around this. Problem: SOLVED!/s
I've said it before, but you can't always solve social problems with technological solutions, and here's a perfect example of that. Teenagers need to be informed about the permanence of the internet, the value of trust, and what the consequences of actions are. Beyond that, society needs to be more forgiving when kids screw up (which they can't help but do) and not brand them for life because of early mishaps.
Those are social solutions, setting up technological barriers without addressing the social problems and solutions, you're just making kids better at finding workarounds.
As I said earlier, I replay games constantly. I have a PS3 I use almost exclusively for PS1 games, and I put my emulators through 10x as much use as my Wii. Final Fantasy 6 stands the test of time, it is an extraordinary game, and that's why even generations who didn't grow up on it, discover it, and list it on their top ten list. Even Final Fantasy 7 is infinitely more profound the second time through than anything that came after it (even just the basic plot concept of being an eco-terrorist group, with sympathetic goals combined with abhorrent methods), so I'm not just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.
Just recently, I played the demo of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I really wanted to like, I was all ready to go to amazon.com and buy a copy, but the demo was so lackluster, and was missing so much that made Castlevania great, that instead I just paid $10 for Castlevania:Symphony of the Night, which was totally worth it, and is 100% as fun as I remember it.
I've replayed games like "A boy and his blob" or "Dragon Warrior", and recognized how things can be more fun when you're a kid, but some games really are classics for a reason.
I've replayed Final Fantasy 6 at least once a year every year for the past decade. I've recommended it to kids who are teenagers now, and grew up on God of War and GTA, and they loved it.
What happened to Final Fantasy? I grew up with it, the original Final Fantasy was my first RPG, and then Final Fantasy 2, and then, what I believe to be the greatest RPG of all time, Final Fantasy 3/6 came out. Final Fantasy VII was great, and breathtaking, but since then, it's been downhill. Nine was a quick breath of fresh air, but VIII is the only Final Fantasy I've never played past the first hour. Ten was super linear (geez, *another* cutscene?), and X-2 was a joke (please stop making intrepid adventurers act like tween girls, it's insulting to everyone except tween girls). XII seemed to be on the right track, but that's because they used an established world and mythos from the Tactics series, and the biggest problem was it's abrupt ending and auto-gameplay, but at least there were some compelling characters and power struggles, although it fell short in that area. And then XIII I haven't played yet, because I took one look at the map, and lost all interest (hint, it's a straight line), and nothing I read said that the story made up for that lack of exploration.
It seems to me that the problem, more than anything, is the failure to dream up a really compelling setting, characters, and plot, and then let the player loose in it. Earlier games had those, but it seems that lately all that they're interested in is new systems of combat and leveling up. There are no villains like Kefka, no tragedies like Rosa's attempted suicide, no big reveals like Cloud's backstory, no tortured protagonists like Cecil.
In a lot of ways, it's as if they've substituted "cool" for "good". They want a cool story, a cool main character, a cool setting, not good ones, not well developed ones. The potential for storytelling in videogames, from a technological standpoint, it's all there. There's nothing really holding anyone back, but instead, we get flashy graphics and a new battle system, instead of characters we care about. When I was 14 years old, watching Rosa throw herself off a cliff, or Terra almost decide against saving the world, or even the NPC orphan teenage couple obliquely considering an abortion because Kefka had turned the world into a wasteland, that was good storytelling, and I expected it to only get better as technology improved, and it really didn't, at least not for the Final Fantasy series.
It's a shame, and maybe this is harsh, but I consider the Final Fantasy series to be like M. Night Shyamalan movies. Sure, "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" were epic, and "Signs" was pretty decent, but at some point you have to give up on things and count yourself as no longer a fan, but a harsh critic.
Combine this with social networking to allow/deny access to your files and I think you've got a game changer. Files which require no server, and which are unknown/unavailable to anyone who doesn't need to know about them. I could share my mp3 collection or movie collection with only my friends list, which would be much more along the lines of fair use (like tape trading).
I ran a BBS in the Chicago area in the 90's called "Throwing Copper", and Legend Of The Red Dragon was my addiction. Sometimes I think I set up that BBS just so I could play it without dialing in. This brings me back, The Whammy Bar, Disallusioned Society, and a bunch that are on the tip of my tongue.
Someone should make a gritty reboot of LORD. I'd play it.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude here punched his boss in the face and they were unable to fire him
Something tells me there's more to this story...
"social networking is ultimately a marketing vehicle"
Social networking is quickly becoming a commodity, which makes it a prime target for an open source challenge. With a distributed network, a single site with under 10 users can operate within a larger network, which overcomes the network effect that centralized social networks require.
... that they'd be willing to kick down some money for open source, distributed social networking projects (like, Appleseed :)
They may not get any return on their investment, unless you count sweet, sweet revenge.
You're right, now it ends in 3 days.
