"I have a dream. I refuse to accept the end of man. I believe he will endure. He will survive. Man is immortal, not because alone of God's creatures he has a voice, but because he has a soul... a spirit capable of compassion... and sacrifice... and endurance. About America and Americans, this is particularly true. It is a fabulous country, where miracles not only happen, they happen all the time. As a nation, we have, perhaps uniquely, a special willness of the heart." - Charlton Heston (1924-2008)
From Gizmodo: "The international publisher, Penguin, has decided to hop onto the ebook bandwagon, by promising regular book launches to be held in conjunction with their ebook counterparts. Unfortunately, the prices will not be lowered for the ebook varieties, but Penguin will offer direct downloads from their website." Nice to see a big publsiher glacier finally edging forward. Of course, my old publishing house, Timberwolf, did this 8 years ago, releasing the book, e-book and audiobook all simultaneously. Of course, we also released the e-book and audiobook on the same disk with the audio in MP3 and WMA formats and via download.
-pfs
Last year Microsoft got very ambitious and unveiled their Silverlight framework initiative Silverlight.Net. Silverlight is built on .Net 3.0 and is basically positioned as a direct competitor to Adobe Flash and the former Macromedia toolset. Microsoft provided a number of alpha/beta version of a broad toolset including an evolution of the Windows Media platform, as well as a good sprinkling of samples, training videos, some live events, a streaming CDN platform that “wasn’t competing with other CDNs,” the social website PopFly.com, etc. Here’s the Silverlight Showcase: http://silverlight.net/Showcase/ This was more than some tools – this was an attempt to catalyze a state change in how sites are architected and position MS as THE dominant overall development platform. Now, don’t get me wrong. I was pretty impressed with some of the tools, and some of the early adopter sites and examples were, well, they were cool. Also, the whole “vision thing” was quite ambitious, but this was a tall order. I wondered how serious MS really was – would they stick with it for as long as it would take to gain at least a respectable marketshare? Not surprisingly, so far, Microsoft seems to be pounding its head against the wall of established toolset inertia. Well, it appears that MS is upping the ante. By some accounts MS is the # 8 site on the net, so there is certainly a whole lotta traffic there. Well, it seems that MS is embarking on a ‘project’ to replace the entire Microsoft site with one built on Silverlight. Can you say JOB SECURITY for some folks at Microsoft? Of course, MS will start with some key portions of their site and I’m sure they reserve the right to change their minds, but here is the beta: http://www.microsoft.com/beta/downloads/About.aspx Bottom line? Microsoft has the deep pockets to stick with something like this if they really want to. The big question to me is just how serious are they? Will this be a 4-5 year experiment or will they stick with it for the long haul? Will they make the tools cheap enough for indy consultants to afford or will they aim this at the corporate market exclusively? Personally, I’d like to see a better packaging of tools, more clearly delineating desktop from Internet development and a totally free Internet developer’s kit with some version of ALL the tools for cheap or even better, for free. Offer add-ons and nice templates for $, but if they want to get more developers out there building site with the tools, I think they need a better packaging of it than they have now. Regardless, it seems like Silverlight is going to be around for “a while” – it will be interesting to see what happens.
A quick personal note -- Deer Channel has been a tremendous experience. i really could not have asked for a more challenging, rewarding and downright FUN time!!! Unfortunately, as so often seems to happen with startups, directions are changing in the company and since I've already built the infrastructure, there is less for me to do, so, I'm moving on. I'm still working part-time, but I'm now looking for new opportunities. Drop me an email at patrick (at) patrickseaman (dot) com if you have any leads I should follow up on. Happy Holidays to all! - Patrick Seaman
4 years ago I pitched a game to a now defunct game division of a major publisher. The prospects for the game were going swimmingly until the prospects for the game company itself began to unravel. I digress. The game was called "Earth Now!" and it was to use a massive P2P engine/architecture (originally developed for the Defense Department) to build a "A massively multiplayer online “Reality Game” that mirrors actual geo-political conditions, updated daily by intelligent agents from actual news service feeds. Play a soldier, spy or businessman – a terrorist, reporter, diplomat, or sports figure – an entertainer, religious leader or zealot – China -vs- Taiwan, Freedom fighters -vs- Government loyalists." Long story -- the proposal didn't seem to go anywhere and my old company, Timberwolf Press, isn't around anymore either.
4 years ago I pitched a game to a now defunct game division of a major publisher. The prospects for the game were going swimmingly until the prospects for the game company itself began to unravel. I digress. The game was called "Earth Now!" and it was to use a massive P2P engine/architecture (originally developed for the Defense Department) to build a "A massively multiplayer online “Reality Game” that mirrors actual geo-political conditions, updated daily by intelligent agents from actual news service feeds. Play a soldier, spy or businessman – a terrorist, reporter, diplomat, or sports figure – an entertainer, religious leader or zealot – China -vs- Taiwan, Freedom fighters -vs- Government loyalists." Long story -- the proposal didn't seem to go anywhere and my old company, Timberwolf Press, isn't around anymore either.Now I read about a DOD project that is using supercomputers to model the earth (copied from Slashdot): "The US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality. Putting supercomputers to an innovative use, the military is simulating our planet in an effort to predict the outcome of different scenarios. They might run tests to see how long 'you' can go without food or water, or how 'you' will respond to televised propaganda. Billions of nodes are created in the system, intended to reflect every man, woman, and child. 'Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project. Simulex is the company developing these systems, and they list pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among their private sector clients. The U.S. military is their biggest customer, apparently now running the most complex version of the system. JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence."
Here's a description from my old game proposal: