Month: December 2006

Nicholas Carr asks what is the ecological cost of Second Life.

“…the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.”

Of course, this isn’t the whole story. The average human in the developed countries consumes about 6 times as much energy.

Yes, James, I’m ragging on Second Life. I’m being extremist on my views. I do see some point in it – but more from the point of view of replacing MySpace and Bebo rather than replacing the web.

I see the value in it being a persistent virtual world. Why not have an entire island dedicated to “Halo” for example. Complete with Banshees and Ghosts. And ready-made suits. And of course guns.

Why not have an entire island dedicated to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Complete with Elf and Halfling suits? Swords and rings.

And yes, why not a Hogwarts?

Second Life, to me, adds a visible element to online gaming. Without the trappings of World of Warcraft, it’s more about narrative fiction than fighting for points.

I’d like to see Bladerunner done SL-style. Or maybe Brazil.

Intel has developed what it calls the “ClassMate PC” it intends to sell for $400 per unit in response to the $150 OLPC and will be evaluating it in Brazil.

The ultraportable will house:

The ultraportable will house an (unspecified) Intel Celeron M processor, 7-inch 800 x 480 LCD, 256MB of DDR2 RAM, 1GB of NAND goodness, and a 6-cell Li-ion battery.

It’ll likely run an embedded version of Windows. The OLPC will have much the same hardware but will run Linux. Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders, the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with: “We declined because it’s not open source.” Therefore Linux was chosen.

It’s annoying though, considering Apple did this in 1997 – a decade ago!

Imagine what they could do now?

James makes me feel like less of a freak geek with this entry today about browsing habits of the general public:

“Which goes to prove that people will interrupt what they’re doing and invoke the all-seeing Google when they come across something that piques their interest. Either the PC is always-on in the background or it’s not an hindrance to boot it up. The sit back and sit forward media can and do complement each other. And the transition can happen in a flash.”

I’ll be honest, I have been ridiculed before for having my laptop beside me when watching a film. But it’s because I like to be able to look up the actors if I recognise them or just query any bit of data that comes along through the traditional media. I dont see it as wrong and the only way it could be better is if every TV had a Nintendo-DS-type screen thing going on.

Yay, I’m normal!!!!

The Seattle Times writes:“Imagine this. One of the world’s most powerful monopolies puts 10,000 people to work for five years to create one new product. And nobody is really sure if anyone wants it. How’s that for a gamble?”

And what a great effort it is. Turns out it’s still vulnerable to MyDoom and Netsky. Brilliant work there guys. Probably $10 billlion dollars spent, at least 2 years late and it’s still vulnerable to 2-year-old Windows malware!

“Ballmer says Microsoft tried to innovate too much. So the company reorganized and tried to placate impatient consumers by shipping Service Pack 2 for Windows XP then rebooted the whole Vista effort in mid-2004. It’s hard to imagine exactly how much Microsoft flushed down the toilet.”

Ballmer’s only half right. The whole shebang was developed by marketeers and executives using Flash/Director to emulate what should happen long before an engineer wrote a line of code.

They didn’t try to innovate too much. That’s doing a disservice to their legions of dedicated engineers who were told to create real magic out of smoke and mirrors.

I hope every software company takes note.

Damien’s Fluffy Links brings us 7 Viral Marketing Tips.

Now, we could digest each of these lessons individually and see how to apply them to our everyday business, or we could just enjoy the various Youtube videos and not worry about the messages involved.

Hmm, time-wastingly-good. Yummy!