Posts for March 2006
Welcome, Anshe$!
Fascinating. As reported by Mark Wallace at Walkerings, Anshe Chung (a real estate entrepeneur in Second Life) is considering (or threatening, depending on how you take her annoucement) to introduce a competing currency to the Linden dollar; the Anshe$. I agree 100% with Mark Wallace here; this is a really, really interesting development, and could actually work if it got enough traction. Anshe is a huge economic force in SL, all by herself, and could conceivably have enough "internal traction" to make this work on her own. By that, I mean that she's considering changing her rental fees to be in US$ or Anshe$ only...no longer accepting Linden$. With the number of renters she has, that automatically gives her currency value; almost as if Target or Wal-Mart not only had gift cards, but ONLY accepted gift cards...suddenly, the cards have their own value.
Over time, other merchants might begin to accept Anshe$, and the race would be on. Anshe's reasoning is purely economic; she has to hold large quantities of Linden$ right now, due to her constant land rental fees coming in, and the Linden$ has fallen almost 60% against the US$ in the past 18 months. She's bleeding (virtual) cash...but she turns said virtual cash into US$100,000/year. The deterioration in the Linden$ hurts! Her hope is to halt that slide by breaking the explicit connection between her rental charges and the fees she pays in turn to Linden Labs...and it's not very often that you're able to watch as someone creates their own currency, is it?
I LOVE this stuff!
March 31, 2006 permalink | Comments (1)
People are better than banks...
Interesting: Zopa appears to be mediated, peer-to-peer lending.
March 24, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)
I hate it when I do that!
Damn it! I whacked a perfectly good, long blogpost earlier by shutting down Firefox while it was sitting, unsaved, in another tab. Crap! Yet another reason to add an "editing" flag to my database schema for posts, so that I can save early, save often without having half-baked posts show up.
It WAS a discussion of one of Jon Udell's latest posts. Good stuff from both fronts; in the practical sense, he taught me some much-needed JSON hacking. In a more contemplative mode, his thoughts on the boundaries between public and private data on the Internet (especially WRT social networks) match up well with a post I've been working on in my head over the past few days. I love it!
*sigh*...This version of this post sucks SO much more than the other one. The saving grace is, of course, that is exists, and the other doesn't. *grin*
PS: by the way, you can see the results of my new little javascript hack on my website homepage...the "recent links" block used to be a static, manually updated list (which hadn't been updated...um...in a long time), and is now a live mix-in of links from my del.icio.us feed. Fun!
March 22, 2006 permalink | Comments (2)
Check out Democracy Player
GetDemocracy is the distribution website for the Democracy Player, which is basically a specialized browser for downloading (via Bittorrent) and viewing online videos, video blogs, video RSS feeds, etc. It's part of a grand scheme by the Participatory Culture Foundation to provide tools for free and open media sharing over the Net. All their various projects are GPL'd, and they're using a lot of cool stuff...the Mozilla XUL-Runner platform, Bittorent, VLC and Xine, and Python!
The player is really sharp, I have to admit. I may have to break down and get another big-ass drive for all this stuff! Check it out...pretty cool.
March 19, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)
Say no to Vongo...
Well, I didn't have high hopes, but I figured I'd give Vongo a try (since I had a 14-day free trial). It's one of the on-demand movie D/L sites...yada, yada. I figured it'd be a change of pace.
But they committed what is for me a cardinal sin. I can't even view their website from my Linux box (well, without lying about my browser user agent, anyway); they "detect" the OS, and send you straight to an "Incompatible OS" page if they don't like it. Note: I can't even see the homepage; it's not like it was the client download page or something! Sheesh. No one without Win2000/XP can even view their site...so the hell with them. I knew I'd have to reboot to Windows before installing anything, but I can't even surf and and check things out. Which is typically a good idea when you're trying to sell something. So bye, bye, Vongo...
Oh, that's right; I got new BG 2.0 episodes from Netflix yesterday. That'll do! Lovely, lovely Netflix! You rock.
March 19, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)
MD5 collisions in one minute
Wow...here's a reference to a new paper describing "a considerable speedup of MD5 collision generation. His improvements of Wang's method enables one to make MD5 collisions typically in one minute on a PC; sometimes it takes a few minutes, and sometimes only a few seconds."
As noted in the paper, the "few seconds" attacks have a reasonable probability, and if they succeed, they are quick enough to allow collision finding during protocol executions that rely on MD5. Zoinks. It's amazing, really; hardware improvements give steady, compounding, year to year improvement in the speed of cryptanalysis. But the truly revolutionary change comes out of thin air, from the minds of mathematicians who just come up with A Better Way. Makes me so jealous that it hurts sometimes! *grin*
link from The Cryptography Mailing List at metzdowd.com (subscribe by sending "subscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com)
March 17, 2006 permalink | Comments (1)
Holy crap...FPS in the browser, and FAST!
This is cool as crap: Phosphor Beta 1 - Rasterworks. Sucks that there is no Shockwave 10 plugin for Linux yet, so I had to boot to Windows to check it out...but damn, it's impressive nonetheless.
link from (where else lately?) Second Life Future Salon
March 17, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)
GPL'd OS in a web server...
What can't AJAX do, eh? I just got back from vacation, and decided to start playing with 30boxes (a calendaring AJAX app) today. Pretty cool stuff; I like it. But then I start catching up on my RSS feeds this evening, and I see this: eyeOS: Web Based Desktop System -- and GPL'd, no less! (and AJAX out the wazoo, of course)
Contains basic apps (word proc, calendaring, phone/contacts, etc.), new apps can be installed, and runs on any webserver including PHP 4.3 or better. All you need is a web browser to access a pretty useful desktop. They also host their own server at eyeOS.info, so you can create an account for free there if you don't have a webserver handy.
Interesting, interesting stuff. In particular, the F/OSS aspect; you can take the code running this things and get your hands dirty with it!
link from Second Life Future Salon
March 14, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)
Ah, the sweet smell of March Madness...
It's that time of year again...even though I'm probably only 10% the fan I used to be, I still find time to head over to SI.com and find gems like this: The Most Heated Rivalry in College Basketball -- The basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest blood feud in college athletics. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses sports; it is locals against outsiders, elitists against populists, even good against evil.
Ahhh...tasty. Of course, that article is written by a Carolina fan, and I'm a Duke alum. But the feeling's the same; he just has it backwards. *grin* Go to Hell, Carolina, go to Hell!
And this little ungrateful bastard? What a piece of crap: Krzyzewskiville eviction -- Duke punishes student trying to sell game admission. That punishment better be slow and painful. He has broken a sacred trust! The free admission to Duke b-ball games and the phenomenon of Krzyzewskiville (the student had been living in line in a tent since Jan 9th...ah, brings back memories!) are priceless!
March 4, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)
Will Wright Spore Video
I've seen several articles and discussions by Will Wright on his new game idea Spore, but this Google video (35 minutes long) looks awesome! By far the most info I've seen; according to the metadata, the video is from the Game Developer's Conference. The UI looks fantastic.
link from Second Life Future Salon
March 2, 2006 permalink | Comments (0)
Earlier posts -- Later posts