Most definitely. There was a Federated Social Web Summit in Portland in July, 2010, and more on the way. There's a federated social web mailing list, and now the beginnings of a W3C working group that many of us will be working together on. I can't say for sure how it will shake out in the end, because we're all taking different approaches to see which one sticks, but I can guarantee you that a common protocol is part of the process.
Appleseed, on that note, is built to be somewhat protocol agnostic, so we can support upcoming protocols, as well as multiple protocols simultaneously.
Appleseed is open source, distributed social networking, built on a commodity stack, and installs in a few minutes on any LAMP compatible host.
Code is available here:
http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed
Appleseed has a main beta site, appleseedproject.org, and approx. 150 test nodes out in the wild. If you'd like an invite, just email invite@appleseedproject.org. It's still in beta, but new features are added regularly.
We've also been fundraising, if you'd like to donate, our fundraising ends in only 4 days, but every little bit counts:
http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking
Here is our roadmap for the future:
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/roadmap/
Diaspora is also available, here is their github. They are running on Ruby + Rails, and they were MongoDB based, but recently switched to MySQL.
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
Yeah, but it is perfectly fine precedent for WikiLeaks to judge that they aren't putting anyone at risk.
Less than 1% of the cables have been released. Wikileaks is working with around a dozen news services from around the world to sift through the data. Wikileaks gave The Pentagon the option to redact sensitive information, and they refused.
There has not been a full dump of the 250,000 cables, they have been slowly releasing them alongside the news agencies they're working with (New York Times, The Guardian, etc). What we've seen so far is only a small fraction of the cables.
The idea that Wikileaks has been indiscriminate with releasing the cables is simply not true.
U.S. federal government documents are not covered under copyright, so when you're talking about "ownership", there's no legal basis for this argument. Those documents, now leaked, are in the public domain. Wikileaks "owns" them just as much as anyone else.
Also, this part:
Is a really dangerous precedent for Amazon to set for themselves. If you're going to cancel members accounts based on not just the potential danger of known information held within, but on the possibility that information not yet discovered could potentially put someone in danger, that's making a decision based on an extraordinary amount of hypotheticals.
Does this mean that directors actually have to focus instead on character development, plot, and pacing?
I want to be able to read my RPGs like a book sometimes.
All I've ever wanted was the option to keep the voice acting in Japanese, with English subtitles. It would go a long way to making modern RPG's more enjoyable, since I don't speak Japanese, and can't accurately gauge whether Japanese voice actors are as terrible as I'm sure they are.
Well, that was very helpful, and thank you for your enlightened and useful response!
But can someone explain to me why IPv6 didn't just extend the IPv4 format logically and stylistically? Why not just tack on more numbers? And all existing numbers could be assumed
For instance,
209.85.225.147
becomes
1.1.209.85.225.147
Instead, we break convention to use colons and hex, ie. 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf
It seems to me adoption could have been a lot quicker and less painless.
That was in May. Since then I've put out six revisions.
The thing is, although there was seemingly a stop in development (since 2008/2009, actually), I had never given up on the project. I had a notebook with all the ideas, sketches, mockups, etc. where I wanted to take the project. When Diaspora hit, I emailed them, offering to help. I never heard back, so I decided to push forward on Appleseed.
The pace may seem extraordinary considering I'm essentially the sole full time developer, with most help having come from designers and testers, and I handle a full time job on the side, while I do put in a lot of hours, things have moved along so quickly because I had gamed and spec'd out so much in the year prior.
Check out our roadmap, you'll see exactly where we're going.
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/roadmap/
You can also send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org for an invite to the beta test site. Here's a screenshot for people who don't want to bother signing up (apologies for FB hosting. we're working on that :)
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs1207.snc4/155927_469182004405_510304405_5358353_7159703_n.jpg
Michael Chisari
Lead Developer, The Appleseed Project
Unfortunately, coffeehouses in the U.S. aren't particularly social places.
This is basically a model of public intellectualism, and popular education. It has three components: 1. Creating a culture of learning which is not dependent on structure, but which is interwoven into life's fabric. 2. Pushing access to information to everyone, with no prejudices about who it will benefit best or who should be prioritized. 3. Encouraging a culture of healthy debate, humility, and a collective struggle for answers, instead of an individual struggle for superiority.
We're already seeing this on some level: Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, Amateur Astronomy, Open Courseware, etc. But I think it's not enough to just keep doing what we're doing, I would advocate that we need to go further. There is no reason that, for instance, a university doing research, no matter how obscure, should not be pressured to put their work online in an accessible fashion. Videos of conferences and presentations, notes, theses, etc. Beyond that, we need to actively break down prejudices about who benefits from this information. We cannot claim to know how people will use information, and determining the importance of their access based on condition, geography, poverty, gender, etc. should not be tolerated. Someone who does studies alternative energies should not dismiss the notion that a teenager living in Nigeria might not want to pour over everything they know, either in order to use that knowledge to create a DIY solar or wind generator, or to create something they hadn't even considered. We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.
