Cyberculture: May 2007 Archive Page

For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable. --Hal Licino --86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins (Hub Pages)

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed. --Jonathan Saltzman --Blogger unmasked, court case upended (Boston.com)

Lindeman, on trial for medical malpractice, paid a hefty sum for his right to his opinion. He blogged about the trial anonymously while it was going on, and the prosecuting attorney found out about it.

Update: A Wal-Mart cashier who joked about bombing the store on his MySpace page has also been sacked. "If you have a MySpace site, you better act like you're a politician," he says, "Be politically correct and don't try to be funny." That's a bit exaggerated... there was nothing "political" about his comment, and there are other kinds of humor.

Venus Redemption is a unique episodic casual game created for 30+ female gamers, with a rich plot written by a noted novelist. Unlike other casual games, it features powerful storylines, deep characters, emotion-based interactive conversations and exciting adventure gameplay. However, like traditional casual games, it's extremely easy to play, requiring only the ability to move and left-click a mouse, and it's playable in short bursts if you don't have much time.

Venus Redemption is written by award-winning author Kate Pullinger, who co-wrote the book, "The Piano" with director Jane Campion, and is one of the leading pioneers of interactive fiction. Additional storyline has been written by BAFTA nominated writer, Gordon Rennie, whilst a unique ambient-orchestral musical score has been composed by veteran musician Tim Wright, best known for his work on the Wipeout game series. --'Venus Redemption' (Worth Playing)

Interesting how this game is pitched at its target audience.

Don Woods is acknowledged to have the Right Stuff. With long, stringy black hair and a bearish grin, he looks somewhat older than his twenty-nine years. He works at Xerox and wears a dark GAMES T-shirt that contrasts with his almost chalk-colored skin. Pinned next to the Xerox employee badge on his shirt is a button that reads question authority. Wood is known as a classic, or canonical, hacker. "Here's a quick hack I've been working on," he says. He types a few characters on his keyboard, and from the computer come the calliopelike sounds of a rousing, Sousa-style marching song. "I put it together in a couple of days," he says.

One of the results of Woods' epic hacks is Adventure, a collaboration with Will Crowther. Ostensibly a game, Adventure is a metaphor for hacking. When you begin Adventure, the computer tells you your location: at a stream, near a forest, within sight of a small brick building. From there you embark on a Tolkeinesque journey through the caverns and glens of a medieval land, encountering murderous midgets, poisonous snakes, treacherous rapids, thieving pirates and magazines written in dwarf language. By telling the computer the direction you wish to move (typing n for north or u for up, for example), the computer calculates where, on the unseen map created in Woods' imagination, you will wind up next, and displays a written description of your next location. You go deeper and deeper into this netherworld, hoping to emerge by the same path with treasure in hand. There are almost 200 rooms you pass through on your way to the treasure, many dotted with hazards, and the path crosses and intertwines in ways impossible to divine without hours of exploration. Adventure is the most popular game at LOTS, and indeed it is a national craze among those with access to computers. "I would show it to people on a Friday afternoon," Woods says, "and they wouldn't leave their terminals until they finished it, maybe on Monday."

Adventure is a kind of litmus test for hackers: if you can lose yourself in the gullies and misty caverns, you might be susceptible to computer addiction. Just as the plot of Adventure is a world unto itself, the vast memory and operating system of a mainframe computer is a gigantic landscape, seeming impenetrable but eventually accessible to the most devoted seekers. Just as everything in the physical world is constructed of atoms, everything a computer processes or reads is ultimately reduced to bits of either one or zero. Like treasure seekers in the subterranean Adventure world, hackers are electronic spelunkers who have developed the skill to burrow down from the more superficial programming languages to the bedrock machine language of digits. Woods call this "going down and doing the grudgies." To get involved this deeply, you must be able to think in dizzyingly abstract terms. Your mental concentration is so intense that your consciousness is subsumed by the computer. --Steven Levy --Hackers in ParadiseRolling Stone 1982)

Levy expanded the theme of this article into the excellent book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

The film's extreme stylization -- dark backgrounds, glowing neon colors, polygonal landscapes, geometric vehicles, and an absence of external lighting -- was an aesthetic decision that embraced the limitations of computer-generated imagery. "The actual process of making something out of polygons, then shading it, became a design influence," explains Taylor. "Not only was the film made with computers, but it was about cyberspace."

[...]

Tron's story of humans interacting with sentient computer programs in an electronic world placed the narrative ahead of its time as well. In 1982, the term "cyberspace" had just been coined by science fiction author William Gibson. In another two years, Gibson's seminal work Neuromancer would launch the cyberpunk genre. --Mike Winder --You Down with MCP? Twenty-five years later, 'Tron' and other 'geek' classics are more compelling than ever (LA City Beat)

Thousands of PhDs are now working in various Google labs, and many of these people were hired from other successful businesses. Google has also acquired a number of smaller companies, many of them for either their technology or their technical talent, and these companies bring yet more entrepreneurial DNA into the mix. The company has created a potent combination of straight-from-university geniuses, straight-from-start-up geniuses, and straight-from-Microsoft/IBM/Yahoo/wherever geniuses. These bright folks work individually and in teams and 20 percent of their time is supposed to be devoted to pursuing new technical ideas of their own. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are sure (and for good reason) that their crew will generate in this 20 percent time thousands of ideas and technologies that the company can commercialize for decades to come. --Robert X. Cringely --The Final Days of Google: It is going to be an inside job. (PBS)

Star Wars. It's the backbone of geek DNA, even more essential than an intricate knowledge of Linux or the inability to get a date. And now, 30 years after an independent filmmaker blew us away with the exploits of a Cinnabon-coifed princess, a wide-eyed farm boy, a scruffy-looking nerf herder and the baddest throat-crushing villain this side of Mos Eisley, we still can't get enough. --Daniel Dumas --Star Wars Rewired: Interviews, Galleries and More (Wired)

A great set of features.

Take the role of the FDA inspectors in a world of increasingly numerous food imports and increasingly unmanagable risk. Your charge: try to protect the country from contaminants in foreign food imports using extremely limited resources.

The first in Persuasive Games newsgame publication relationship with The New York Times, in which our editorial games are published alongside all the other op-ed content on TimesSelect. --Food Import Folly (Persuasive Games)

I'd wondered when the rhetorical potential of a current-events game would be recognized as a vehicle for critical commentary, rather than the occasional subject of a column or other traditional form.

When I go to the link on the NYT website, I get a header and footer, but no content.

Are you a skilled programmer or Web developer? Are you interested in applying your talents to the challenge of creating a better-informed society? Do you want to learn how to find, analyze and present socially relevant information that engages media audiences? Do you see possibilities for applying technology as a way to connect people and information on the Web or new delivery platforms?

If your answers are "yes," consider coming to Medill for a master's degree in journalism. You can earn your degree in just a year. You will learn new skills that will open doors to new opportunities that might help build a better democracy. And a new program at Medill offers you a chance to win a fully funded scholarship. --Medill offers journalism scholarships to programmer/developers (Northwestern)

Sounds like a great program.

Tools for Teaching Basic Programming Concepts

Alice and Scratch. Filing for future reference.

--Shakespeare hates your emo poems (Threadless)

Interesting cultural phenomenon... sell a T-shirt, then create a website that lets customers upload photos of themselves wearing the T-shirt.

The result turns the rebellious and snarky T-shirt designs into the uniforms of conformist consumer zombies.

--The civil war in four minutes (YouTube)

Modern interactive fiction, much more than its technically limited earlier counterparts, displays an incredible range of literary influences, tributes and styles. For Sherwin's part, science fiction is an inspiration, but the greater part of his text adventures' efficacy comes from the unique and anarchic style of his characters' dialogue. "I have been greatly influenced by the late George Alec Effinger," he says. "He was the first guy I read that was able to write science fiction chock-full of characters that I not only deeply cared about, but characters that drove the plot due to their strong wills and personalities." In text adventures, literary influences are naturally more evident; text game writers are free to attempt to emulate the same literary devices as the authors who perhaps inspired them, whether in their dialogue styles, plot development or written motifs.

Gamers in search of an edifying read could hope for nothing more than the surreal eloquence of Adam Cadre's Photopia, or the superbly idiosyncratic dialogue of Sherwin's own Fallacy Of Dawn. Sherwin cites Stephen Bond's Rameses as "the best character study in the history of videogames" -- outside the world of the text game, one would be hard pressed to find characters and situations as lovingly and artfully developed and described as they often are in interactive fiction.

However, text games enjoy a luxury not afforded to videogames in any other form; they communicate exclusively through the written word. Without needing to integrate visuals, sound or 3D gameplay, they are free to concentrate wholly upon their writing, and thus are able to achieve a focus that is usually beyond the reach of a medium as multi-disciplinary as videogames. Pacotti relates this coherence to that of books. "The novel, typically created by one person working exclusively in language, strives for a coherence only occasionally seen in film and almost never in games," he explains. "This coherence -- the integration of the smallest details into a single vision -- is the basis of good art." --PLAY-PEN: Games Due for a Lit Course (Next Generation)

This article gives the literary qualities of text adventure games some welcome attention, integrating canonical recent IF works with a discussion of good writing in recent mainstream PRGs, but I fear that it tips too far over onto the narratological side, with a good bit of cinema 101 thrown in for good measure.

