Year: 2007

I was wrong, Second Life Does Teach People (Or, At Any Rate, the IP Mafia) Valuable Lessons for Reality

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As regular readers may recall, I have had sharp words for those who can’t tell the difference between MMORGs such as “Second Life” and reality. Nor do I stand alone. Industry Reporter Clay Shirky over at Corante wrote this article a few weeks ago describing how the business press generally appears to have fallen into some sort of Second Life worshipping trance. So it may surprise some to see me lauding Linden Labs’ latest innovation as a fantastic contribution with the potential to make the real world a better place and teach those who need it a valuable lesson in life.

I refer to what the always clever folks at Good Morning Silicon Valley dubbed a “proceed and persevere” letter (the opposite of the “cease and desist” letter). What happened, and why I hope it catches on, below . . . .

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“Turn me on dead man” (The Beatles)

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The Collaborative for Croquet should be good to go, again. Get the new download.

We’ve lengthened the fuse on self-destructing deleted stuff and improved the error logging, and have not seen further “no such object” errors. (Except for one person who was using an older version. This beta release doesn’t check your version, but I could tell from the error report that it was something we fixed two versions ago.)

Also, the Macintosh VM that was included in the last download had gotten miscopied somewhere along the chain. Testing the new .zip confirms that it works on Mac and Windows. (Linux folks will have to test on their own.)

Anyway, this beta version still doesn’t have anything to reset itself if someone does manage to crash things, so if it takes longer than a minute or two to connect, let us know.

“Well, no one told me about her… She's not there…” (The Zombies)

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Getting nothing but a red screen at CroquetCollaborative.org? Here’s why.

Croquet keeps track of everything ever created, so that anyone can tell each object to do stuff. Most of the demo applications in the current SDK keep track as long as they are running. That creates a problem for our KidsFirst Application Toolkit demo,
and its public space at the Collaborative for Croquet. The public space is meant to be a long-lived environment, in which you can come and create (or destroy) stuff and rearrange it, and come back later to see things as you left them (perhaps evolved by someone else).

So we resort to a very old programming technique. And if you’re a developer, we need your help!

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The Collaborative For Croquet

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We’ve got a bunch of Croquet stuff going on. We have the KidsFirst project in early education. There are a few folks who would like to work with the KidsFirst project as educators, academics, etc., but who need an entity to work with. We also have a fairly traditional open-source development project for the software used by KidsFirst, called the KAT: KidsFirst Application Toolkit.

And we REALY, REALLY, REALLY want a place that people can just connect to and try Croquet. To interact with others through Croquet. To come back another day and have some hope of finding the same 3d world, evolved though it may be, but still maybe having some of the same things that had been put there in the previous visit. A little open-source 3D-direction-manipulation real-time collaborative place on the Internet.

And so we have formed “The Collaborative For Croquet”.

Check it out at: CroquetCollaborative.org.

NCMR Day 2: I collapse into an exhausted stupor

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First, I must report that Jen Howard, one of the amazing folks at Free Press (formerly one of my colleagues at MAP) was a touch disappointed in my review of the party Thursday night, which she planned. She also informs me that the company that handled the drinks had said that non-alcoholic drinks were free and they were definitely NOT, supposed to charge me $2 for a bottle of water. So I will conclude that Free Press (and Jen) are amazing at everything, including planning parties, and just got ripped off.

And so they proved on Friday Night. Or so I am told. It being Shabbos, I retreated to my room. Alas, I therefore missed the further inspirational remarks of Commissioners Copps and Adelstein. However, I urge all those benighted souls who, like me, missed it, to check them out in the video archive.

I do urge everyone to pay particular attention to Copps’ proposed New America Media Contract. I will have more analysis of this when the brain cells start workng again.

O.K., here is how Harold spent his day. It is a rather disjointed, personal approach that skipped most of the main events with the real news makers. Which is why I don’t call myself a “citizen journalist” (but more on that below).

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The KAT

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Our KidsFirst project includes a great deal of what we’ve learned about Croquet. We’re making all the code available through the CroquetSource code repository, as part of the Contributions collection of code that will be distributed in the forthcoming Croquet release. (This repository is available to developers ahead of release, as part of what David Reed calls “Invention in public.” For info on updating, see this movie and this discussion thread. There will also be a new image distribution shortly.)

We call this code the KAT – KidsFirst Application Toolkit. It fits over all the other Croquet SDK code without changing it. All the KAT-specific classes begin with K – partly for the KidsFirst project that informs its development, and partly as homage to Alan. As the code matures, you may or may not see some of the KAT code migrate down to the base classes from which it inherits. (For historical reasons, the name of the Monticello package is “Wisconsin.” This may change.)