And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
This is something I feel very strongly about, that the delineation between the academic and the non-academic, the intellectual and the non-intellectual, must be broken down and done away with. Here, then, is an RSA animate which talks about the structure of the current education system, and touches on the stratification within it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Now would be the time to announce PS3 remakes of Final Fantasy VI and VII, available together for $29.
Whew! There is *no* way kids will find a way around this. Problem: SOLVED! /s
I've said it before, but you can't always solve social problems with technological solutions, and here's a perfect example of that. Teenagers need to be informed about the permanence of the internet, the value of trust, and what the consequences of actions are. Beyond that, society needs to be more forgiving when kids screw up (which they can't help but do) and not brand them for life because of early mishaps.
Those are social solutions, setting up technological barriers without addressing the social problems and solutions, you're just making kids better at finding workarounds.
I played through the whole game. It didn't get any better.
As I said earlier, I replay games constantly. I have a PS3 I use almost exclusively for PS1 games, and I put my emulators through 10x as much use as my Wii. Final Fantasy 6 stands the test of time, it is an extraordinary game, and that's why even generations who didn't grow up on it, discover it, and list it on their top ten list. Even Final Fantasy 7 is infinitely more profound the second time through than anything that came after it (even just the basic plot concept of being an eco-terrorist group, with sympathetic goals combined with abhorrent methods), so I'm not just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.
Just recently, I played the demo of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I really wanted to like, I was all ready to go to amazon.com and buy a copy, but the demo was so lackluster, and was missing so much that made Castlevania great, that instead I just paid $10 for Castlevania:Symphony of the Night, which was totally worth it, and is 100% as fun as I remember it.
I've replayed games like "A boy and his blob" or "Dragon Warrior", and recognized how things can be more fun when you're a kid, but some games really are classics for a reason.
I've replayed Final Fantasy 6 at least once a year every year for the past decade. I've recommended it to kids who are teenagers now, and grew up on God of War and GTA, and they loved it.
Some things really do stand the test of time.
What happened to Final Fantasy? I grew up with it, the original Final Fantasy was my first RPG, and then Final Fantasy 2, and then, what I believe to be the greatest RPG of all time, Final Fantasy 3/6 came out. Final Fantasy VII was great, and breathtaking, but since then, it's been downhill. Nine was a quick breath of fresh air, but VIII is the only Final Fantasy I've never played past the first hour. Ten was super linear (geez, *another* cutscene?), and X-2 was a joke (please stop making intrepid adventurers act like tween girls, it's insulting to everyone except tween girls). XII seemed to be on the right track, but that's because they used an established world and mythos from the Tactics series, and the biggest problem was it's abrupt ending and auto-gameplay, but at least there were some compelling characters and power struggles, although it fell short in that area. And then XIII I haven't played yet, because I took one look at the map, and lost all interest (hint, it's a straight line), and nothing I read said that the story made up for that lack of exploration.
It seems to me that the problem, more than anything, is the failure to dream up a really compelling setting, characters, and plot, and then let the player loose in it. Earlier games had those, but it seems that lately all that they're interested in is new systems of combat and leveling up. There are no villains like Kefka, no tragedies like Rosa's attempted suicide, no big reveals like Cloud's backstory, no tortured protagonists like Cecil.
In a lot of ways, it's as if they've substituted "cool" for "good". They want a cool story, a cool main character, a cool setting, not good ones, not well developed ones. The potential for storytelling in videogames, from a technological standpoint, it's all there. There's nothing really holding anyone back, but instead, we get flashy graphics and a new battle system, instead of characters we care about. When I was 14 years old, watching Rosa throw herself off a cliff, or Terra almost decide against saving the world, or even the NPC orphan teenage couple obliquely considering an abortion because Kefka had turned the world into a wasteland, that was good storytelling, and I expected it to only get better as technology improved, and it really didn't, at least not for the Final Fantasy series.
It's a shame, and maybe this is harsh, but I consider the Final Fantasy series to be like M. Night Shyamalan movies. Sure, "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" were epic, and "Signs" was pretty decent, but at some point you have to give up on things and count yourself as no longer a fan, but a harsh critic.
I wish they would turn to their attention to the next issue of the open Internet, a free and open social network.
Here you go:
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
Combine this with social networking to allow/deny access to your files and I think you've got a game changer. Files which require no server, and which are unknown/unavailable to anyone who doesn't need to know about them. I could share my mp3 collection or movie collection with only my friends list, which would be much more along the lines of fair use (like tape trading).
I ran a BBS in the Chicago area in the 90's called "Throwing Copper", and Legend Of The Red Dragon was my addiction. Sometimes I think I set up that BBS just so I could play it without dialing in. This brings me back, The Whammy Bar, Disallusioned Society, and a bunch that are on the tip of my tongue.
Someone should make a gritty reboot of LORD. I'd play it.
For every bucket of fried chicken assholes like you DON'T eat, I'll eat three, plus a package of Wal-mart bacon.
I would encourage you to do so, because people with attitudes like that are what I like to call a "self-correcting problem"