Just because text games use prose instead of polygons doesn't erase the fact that, as a game, a text adventure requires coding.

Last night I found myself digging out a text-adventure work-in-progress, and I managed to squash a few bugs after I put my daughter to bed, but before my son was finished with his bath. And then after putting my son to bed, I fell asleep on the floor of his room, so I didn't get much done last night.

Though Ferguson couldn't figure out how to make his 1938 scenario work, there was a better expert who could: His 13-year-old son, who was a whiz at strategy games. Rather than rush out to attack Germany, his son carefully set up robust trade agreements with France first to make sure the country felt diplomatically obligated to go along with the fight. Presto: France fought, and Germany fell.

Ferguson became so delighted with Making History that he has joined forces with Muzzy Lane to design a new game. Due out in 2008, this one will model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran.

It'll undoubtedly be controversial. But it will also, he expects, be humbling. The power of counterfactual thinking is that forces us to step outside of our comfort zones. When we think about historical events, we have 20/20 hindsight -- so we forget how confusing and uncertain they were at the time. In 1943, nobody really knew how strong Germany was, or what Stalin was thinking. In modern conflicts, we often have a similarly false sense of surety -- too much confidence in our ability to predict the outcome of major events.

When we play with sims, they knock us off our pedestals -- because crazy things usually happen we don't predict. Yet the chaos is useful, because we can run the same situation again and again, changing one little thing each time, until we've war-gamed it deeply and understand it better than ever. --Clive Thompson --Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games (Wired)

Really, though, Xbox Live is just an online simulacrum of a middle-school cafeteria. The crudeness is coming from the kids, not being inflicted on them. If anything, the over-25s we met were an excellent influence. They tended to be polite and mellow and demonstrated good sportsmanship?like saying "good game" after they'd eviscerated me with various weapons.

[...]

I'm right at the fulcrum point of gaming popularity. Almost everyone five years older than me doesn't really "get" video games and has little interest in playing them. Almost everyone five years younger than me can't imagine life without an Xbox (or PS2 or whatever). -- Seth Stevenson and Chris Suellentrop --The Gaming Graybeards: Can two thirtysomethings survive on Xbox Live? (Slate)

I'm pushing 40 (and this very moment is the first time I have ever thought of myself in precisely that term) -- and the guy who wrote this is 30, so I found this statement very apt.

I would probably enjoy online multiplayer games if I had the time to play them... but quite frankly, if I did have more time, I'd probably spend it modding rather than playing. (I never did finish Half-Life 2.)

We know that pro-am journalism can work only if people are persuaded to give their time, lend their knowledge, pool their intelligence. Those are donations, but not of money. Often they are more critical than money.

To succeed in this, we have to persuade several hundred people to donate good work to one big story -- and to swarm around so it gets really good. We plan to modify this site for use in future stories, more sprawling and more difficult. Maybe about the environment. Or the schools. Or -- who knows? -- the war.

A professional newsroom can't easily do this kind of reporting; it's a closed system. Because only the employees operate in it, there can be reliable controls. That's the system's strength. The weakness is the organization knows only what its own people know. Which wasn't much of a weakness until the Internet made it possible for the people formerly known as the audience to realize their informational strengths. --Jay Rosen --Why We're Doing This (Assignment Zero)

Using games to entice, entertain, and engage introductory programmers has been successful; many of the approaches, however, use graphical programming. This either requires a complex game engine or toolkit for students to program or a lot of additional effort for students to get the game looking the way they want. Taking a page from the game studies literature, the current paper reports on gaining the benefits of games without the graphics, of traveling back in time to the days of the great text adventure games. --Brian C. Ladd --XYZZY: Finding New Magic in Text Adventure Games (Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education)

I'm always glad to encounter new scholarship on text-based games, but the "back in time" rhetoric here is rather dismissive of the incredible artistic and programming advances that the post-commercial interactive fiction community has made.

This is a Microsoft-sponsored conference, held on the "Disney Wonder Cruise Ship."

And I, for one, welcome our new digital cultural overlords.

Seriously, though, engineering papers are a very, very different genre than the academic papers I've been writing lately. I actually presented at an engineering conference when I was a graduate student, presenting a method for sequencing writing assignments. This was nothing new so far as the rhet-comp field is concerned, but at the time the concept of writing across the curriculum was new to a lot of engineering teachers, and I did what I could to present it to them in a genre that they would find familiar.

