Speeches and Reviews, Gaming, Socialities, Environment Issues

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I have two presentations in coming weeks which I have to prepare for. One is October 8 at the Unitarian Church, on "The Age of Spiritual Machines", derived from Ray Kurzweil's book of the same title and the preceeding "Age of Intelligent Machines". The other is October 12 at the Australian Unix Users Group annual conference on "The Economics of Open Source". Have also wriiten a review for Ticonderoga on a re-release of Phillip K. Dick's "The Cosmic Puppets". Needless to say, it shines with the same brilliance it did the last time I read it (which was about fifteen years ago).

Three gaming sessions this week. On Friday was zen_cat's In Nomine game and briefly met pache. We managed to get a copy of the evil soul-sucking MMORP, delete the offending code and release it as OSS. Unfortunately one angel had gone rogue and destroyed the software company building (along with several people). Had to outsource a young hacker to a outdoor raver commune after he saw some in angelic form. Kept on muttering about aliens. Overall a victory for the forces of light. On Sunday was the RetroAD&D Norman Britain game, using the U3 (The Final Enemy) module. An underwater adventure, we defeated the barracks of the Saughighan (hmm, very like Call of Cthulhu Deep Ones) and destroyed their temple. Game ended on a nail-biter following as the lair began to collapse around us following the temple incident. On Tuesday played DragonQuest which really is quite brilliant for a game 26 years old. We are fortunate to have a GM who has all the old classic modules and we're hoping to combine it with the Barbarian King's wargame, also published by SPI. To finish off, this Saturday will be attending Unicon.

Other socialable occassions of late included a housewarming party for Paula and Craig where caseopaya and I spent time with the delightful log_reloaded and I chatted with one Geoff S., a character I've known for about twenty years and whom enters my life every two-three years. Sunday night was a birthday dinner for imajica__lj at the Xanghai. Monday night was obscure drinks at the European Beer Cafe with severina_242 and _zombiemonkey followed by an excellent dinner at the "well-known to a small group" Waiter's Club.

Energy. Why not solar? Warmimg. Greenland's Ice Melt Grew by 250 Percent, Satellites Show. Shrinking species. Polar Bears aren't too happy about this. Payback? Virgin pledges $3bn to combat global warming. Currently my brain is struggling with economics of water. Liquid land is a hard one. Assistance requested, especially on the supply side. Demand side is relatively easy.

Comments

[mikey-ob.livejournal.com]

DragonQuest...I think I still have the boxed copy lurking around here somewhere. I remember that if you had dagger skill it did not mean you could use a knife, that was a seperate skill altogether.

Good to see that the old titles are getting an airing. Now if you had played Arduin or Tunnels & Troll I would've had a chuckle. Anyone still play C&S to your knowledge?

[blot.livejournal.com]

we all be livin on the barges soon, matey!

[ctudball.livejournal.com]

Sadly the solar link doesn't work for me . .

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

There is more than one classic Dragonquest module? I have The Enchanted Wood (which is such a classic that the module has been written into a whole bunch of non-Dragonquest game worlds ie Forgotten Realms), but I don't even recall any others.

I'm not sure I think DragonQuest was that good. Some interesting ideas, some dodgy mechanics, IIRC.

[zey.livejournal.com]

I'll be very interested in seeing your take on the economics of OSS.

As far as it goes, I've only really seen these arguments so far:

(1) It's great for achieving end goals if money's not an issue/no longer relevant. You're a Netscape or a Sun Microsystems and want to destroy Microsoft's market? Go OSS. You're an nVidia or a ATI and can't be arsed maintaining driver code? Go OSS.

(2) You can sell tech support for your own software. (Of course, if your interface and documentation are good, your market for tech support will be small.)

(3) You can use your software hacking to demonstrate your skills to potential employers and clients. (Except that unless they're techs themselves, it'll be hard for them to confirm which bits you did... unless you're the project's only, #1 or #2 contributor.)

(4) You can trust customers to purchase your OSS software, as many will do the right thing. (In the Shareware world, they've run the experiments: unrestricted Shareware gets registered 1/8th as often as time restricted Shareware.)

(5) You can sell tech support for other peoples OSS projects. By far the most convincing. There's definitely money in it, but, that's more a job not a successful business. Does anyone want to be providing tech support for buggy and incomplete code for the rest of their life?

(6) Paying forward. It's the BSD license way more than the GPL way. For the corporate, it means they can reuse code, while still having the potential to make decent commercial software sales to end-users so developers can pay their mortgages and play with OSS in their spare time. They can also release toolkit code to the world in a way which disclaims responsibility for it.

Feel free to use any of the above in your presentation. Don't quote me though ;-). Do send me a link to your presentation if you put it online.

[shorxrore.livejournal.com]

you should check out the lj gamepolitics, it's the lj feed of the www.gamepolitics.com website. it's pretty interesting and lotsa people have lotsa talks in it. it's mostly about video games but feh. though for some reason the comments have been disabled the last few days just as i was about to start arguing about military games...oh well.

[nvcarnie.livejournal.com]

Hahaha.... realized I have replied to your journal in ages and ages. Do still read them, although I think I don't get them all the time.... :-D Had another student in my polisci class talk about protecting sharks, nets catching them, and the overfishing problem..... always delightful to be further convinved that there is no way out.....

[bobstar.livejournal.com]

Hey there (-:

We live on solar power, collect our own water and are responsible for our own grey water and wastes...if we can help you at all please let me know.

Can you pass a hug onto caseopaya from me please?

(-:

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

I recall some stuff a while back about the amount of pollution/energy required to make the home solar systems, vs. their output, being questionable in the big picture. Though clearly they would help with a stressed grid, ala California.

There was a rather cool solar concept I recall reading about, I think in Jerry Pournelle's A Step Further Out. Effectively, have the solar arrays in orbit, where there's no atmospheric interference, and beam the resultant power down via microwave. With an antenna grid about 2m above the ground (IIRC) the expected ground level radaiation was low enough to graze cattle underneath with no ill effects. Seemed an interesting idea to me.