The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 24, 2011

Official News page 12


WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

This week was not a good week. Those of you who know me well will be aware that I am rather partial to a glass (several glasses, in fact) of good quality wine. Thus, I was devastated to read that an shipping accident has resulted in the smashing of 462 cases containing US$1 million worth of high grade Australian 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove shiraz wine. When they opened the shipping container it apparently 'smelled phenomenal'. That I can believe, but what a tragedy. That little lot would have lasted me through a number of meals...

And now for a look at the PC games business...


Analysis: The irresistible rise of Downloadable Content in PC games

Those of you who play games on PCs will undoubtedly have come across Steam. It's the biggest digital distributor and provider of DRM in the business - especially when it comes to triple A games (Warning: I work for one of Steam's competitors, Green Man Gaming). Well now it seems that Steam is not going to be publishing any more games from Electronic Arts (EA) - the biggest gorilla on the games block. The two have fallen out over the matter of downloadable content (DLC). Steam, it appears, are not prepared to sell games unless they also sell the DLCs, whereas Electronic Arts plan to sell DLCs from their own site.

DLCs are important for the modern games industry. Let me explain why. In the old days, you would write a game, and sell it. If it sold well you would write a follow up from scratch, and sell that on the enjoyment of the original game, and so on. This works well when you are still massively improving and changing the game engine, as most companies were in the 1990s.

However, rewriting the code is an expensive, and time consuming, business, so nowadays computer games tend to come with a game 'engine' and a bunch of files that are used by the engine to create the actual game you play. Indeed there are a number of excellent engines available as libraries for licensing - you may, for instance, have heard of hard core gamers refer to the 'unreal engine' which powers a number of first person shooters.

Once you have a suitable engine in place it becomes much faster, cheaper and easier to produce follow ups by issuing new scenarios that use the game engine already on the customer's computer as part of the original game installation process. This approach was originally pioneered by strategy game publishers like Paradox and 1C, who also encouraged their players to produce and distribute their own scenarios for strategy games, thereby increasing the depth of play and thus the popularity of their games.

This approach has now penetrated into the mainstream, driven by both the relative cheapness of DLC solution, and the speed to market of DLCs compared to a complete re-write. This means that DLCs have become an increasingly important part of the mainstream , rather than being seen as an optional extra. The Steam/EA dispute revolves around the question of who controls the distribution (increasingly a digital affair) of the DLCs, of which there may be anything up to half a dozen, compared to the single initial game distribution.

So how will this play out? EA games are something like 70% of the digital download market. Steam has a similarly large slice of the digital download market, and their download platform is stable and mature. What the final outcome will be I don't know, but I do know we are about to go through what the Chinese call 'interesting times' in this market in the not too distant future.
http://www.vg247.com/2011/07/12/why-valve-needs-to-come-clean-on-steams-ea-aversion/


Shorts:

How do you get the upper floors of a 39-story sky scraper to sway and shake given a mere 17 middle aged people and no external equipment to work with? Answer - get them to do a Tae Bo workout to the song 'The Power' by Snap on the 12th floor. This is exactly what happened in a South Korean skyscraper earlier this month. "It just happens to be that the vibration cycle caused by Tae Bo collided with the vertical vibration cycle unique to the building," Chung Lan, a professor of architectural engineering explained. The action amplified the building's natural vibration and caused the shaking.

It's a pretty ridiculous thing to happen, given all the high tech tools available to model the physics of buildings these days. I think I need to figure out who the architect was and avoid his or her buildings in the future. In the meantime avoid all middle aged people practicing Tae Bo, whatever that may be!
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/19/scientist-tae-bo-workout-sent-skyscraper-shaking/

I see computers have finally taken over from dogs as 'man's best friend'! A survey conducted by pollsters YouGov (one of the better polling organizations in terms of accuracy of predictions) discovered that the two thirds of the respondents consider that their computers are a more constant companion that a dog.

I wonder how long it will be before landlords start to ban computers from their property under the 'no pets' clause...
http://newslite.tv/2011/07/20/computers-overtake-dogs-as-man.html

One of the more interesting things to come out of the Sony data breach is a report that Sony's insurers are refusing to cover the costs. Why is this interesting? Because a number of highly respectable figures in the computer security business have long maintained that companies will start to take security seriously only when it starts to affect the cost of their insurance premiums. The Sony breach is estimated to have cost something in the region of US$171 million.

This particular case is just about the fact that the policy only insures the company against claims for "bodily injury", "property damage", and "personal and advertising injury". Which means the argument is not directly on the subject. However, if the insurance company prevails, there will undoubtedly be questions asked about why there was no data theft insurance. Indeed it might well be the case that the whole mess will lead to legislation requiring data theft insurance for companies holding personal data in digital storage.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/22/sony_breach_insurance/

The double edged nature of all things digital was recently demonstrated by the Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) Linux distribution from the US Department of Defense. It is launched from a CD-Rom and turns an untrusted laptop into a tamper proof, trusted, network client. It doesn't use the computer's hard drive at all, it's secure and it leaves no trace of work activity on the computer. Interesting. It's intended so that staff can safely access secure computers from home or hotels.