In this strange, strange tale the Davids are the size of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, rumoured to be discussing an alliance to take on the search leader. The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. --Who Isn't Afraid of Google? (Slashdot)

I recently submitted a proposal to give the "con" perspective on a panel about one of Google's recent innovations. If that panel is accepted, this article will be a good starting place for my research.

We are no longer talking about shovelfuls of dirt on the coffin of computer-enforced copying restrictions; that sound you hear is the beep-beep-beep of the dump truck backing up to the grave site. --Rob Pegoraro --The Sound of Copy Restrictions Crashing (Washintgon Post)

When I think about all the expensive engineering that Microsoft embedded into Vista, and how that cost is going to be passed on to consumers who didn't want it and don't need it... and when I think about what amazing things a fraction of that R & D money could have accomplished if it had been given to the open source community, it makes me want to... I dunno... go sharpen a pencil and draft my next syllabus on paper.

After I finish blogging for the evening.

It's now common for companies to Google potential employees to uncover peccadilloes from the past. It took me all of 30 seconds, via Google, to discover one applicant's very public infatuation with indecorous sexual escapades and another's unhealthy fondness for abusing industrial strength pharmaceuticals. Needless to say, neither was hired. --Jim Louderback --On Media in Our Lives: Embarrassment forever (SFGate.com)

Will, this one will probably annoy you, but the reason I'm posting it is because it's written by one of the people who actually makes the decision to hire an applicant or trash the resume.

Has Louderback read The Diamond Age? His penultimate paragraph seems to refer to Neal Stephenson's ideas about the Neo-Victorians.

We could evolve into a much more tolerant and forgiving society, where everyone's secrets are laid bare, and no one -- aside from your mother -- really cares. Don't hold your breath. The more likely outcome is that we'll devolve into a new age of crushing civility, one that makes the current "PC" climate look downright permissive. I see a new Victorian Age dawning, where everyone's proper and polite on the outside, yet out of control in private, when the curtains are drawn and the power is off.

The VSTF process converts display of text such as this first sentence from the U.S. Declaration of Independence

into this:

--Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading (Reading Online)

Fascinating. The indented version really does seem a lot easier to read, perhaps chiefly because the first word in each line is often a preposition or other small word that one can usually guess from the context. Such words are so common that they are easily recognized, even when the eye is focusing on the next word in the line. So there is less back-tracking of the eyes.

The article is packed with statistics that show that students comprehend better when they learn texts formatted in this manner.

The researchers are selling an online service that reformats text on the fly, so naturally the research is going to emphasize the benefits of such a service, so keep that in mind.

The economics of book printing dictate that books are less expensive (and therefore accessible to more people) if the print fills up as much of the page as possible. But there is no such restriction on electronic text. As monitor screens get wider and wider every year, I have often wondered what to do with all that blank space on either side of the legible columns of text. This looks like a useful option.

Over the summer, I'm planning to create some new online handouts for my journalism class, so I'm blogging this for future reference.

In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). "After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles," he said. --Americans and Japanese Read Faces Differently (Live Science)

They came from all over the world, poles in hand, and feet ready to inch more than half a mile across a high wire strung over the Han River in a spine-tingling battle of balance, speed and high anxiety. --Bo-Mi Lim --Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo (Yahoo! | AP (will espire))

This is a news article about a high-wire competition that involved crossing a body of water called the Han River.

A tip of the blaster-shield-fitted helmet to a very clever headline writer.

Some linguists are worried that the proliferation of text messaging among students may hurt the development of formal English. Johnson does not agree.

"I don't buy it," Johnson said. "I think students can distinguish between different contexts. What they would say with their friends is different from what they would say to an instructor."

Text messaging may be an important tool to help students learn the difference between different English and behaviors that are appropriate for different situations.

"Sure, text messaging can help teach that difference," Johnson said. "I would put the emphasis on explaining the importance of context."

In fact, Johnson says that text messaging may have a positive effect on language, especially with English as a second language students. --Teaching through Text Message; Cell Phones Emerge as Learning Tool (Rebel Yell)

I tend to agree. If instructors teach that text-message lingo and academic English are two points on a sliding scale (not necessarily the most extreme points), that's a good way to help students learn about the importance of audience and rhetorical context. I try to make it very clear that my expectations for blog entries are slightly more formal than in-class timed writing exercises, but I really don't mind shorthand or typos in the comments that students leave on peer blog entries.

Of course, I do ask students to demonstrate that they are capable of leaving an in-depth comment from time to time, and naturally I hope that when students are doing any sort of course work that they will be practicing the appropriate writing skills.

