Category: tech

Several years ago, Gamespy’s Daily Victim column spun a colourful yarn about a company that did nothing but play online RPGs all day and then sold their loot on eBay. Apparently, a cottage industry has sprung up in Asia where peasants and university students are paid to do just that. And it’s a million dollar enterprise.

These “farmers” are paid peanuts, but they spend their days in chairs in air-conditioned comfort, so it’s not so bad. Macros control the actions of the ingame characters for the most part; the workers’ duties mostly consist of keeping an eye out for the fuzz, since bots are illegal.

For those of you who are scratching your heads and wondering who on earth would pay real money for a virtual sword or a digital suit of armour, consider this: _most of what you do in online RPGs is damn boring_. A casual gamer may spend days tromping around slewing rabbits or something before they can obtain that powerful new sword. So if you can buy that same sword for, say, $30, and go straight to the fun stuff, why not? Everything has its price, including time.

The existence of this industry does raise another issue – MMORPG economic systems may also be used to hide money in laundering schemes.

Posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2005Categories techLeave a comment on Going mainstream to go indie

Jordan Weisman, cofounder of 4orty-2wo, as interviewed in the East Bay Express’s
The Buzzmakers

“Our theory was if we posed the question in the right way, and inspired a group of people — a small group initially — to try to find the answers, they would organically start to enlist a larger and larger group. As that group grew, it would come to quickly represent every knowledge base, and every skill base you could imagine, plus a virtually unlimited amount of time, energy, and resources.”
“And we were right, but by an order of magnitude we were off…Damn, there is nothing they can’t solve; there is nothing they can’t solve instantly.”

Weisman is talking about the participants in their massive alternate reality roleplaying games/viral marketing campaigns. 4orty-2wo’s creations: the AI project and ILoveBees.com. But in my mind, he could have been talking about Wikipedia. Or discussion forums. Or open source software.

The designers, in fact, concluded they were no longer building games for individuals, but for a “hive mind” composed of millions of walking, talking neurotransmitters. Rather than diffusing across nerve synapses, these transmitters processed information via cell phones, chat rooms, and Web forums.

The Internet continues to shape and reshape global communications…

Running a video store is a particularily heinous form of hell, as Silverlotus can attest to when she worked at EB Games. Even though it was a corporate chain store, profit margins were still razor thin. They made the managers pimp these $40 contraptions called Disc Doctors that supposedly removed scratches off compact discs.

So I can sympathize when I read Eric Grissom’s Untold Stories of the Indie Game Store:

If you wanted to order four PS2s you would have to buy eight copies of Killzone and a half a pound of Celebrity Deathmatch. The same was true for Xbox. Things got even worse by the time the PSP hit. The MSRP for the PSP is $249.99. Your price? $280 plus $150 worth of those same PS2 games they couldn

When Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs dropped out of college, he still snuck into some classes for kicks. One of them, Calligraphy, impressed him so much that he later used this serenditipious knowledge when developing the typeface rendering on the Macintosh.

Implausible? That’s what Jobs told the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford.

More from the Stanford Report.

Joe Beda gives us a glimpse of Google’s internal project methodology.

They seem completely dedicated to knowledge reuse. They have only one codebase; everyone pools their programming code in one repository.
Project teams are completely transparent. Project members share information, strategic decisions, resources or even people without the tangles of office politics.

It’s like an open source software foundation, but internalized. It’s fitting that an Internet company works like, well, the Internet.

Loft computing, or completely seamless, barrier-less IT environments could prove beneficial to other companies requiring fast dev turnarounds.

P.S. Google also employs the services of a master chef who once cooked for the Grateful Dead and the Waldorf-Astoria. He apparently knows how to make a gooood southern fried chicken.

Last month, I posted on the Neowin Forums that Microsoft was suing David Zamos, an Ohio chemistry student, for selling his two unopened academic version copies of Windows and Office on eBay. He earned $143.50.

To whit:

Microsoft, which reported $38 billion in sales in the past year, alleges that Zamos’ eBay sales amount to unfair competition.

In the company’s suit, its lawyers accuse Zamos of copyright infringement for the eBay sales and contend the sales have “resulted in losses to Microsoft and an illicit gain of profit” to Zamos.

Further, the corporate lawyers said, “Microsoft has suffered… substantial and irreparable damage to its business reputation and good will, as well as losses in an amount not yet ascertained.”

But instead of bending over like a good corporately-owned citizen, Zamos taught himself law and countersued, creating an escalating game of legal chicken.

I’m glad to find out from Network Compendium that Microsoft’s lawyers blinked. IP lawyer Robert Chudakoff, who just a month before threatened to illegally seize Zamos’s sole possession, a Ford Escort, and throw him into bankruptcy, called Zamos and sweetly asked to settle.

