Primordial Ooze

I can't believe this has happened, but I suppose it was inevitable.

If you have ever played massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Star Wars Galaxies or EverQuest,  you probably know that they can take up your life. In essence, it takes an enormous amount of time and energy to create a powerful and resourceful character in those games. Some people get really addictaed and achieve this on their own, but other players (perhaps ones with a life) choose either to settle for mediocre characters or they spend money to have other people get powerful technology or artifacts for them.

It's commonplace for economies to develop within these games that are just as complex as the real-world. Wire News reported on that way back in 2002. I believe there were even earlier studies, google turns up most of them.

Well, it looks like MMORPG economies have taken on another real-world spin, outsourcing this "drudge work" to other countries! 

I can just see it now, I'm in a tavern, drinking a virtual meade, when in comes a salesman selling +5 Swords of Dragon Slaying at discount prices. Seeing the competition, the local salesman draws his blade and attacks the foreigner! Unfortunately for the local salesman, the foreigner has superior armor and weapons and makes short work of the local...

Wired News has the whole article.

By Nick at 9:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dive into Mark made this great post, saying, "Most developers are morons, and the rest are assholes. I have at various times counted myself in both groups, so I can say this with the utmost confidence."

To that blog entry, I'd like to add:

...another group of developers that I'll call motherfuckers. Motherfuckers question every line of the spec and don't even start coding until it makes sense to them. Motherfuckers typically send the spec writer home crying. Sometimes the spec writers are sent packing with a look that says, "I hate spec review meetings with that motherfucker." I suppose motherfuckers are like assholes with the heart of an angel.

By Nick at 8:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Wired News: It's Just the 'internet' Now

Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet.

At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.

Fascinating.

The reasons for doing this seemed dubious to me. I thought, you don't go around saying "the radio" and "the television" when you're speaking generically about the medium. It seemed right to capitalize the Internet because it was always preceded by "the". However, I then thought, you don't capitalize television when you say something like, "the television sucks honey, we need a widescreen HDTV." So yeh, I guess it makes sense.

By Nick at 9:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I started reading SimpleBits blog (Syndication links) to learn more about web design. The author has been running a rather interesting discussion and has modeled that discussion as a quiz called SimpleQuiz. The latest entry is entry XVII.

In this quiz, he proposes a number of formats for markup and his readers discuss the pros and cons of each approach. The entries are easy to digest and I'm sure you'll learn a thing or two about HTML.

If you want to skip the original blog-entry format, as the questions were proposed and go right to the original problem statement and the conclusion, go here.

By Nick at 12:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Short but complete guide on how to write short but complete programs when asking for help in Newsgroups...

http://yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/complete.html

By the way, the Matt Reynolds' site (where I got that link) has consistently answered most of my questions over the past few weeks, through existing Q/A recorded in their forums. Definitely worth a visit.

Matt also has a blog.

By Nick at 8:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm disabling comments on my blog for a while. This is mostly because John Mayer, of all people, keeps command-spamming me with his casino links. I didn't even know he was involved with casinos!

Truth is, this blog is a mostly one-way operation so I figure I'll just force it to be that way. Please send me e-mail with your comments and I can always add those comments to the blog, much the way other bloggers do (like Jon's Radio).

You can also e-mail me and say how you think I'm such a damn coward for disabling comments.

By Nick at 4:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)