Police arrested a college student Tuesday suspected of opening fire in an off-campus apartment during a dispute over a video game console, killing one man and wounding two others. --Calif. Student Arrested in Shooting (AP | MyWay (will expire))

But I should have expected that. The IF Comp, an annual contest to see who can write the best text-based game, offers a vast treasury of interactive fiction, and many of the entries over the past 13 years are truly fantastic. Some, like Vespers, are lit-geek works of art, putting the bulk of commercial games to shame. --Textual Pleasure: Parsing the Annual IF Competition (The Escapist)

--atari-and-controllers (jackrabbit.etsy.com)

Via join the dots.

Vetting Comments Strangers Post to Class Blogs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I always enjoy telling my students when I start noticing comments that people who aren't in our class start posting comments on the course weblog or individual student weblogs.

Sometimes the poster is someone who took the course in the past and is recalling with fondness (or horror) a particular assignment. Other entries attract comments from other people on the Internet who happen to be interested in the same subject.

Here is an example of such a comment (posted to a 600-word blog entry that discussed the nature of heroism in Huck Finn) that I don't bother to approve:

im writing a paper why is huck the hero??

But here is an excerpt from a 700-word comment (posted to a student's entry about Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"), which I did approve:

My take was that it is blindingly obvious that he is a first draft of perfection, but like the Misfit, a flawed one. He talks the talk, but Jesus never said anything about the heart as a car or anything mobile - it was a mustard seed that grew IN PLACE, like a house, like the Kingdom of God.

See Also:

• Approving or Ignoring Comments on Old Student Blog Entries
  
• Blogging Now Begins Young

Digg Takedown, Obama Takeover, Army Blog Squeeze (Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

This is the last week of classes, and I've got deadlines galore (3 conference proposals, an annual report, a departmental proposal, and an article submission that I've been sitting on for a week).

So I won't have much to say, but I still thought it was worth noting the story of Digg's attempt to silence user-submitted articles about cracking HD-DVD security. Since Digg is made up of user-supported content, Digg users have responsed by submitting a flood of articles that express their unhappiness with the fact that Digg tried to suppress the HD-DVD security information (and most of those articles probably duplicate the protection information that Digg was supposed to be protecting by taking down the article in the first place).

I also note the story of how the Obama campaign was initially happy that supporter Joe Anthony volunteered to keep the Obama MySpace page. But then the Obama campaign pushed Anthony off the site, taking it over from and refusing to pay him what Anthony thought it was worth. (I don't know whether they offered a lower figure and Anthony was holding out for more, or whether they just figured it was their right to take over the site.) At any rate, Anthony says the campaign has lost his vote.

Just think of all the money that has gone into the development of complex software with digital content protection schemes that bloat the size and blunt the usability (Vista) , and that will go into litigation that will attempt to extend the economic lifespan of the 19-th century models of cultural production. Imagine if that money had instead been spent on think-tanks that aim to work with the cultural tide, rather than against it.

And while I appreciate the desire of the US Army to crack down on the possibility of leaking military secrets, wouldn't the blogosphere be a useful place to engage with public opinion and recruit new members? The military crackdown on soldier blogs suggests the public at large will lose a valuable avenue to interact with the men and women who make life-or-death decisions that affect global stability. If you think of what the US Army Corps of Engineers can do in an emergency, think of an online strike team that might be ready to swoop in the event of a Katrina-like crisis, or a Darfur-like morass, engaging the good will of people around the globe, drawing on their first-hand observations.

Am I naive? Probably. Regardless, today was not a very good day for social networking.

On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up. --Richard Pérez-Peña --Business magazine fails to heed its own tech advice (International Herald Tribune)

What makes this a "dog bites man" story is the fact that Business 2.0 publishes an annual "101 Dumbest Moments" feature, in which the magazine mocks other companies for making mistakes.

Oddly enough, while I was typing this entry, I accidentally pulled my computer plug out of the wall -- again.

But the last time this happened, I must have rearranged my plugs so that only printer and monitor were connected to that particular power bar. The CPU is plugged directly into the wall. (Yay, me!)

--Map of Online Communities (XKCD: A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language)

Thanks, Josh, for the suggestion. (This is just an excerpt from the full map.)

I'm going to have to give this site some attention when grades are in... I wish the artist could draw people instead of stick figures, but the jokes are clever, sweet, and geeky.

I Think, I Want, I Know, I Feel, I Google (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Google Hits:

• I think (369,000,000)
  
• I want (275,000,000)
  
• I know (257,000,000)
  
• I feel (128,000,000)
  
  
• I hate (51,200,000)
  
• I love (270,000,000)