Tag: technology

Technology and the decline of the gatekeepers

The same forces are at work undermining the power of gatekeepers in every entertainment industry, film, books, and games:

“Let me give you the simplest math,” he replied. “The simple, simple, simple math.”
Good,
I thought. Because my friends and I are not so great at math. I can
guesstimate the budget of a big movie to within a hundred thousand
dollars by reading the script, but I can’t add the columns therein.
“The
movie business,” Peter said, “the historical studio business, if you
put all the studios together, runs at about a ten percent profit margin.
For every billion dollars in revenue, they make a hundred million
dollars in profits. That’s the business, right?”
I nodded, the good student, excited that someone was finally going to explain this to me.
“The
DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” he went on.
“Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit
could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”
For
those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s
statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10
percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that
profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those
little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.
This
was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to
our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young
males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home
entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But
slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line
forever?
This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years….
When Peter referred to the “transition of the DVD market,” and
technology destroying the DVD, he was talking about the implications
of the fact that our movies were now proliferating for free—not just on
the streets of Beijing and Hong Kong and Rio. And even legitimate users,
as Peter pointed out, who would never pirate, were going for $3 or $4
video-on-demand (VOD) rentals instead of $15 DVD purchases.
“When did the collapse begin?”
“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”
It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.
“The
international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD
sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their
movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a
DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.

This is the very point that the SFWA members didn’t understand when I tried to warn them about the sale of ebooks through non-Amazon channels such as games.  The big mainstream publishers, (and more importantly, the genre publishers owned by them), not only don’t have these channels, they can’t even sell through them because their legacy distribution contracts prohibit them from selling books for virtual currencies.  And I very much doubt Ingram or Barnes & Noble is going to allow publishers to rewrite contracts in order to help them bypass the conventional channels into which they are locked.

Amazon is putting serious pressure on ebook pricing, but it is also maintaining a strong floor.  That floor will disappear once the in-game channel starts to see decent volume. So on the one side, their profit margins are going to decline as ebook prices continue to fall – the average price of an ebook bestseller fell from $11.79 in October 2012 to $6.59 in May 2013 – on the other, they’re not going to be able to sell game tie-in books much longer once Microsoft starts selling HALO ebooks through the Xbox and Disney starts selling Star Wars ebooks through its in-game stores.

It will probably surprise no one to discover that the primary response of the forward-thinking futurists was to declare their opinion that First Sword was unlikely to sell enough ebooks to matter one way or the other, as if the universal adoption of 3D hardware texture-mapped acceleration that Big Chilly and I introduced in Rebel Moon, and the 16-bit color we introduced in Rebel Moon Rising, had anything at all to do with how many copies of those games were sold. 

Speaking of First Sword, I’m working on the standard contract for in-game ebook sales right now, and I would welcome any comments or suggestions those interested in selling either original Selenoth-related fiction or unrelated material through First Sword and other games might have.

The extent of Facebook spying

Or, at least, this is what they’re willing to admit to for the present:

For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of
user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government
entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including
criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000
and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local
sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a
fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national
security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of
Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the
entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000
accounts.

And, of course, the fact that they’re handing over about 40,000 accounts per year doesn’t eliminate the NSA’s widely rumored backdoor access.

Flat ugly

Steve Jobs must be rolling over in his grave:

The new iOS 7 software has what’s been dubbed ‘flat’ look with fewer
textures and a more monochrome look. The gradient textures on tabs have
also been removed in favour of block colours.
Users can now swipe from the left of the screen to go back and move
between messages. When you slide across in any app you now get an
options menu too….

Experts warned the radical makeover could confuse some users. Jan Dawson, chief telecoms analyst at Ovum, said it ‘represents a massive overhaul of the look and feel of the operating system, which has remained largely unchanged visually since the original version.’ However, he said the changes could be too much. ‘The new version is almost unrecognisable, which will make it polarizing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was enough to send even some of the fanboys to Android.  Even the previous generation of Samsung phones are better than the current iPhones, and uglifying the operating system isn’t going to help matters any.  It looks almost as if Apple thinks its competition is Windows 8, not Android.

The difference between “conspiracy theory” and “news”

It’s about seven years, these days.  It is an amusing coincidence that on the very day I’m being accused of being a “conspiracy theorist”, (and admittedly, I openly subscribe to the Conspiracy theory of history), one of the past “conspiracy theories” about which I wrote, and for which I was mocked as being paranoid at the time, is now being reported as news:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

I have said for years that it is a safe assumption that the NSA collects everything via Carnivore or some other system.  They’ve got everything, your emails, your text messages, your history of viewing Brazilian Goat porn, your bank account balance, and so forth.

