Month: January 2007

Gold Farmers

Funny yet profound:

a new trade association has been formed by Korean gold farmers and real-money trade sites to lobby the Korean government, which has been considering regulation of the sector.

2007-06-19: Should have read the nyt gold farmer story. Not just the obvious arbitrage angle, but farmers playing WoW in their spare time after 12h shifts clicking away in WoW, and 40-person guilds for hire by high-level players in need of backup for their campaigns.
2007-07-09: Creative protests

The farmers retaliated by slaying gnomes and arranging them on the ground to spell out the URLs of their gold-farms.

2008-05-08: AN explainer

Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games. They acquire (“farm”) items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they’ve harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get “real” money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

Microsoft Wikipedia spam

Microsoft tried to hire people to contribute to Wikipedia. Not wanting to do the edits directly, they were looking for an intermediary to make edits and corrections favorable to them.

they picked the wrong crowd to astroturf this time

1984 Comic Book

very nice adaption

Sprawl fat

areas with interspersed homes, shops, and offices had fewer obese residents than did homogeneous residential areas whose residents were of a similar age, income, and education.

this has always been true empirically, and is yet another reason to avoid suburbia

HD Porn

“The biggest problem is razor burn. I’m not 100% sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD”

porn used to drive tech. maybe it will drive a retro movement now. or we’ll get real-time gaussian blurs 🙂

New multi touch demo

why is this not in all sorts of products yet? and i dont mean greasy iphone screens

Competing Threads?

do mailing lists have an upper limit of concurrent threads?

Get a First Life

Beyond Megapixels

Sometime in the next 18 months, the megapixel war will end (16? 24? 500? Who cares?) and we’ll actually start seeing stats on things that a) vary significantly and b) actually affect photo quality: ISO ratings, noise levels, etc.

Linking

The trouble with the Web is that like everything else, per Sturgeon’s Revelation, 90% of it is crap. In particular, a lot of institutional sites are pathetic self-serving fluff served up in anodyne marketing-speak with horrible URIs that are apt to vanish. Linking to the Wikipedia instead is tempting, and I’ve succumbed a lot recently. In fact, that’s what I did for the Canada Line. After all, the train is still under construction and there’s no real reason to expect today’s links to last; on top of which, the Line’s own site is mostly about selling the project to the residents and businesses who (like me) are getting disrupted by it, and the taxpayers who (like me) are paying for it. Wikipedia entries, on the other hand, are typically in stable locations, have a decent track record for outliving transient events, are pretty good at presenting the essential facts in a clear, no-nonsense way, and tend to be richly linked to relevant information, including whatever the “official” Web site might currently happen to be.

why linking to wikipedia often wins over pathetic originals