Monday, August 15, 2005
10 Best Resources for CSS
source:http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/15/0051234&tid=95&tid=8
A World of Warcraft World
Thomas Edison said it best: "Change happens with ball-flattening speed."
by David Wong
If you don't know what an "MMORPG" is, don't worry. It's a geek term, like "e-mail" used to be a geek term. For now let's just say it's the most instantly gripping, involving and demanding entertainment technology ever invented. The addiction rate appears to be about twice that of crack Cocaine. There are 10 million MMORPG users in the world and their population is doubling every two years.
Hold your hand about three feet above your monitor. That's where the graph will be in 2010. It's an infection, it's a tsunami, it's a volcanic eruption. All at the same time, waiting, like a nest of plague-infested rats next to a ticking hydrogen bomb in an underwater volcano. Or something. What I'm trying to say is, it's The Next Big Thing.
Some of what you're about to read will sound like science fiction. You'll be tempted to dismiss me along with those who for decades have been predicting sentient robot maids and hotels on the moon. But for every delayed technology there is another sudden, completely unexpected advance that jumps us from the shadows. For instance, none of the illustrations used in the article below were done with human hands. Each was rendered automatically by a remarkable piece of software called Nedroid, which can scan any piece of text, "read" it for comprehension and, incredibly, render artwork to match the context.
Did you even know that was possible before now? Truly, this morning's science fiction is this afternoon's science not-fiction.
So where will MMORPGs will take us?
In your lifetime...*
1. Everyone will look like a Greek god or goddess.
If you don't understand the gravitational pull of an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), I'm going to enlighten you with just a dozen words: you get to pick what you look like and what your talents are.
That's the real beauty of it. The first thing you do in the MMORPG World of Warcraft is design your own body and decide what your strengths will be. You pick your race. What could be more seductive than that, the ability to turn in all of the cards you were dealt at birth and draw new ones from a face-up deck? If you have friends who've gotten sucked into the WoW black hole and you don't understand why they never talk to you any more, this is it. I remember being a chubby teenager with bad skin and astigmatism and pants that didn't fit quite right. What would I have given to be reborn as a strapping warrior with rippling pecs and armor of hammered silver?
Rendered in .026 seconds, nedroid artsoft v 1.6
On that kid's screen now is a dozen noble warriors of exotic races, brandishing elaborate weapons and charging a gigantic demon across a fire-scarred mountaintop. The dwarf next to him is controlled by an accountant planted at his own computer in Cleveland, two babies sleeping in the next room and his pregnant wife on the sofa. The robed priest in the back casting healing spells is actually a 250-lb. ex-gangster, playing from the computer lab of a maximum security prison in Pennsylvania. The elf on his left, sprinting and drawing his mighty magical bow, is the digital body of a wheelchair-bound 12 year-old girl in Miami.
It's not just for fantasy geeks, of course. Even The Sims lets you pick a version of yourself with low body fat and cool hair. And this idea is what's going to push the expansion of MMORPG technology in the way that porn pushed the expansion of the internet, the desperate-but-untapped desire to interact with others without the bothersome interference of genetic flaws and poor diet and exercise habits.
But it's not just the physical image that changes. In that world, I am a dragon slayer. There, my reptutation and history are just as awe-inspiring as my look. Even now, much of the satisfaction for WoW gamers is in the very real sense of accomplishment they get, a person glowing with a burst of golden light when they gain a level in experience and strength. How can the real world compete with that? Wouldn't those long Calculus lectures have been easier to sit through if, every time you learned something important, gold light shot out from your body?
In the future, long after World of Warcraft has gone the way of ARPANET, everyone will have a virtual-world twin. An upgraded, digital representative of yourself which I'll henceforth refer to as Awesome You. And you'll see a time in your life when more people know Awesome You than know the real you.
Some people live like that already.
2. All will play in the same virtual world.
Gamers rejoiced back in April when it was announced that Blizzard, Square/Enix and Sony were merging their virtual worlds so that online characters from one game could stride seamlessly into another. It made perfect business sense and I was the first to say I wasn't at all surprised by the news. I had been predicting it for months. The fact that it turned out to be an April Fool's joke and entirely false only proves my point. Ahem.