None of this is a surprise.  How else could the economic system described in relation to The Number of the Beast come about?

Mailvox: they want to disbelieve

Obvious challenges my statement about introducing 16-bit color and 3D graphics hardware to the game industry:

Oh, you did? Which game was that? Do you have anything at all that backs that up?

Yes, I did. Concerning the hardware, see Computer Gaming World’s 1994 article on the 3GA and its reference to my title as “Trans-Dimensional Evangelist”.  Concerning 16-bit color, I direct your attention to the September 1997 Computer Gaming World review of Rebel Moon Rising.

“Rebel Moon Rising makes use of Intel’s new MMX technology. Fenris Wolf used MMX to gain a reasonable frame rate at high resolutions with 16-bit color. This let them create dynamic lighting effects that could change on the fly and even move with the different characters.  For example, a moving orange glow might indicate a nearby enemy jump trooper.

Another new technology feature is voice recognition. One early Windows 95 game, ACES OF THE DEEP, used speech recognition, but the implementation was very limited.  In Rebel Moon Rising, the list of usable words is quite large.  While you can actually give orders to AI squad mates in a limited way, it’s mostly used to communicate with other players in multiplayer games. You can speak into the microphone to chat, rather than having to hunt for keyboard commands – something especially handy for Internet play, which the game also supports.”

Now, none of this proves the feature we are going to introduce to the game industry in our upcoming announcement of our forthcoming game is going to make that game successful.  And it demonstrates that even if we are the first to introduce it, we will not necessarily be the primary beneficiaries of it, or be generally known to have introduced it.  I have, in fact, repeatedly expressed my belief that every game company is going to follow our example very quickly; that is the primary reason the innovation is going to be significant. The mere fact that people like Obvious see fit to doubt what was once known by literally everyone involved suffices to prove that credit primarily tends to be given to those who are both innovative and massively successful.  And sometimes only the latter.

But Jensen Huang, Hock Leow, Steve Mosher, Chris Taylor, Marc Rein, John Carmack, Andy Grove, and those who were executives at companies like Intel, Rendition, 3D Labs, Diamond, and Hercules, all know what happened.  And thanks to Mike Weksler at CGW, it’s a matter of public, if obscure, record.

This is another fundamental difference between Right and Left.  The Right is mostly indifferent to the various successes of the Left, whereas the Left is desperate to not only deprive the Right of any opportunity to succeed, but also to deny every last vestige of whatever success was already achieved.  Obvious’s petty desire to disbelieve one minor chapter in the history of the game industry is the goblin to the ideologically censorious behavior of the SF/F publishing ogre lords.

The epic flop of Windows 8

Karl Denninger suspects it is even worse than is being reported:

There is another interesting batch of numbers here as well in the desktop figures:
SunOS         0.01%
FreeBSD         0.04%
Windows 98    0.12%
ChromeOS/Linux    0.14%
BB Playbook    0.15%
WinXP/64         0.69%
Linux         4.09%
Windows 8    4.52%
Apple iPad    8.10%
Vista/Win2008    8.28%
MacOS         14.75%
WinXP         17.88%
Windows 7    41.25%

Note carefully those Windows 8 figures.  4.5%, or less than Vista?!  In addition note all the people still running XP — there are a hell of a lot of them!  In fact those desktop machines identifying themselves as Linux machines compares favorably with those running Windows 8!

I would say Microsoft has flopped the Win8 release in a big way — far worse than is being reported.

Worse than Vista?  Yowzers, that’s pathetic! Blogger doesn’t report in this kind of detail, but I do find it interesting to note that the Android percentage, at 12%, presently exceeds that of iPhone and iPad combined at 11%.

Wish list

I don’t bother with tip jars or Amazon wish lists, but if you’re looking for ideas about what to buy me for Christmas, this will do nicely:

The PGF isn’t just a fancy scope on top of a rifle. All together, the PGF is made up of a firearm, a modified trigger mechanism with variable weighting, the computerized digital tracking scope, and hand-loaded match grade rounds (which you need to purchase from TrackingPoint). This is a little like selling both the razor and the razor blades, but the rounds must be manufactured to tight tolerances since precise guidance of a round to a target by the rifle’s computer requires that the round perform within known boundaries.

