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Spore DRM and the most copied game

Camilo — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:54:33 +0000

And I get this email

“@Neurokafka you DMR invaded brain washed corporate elitist! about 5 hours ago from TwitterFox in reply to Neurokafka”

okay, w.t.f. are you talking about?
What do you have against stand-up comedy? Larry Miller

and what the hell is DMR invasion, some sort of takeover of the Department of Mental Retardation, or Dept Marine Resources? Is this some sort of offshore drilling reference?
My GOD Man! sometimes your tweets (not just your tweets) are like some sort of ironic-cynical koan designed to induce seizures.

This deserves a blog, not a tweet, and since today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, from now on referred to as TLPD in the rest of this document, let’s talk about pirates and DRM, Spore, and IP assumptions.

Spore: magic concept, ambitious yet achievable, and full of unexplained possibilities. It is alike to a caricature of the Metaverse, yet it is extremely poor in activities. It is a common theme that, whenever a social virtual space appears, people forget that activities and meeting points are the most important elements when designing a community infrastructure, be it a building, a city, an enterprise or a game. As Jane Jacobs would say, The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

The facebook people got it – they walk to school, they walk to work, they interact with others. Yet apparently the people at EA have a limited exposure to old buildings, and probably it is their crunch time strategy affecting the products from Maxis, I don’t know. But while evil facebook will allow people to create communities through activities and enjoy the addictive space that it creates, all that Spore allows you to do is click and click and click. It may have worked ten years ago for SimCity, but now we have RealCity. Times, they are a’changing.

And now to Spore DRM: you have to have an approved PC to run that? Are you oput of your mind, EA? Here are some links you might have encountered regarding that little debacle: Dumbed down experience and draconian DRM; EA Admits Spore Launch Botched by DRM; Still, Financial Damage Already Done; DRM: Buyers Beware, and, last but not least, Spore Most Copied game Thanks to DRM.

What’s that about TLPD then? Pirates are not interested in games qua games, they are interested in whatever brings them money.

Users sharing their game with others? Cool! Monetize that!
Users using your servers to exchange creatures? Good! Monetize that!
Users asking you to allow them to give you money so they can get extra servers and faster interaction or premium access? Monetize that.
Users talking about how cool your company is? That is something that you can actually transform into money!

So, you see, my tuíterin friend, Spore is bad business, old model, worse interaction.

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Modern art

Camilo — Mon, 21 May 2007 01:29:42 +0000

You know all those GPS trackers you can get at spy stores? What about the smaller ones, the ones that indicate position in a room?
Abe has a proposal for a 21st century installation:

- Buy 5 -11 floor cleaning “Roomba” robots. Any type and variety designed for use on floors can do.
- Plug chargers into gallery outlets
- Fully charge robots
- Open gallery
- Turn all of them on at once and let them clean
- Performance ends when all the robots have stopped

I add:
- have a real time map of all the position fo the robots
- make them interact with the public at the exhibition
- sell that graph.

It won’t be a proper exhibition unless you sell the final result, won’t it!

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Inflight information

Camilo — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 11:16:32 +0000

These last airline restrictions spell marvels for the software industry! Seriously.
I was reading last night the blog of DarcyLabMistress (and for those interested in who she is you might want to remember Kevin Mitnick), and reading her and her readers’ considerations on how to fly in this era of fear and increased surveillance; the main question was: would you put your electronics in your luggage, allowing it to be destroyed, searched and seized arbitrarily?

1) Are you willing to place all of your significant electronic equipment (including laptop or other computers, cellphones, DVD players, iPods, etc.) in checked baggage for airline flights?
2) If you are required to place such electronic equipment in checked baggage, would it have a significant negative impact on your willingness to fly?
3) Do you mainly fly for business or pleasure?

DarcyLabMistress background allows her to consider this very real scenario from a professional and personal point of view, and she is naturally unwilling to submit her electronic information in the hands of TSA and baggage handlers; the least risk you can expect from that is delayed equipment; the most, some unwarranted search and seizure using the latest Presidential powers.

The readers’ answers reflect that: nobody is willing to put their electronic information in the hands of TSA and baggage handlers, and from this highly unscientific poll, a lot of people are wary of putting their files, if anything, at risk of loss.
And that finally brings me to the starting of this post: putting your info on the web. A few years back, you could put your backups in Xdrive, but mainly, that was slow, expensive and cumbersome; you depended on the availability of a fast connection, on the fickleness of the local firewall, and it was not practical, restricted to only a few megas.
Now we have googlemail and its oodles of storage, what has prompted those remote storage services to offer faster and bigger repositories. We have virtual productivity software, and good encryption and security devices easily available.

I can imagine thus going to a clients presentation and sitting at their machine, USBing securely my passwords and encrypted environment with a keychain previously fedexed, or using a one time only password or shared space, downloading the standard format app that I am demoing, and leaving afterwards with just a paper under my arm. Not more hauling heavy electronics.
I can also see people carrying an image DVD and installing it in a loaner laptop previous to a conference, and a company making sure that all WiFis, signals, applications etc. work in the new machine, the perfect rental pc for the weary traveler that is not allowed to travel with their beloved machine: you simply download some imaging software, which creates the DVD image, and you recreate that on the company machine, right there at their counter in the airport, next to Hertz and Avis.
On leaving, the same software creates a differential image to you, and you yourself get to erase the whole thing with a powerful industrial magnet.
Laptops are commodities already. What is interesting is the info.
Technorati: security, web3.0, trends

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Ruby Acceptance

Camilo — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 14:26:56 +0000

Cedric is pessimistic regarding Ruby and its mainstream acceptance: Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream

Interestingly, they might even be right. But by then, it won’t matter because despite its technical excellence, Ruby on Rails will still be a niche technology that only experts know about.

And then he proceeds to make a case for reasons that have already held back amazingly good concepts, like ~~the Betamax~~LISP, Smalltalk and the like.
Oh, I do disagree: the same could have been said of linux, you know, that it is only a thing for a few experts, a niche development.
But both Ruby and RoR have things that the other products lacked when first out: a vocal, convinced and evangelizing community, a low barrier to entry, an amazing product, and a philosophy where the programmers’ ease is at the front. The whole thing is just elegant.
Have you tried using LISP? Expensive, complicated, hard to get – and I am not talking about ten years ago, or twenty, when you had to deal with nonstandard issues (i read it somewhere). I am thinking about right now, where you go to install KPAX and you find that there are no documents, and that your pc won’t work, and frankly, no. Too much time, and your time is worth money.
Now, simply download ruby, gems, and presto: start working.
Or get the Poignant Guide, or The Pickaxe. What is more, there are a lot of developers that, fascinated with the ease of programming with Ruby can actually make a difference in the acceptance of the language, regardless of the difficulty of the concepts or the relatively newness of it.
And, really, Ruby is not that new: it has been around for 10 years, only that it is only recently that we are getting to see some applications and evangelization process going on.

Let’s make an experiment: we know that the cool kids are all trying this now; so, next foo camp, let’s check how many of the invitees get there spouting ruby dogma, and how fast it goes.

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