As this kind of community gaming becomes the nation's pasttime, convenience will demand that some day each person's online identity be able to move from one realm to the next, from the suburbs of the next Sims Online game to WoW's Spiderskull Mountain. And with that convergence of virtual worlds we'll have the first real, primitive incarnation of something not unlike the matrix, or what old science fiction authors called the metaverse. A simulated, virtual world.
You won't have to be into fantasy to participate. You can spend your gaming time in a virtual suburb and build a virtual family and enjoy growing a virtual garden, while your best friend goes off to fight the Orcs of Thunderclaw Valley. Your cousin can go re-fight World War 2 every day. It will still be mainly a game at this stage of its evolution, but as the experience is tailored to every single taste (all under one virtual roof) more and more people will participate. And once everybody's there, why not do all of your chatting and text messaging there? Half of the WoW experience seems to be just a beautifully-rendered and animated chat interface anyway.
The first steps will likely come with the next game consoles, expanding the pool of gamers beyond those with pimped-out gaming PC's. The Playstation 3 will have at least one huge MMORPG on it (Final Fantasy VII). The XBox 360 should have World of Warcraft. And then if you get the console users hooked, and if the the console makers succeed in their plan to get a box in every single house in the civilized world, and then if they expand the interface so you can use your cell phone to check in on your game... You get the idea.
3. Someone will go to jail for stealing a Bonebiter.
You may have heard about a guy who recently was convicted of murdering a man during a dispute over a rare, valuable sword. That sword that was not made of metal or anything solid, but rather of 1's and 0's inside a computer hundreds of miles away. It was a sword he had won in the MMORPG Legend of Mir 3.
Insane, right? I mean, let's say our friend John has his Bonebiter (one of countless powerful weapons in WoW) and a man steals it somehow. Should the thief be convicted of a crime and punished in the real world? Did you snort with laughter at that question? Why?
Rendered in 4.16 seconds, nedroid artsoft v 1.6
The victim worked many hours to "earn" the object. The victim used it daily and depended on it. He derived happiness and satisfaction from it. So why shouldn't depriving him of it be punishable by law? If you say, "but it's just something he used in a game," I'll say that golf is also just a game. Want to see what happens to me when I steal a new set of golf clubs?
If you say, "but the Bonebiter doesn't even exist," I'll say it exists in exactly the same way that the songs and software I download off Bittorrent exist. And yet stealing them is a crime. The only difference is that when I steal a song, nobody else is deprived of the song. When that guy stole John's Bonebiter, he was left unarmed and forced to go find a replacement. That theft actually hurts more, not less.
So when will we start to see laws prohibiting the theft and misuse of game-world objects? As soon as members of the gaming generation become lawmakers, that's when.
4. You'll meet someone who plays an MMORPG for a living.
Let's take this a little bit further. You earn gold in World of Warcraft, gold with which you can buy these in-game objects. If this game gold is truly valuable to my life, if it lets me get more value out of the pasttime I already pay real-world money for, what's to stop me from paying real money for game money? Nothing. Go to Ebay and do a search for World of Warcraft Gold and let your jaw drop open.
Here we have game currency being traded for real currency, and at a better exchange rate than the Iraqi Dinar.
If we go further still, we can imagine a person winning rare weapons and selling them on auction sites or directly to other players they meet. We can imagine somebody working full-time to gather in-game gold by slaying gold-shitting squirrels (or whatever you do to get gold in the game) and then exchanging it for real dollars to pay the real rent with. Sure, it may be decades before you see this kind of-
Oh, wait. There are people doing that right now.
And if you're chuckling and shaking your head at the glazed-eyed geeks who can't tell the difference between game money and real money, let me ask you something: when Square bought Enix for $727 million two years ago, do you think they they actually stacked crate after crate of cash on a flatbed truck and then drove the $727 million over to their offices?
No. That money only existed as numbers in a computer. In fact, not even 10% of the money in the American economy exists as physical, printed currency. All of the rest exists on servers and hard drives and in the imaginations of the people. It has value for the exact same reason WoW gold has value: because people think it has value.