Zamos probably won due to the negative publicity. However, there may be another reason; once again, the legality of a software EULA has escaped the scrutiny of the justice system. Most EULAs are lengthy, jargon-filled documents viewable in a tiny dialog box on your screen which you cannot read until you’ve torn open the package and popped in a CD – and MS lawyers had insisted Zamos had broken it when he resold his software, despite the fact he never opened the box.

Another interesting thing of note is that Zamos had initially attempted to return the software to Microsoft, who refused, despite that fact MS’s EULA explicitly allows this. I guess getting a Windows refund still requires going to court (as Linux users discovered in 1999).

I wonder what Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble would say about this.

I was surprised that my new 20GB 4G iPod didn’t come with a docking cradle. Come to think about it, almost no electronics come with docks anymore. That’s why we have multiple $300+ gizmos tethered to our computers or power outlets with nests of cables, twisting in the breeze. It just ain’t right.

Anyhoo, here’s some neat iPod tips, tricks and hacks I’ve found:

* Winamp5 ml_iPod plugin So you don’t have to use iTunes.
* GoogleGet Downloads news and weather headlines to your iPod’s Notes section with the click of a button.
* iPodAgent Sync your Outlook calendar, email and contacts without having to manually export everything and drag them into the iPod drive (What’s with that, Apple??). You can even use it to run regular backups on your PC’s files.
* MusicBrainz This software, together with the massive online song database, will automatically tag all your MP3s with the proper artists and albums, just by listening to them. Its accuracy is about 50%, but that’s still 50% less songs to manually tag.
* Hackaday’s list of iPod hacks, both of the software kind and hardware kind. Void your warranty today!

To me, Bram Cohen – the creator of the P2P technology BitTorrent – is inarguably a uniquely precise individual, the kind of character you would find among the profound hyperlexics in a Douglas Coupland novel. His hobbies include “recreational mathematics”, juggling, and solving strategy games and twisty puzzles. If you read his blogs at Advogato and LiveJournal, you’ll see him espousing pragmatic mathematical advice on everything from electoral votes to military-strength cryptography. This is a guy who wrote an entire algorithm, in pseudo-code, on wagering in Final Jeopardy.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that BitTorrent is not only open source and free to download, but terribly clever. He told Neowin that he gets an interview a day. So it’s a sad thing then that all everyone ever wants to ask him about is his thoughts on piracy, and the fact his program is the preferred pilferer of the people.

He usually gives a non-commital response, citing technology agnosticism. He believes the traditional CD and DVD model of the moviemaking fat cats is quickly becoming extinct, but that is a pragmatic assessment easily proven by mathematical trends. People say he’s playing it safe, but I think that’s really what he thinks. Piracy is a socioeconomic topic that doesn’t involve math or logic. And anything that doesn’t involve logic, isn’t worth considering.

You just have to read his entry on hiring employees to understand how his mind works. “Interviews are practically worthless for screening candidates,” he sniffs. His strategy? Pick the candidate with the shortest commute time. Can you get any more pragmatic?

One of my pet peeves in people/technology/processes are a lack of precision.

I just got Silverlotus an 1GB iPod Shuffle for Valentine’s – one of the first to grace Canadian shores (The box even came with a free song promo for the American iTunes Store).

One thing I was struck by was Apple’s obsessive detail into the end-to-end user experience. The Shuffle is small, simply designed and solidly built. The earphones are confortable to wear. The iTunes media library software makes buying, sorting, playing and transferring music a breeze. Especially the buying; with three clicks you can buy a song and have it ready to play on your iPod.

Critics charge that the Shuffle is a lame duck, since it has no built-in LCD screen or FM radio or salad tosser. They just don’t understand that making a good product doesn’t mean fulfilling a giant feature checklist; first and foremost it has to be intuitive, reliable, and attractive.

That’s Apple’s great secret to success. It’s not exactly rocket science! iPods control 80% of the hard-drive-based digital music player market because all its competitors use clunky interfaces, buggy firmware, nonexistent technical support, terrible media library software, and are encased in a cheap looking faux chrome enclosure that only a blind engineer could love.

Only Creative has come close to understanding this with the Zen Micro.

UPDATE: Apparently David Gilbraith agrees: “Apple is a great vindication of ballsyness rather than MBAness. Jobs is our generation’s Frank Lloyd Wright.”

People say that Apple is just a big reality distortion field generator, but if the shoe fits, wear it. Case in point: the story of the Graphing Calculator. It was part of a cancelled project that an Apple contractor decided to finish by sneaking into the building and worked with no pay for six months. It shipped on twenty million PowerMacintoshes.

P.S. One thing I didn’t get Silverlotus: a romantic dinner at White Castle.