Technology
Entries related to technology.
Computer Games
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/09/2007 - 11:37I’ve often told my daughters that they could play any computer game that they could write. With machinima becoming so much easier, I’m tempted to add that they can watch any cartoon that they could produce. Some of this reflects my views on media education, but it also comes from a core part of who I am. I am an early adopter. I like to play with things to see how they work. This was reflected in one of the most memorable Christmas gifts of my childhood, a broken alarm clock and a set of screwdrivers.
It is in that mindset that I am writing this very geeky blog posts. If you are interest in following how I have used those Christmas screwdrivers to explore Second Life with some interesting twists and turns, read on.
1994 all over again
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/07/2007 - 14:02This morning, I started up Second Life, connected to the Deep Grid and it felt like 1994 all over again. Let me explain.
I’ve always been a technology early adopter. Some technology I play with for a little while and leave it littering up my hard disk. Other technology I start using and find that I use it extensively in my regular life. Still other technology, I start using, don’t have an immediate need for, but keep in the back of my mind as some of the disruptive technology that is worth keeping an eye on.
I first connected to the Internet in the early eighties at Bell Laboratories. Then around 1994, I got my first Internet account and home and started building web pages. I had little idea then what the web would look like today, but it seemed like one of those disruptive technologies worth keeping an eye on.
Another technology that I got involved with around the same time were text based programmable chat rooms. They were fun yet didn’t seem like they would have as much of an impact as websites.
Over the years, I looked at various systems for handling micropayments online. They seemed important but none of them really took off. I played with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, (VRML), which seemed really cool, but also didn’t ever particularly take off.
Various three-dimensional virtual worlds came along, and I played with them, but it was Second Life that seemed to break through where the others failed. It had the immersive elements of VRML. It had the synchronicity and programmability of text based programmable chat rooms, and it even had a currency that enables micropayments.
It’s biggest problem was that it was a fairly closed system. You needed to use their clients and their servers. SecondLife has made its client open source and they have been talking about providing an open source version of their server software. However, yesterday Reuters ran a story about Rival grids that threaten Linden’s monopoly on SL technology.
The grid was Deep Grid. As I logged in, I found that it had all the feel of some of the 1994 websites that I visited way back then. It was barebones and incomplete. There was nothing really notable to see there. But there was that feeling of a disruptive technology. I set up a server in my office running OpenSim, the Open Source simulator which Deep Grid runs on. It isn’t fully functional yet, but its getting there.
Now, anyone can set up their own ‘Sim’ which they can add to some existing grid or create their own grid. This will bring up all kinds of different issues. How can I take my inventory with me from one grid to another? How about my currency? Will someone set up a currency exchange between Second Life, Deep Grid, and whatever other grids get set up? Will interworld IMing be added? How about teleporting between worlds?
These are all issues that the text based programmable chat rooms faced a decade ago and I imagine with some innovative programming, there may be some interesting solutions for the three dimensional virtual worlds.
Beyond that, there are all the other tools that have grown up around the web. Right now, using my Second Life client, I can find things in whichever grid I’m in. Yet who will be the Google and the Yahoo for cataloging and finding things across multiple grids? Who will make the grids more accessible to the less geeky? Who will come up with applications in the grids that will make them ubiquitous?
It may well be another decade before grids of programmable immersive synchronous sims with functioning micropayment systems become a standard way of accessing information. These grids may be very different from what people used to using Second Life are accustomed to today, but my brief exploration of the Deep Grid sure felt a lot like 1994 to me.
Trading in Second Life
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/02/2007 - 12:29Over the past several weeks, I’ve been actively trading on the stock exchanges of Second Life and it seems as if this style of trading has broad implications for capital markets for small businesses.
Second Life is a three dimensional virtual world. Like other such worlds its own currency, yet unlike other such worlds, Second Life goes beyond the goal oriented game paradigm and allows users, often referred to as ‘residents’, to create whatever they can imagine and program.
One thing that has been imagined and programmed is stock exchanges. In a previous entry, I have provided a brief history of some of the Second Life Stock Exchanges. Theses exchanges, for the most part, are dependent on the Linden Dollar, the currency of Second Life.
The Linden Dollar is a fairly stable currency. There is an active exchange between Lindens and U.S. Dollars. Currently, they are trading around 265 Linden Dollars to U.S. Dollar and fifty to sixty million Linden dollars are exchanged each day.
Every resident receives fifty Linden dollars each week that they are active in Second Life. This money can be used for a variety of purposes. Some are basic to the functioning of Second Life. For example creating a new group, or uploading an image into Second Life costs Linden Dollars. Linden Dollars are also used for buying, selling, and renting property and objects in Second Life. Performers at live music events often have a tip jar where listeners can contribute to Linden dollars. Charities often hold fundraisers where people contribute Linden dollars. Others have used Linden dollars for things like gambling and virtual prostitution.
I have contributed to performers and charities in Second Life. I have bought objects that allow me to post to blogs on the web from inside of Second Life. I even bought a car from Toyota in Second Life. I have also stored money in a bank, the collapse of which brought me into the world of Second Life Trading.