I'm guessing that if you started this article thinking it was a joke, this is the point when you sobered up and realized that, as author H.G. Wells predicted, "the future will accost us with boob-slapping ferocity."
5. They'll take the "G" out of "MMORPG."
We'll stop thinking of the online world as a game right around the time you find yourself strolling through Witchblade Village, or some such fictional online town, and see a Target store open there. You'll enter it just like you do the in-game stores, and you'll be able to view the merchandise in realtime 3D, pick up objects and turn them over in your virtual hands, and buy them the same as if you did it on Amazon.com.
So now our fledgling metaverse isn't just a place to slay computer-generated dragons and nazis. Now it's where you go to shop, to chat, to have cybersex with actual nudity and everything.
Rendered in 26.9 seconds, nedroid artsoft v 1.6
Just think of how porn changes when the user also gets to go in with the toned body of an underwear model. It'll make our current online porn look like just the tip of the assberg.
The joy of experiencing life as Awesome You, as the stronger, handsomer avatar of yourself, will take all of those activities to another plane of cool. The casinos will be there, the movies will play there, concerts will be performed there. The metaverse will stop being a playhouse and will start becoming the interface through which we interact with reality. And every step you take will be as Awesome You. Cool, beautiful, confident.
Nothing invented yet has had such universal appeal.
6. You will find yourself momentarily forgetting whether you're in the real or virtual world.
Fans were astonished when a leaked video depicted a Nintendo virtual reality headset intended for its upcoming system, complete with high-resolution 3D screens and surround-sound earpieces. That it turned out to be a hoax put forth by a lonely, psychotic fan should not detract from the amazement. Today's hoax is always tomorrow's reality (except for that fake picture of the guy holding a huge cat.)
What is not a hoax is this machine somebody invented that operates on the user's thoughts. Yeah, that's right. You think it, the machine does it. That machine exists right now, as you're reading this.
Total immersion, the kind that could really fool you, won't happen tomorrow. But as time goes on it is absolutely inevitable that the graphics will become life quality, that visual displays light years beyond monitors or cumbersome headsets will hit the market. The keyboard and mouse will be long gone, everything done by thought and voice. It is the logical end of everything game developers and console makers are trying to do today and they will not stop until they have it.
And that, my friends, will be a watershed moment in human history. The point where we can trick the senses into thinking a piece of software is real, thinking a real supermodel is in our bed or a dragon is in our front yard or our dead mother has come back to give us advice, that's when everything changes. The metaverse will still be less important in many fundamental ways. Goods won't be produced there, food won't be grown there, babies won't be born there. But in the minds of a whole lot o' people, visits to the physical world will be just brief interruptions to the "real" world as they live it, the world where all of their friends and hobbies and ambitions are.
7. You'll meet a couple who have been married for years and have never seen each other's real-life faces.
If the metaverse interface is good enough, why not? You have a woman who, in real life, weighs 400 pounds and has a thick, neatly-trimmed beard. But she has a heart of gold. A thousand miles away you have a guy with three eyebrows and a hairlip. In reality he lives in a trailer with his 14 cats. In the metaverse he lives in a stone palace with 14 magical flying cats. They marry, the woman showing herself as a beautiful princess, the man a handsome prince. What do they lose by not meeting in the flesh (or "meating" as they will call it)?
If you're one of the thousands of people I just heard shout, "sex!" you're being naive. If you think the interface technology will go this far without developing a damned good and convincing sexual intercourse device, then you understand nothing about the world. Hell, if you Google it you'll probably find one for sale already.
Can anyone prove that such a marriage would be less "real" than the ones we have now? Are not economic hardship and increasingly unattractive, flabby bodies the main (though often unspoken) reason couples spend more and more time badgering each other as the years wear on? Neither, in a perfect world, should be valid reasons to kill off the flower of romantic love. So doesn't the metaverse actually remove a layer of bullshit in that case? Doesn't the symbolic princess with her fair skin and spill of blonde hair more accurately represent the kindness of the aforementioned woman than the bloated body life really gave her? So why not use it instead?
