January 2009 Archives

Google has announced on their official blog that the Pope (and more broadly, the Vatican) will be making regular contributions to YouTube. I need to make something very clear, here: I'm about to turn 40 this year, and this was not the reminder that I needed that my childhood dreams of a wired world were quaint by comparison to the reality. Sure, I dared to imagine a Robot Pope and a Space Vatican (located a convinient 26,000 miles above Rome in an geostationary orbit) among other crazy hybrids of ancient cultural icons and fantastic applications of technology, but that the world would change this much by 2009 was certainly not something I would have suggested.

In reality, I'm probably over-reacting. After all, this is no different than appearing on the radio or TV, and I don't bat an eye at the Pope appearing on TV (especially since I'm not actually a Catholic), but there's something that rings inside my head when I hear "YouTube" and "Pope" in the same sentence... is it just me?

WOW Insider currently has a nice article about potential upcoming hero classes, and it got me thinking. There is a lot of buzz about shadow hunters or arch druids, but I really think people are just putting existing WoW classes in a blender and coming up with mashups. Instead, I'd like to explore some hero classes that I really think would add to the depth of the game.

Today, I got two pieces of bad news from Variety. Brace yourself if you're a science fiction fan...

• Keanu Reeves will star in a live-action Cowboy Bebop
• The Foundation Trilogy will be turned into a movie by the guy that did 10,000 BC and Godzilla

I know that I should never say, "at least it can't get any worse," but my capacity to visualize "worse" is failing me. Perhaps news that The Men Who Killed Mohamed will star Ashton Kutcher? Bah. I may have to just stop watching movies after Watchmen comes out.

How often do you IM or email someone to let them know about a page that's cool? Do you tweet it? SMS it? There are a lot of ways to tell people about cool sites or pages, but it can be difficult to wade through all this noise if you're the recipient. Enter Google Reader. It's trivial to set up. Just log in with your Gmail account and click on "Sharing settings" along the left sidebar. This brings up a bunch of options including the ability to share your Google Reader entires with everyone on your Gmail Talk friends list. Do this. You can send them all mail if you want through the same interface to let them know, but you don't need to.

Now, you can add RSS feeds for any number of sites and start reading, but the goal was to just share random things you happen to find. How do you do that? Two steps:

Laura DiDio, a former CNN on-camera personality and a central figure in the paranormal investigation of the house that was the basis for the movie The Amityville Horror, eventually went on to work in market research for The Yankee Group and later spun off her own research group called ITIC. She was in a swirl of controversy during the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit when SCO was alledging that IBM had injected proprietary UNIX code into the Linux operating system. DiDio not only supported SCO strongly, but also spent a good deal of time publishing surveys and making comments to the press suggesting that Linux was the more costly server platform as compared to Windows due to the "total cost of ownership" (TCO). Microsoft, in turn, based much of their TCO-oriented marketing and PR around these findings.

Today, her ITIC company is producing results that show that Microsoft is a leader in the virtualization market and that any gap between Microsoft and VMware is vanishing while also suggesting that corporate users are "surprisingly satisfied" with Windows Vista.

The world of market research and the "recent surveys indicated" marketing phenomenon  have really gotten out of control in the past 10 years. Now, most companies' marketing departments don't deal in the real perception of their products, but in the perception that can be crafted by paying for the right kinds of surveys. Of course, if you just go to someone and say, "I need research that says X, and I'm willing to pay Y amount for it," that's likely to come back to you later. Instead, you float ideas on what your marketing team "neads to know," and and market research organizations perform "independant research" which you then buy. It's the same result. You pay someone to come up with the data you wanted, but it looks cleaner to the casual observer.

DiDio is a master at this kind of stats-for-hire research, which is, I imagine, why she's formed her own company.

For further reading:

• Laura DiDio on Wikipedia
• A recent ITIC survey finds that Microsoft is gaining major ground in virtualization vs. VMware and Windows Vista's bad rep is "undeserved"
• A 2004 piece where DiDio explains the why continued growth of the Firefox browser is unlikely
  

Ghostcrawler, a designer for World of Warcraft, today discussed possible future development on the Battleground concept for Player vs Player (PvP) play in World of Warcraft. Specifically, he's saying that the team wants to find "a brilliant way to measure skill (which is frankly something we would very much like to do)," in order to rate battleground players and reward skilled participation.

I've suggested ways to measure these metrics and implement battleground progression before, but Ghostcrawler specifically mentioned the need to not force players to just sit in BGs all week, grinding out points. I think my first suggestion would accomplish that (scoring each player in each BG and then developing a rating based on average score per BG over time in order to progress through ranks), but the second suggestion (using achievements on a per-kill, per-win, and per-damage/healing done basis) would not.

It's an interesting problem, though. Obviously if BGs are to remain viable they need to either provide easy epics or a way to dole out good gear to the most accomplished players.

Here's a thought for the day: over the last 20 years (since I first built gcc), the total time to compile has remained relatively constant on moderate hardware (Sun workstations then, Linux consumer desktop now). I suppose that tracks the massive increase in size of the distribution, but it shocked me when I thought about it.

As you probably know, a man was shot and killed a man outside of San Francisco at the Fruitvale station on the BART (commuter rail) by the transportation police. The man was named Oscar Grant III, and his crime appears to have been being drunk and disorderly and involved in a fight. He was hadcuffed at the time, and face down on the cement walkway.

Rumors are flying about the incident. Some people are saying that he was shot because the officer in question thought the gun was his taser. One report suggests that his mental state is in question. Now, over 100 protesters have been arrested in riots that followed.

I just want to get one thing off my chest about this: cops are people. That means that, like any group of people, while some are wonderful human beings and some are evil bastards, most of them fall in the middle. I don't know if this cop was the kind of scum that would knowingly shoot an unarmed man in the back while pinned down or if this was a tragic mistake, but what bothers me is that so many people immediately move to paint all police with the same brush.

Cops are people with jobs. Their jobs are a bit less pleasant than most people's, and that obviously takes its toll, but overall they're just people. To suggest that they're all sadistic power-mongers is just as bad as suggesting that they can never do wrong. Let's make sure that this boy's family gets the help they need to get through this, and that the officers responsible are investigated and delt with appropriately, but let's not make the mistake of thinking that our lives would be better off without someone to call when there's an accident or someone breaks into your home.

A long time ago, I wrote a World of Warcraft article titled, "Typical Hunter Specs." Since then, a lot has changed, but that article is still the number one Google hit for "hunter specs." This got me to thinking it was time to update the page with what I've learned playing a hunter in Wrath of the Lich King, and there was quite a lot!

In the World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, there are some really wonderful events called "rings". These are area-style chain fights where your group faces successively harder challengers, each of which is like a dungeon mini-boss, leading up to a fight that's on-par with an appropriately leveled dungeon boss.

These events suggest 3-5 players, but 3 well-geared players of appropriate level can accomplish all of them, assuming that you have a tank and a healer.