The image displayed on the scope isn’t a direct visual, but rather a video image taken through the scope’s objective lens. The Linux-powered scope produces a display that looks something like the heads-up display you’d see sitting in the cockpit of a fighter jet, showing the weapon’s compass orientation, cant, and incline. To shoot at something, you first “mark” it using a button near the trigger. Marking a target illuminates it with the tracking scope’s built-in laser, and the target gains a pip in the scope’s display. When a target is marked, the tracking scope takes into account the range of the target, the ambient temperature and humidity, the age of the barrel, and a whole boatload of other parameters. It quickly reorients the display so the crosshairs in the center accurately show where the round will go.

Image recognition routines keep the pip stuck to the marked target in the scope’s field of view, and at that point, you squeeze the trigger. This doesn’t fire the weapon; rather, the reticle goes from blue to red, and while keeping the trigger held down, you position the reticle over the marked target’s pip. As soon as they coincide, the rifle fires.

People occasionally accuse me of being envious of this or that.  But if I’m envious of something, I’ll admit it.  And yes, to be honest, I am totally envious of the guy who thought of software-corrected personal firearms.  Because it essentially defines awesome.  I mean, an 18-button mouse with a joystick, that’s cool.  But a Linux-powered rifle?  How do you top that, with a freaking Death Star?

Of course, being Linux-based, there will probably be annoying package update requests popping up right when you’re busy trying to shoot something.  Or someone.  On the plus side, you can probably play Battle for Wesnoth on it while you’re waiting for the target to present itself.

State Department attacks First and Second Amendments

Defense Distributed was instructed to take down the CAD files for the Liberator, a single-shot 3D printed plastic gun, by the US State Department:

Defense Distributed, the Texas-based nonprofit that wants to empower people to 3D print their own guns, has hit a bit of a legal snag. According to founder Cody Wilson, DEFCAD, the open source weapon-printing project powered by Defense Distributed, received a letter (embedded below) from the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance, telling him to remove the blueprints of the Liberator, his 3D printed gun, from the web so that they may be reviewed by the department.

The group’s website currently has a red banner appended to the top that reads, “DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls.  Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information.”

“We got an official letter from the Secretary of State, telling me who they were, what their authority was under U.S. law and telling me they want to review these files to see if they’re class one munitions,” Mr. Wilson told Betabeat by phone. “That includes blueprints.”

In the letter, embedded below, the State Department says that Defense Distributed may have released data that is controlled by the International Traffic in Arms Regulation without getting prior authorization. This would put the company’s actions in conflict with–oh boy–the Arms Export Control Act.

“Please note that disclosing (including oral or visual disclosure) or transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad, is considered an export,” reads the letter. It also says that until Defense Distributed has received the legal all-clear, the company “should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled. This means that all such data should be removed from public access immediately.”

Keep in mind, this is the very same State Department that sends tanks, jet fighters, and missiles to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.  But the freely distributed plans for a single-shot plastic pistol is somehow considered sufficient cause to justify violating the First and Second Amendments.

Forget Pirate Bay and the thousands of torrents that are already distributing the files, given that the zipfile is only 2 megs, it seems to me that a few patriotic virus programmers should be able to see that they are rapidly distributed to millions of computers around the world regardless of what the State Department has to say about it.

And if they think they’ve got problems now, just wait until home genetics become as accessible as 3D-printed firearms.  It will bring back the old fears of witchcraft; I can imagine that the unauthorized possession of another individual’s hair and nail clippings, or at least a government employee’s, will becomes a crime.

Fred Reed bites the Apple

His thought processes concerning his next computer are entertaining, if not, in my opinion, even remotely convincing:

I had no particular feelings about the Mac, for or against. I knew
that people who had them also had a peculiar emotional attachment to
them. It worried me, about the people, not the computer. I mean, a
carpenter doesn’t bond with his claw hammer. A friend once described
the MacIntosh as “a fashion accessory for the conforming
nonconformist.” Well, yeah. On the other hand, Mac-heads were usually
well on the bright side.

I was not interested in abnormal psychology, but in
computers, so I resolved to ask practical-minded friends, not
Mac-heards, about these fructiform machines. Actual Mac-users had the
chill objectivity I associate with Salafi terrorists. I started with a
buddy who does networking and data-base manage for medium-sized
companies. I knew he had a MacBook Pro. Did he like it?

He said, “It’s cute, well-designed, and I’d buy another one,
but when I have work to do, I need a PC.” Ah. Why? “Because the
network analysis software I need doesn’t exist for the Mac, and their
data-base and spread-sheet applications are toys.”

Hmmm. I didn’t want to analyze networks or fiddle with data
bases, which left “cute and well-designed.” Nothing wrong with that….