Rendered in 43.1 seconds, nedroid artsoft v 1.6
Once again, if this seems ridiculous and alien, remember how many societies had (hell, still have) arranged marriages, often where the groom didn't see the bride's face until their wedding night. Wasn't the change from that to the modern method of getting matched up with girls by internet dating sites just as strange?
Aristotle said it best: "society is a house, change is a tornado full of woodpeckers."
8. There will be a branch of government to rule the virtual world.
If we're going to make theft illegal in the metaverse (and hackers will always devise ways to steal, or at least vandalize, digital goods) someone has to make and enforce those laws. Obviously no team of IT guys or game moderators will get to decide how the everyday lives of billions are lived, arbitrarily giving and taking goods and abilities as they see fit (would not a common punishment in the virtual world be to shave a foot off a person's height and add 150 pounds to their weight?)
But this raises an avalanche of questions. First, do you limit the amount of "gold" available in the game? You'd have to, once real-world goods can be purchased by metaverse gold (or whatever is used for currency in the virtual world). The exchange rate with real currency and the inflation rate of the virtual currency both become key as corporations depend on both for their profit.
If you don't understand the complication here, remember that in the metaverse if you want a 36-room mansion with a giant guitar-shaped pool, you can have it for free. No construction crew needs to be paid to build it, no materials have to be bought, no piece of real property had to be bought or paid for. It's just bits and bytes. So do you even have "gold" in the metaverse at all? How would it have any value if goods can be created from thin air, for free? What if I'm an interior decorator in the metaverse, going around and using my creativity to dress up their virtual homes for pay? How do they pay me for my effort and time? How do I, in turn, pay for porn?
If you say, fine, we'll just have to go back to using real money to pay for things, remember that real money means nothing to me because I don't spend any time in the real world. What am I going to do, buy a real metal-and-rubber car? For what? Where do I drive? It'd be like Monopoly money to me.
But wait, there's more. What about those who live in different countries in the real world - and under different laws - but who inhabit the same household in the metaverse? Which laws apply? Are metaverse laws universal? How could you get everyone from different cultures to agree to the same set of metaverse laws?
Would prostitution be legal? Especially if there is no real body-on-body contact with the real hooker? If not, what if the prostitute isn't even controlled by a real woman but is just a bot program meant to simulate one?
What about the customers who want to simulate sex with a bot who looks like a six year-old? Legal? Illegal? No real child is being harmed.
And just how do you punish a rape committed by one virtual character on another, if the real person's body is left untouched?
9. There will be a whole class of wealthy people without a dime to their name.
The trailer park guy I mentioned before, the one with a virtual world palace, brings us to yet a new plane of strangeness to consider. In the metaverse, unlike real life, everyone can be wealthy. It doesn't matter if you have actually invented anything or held a job of great responsibility or even came from a family of great wealth. Metaverse wealth has nothing to do with life achievement because there is no reason every man can't be a king there. As I said, it doesn't cost the metaverse servers any more effort or resources to render you a sprawling estate than it does to give you a one-bedroom efficiency apartment in the basement.
You get to live a king's lifestyle, without a king's responsibilities.
This is another reason the real world won't be able to keep up with the virtual world once it takes hold. Imagine an unskilled kid, doing a minimum-wage job like data entry from home. The job pays poverty-level money in the real world, but pays a fortune in virtual gold. For the guy, his smelly one-bedroom apartment is nothing but a storage area for food. It needs only three rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom, and then a little room with a comfy chair he uses to jack into the metaverse. The real apartment becomes only an unpleasant little commute on the way to his "real" life. Hell, you could even sleep in the metaverse, the interface tricking you into thinking you're lounging on a king-size bed with sheets of silk.
This works out wonderfully for society, as you now have entire classes of the population who live in what used to be considered abject poverty, and are thrilled with it. You can give them everything they want and need with 200 square feet of apartment and enough electricity to run the metaverse interface. Their food can be chewy protein bars that the interface will convince them is a 5-course meal.