Ginko Financial had ATMs around Second Life where you could deposit your Linden Dollars. They were returning a high rate of interest, approximately 44% annually. I placed a small amount of my free Linden dollars in Ginko Financial and when they collapsed , Ginko Financial’s deposits where transferred into Ginko Perpetual Bonds (GPB) which are traded on the World Stock Exchange (WSE).
Over the past month, I’ve executed over 150 trades on various Second Life Stock Exchanges for a total of over 12,000 Linden Dollars. I’ve earned over 1,200 Linden Dollars after spending over 150 Linden Dollars in commissions. Translated into U.S. dollars, my average trade was for thirty cents.
While the fifty cents in U.S. Dollars that I’ve spent on commissions isn’t a lot, if enough people trade, this can add up to a reasonable amount of money. Likewise, the four dollars in U.S. currency that I’ve earned isn’t something I can make a living off of, it is something that I can use to enhance my experiences in Second Life.
As I’ve researched the different companies that I’ve invested in, I find that they have capitalizations in U.S. dollars ranging from $500 to over $300,000. This can be a tad misleading, since many of the companies have significant insider holdings. Excluding the insider holdings, these capitalizations drop to the range of $300 to $26,000.
Many years ago, a friend of mine learned trading by trading pennies with an experienced Wall Street trader. The pennies that he lost were miniscule compared to the value of the education that he received trading. Likewise, the stock exchanges of Second Life provide an extremely valuable environment for individuals to trade and learn from the experience.
Years ago, my wife worked on setting up a brewpub. The brewpub’s capitalization was in the range of $200,000. It was a painful and onerous process recruiting investors. Some of this was because the minimum investment was in the hundreds of dollars and there was no active secondary market. Raising capital would have been orders of magnitude easier if individuals could easily have invested five dollars here and there, perhaps even at a bar, and been able to get out of those trades with similar ease.
Building upon the current trading environments of Second Life could provide valuable resources both for educators as well as for the small business community. It is time to take this trading to the next level.
An exploration into Second Life Trading
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/30/2007 - 20:51Over the past month, when I’ve had free moments here and there, I’ve been exploring virtual stock trading in Second Life. This article will provide a brief history of virtual trading in Second Life, a review of various virtual stock exchanges, and ideas for future trading development.
I’m still waiting for my invitation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/27/2007 - 09:19Back in March, David Cohn wrote a post about his Geek Thesis: Drupal and the New Left. He raises many interesting questions.
Around the same time, I wrote a blog post, The Innovation Invitation, which talked about a general sense that the 2006 Presidential campaigns are not encouraging innovation the way Gov. Dean’s Presidential campaign did.
I had a good discussion with David on the phone about these issues, and today, I received a follow up email from him. Here is the gist of my response, altered a little to fit the blog.
My post, The Innovation Invitation gets to my key view that it is not Drupal per se that mattered, but an embracing of open source, which in my mind is a simple extension of openness and transparency in government. I think that is one of the reasons Drupal has caught on less amongst conservatives than it has amongst liberals, and part of the reason I've never been concerned about whether or not they embraced Drupal. To the extent that we get anyone, independent of their political orientation, to embrace openness in government, that is a good thing.
Two books that address some of this is Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics edited by Tom Streeter and Zephyr Teachout. It should be coming out any day. I have a chapter in the book describing how I got involved and touches on the ideas of the innovation invitation.
The second book is Extreme Democracy. This book was edited by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Radcliffe and came out in 2005. My chapter was more on the nuts and bolts of DeanSpace, but the whole book explores the idea of democracy being affected by technological ideas like extreme programming.
Recently, the Texas Forums has been having a session on the book, and we’ve discussed the lack of an innovation invitation in the 2008 election cycle.
I think it isn’t Drupal per se, that mattered in the Dean campaign, but this invitation to innovate. I think that most campaigns are very hesitant to invite innovation, and that Joe Trippi captured this hesitance best in his blog entry, The Perfect Storm
One of the other reasons I think this has not happened before is that every political campaign I have ever been in is built on a top-down military structure — there is a general at the top of the campaign — and all orders flow down — with almost no interaction. This is a disaster. This kind of structure will suffocate the storm not fuel it. Campaigns abhor chaos — and to most campaigns built on the old top-down model — that is what the net represents — chaos. And the more the campaign tries to control the “chaos” the more it stiffles its growth. As someone who is at least trying to understand the right mix — I admit its hard to get it right. But I think the important thing is to provide the tools and some of the direction — stay in as constant communication as you can with the grassroots — two way/multi-way communication — and get the hell out of the way when a big wave is building on its own.
All of this was prologue to answer David’s questions about my current involvement with the Edwards campaign and if they are using Drupal in any way.
Yes, I am supporting Edwards. In that, I add comments to blogs and on social networks when I have time indicating my support. I have suggested using Drupal to try and replicate what we did with DeanSpace, but no one was interested enough to follow up. Yet even that would simply be replicating what has been done before and not inviting people to come and innovate. I do not believe any of the campaigns are inviting people to innovate the way the Dean campaign did, so I believe that the innovators have moved on to focus on things other than presidential politics.
