Gizmondo

Remember Gizmondo? Not Gizmodo, the tech site, but Gizmondo, the hand-held game device that was supposed to compete with the Nintendo DS and PSP? Neither do I. It was a huge flop and the company went bankrupt. But I came across this Wired article about a year ago, and I never get tired of reading it. The story behind Gizmondo is simply amazing. Here is the first paragraph to catch your interest:

THE BUMP IN THE ROAD that ended Bo Stefan Eriksson's fantastic ride is practically invisible. From 10 feet away, all you can see is the ragged edge of a tar-seamed crack in an otherwise smooth sheet of pavement. Only the location is impressive - a sweet stretch of straightaway on California's Pacific Coast Highway near El Pescador state beach, just past the eucalyptus-shaded mansions of the Malibu hills. On that patch of broken asphalt, there's barely enough lip to stub a toe. Of course, when you hit it at close to 200 miles per hour, as police say Eriksson did in the predawn light last February 21, while behind the wheel of a 660-horsepower Ferrari Enzo, consequences magnify.

This other article has more details about the history and especially the financial data of the company. After reading these two articles, I come to the same conclusion as one of the commenters on this article: "The whole thing was a front for the Swedish mafia to launder money."

And it looks like this story might not be over. From Wikipedia:

In November 2007 Carl Freer stated in an interview for the Swedish-American journalist Hans Sandberg that he was interested in starting up production of the Gizmondo again. The interview was published in the business news site Realtid.se, and a translated segment of the interview was made available on the author's blog The Nordic Link on January 23, 2008. The week before, Veckans Affärer, another Swedish business publication, had confirmed Realtid's story about Carl Freer's cooperation with the British company Plextek, who designed the original platform.

Skittles Commercial

This commercial is amazing. I've seen it on TV a couple of times, but it was a shortened version that's missing some of the best parts.

Framerate and Ping

There's always a lot of talk in C:SI about improving framerate. I've also heard a lot of comments about how after a certain framerate, the human eye can no longer see any difference and so improving framerate past this has no point. Usually the number stated is 24 or 30 fps, because those are the framerates of movie projectors and televisions (NTSC), respectively. While the reasoning makes sense to me, it definitely seems like I can tell a difference between 30 fps and higher rates. I decided to see what information I could dig up about this, and found this interesting article. The article explains how blurred images and other techniques are used to make 24-fps movies appears smooth, and so these are actually not the limit that we can detect. According to the article, the question is actually extremely hard to answer, but it's pretty clear that it's at least 100 fps, and probably much higher than that.

The article also touches on the aspect of monitor refresh rates. Basically, your monitor can only redraw the screen a certain number of times per second, and that's probably lower than the framerate your eye can detect. It also mentions that it might actually appear worse if you have more fps than your monitor refresh rate can support, because it has to sync the frames by repeating some.


Ping time is also something that is often stated as making a difference in duels. I have personally tried fighting with ping times of over 2000 ms, and that definitely makes a difference. But what about more normal variations? I usually get a "ping sim" of about 70-90 ms. That is the time it takes an empty message to travel from my computer to the Second Life server running the sim I'm in, and then get sent back. What does this mean for dueling? From my experience during times of extremely high pings, I know that the way SL works is that when I press a key to slash, my client does not immediately start displaying the slash animation. That message must first reach the server, then a message is sent to both people telling their clients to display the animation. What this means is that if both of us have equal ping times, we should both see my slash at exactly the same time.

Usually people have different ping times, though. I've heard people in Europe saying they usually have pings around 150 ms. If I were fighting them with my 70 ms ping, that would mean that they see the animations 80 ms after I do, including their own attacks. Is 80 ms significant, though? According to Wikipedia, the reaction time for humans is between 150 ms and 300 ms, so it doesn't seem like that would really make a difference. But then again, it doesn't matter how quickly a person reacts, it will still be delayed by 80 ms in this example. But...will that delay in their reaction matter since their opponent can only react at 150-300 ms? I'm confused.

OpenSim and realXtend

This started out as a comment I was writing in response to Robby's post about realXtend joining OpenSim. It grew so large I decided it was probably a better idea to post it here.

It will be interesting to see how Linden Lab reacts to this. I'm sure most of the features realXtend will bring are ones that LL would love to have in their own server code. OpenSim is released under the BSD license, which is one of the least restrictive open source licenses out there. It looks like the license only requires that any code or binary distribution be unrestricted in terms of copying and redistribution, and carry the same license.

BSD License:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the OpenSim Project nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

But here's the thing: LL doesn't distribute their server code or binaries; they run them on their own servers. I'm not a copyright lawyer or anything, so I'm probably wrong, but it seems like LL might be able to incorporate the OpenSim code into their own server code without really having to publicly release it. That seems a little fishy to me, but I know that the BSD license is often criticized as not being a true free software license, and maybe this is why.

From the Wikipedia article on the BSD license: "The BSD License allows proprietary commercial use, and for the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary commercial products. Works based on the material may even be released under a proprietary license (but still must maintain the license requirements). Some notable examples of this are the use of BSD networking code in Microsoft products, and the use of numerous FreeBSD components in Mac OS X."

I'm a strong supporter of open source software, but the problem with OpenSim is that while they are going to be adding all these exciting features, there's probably not going to be a grid running OpenSim anytime soon that has the resources to support 60,000 simultaneous logins. That's why I'm kind of hoping for LL to "steal" the code (it's OpenSim's fault anyway...everyone knows you're supposed to use the GNU Public License :P)

Mono Refresh

They made another update to the Mono Beta today. With the fix of "[SVC-1331] Floating point fed to conditional causes error", LSL/Mono is now even closer to completing the "basic things any programming language should do" checklist. As posted in the bug report, this basic script would produce an error:

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        if(1.0)
        {
        }
    }
}

See my previous post for more comments about this. Actually, the image probably won't load because the website hosting it is currently suffering from the Digg Effect. Edit: Nevermind, the pic should work now.

Dear Lindens

Dear Lindens,

I have decided to evaluate your performance over the past few months.
Actually, that bike is working perfectly fine, they just need to change the sit target and adjust the link position of the front wheel.

Edit: I uploaded my own copy of the pic instead of linking to it, so it should load reliably now.

C:SI Stats Perl Script

I wrote a Perl script that grabs avatar duel data from the C:SI website and calculates some useful information. It can be downloaded here. I know that most of you reading this probably have no idea what to do with a Perl script. If I had the resources, I would put it up on a web site so that everyone could make use of it. I invite the C:SI devs to take this script and use it on the website, or for Robby to do something with it on his blog (or anyone to put it up on the web, for that matter). It takes avatar names as command line arguments, and is especially useful if given multiple names (so that you can see the combined stats of your alts).

Example:

$ ./csiscores.pl Colin Kiernan Selene Corvale
Getting stats for Colin Kiernan...
Getting stats for Selene Corvale...

Colin Kiernan
 Total Wins Losses Ratio
Count 3323 1686 1637 1.0299 (102:100)
%total 93.13% 91.38% 95.01%

Selene Corvale
 Total Wins Losses Ratio
Count 245 159 86 1.8488 (184:100)
%total 6.87% 8.62% 4.99%

Overall
Total Wins Losses Ratio
3568 1845 1723 1.0708 (107:100)

Edit: Another thing you could do with this is list all the members in a clan and get the total clan score, how much each person contributed, etc. If you do that, I recommend promptly logging into SL and buying a few more swords to cover the bandwidth you've just used on the website ;)

Edit 2: I forgot to mention that it only takes the stats from the first page (30 sims). Since they are sorted in order of most duels, the sims omitted probably won't have that big an effect on the results.