Most jobs will be online and can be done from within the metaverse (most manufacturing and farming and manual labor will be done with robots at this point, or, as I predict, genetically-engineered land dolphins). If you work the complaint counter at a government office, the office will exist only in the metaverse and thus neither the worker nor the complainer need leave their homes. And get this: if the complainer explodes in rage and tries to attack the guy behind the counter, no one is harmed. You can't really hurt anyone from within the metaverse.
10. The rise of the metaverse will go almost completely unopposed.
You won't have to trick people into jacking themselves into this one. It legitimately makes their lives better. Everything we've done a as a civilization from the caves until now has been about making a better world. Well, the metaverse will just be a shortcut, won't it? We'll have our Utopia of unlimited wealth and friction-free homogeny.
Population growth will be kept easily under control, since most sexual partners will live separately and won't be having meat sex at all (a guy can't get a girl pregnant from 100 miles away unless he's, you know, me). To have an actual baby will take so much effort and planning that only those who really want one will get one. That would have to be a change for the better, right?
The people are ripe for it. You've heard stories about how ticket sales are plummeting at movie theaters, in favor of home DVD viewing. Why? Why do so many people want to work from home now? Because we're sick of having to sit with other people. We want that extra layer of control that meat interaction will never give us. We want a world without the unpredictability of real, unrestrained humanity.
This could not have been attempted say, 100 years ago, even if the technology had been around. Back then people believed in all sorts of unchangeable gods and spirits and philosophies that live beyond what a person can see and smell and taste in front of them. But the Age of Reason did away with all of that, taught everyone to believe in nothing but the real, physical world. And if the stream of sense data we call "the real, physical world" can be altered to display a superior world, then it's impossible to say with any conviction that anything has really been lost in the transition. The modern "I believe it when I see it" religion will be satisfied by simply giving them something new to see.
It was only a matter of time. Humans got fed up with this world, and so we invented a new one. I suspect some theologian will come forward in the future to suggest that, in fact, our world was created in the same way. The gods got sick of their boring spiritual realm and made a more exciting, physical one to replace it.
You shouldn't be disturbed by this. Jules Verne was wrong when he said, "the future is a jockstrap made of bees." Anything manufactured by machine is destined to be better and more free of defect than anything created with human hands. Why not extend this idea to reality itself? It's the end of evolution, and I welcome it.
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please contact your system administrator
There is nothing to fear, and it will happen in your lifetime.*
source: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/wowworld.html
Confirmed: Windows & Linux Run On The PSP
Earlier we reported on the Bochs x86 emulator being ported to the PSP by Matan. This is indeed true and has opened the door for a wide range of options that the PSP can now do, not limited to but including the running of: FreeDOS, Linux, DLX Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PicoBSD, Pragma Linux, Debian 3.0r0 and 2.2r5, and any other disk images with pre-installed systems on them (which are on the bochs sourceforge site here.)
How do I make it work?
1) Create your bochs image and configuration files. I highly recommend installing the OS on a PC before moving it to the PSP (unless you want to spend the next 10 years staring at a progress bar). You can also download some readily available images from here.
2) Download and unzip the files below.
3) If you have 1.0 firmware put the EBOOT.PBP file under the GAME directory (e.g X:\PSP\GAME\BOCHS where X is the PSP drive). If you have a version 1.5 firmware you need to repackage the file using KXploit. I haven't tested it on a v1.5 firmware so I hope it works. It won't work on newer firmwares (v1.51, v1.52, v2.0) because it's impossible to run homebrew applications on them at this time.
4) Create a directory named VM in the root of the memory stick (e.g X:\VM).
5) Copy the disk images and bios files anywhere on the PSP.
6) Edit the bochs configuration file so it will point to your disk images and bios files correctly. Note that on a PSP you have to use the "ms0:/" prefix as the root of your filesystem (see the example configuration in the downloads). Also set the amount of memory your VM will use. Be sure to set it to about 8MB as the PSP will crash if you try to use more (the PSP has about 32MB of RAM total).
7) Rename the bochs configuration file to "bochsrc.bxrc" and put it under the VM directory. This is the only real requirement as the path to the configuration is hardcoded. You can put the rest of the files wherever you want as long as the configuration file points to them correctly. See downloads section for sample script.
