Category Archives: Culture

Geek culture

Second Life heading down the gurgler

Didn't I say Second Life was a waste of time?

The companies that rushed to set up bases within the cult virtual world of Second Life appear to have wasted their time as many have shut down and others are “ghost towns”, an Australian researcher has found. — aquaponics fish food cost2008/08/20/1218911810203.html?page=fullpage”>The Age: Few lives left for Second Life

As one of the pundits in the article says, “If you're looking at real numbers of people in terms of brand engagement, Second Life is really not the place to be.”

Can't argue with that. I reckon SecondLife is the 21st century equivalent to the original MSN.

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Twitter shuts down outbound SMS

Twitter shuts down outbound SMS updates for all users except in Canada, India and the US. Inbound via the UK number still works.

Understandable I suppose, given the huge cost they must incur from it. But must be annoying to those who use it.

A lot of Aussies in the initial comments, probably due to the timing of the announcements. Introducing an Australian inbound SMS number would have cushioned the blow.

Bigpond selling MP3s

This should be welcome to Aussies who can’t buy DRM-free music from Amazon, who want to be free of Apple’s iTunes DRM and don’t want to delve into the shadowy world of AllOfMP3(*): Telstra’s Bigpond Music has started selling DRM-free MP3-format music. It only covers certain artists at the moment, but here’s hoping it expands rapidly, as they appear to have lined-up deals with most of the major labels:

The agreements will see BigPond offer music from record labels Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI, as well as leading Australian independent record labels and distributors including MGM, Inertia, Liberation, IODA, and AmpHead.

Tracks are A$1.69 (the same as iTunes); albums are A$16.50 (slightly cheaper) — or A$15 for Bigpond broadband subscribers.

(*) I don’t know for sure if AllOfMP3 is legit or not, but I do know this — for the amount of money they’re charging, no way is any money getting back to the artist.

WarGames sequel trailer

No way will this be as good as the original.

WarGames: The Dead Code

From the looks of it, they’ve taken the original plot and just substituted different teenagers, a different city, a new computer and… well, not much else. It’s more of a remake than a sequel.

No wonder it’s going straight to DVD. Release is expected in July.

And if that’s not to your taste, how about this rumour: Leonardo Dicaprio to play Nolan Bushell in a movie about the creator of Pong.

Twitter == yoyo?

Twitter’s ups and downs are now almost legendary. There’s now a web site which can tell you if it’s up or not.

Twitter is very popular. It has a lot of users. (Including me.)

But it hasn’t commercialised. There’s no ads, no user subscription fees, no deals, and, I suspect, no money. Or at least not very much.

Or at least not much. It’s maintained its independence and integrity, but I wonder if subsequently having no dosh is the reason the service is becoming so unreliable as popularity increases. At least the commercial services out there have been through all these issues.

Some are blaming it being built on Ruby On Rails, which evidently doesn’t scale very well, but this is only a problem if they don’t have the funds and the will to migrate it onto another platform.

It’ll be interesting to see where Twitter goes as more people pile on. Are they up to the challenge? Will they just give up and sell out in return for investment in reliability, or can they find another way forward?

Recent finds

Ever wonder how they fitted an entire computer language into just a few kilobytes, back in the 80s? Documented disassembly of BBC Basic 4.

How to highlight author comments in WordPress … but it relies on the author being user ID 1, so it won’t work here, where we have several people posting. Could easily be customised to look for other user IDs though.

Some developers are throwing in the towel and running Vista as Admin.

The excellent Secret Life of Machines not only has a web site, but is available freely (and legally) via BitTorrent. And the theme tune is available on iTunes.