New Zealand Microsoftie Nigel Parker had a demo slot to fill at the WEB09 event and, after a chat with a colleague, decided to use crowd sourced images tagged as New Zealand to promote our beautiful country. The embedded video is the result of his frantic 3 days work where he used these images to present a truly stunning example of what a mix of Siverlight, Photosynth and SmoothStreaming video can do.
Okay, I’ve been sitting on this for awhile but, while I’m still to angry about the changes to post objectively just yet, I thought I’d link in some other commentaries.
I encourage you all to follow the links, read up on what this could mean to internet users in New Zealand, and to make some noise! (it is election year after all)
A friend of mine wrote a post pondering the believability of images now that digital capture tools and manipulation programs are so accessible to whomever wants them. Specifically he raised the question also raised by newsweek in this article. Dale went on to ask the question “what about photos of – say – someone committing a crime? Useless in a court of law?”
I think his concerns were addressed by other commenters, but the question got me to thinking, and that started off what ended up being something of an epic comment of my own, which I’ll repost here to remind me to return to this subject later after a bit more research as it’s quite an interesting issue that Dale has raised.
Okay, so I did a painless upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 LTS while it was still in pre-release, but now that I’ve been playing around with the system for awhile, it’s apparent that my needs are changing and the easiest way to cater to these needs is a full reinstall from scratch, putting in place the learnings I’ve gained since initially getting the EEE and blowing away the default Xandros installation.
Update 19/05/2008: Added a few more applications to the HOWTO
Update 22/05/2008: Added a ‘Weirdness’ Section after having problems removing files from Trash.
I was very interested to read this post this morning, and I wanted to drop out a quick post just to link to the article so I’d feel compelled to return and flesh out my thoughts on the subject.
I transitioned my content from the World of Warcraft blog I originally set up back in 2006, back into this site today. I’ve been having issues maintaining the discipline to post regularly in this blog, let alone attempt to maintain another blog devoted to the wonderful World of Warcraft thus, in an effort to simplify my online hosting, I’ve killed off the blog and moved the content. Sorry WoW Blog, we didn’t really seem to hit it off… /mourn
Just got sent a link by a friend (who doesn’t quite understand my addiction, but that’s another post) to an article on how Halifax Bank in the UK has blocked payments to the World or Warcraft subscription servers, quoting “a significant number of fraudulent transactions through Blizzard’s gaming sites” as the motivation behind this move.
Personally I find this an interesting move as, to the best of my understanding, UK banks are not beholden to sort out fraudulent transactions, the onus being on the card owner to prove their innocence – this is the complete opposite of US/NZ banks (including other countries) who will deal to the fraud themselves, leaving the subscriber only liable for the first $50 of the fraud.
The limit of risk for non-UK cardholders certainly may drive less responsible behavior than that of their UK compatriots who are in the stink for the whole amount.
Factor in also the lack of security many World of Warcraft players apply to their account details, and the source of the add-ons they install and it doesn’t take a security expert to see who so many Warcraft accounts get hacked by dirty, stinking, toon raping, gold farming, sell off everything you’ve ever quested for… scumbags.
I kind of think it’s a responsible move as it forces the user to make a conscious and active choice around their payments – and you know how I feel about trusting the end user…
While I haven’t played with MythTV for quite awhile, I was pretty excited to learn that the Mythbuntu project has released their latest update to bring themselves into line with the 7.10 Gutsy release.
I’m going to download an ISO of the latest build to try out on one of my machines at home – I’ve got a wee plan for a possible front end client machine already <insert evil cackling>
I’ve just finished giving a presentation at the Conferenz‘Digital Media & Content Summit’ in Auckland. While it was a lot of work putting the presentation and supporting document together, I found it quite a rewarding experience to be able to capture my thinking on the subject of Digital Entertainment.
The conference organisers are publishing my whitepaper and presentation notes on their website, but I felt it would be appropriate to also distribute them here to gain additional feedback on the topic.
So please feel free to download the documents, have a read, and let me know what you think. This is open source thinking, but an example of what I’m doing in my current role.
Note also the disclaimers in the documents, this is not a company policy statement, it is “free thinking” around what the future could look like and what challenges and opportunities exist therein.
Please note that the presentation is a ‘Notes View’ of a Microsoft Powerpoint slide pack and as such doesn’t have the transitions or builds of the slides, so things will look a little.. strange. I did try to host this on Slideshare, but it doesn’t handle builds either so, let me know if you have ideas as to where it can be hosted to represent the actual run through.
I’ve heard references to a movie on gold farming via The Instance podcast, but this is one of the first major papers I’ve seen to carry an article on the virtual goods trading phenomenom.
It’s been awhile since my last post on this subject, so seeing the $1.8 billion figure quoted was interesting, given that around this time last year when I wrote, it was projected that there would be a $5 billion market for non-subscription revenue (i.e. virtual goods trading) by 2011. That’s still 4 years away, looks like we’re well on track, of course, if gold farming offends your sensibilities, you could always start up a player community centric website to support an MMOG, then sell it for over $1 million. That’s what WoWHead did, and now they’re part of the same conglomerate which owns the 2 other major World of Warcraft community sites, Thottbot (my personal favorite) and Allakhazam.
So what you ask? Well, Affinity Media – the conglomerate which now owns 3 of the most trafficed player sites for World of Warcraft used to own IGE, which is/was one of these gold dealing companies. They now claim that they have sold that company and based on that, it appears that the people over at WoWHead are now comfortable selling their online property on to Affinity. So, a well designed site, rich with publically avalible information, embracing a niche community is worth some good (real world) coin. Who said community content would never make anyone any money?
