The Boogie Board is a reflexive LCD tablet that can be written on with a stylus — essentially a high-tech replacement for traditional dry erase technology. This retails for $30-$50 (these are in short supply right now), and can be written on and erased 50,000 times or so before the non-replaceable battery fails.
There is no way to save screens, so you can’t export what you’ve written as an image to your computer — as with dry erase boards, you’re probably stuck with taking a shot with a digital camera to preserve anything worth preserving. The company that makes these is working on a version that will save the screens, however.
Still, even without that feature, this looks like pure awesome.
Edward Castronova has a peculiar post on what he sees as the end of resistance to real-money trades in MMOs.
Castronova sites a study finding that people who want to role-play within MMOs are a decidedly small minority, and then concludes from this that RMTs are inevitable since, apparently, the only argument against RMTs was that they break the immersion that role-players want from a game.
As Fairfield notes, it is becoming weird now to insist on an RMT-free gaming experience. I freely trade money for time all day, every day. The community here in Bloomington finds this utterly normal and so does the most of the community in Azeroth. As devs will argue, they don’t make all this stuff for free; they have to get paid somehow, and given the general disinterest of their players in pure refuge, there is quite a lot of give along the immersion / cash spectrum. How can I oppose RMT?
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But these events are worth noting from a social theory perspective: Even such strongly framed alternative environments have had little effect on the way people act. The fact that people do NOT role-play, that they do NOT treat dragons as monsters, the fact that they do NOT treat evil as Evil and good as Good, nor kings as Kings nor quests as Quests, the fact that if they change at all it is only to revert to strategies of mooning the whole world just for the adolescent joy of it (which, I respectfully and lovingly submit, turned out to be a special devotion of my gameplaying colleagues in academia), seems to reject social construction theories. Drop a society of 20th century people into World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, and you get a masked ball, only: A thoroughly unremarkable 20th-century society playing around with high-fantasy costumes. You cannot remake a people by changing the world in which they live.
What I don’t get about this is why Castronova and others would prefer to establish multiple identities (at a minimum, a real world identity and a virtual identity) but then restrict that virtual identity to just a single mode of interaction. Since MMOs involve dealing with multiple identities at the outset, it seems inevitable that rather than be constricted by some artificial restriction on identity (which is already an omnipresent feature of the “real world” for many of us), players would want to take both varying approaches over time to their virtual identity.
I see no conflict at all between logging on to World of Warcraft and roleplaying one moment, making a crude joke in the Trade Channel the next, and discussing some real world event that my guildies and I happen to have in common. In fact it seems kind of strange that Castronova and others would see as desirable a strict adherence to just the first identity given that MMOs tend to give players tools to easily manage multiple in-game identities.
So I don’t see how RMT transactions in-game detract from the immersiveness, anymore than does the fact that each month a $14.99 charge appears on my credit card, or that I have to boot up into Windows first before launching a game.
Back in 2008 I posted about how much I hated the way Firefox’s spell checking system underlined misspelled words with little red dots that I found almost impossible to spot and asked for someone to write an extension to fix that.
Fast forward to 2009 and Automattic — the folks behind WordPress — acquired AfterTheDeadline.com and integrated it with WordPress.com. In addition, After The Deadline released a much-improved Firefox plugin.
The beautiful thing about After The Deadline is it uses a solid underline system to flag misspellings and possible grammatical errors. Finally, I can actually find the damned errors in long blocks of text.
The developers behind the awesome VideoLAN VLC Media Player are working on a free video editing project called VideoLAN Movie Creator. VLMC aims to be a simple, user-friendly video editor, as demonstrated by this YouTube demo.
Unfortunately, the project’s website has been down for awhile and it is a bit unclear what the status of this project is.
New Scientist reports on a study by two Harvard researchers suggesting that Google may earn as much as $500 million annually from typosquatting — those ad-filled domains that target people who mistype the domain name of popular websites.
According to New Scientist,
[Tyler] Moore and [Benjamin] Edelman started by using common spelling mistakes to create a list of possible typo domains for the 3264 most popular .com websites, as determined by Alexa.com rankings. They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.
They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating.
If the top 100,000 websites suffer the same typosquatting rate as the sites Moore and Edelman studied, up to 68 million people a day could visit a typo site, they say. They estimate that almost 60 per cent of typo sites could have adverts supplied by Google.
If the company earns as much per visitor from ads on typo sites as it reportedly does from ads alongside search results, it could potentially earn $497 million a year in revenue from typo domains, they conclude.
Edelman is co-counsel on a lawsuit against Google by a firm seeking damages from Google for serving ads on a typosquatting domain, so he’s not a disinterested party here.
Google will stop serving ads on typosquatting domain names if the owner of the “legitimate” domain name complains, but it doesn’t pro-actively seek out such domains.
Edelman apparently wants Google to do so and notes that typosquatters tend to own hundreds or thousands of such domain names, so presumably Google could block Domain X and then also perhaps use WHOIS to find other typosquatted domain names owned by the same person. That seems like an extremely problematic solution that would be relatively easy for squatters to route around fairly easily.
If, as Edelman says, it is fairly easy to identify typosquatters, why not sue them directly, perhaps in a class action representing the presumably thousands of businesses who are allegedly harmed by this practice?
Man, DC Direct is really dropping Green Lantern rings right and left (probably because they know fanbois like me will be there to buy them). This Honor Guard replica ring is set for June 2010 for $35.
CorsixTH is an open source clone of Bullfrog’s 1997 game Theme Hospital. Playing the clone requires either a copy of the original game or a copy of the demo version of the game.
As the Google code page for the project notes,
As computers evolve, we risk losing some classic games. Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital, published in 1997, is a classic simulation game, but getting it to run natively on modern operating systems is getting progressively harder.
This project aims to reimplement the game engine of Theme Hospital, and be able to load the original game data files. This means that you will need a purchased copy of Theme Hospital, or a copy of the demo, in order to use CorsixTH. After most of the original engine has been reimplemented in open source code, the project will serve as a base from which extensions to the original game can be made.
Good show. The Bullfrog game I would really like to see get this treatment, however, is Syndicate Wars. Not sure if that game is playable on modern hardware.
Museum Replicas will be releasing this replica of the World of Warcraft Alliance War Flag later this year. This will set you back $40, and yes there will be a Horde version available as well.
In July, DC Direct will be releasing this nice looking 1/6th scale Kingdom Come version of Superman. I’m not a big Superman fan, but that looks hella nice. Moar Alex Ross plz.
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