Meanwhile, I talked to a few more of the Salafi terrorists. It
didn’t help. If you want intelligent thoughts regarding the Mac, it is
better to talk to people who don’t have one. Attempts to probe the
consciousness of Mac-heads usually went like this:  Mac-head: “Mac is better.” Me: OK, how is it better? “It
just is.” Ah, I see. How is it just is? “It’s easier to use.” How is it
easier to use? “It just is.” “How is it just is?” Round and round the
mulberry bush.

They said things like “The Mac’s hardware is better than the
PC´s.” At this point I realized that most Apple cultists didn’t know
much about computers. For example, they didn’t understand that the
Macintosh is a product, while PC is a specification. Only Apple can
make a Mac. Anybody can make a PC. Thus on one hand you have
manufacturers on a level with back-alley abortionists who use cheap
power supplies that smoke like the audience at a Grateful Dead concert,
and hard drives with a Mean Time Between Failure of five minutes or
until next Wednesday, whichever comes first. On the other hand, you
have solidly built PCs such as Delll’s Latitudes, serious boxes aimed
at businessmen.

Give him six months and he’ll either be parroting the very cultists he mocked, or, like Spacebunny and a few others of my acquaintance, he’ll regard his brief period of Macintosh ownership as being the techno-analog of surviving cancer or a stint in a concentration camp.  But Fred is right in discerning that there is no one correct and objective answer, because it completely depends upon what one’s individual requirements and preferences are.

None of this should be in any way taken for a defense, much less endorsement, of Windows 8, you understand.

Mailvox: ideas for a new comment system

After fixing the template here – you can now link properly to individual comments by using the link on the comment’s datestamp – Matt contemplates going where so many have gone before, and failed:

The CoCo circus and slow disaster, combined with your rejection of the alternatives, followed by all the infelicities of Blogger’s commenting system has long tempted me to try to create a better way.  I’m now professionally situated in a place where trying to design [if not necessarily implement] a better commenting system is on topic.  I understand most of the challenges in designing and maintaining such a system on the back end, but I do not have a good grasp on the needs and failure modes for the front end.

For me, the single most important thing is to avoid any registration requirement on the part of the commenters.  This is where most of the comment systems fall down. They place all their emphasis on allowing logins through Facebook, Twitter, and 10 other systems, clutter up their interfaces with micrologos, and make no effort to let people comment as they obviously prefer to comment. Back when I had the system distinguish between logged-in commenter and not logged-in commenter via color, it was obvious that between 10 and 15 percent of the commenters were logged into something.  So, most comment systems are designed to cater to the vast minority of commenters.  This is a fundamental design mistake, as it is there to serve the needs of the comment system, not those who are intended to use it.

Anyhow, here is my list of the features of an optimal comment system:

  1. No registration necessary.  Custom registration only, no use of all the other systems.
  2. Option to block or auto-spam blank, Anonymous, and blacklisted names. Note that hese are two different things, as in some circumstances it may be better to accept and auto-spam than simply block.
  3. Ability to search comments by name, URL, or IP address.
  4. Good spam-trapping.  Blogger is actually pretty good in this regard, although vastly better on VP than on AG for some reason.
  5. Checkboxes, mass select and mass delete options for managing comments.  What Blogger really misses is the ability to view by Name, which would make managing them much easier.
  6. Editable comments. They should always be editable by the blog host, with editing capabilities made available to registered commenters at the blog host’s option.
  7. Good, easy quoting system.
  8. Recognize HTML tags and buttons to provide the basics: B, I, U, strike, Link, and blockquote.  No need for spellchecks and so forth; no one ever uses them.
  9. Session recognition of commenter’s Name/URL.  Even if you don’t want to register, it is tedious to repeatedly type those in.

There are other things, to be sure, but that would be a desirable base.  I actually like the Blogger comment system as a base, but it’s lacking in a few important particulars, such as the inability to separate the permission of unregistered comments from permitting Anonymous comments.  If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to share them here.

And while we’re discussing your thoughts on the matter, I’m curious to know what sort of subjects people are finding to be of the most interest today.  I’ve been writing more about the business of fiction than I normally do, mostly because the world of publishing is changing so rapidly and I’ve been cranking out a considerable quantity of it lately, but there has also been an awful lot of excitement on the economic and current events front as well, so I don’t have a good feel for what is of particular interest these days.  And then there is the Great Rabbit Hunt and the occasional soccer game. On the other hand, I’ve been writing less about some popular subjects to which I tended to pay inordinate attention in the past, such as history, evolution, and games.

I’m not promising that I’ll pay any attention to what anyone thinks, of course, but I am curious nevertheless.  If you’re so inclined, just list your favorite three subjects for blog discussion, in your personal order of preference.