However... It seems to me that this distribution - which is publicly available - would be ideal for criminals and the like to access communications without leaving any trace for forensic analysis to work on. Good security works for the bad guys, as well as the good ones! I'll probably start using this distribution to access my online bank account and credit card use. I'll leave it for you all out there to decide whether I'm a good guy, or a bad guy...
http://www.unixmen.com/software/1832-lightweight-portable-security-lps-a-linux-disto-from-the-us-department-of-defense


Homework:

The New York Times has an interesting little piece on reason. Reason as in rationality. We in the west usually consider reason to be a uniquely human trait which has resulted in the body of scientific and philosophical knowledge available to us. Recently, however, scientists have come up with a suggestion that reason may have other, individually more important uses - winning arguments! In fact, they suggest, reason doesn't help us make better decisions, it's a social phenomenon designed to help us convince others.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3

This week I have three TED videos for you to take a look at. They are all in the 15-20 minute long bracket, so you need to allocate time to watch them.

The first is by Mikko Hypponen, who is the chief research officer at anti-virus vendor F-Secure. His piece is a fascinating look at early viruses, modern viruses - including how one Russian virus writer was tracked down - and suggestions for what we should do to protect ourselves, in the broadest sense, from the malign effects of these beasties.

The second is Tim Hartford who writes the 'Undercover Economist' column in the Financial Times newspaper. He is talking about complex systems, God complexes and trial and error. His argument, that claiming to 'know' how complex systems work is not realistic. The systems, he argues are built by a process of trial and error and contain too many components to grasp the totality. He uses doctors as an example, but the same problem afflicts many other trades (including economists) as well. An interesting little piece.

The final video is of Rebecca MacKinnon, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, talking about the Internet. This is the most overtly political of the three pieces. Given, though, the way the Internet pervades all our lives, and is of a truly international scope, I think it's important to have some ideas of where the Internet is going. Ms MacKinnon looks at issues of privacy, free expression and governance (or lack of) in the digital networks, platforms and services. She also points out the role of private companies, rather than governments in setting the agenda and undertaking the policing of the Internet.

I was sufficiently impressed by her talk to add her forthcoming book, 'Consent of the Networked' to my Amazon wish list. Well worth watching, even if you disagree with her conclusions.
http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_fighting_viruses_defending_the_net.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_mackinnon_let_s_take_back_the_internet.html

The space shuttle has been a somewhat controversial project, but now it's come to an end, I thought I'd draw your attention to an eight minute video on the Scientific American web site covering the 30 year life of the shuttle program.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=a-tribute-to-all-135-of-nasas-space-2011-07-21&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SPC_20110721

And finally, take a look at Network World's little piece on the role of napkins in the tech world , including the original sketch that launched Compaq computers, and the one that started Southwest Airlines, not to mention the first diagram of the ethernet networking system!

For some reason, though, my first design for my Federation multiplayer game drawn on the back on a beer mat in green ink in a canal side pub in the Park Royal district of London, got overlooked. I think I'm a victim of the anti-booze faction...
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/napkins-where-ethernet-compaq-and-facebook


Geek Toys:

Don't give me none of your multi Megapixel cameras. Mere toys, my friends, mere toys. What I want is the little number going aboard the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft. It's a billion pixel camera which is currently under construction. Now that's what I call a digital camera! The only problem I can see is how I'm going to carry it round (the pixel array is 0.5 x 1-meter (1.6 x 3.3-foot) in size, and needs to be kept at a temperature of -110C (-166F). Now, where did I put the ice bucket?
http://www.gizmag.com/gaia-billion-pixel-star-mapping-camera/19181/

Philips are finally coming up with something I've wanted for a long time - wallpaper with integrated LED lighting. Actually, I have to say that I originally envisaged it more as walls with built in electroluminescence which could change color as you changed the electrical frequency. Using LEDs is just as good, I have to say, although having a missing 'pixel' or two in the middle of a 6ft x 9ft panel could be really irritating.

However, imagine being able to link your music player to the walls of the room you are in - move over Dolby, make way for surround light!
http://www.gizmag.com/philips-glowing-led-wallpapers/19220
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroluminescence

And to go with your new ambient wallpaper, how about an interactive, animatronic Triceratops? You will need plenty of space, since it's 20 ft long and weighs 1,345 pounds. The beast can be ordered from New York's legendary Hammacher Schlemmer shop. (I love looking at their catalog - slogan 'Offering the Best, the Only, and the Unexpected for 163 years'.) The kids will love it, and it's a snip at US$350,000...
http://www.gizmag.com/interactive-animatronic-triceratops/19273/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxkAQb-TrQU
http://beta.hammacher.com/Product/Default.aspx?promo=Category-NewArrivals&catid=60&sku=11907


Scanner:

Australia: Forklift mishap destroys US$1m of shiraz wine
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14247551

Steampunk Plasma Speaker produces electrifying sound
http://www.gizmag.com/steampunk-plasma-speaker/19263/

The new thought police
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nsa-police.html

Electronic Arts Sports: the future is all our games for the price of one
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/jul/19/ea-sports-new-business-model

£20m tool to be used to dismantle nuclear site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-14184843


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.

Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
24 July, 2011

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


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