Unrest in Cyberspace

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Hmmm…. It’s not just Digg that’s been having trouble with restive users. It seems that Second Life is also having difficulties. Tech Review reports that:

The overseers of Second Life, a complex and booming virtual world hailed by many as the first step toward an immersive 3-D Internet, attempted yesterday to calm angry cyber-citizens who have petitioned for fixes to technical bugs recently plaguing the world.

The main problem, in members’ eyes: Second Life is growing so fast that it’s straining Linden Lab’s resources to the limit, including its developers’ ability to fix old bugs and roll out new software versions that don’t introduce new problems. In a town-hall meeting yesterday inside Second Life, the company appealed for patience.

“We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement,” said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, the venture-funded San Francisco startup that launched Second Life in 2003. The town-hall meeting was hastily arranged in response to a damning open letter published by irritated Second Life residents on April 30. “At the same time, we are building the foundations for the next-gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale,” Ondrejka said.

Every day, some 25,000 computer owners, plus teams from dozens of major corporations, are rushing to join Second Life. But as these new members buy virtual land, set up house for their avatars, and start in-world businesses, the strain on the Second Life “grid” is increasing. Linden Lab is adding more than 120 new servers every week, according to Ondrejka, but users say that the company still isn’t keeping up. Complaints have piled up in Second Life forums and blogs from longtime users impatient over frequent slowdowns and crashes, property that goes missing, messages that aren’t delivered, search and friend-finder functions that don’t work, purchases that aren’t completed, and poor to nonexistent customer service and technical support.

The dissatisfaction culminated this week in the open letter, which demands that Linden Lab address the bugs “immediately,” before rolling out planned features such as voice chat. More than 3,000 Second Life users have signed the letter so far.

“People feel that Linden Lab is failing them because they are paying a great deal, in some cases, for a product that is failing to work acceptably, from a company that will no longer communicate with its customers,” says one signer, a United Kingdom-based IT manager known within Second Life as Inigo Chamerberlin…

OLPC machine won’t run Windows after all

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Phew! Contrary to those rumours last week, Ars Technica is is reporting that Nicholas Negroponte hasn’t done a deal to run Windows on his ‘$100’* laptop…

Late last week the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project had a media event in Cambridge, and while I couldn’t make the event, I did tape a video interview for the BBC on the project. During my preparation I kept coming across these claims that Microsoft and OLPC had partnered to put Windows XP Starter Edition on the OLPC, and according to one report, this was being done to get the XO laptop into US schools. None of this jibed with what I had been hearing from sources, so I decided to look into it further. As it turns out, a number of news outlets, including the AP, mischaracterized the situation.

According to Walter Bender, president of Software and Content at OLPC, there is no agreement in place between OLPC and Microsoft to offer XO laptops with any version of Windows. Bender also indicated that Microsoft has not contacted OLPC regarding its $3 software bundling program, nor have any governments requested that the XO be outfitted with Windows. In short, there is no existing collaboration between Microsoft and OLPC aimed at outfitting the XO laptop with Windows.

“We are a free and open-source shop. We have no one from OLPC working with Microsoft on developing a Windows platform for the XO. MS doesn’t get any special treatment from OLPC,” Bender told Ars.

*$175 as of last week.

Windows piracy reduced

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Good news…

Microsoft UK says that since it launched its Keep IT Real campaign in February 2006, the Windows XP piracy rate has dropped from 16.7% to 12.9%, with 36m users validated.

I’m all in favour of stamping out piracy of Microsoft products — because it forces the world to realise how much proprietary software costs! And of course it helps Ndiyo.

The end of professional photography?

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Nice Guardian column by Andrew Brown…

Half a dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world. Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites…

Later: Nick Carr has commented on Andrew’s piece. “It’s not that I have anything against amateur photographers (being one myself)”, he writes,

it’s that I think we’ll find – are finding already, in fact – that while amateur work may be an adequate economic substitute for professional work, there are things that pros can accomplish that amateurs cannot. We see in the decline of professional photojournalism how the Internet’s “abundance” can end up constricting our choices as well as expanding them.

Quote of the day

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“Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out…only being able to lash out…And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.”

The late David Halberstam, writing about Vietnam in The Best and the Brightest, 1972.

Social Networking — for Dogs

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No, I am not making this up. Tech Review reports that

If you’re passing through a dog park in Boston in the coming months and happen to catch a glimpse of a funny little device hanging off a pooch’s collar, don’t be surprised. A startup called SNIF Labs is gearing up to beta test a technology designed to help dogs–and their owners–become better acquainted.

SNIF Labs–the company’s name is short for Social Networking in Fur–is developing what its website calls “a custom radio communications protocol” that allows special tags dogs wear on their collars to swap dog and owner information with other SNIF-tag users. When two dogs wearing tags come within range of each other, the tags start to swap dog and even owner information…

Darwiinian evolution

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My colleague Tony Hirst gave a terrific workshop on Web 2.0 today. I noticed he had a strange-looking controller on the podium as he talked and afterwards asked about it. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “What is it?”
Tony: “A WiiRemote.”
Me: “Eh?”
Tony: “It’s a bluetooth device.”
Me: (striking head in manner of man who realises he is as thick as two short planks laid end-to-end) “Ye Gods! So it is.”

At this point, Tony opens up his MacBook.

He’s got a neat app called DarwiinRemote running.

He makes sweeping circular gestures with the Wii controller. This is what appears on the screen:

And all of a sudden I remember from my schooldays how difficult it was for beginners to see the connection between rotation and periodicity. Which leads to the thought that this might make an excellent teaching tool for physics and maths.

Obvious, really. Wish I been smart enough to think of it myself. Sigh.

Sport?

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Here’s an interesting thing. The Guardian makes a distinction between football and sport. Mind you, having seen what goes on, I’m not entirely surprised.