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NCMR Day One: Free Press Amazing At Everything But Planing Parties

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The official National Conference for Media Reform has now gotten under way. Alas, as it is now less than an hour before Shabbos, when I will stop using all things electronic (which makes staying in a hotel with electronic card keys soooooo much fun). So I can only hit a few highlights.

1) They say 3000 people are here, and I believe it. While media consolidation as an issue is non-partisan (or bi-partisan, if you prefer), the conference attendees are most decidedly progressive. I hope the conservatives have their own anti-media consolidation conference.
In fact, I make it a challenge. Yo, conservatives! We hate main stream media more than you do! Can you get 3000 conservatives together to talk about how sucky media is? Well, when you do, lets get all 6,000 together and march on the Capitol. That will show us white-wine swilling effete liberals a thing or two!

2) Go to the Free Press video links and watch the speeches from the main ballroom. For most moving short piece on why media reform is a critical human rghts struggle and essential to the dignity of us all and our democracy, I nominate Danny Glover’s opening piece. Short and beautiful.

Bill Moyer’s speech was, as one would expect for Bill Moyers, brilliant. He began with some much needed words of caution. We can feel good about the fact that this is now a bona fide movement, and one that is winning. OTOH, this is the traditional moment when left-wing/progressive movements start fracturing and battling each other (usually with a little assist from the powers that be). How about we not do that this time? We got a lot of people working toward a common goal essentially to preserving our free society. If we keep working together, we will win.

Jesse Jackson gave the afternoon speech placing the media justice movement in the context of the civil rights movement and why we cannot achieve the success of the “broken promise” of liberty for all dating back to the Emancipation Proclamation without media reform. Why, he asked, do people have to learn about race relations from things like the “Call me, Harold” commercial? How can the same person who shows amazing affection and loyalty for a black athlete get all suspicious when the same black man is in a store buying groceries? Because the consolidation in the media deprives people of a diversity of voices and views.

Very good afternoon sessions as well as a good dealers space below. Also kudos for ubiquitous free wireless network which I am using to post this. Working pretty well so far.

Lest one thing that my affection and admiration for Free Press has blinded me to the need for journalistic objectivity, I should mention that last night’s “Save the Internet” party was totally lame. When I go to a party, I do not expect to pay $2/bottle of water. When Dorgan-Snowe (no longer Snowe-Dorgan!) passes, I am definitely letting the party animals at the Chirstian Coalition and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops plan the party.

O.K., journalistic integrity and “fairness” reestablished, I bid you all Good Shabbos. I’ll be here and around. You’ll know me as the guy who is standing by the electric doors waiting for someone else to work in first. Stupid electric doors.

Stay tuned . . . .

FCC Makes Cable Companies Obey Law! Activist Lawyer Faints In shock!

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Oh my stars! After endless years of delay, the FCC has has denied the various waiver requests from Comcast and the National Cable Telecommunications Association to delay the implementation of the set-top box interoperability. My stars! The cable industry will actually be required to comply with a law passed in 1996! I am positively weak from shock. Now if only we could get the FCC to resolve the horizontal cable ownership that’s been pending since 1992.

More below . . . .

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FCC Commissioner Adelstein Kicks Off Academic Pre-Conference in Memphis

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Hello all from the Memphis Tennessee Convention Center. While the Free Press National Conference on Media Reform does not officially open until tomorrow, Free Press and the Social Sciences Research Center (SSRC) have co-sponsored an academic pre-conference for today, with a goal of promoting greater coordination between academics and activists and encouraging more academics to get involved in the substantive policy debates.

Craig Calhoun of SSRC and Robert McChesney of Free Press did a good job introducing the conference. But the real star of the morning was FCC Commissioner Joathan Adelstein.

I couldn’t have wished for a better speech. If Adelstein doesn’t read my blog (and I rather doubt he does), I take it as prof that “great minds think alike.” He savaged the neo-cons and others who rely on “faith based” research and regulation, and an FCC that has allowed the corporations it regulates to control both the framing of the debate and the information used for policy. Because the FCC has consciously decided not to “burden” the industry with reporting requirements that would provide an accurate picture of the industry (altough they provide exactly this information to investors and the SEC), the “expert agency” is now “starved for information” and reduced to writing “advocacy pieces” for industry or reports devoid of meaningful data and analysis.

On the plus side, according to Adelstein, we have truth on our side and a massive reserve of talent and ability. We have already accomplished amazing things. With greater coordination and effort, we can do more.

Details below . . . .

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