8) Run bochs and hope for the best.
To run your own games in DOS, download WinImage here and open c.img from FreeDOS. Extract autoexec.bat, add the commands you would like it to run, ie: prince.exe (prince of persia), save the edited autoexec and put it back.
For a more easy way, a user in our forums, ‘ohballs’, has created some pre-edited FreeDOS and DLX Linux packages to easily run it for yourself.
You can download the PSP Bochs Emulator in our PSP Download section [here].
You can download the premade DLX Linux package in our PSP Download section [here].
You can download the premade FreeDOS package in our PSP Download section [here]
source:http://www.pspupdates.com/2005/08/confirmed-windows-linux-run-on-psp.html
The Future of Advertising is Here
The world is awash in advertising clutter. For decades marketers have been spending more and more to try to get their message out -- only to find their pitches drowned out in a sea of noise generated by countless other marketers trying to do the same thing. In effect, companies have been paying big bucks to be ignored. Now, inspired by the Internet's ability to do a better job of targeting prospects and measuring results, advertisers are dreaming up new ways to break through the clutter and connect with potential customers at a lower cost.
The big advances in advertising technology once favored traditional giants like Procter & Gamble, which could afford to mass-market its message. The new techniques are affordable to smaller companies, too.
Though the advertising revolution got started online, some of the new techniques are already finding their way onto streets and walls and even into clothing pockets around the world. Perhaps just five years from now, companies will be able to routinely and inexpensively embark on ad campaigns that hit exactly the right prospects -- and hardly anyone else -- with entertaining, hard-to-ignore messages that can follow people via new high-tech media into their cars, offices, living rooms, and bedrooms. For companies that master the new techniques, the payoff is potentially enormous: a big jump in customer mindshare while holding the line on marketing costs. And whereas the big advances in advertising technology once favored traditional giants like Procter & Gamble, which could afford to mass-market its message, the new techniques are affordable to smaller companies, too. "Over time," says Karen Breen Vogel, CEO of ClearGauge, one of hundreds of interactive ad agencies that have sprung up to focus on online advertising, "we can cut the cost of the advertising in half while maintaining customer response."
Fixed in an archipelago of art galleries and airy cafes at the periphery of Chicago's North Loop, the offices of ClearGauge have the hip, slightly subversive look you'd expect of a boutique advertising agency. Except that where the halls of other agencies regale visitors with blowups of their all-important creative, ClearGauge has proudly plopped a wicked-looking bank of servers front and center against the exposed concrete walls. It's a tip-off to the agency's sensibilities -- and to a sea change in the advertising industry.
Advertising has long been a sort of black art with a murky ROI, and for a simple reason: Clients rarely know for sure who sees their ads, let alone whether the ads influence anyone. Even though companies spend a third of a trillion dollars a year on advertising, those ads often end up being irrelevant to the people who see them. On average, Americans are subject to some 3,000 essentially random pitches per day. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a Yankelovich Partners study said they feel "constantly bombarded" by ads, and 59% said the ads they see have little or no relevance to them. No wonder so many people dislike and ignore advertising, and so many business owners feel gun-shy about investing in serious campaigns.
The Internet has begun to change all that. The ability to measure the impact of an ad simply by counting how many people click on it, and to link advertisements to search-engine results, in large part drove Internet advertising to $9.6 billion in 2004, a 33% jump from 2003, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau reports. (For a cautionary tale about counting clicks, see "So Many Clicks, So Few Sales," on page 29.) But the real advantage is going to companies that figure out how to use these tools to hunt down specific types of prospects and nail them with the right pitch. "We look for subsegments of Internet users who care about certain things," explains Breen Vogel. "We find them when they're online, we intercept their activities, and we start a relationship with them."
To understand how the Internet and firms like ClearGauge have been changing advertising from a slippery craft to what might be called "persuasion engineering," consider the campaign ClearGauge has been developing on behalf of Mod-Pac, a Buffalo company that manufactures cartons and handles printing and packaging for more than 5,000 companies. Mod-Pac came to ClearGauge for help in launching a new 24-hour online service specializing in running fast, less expensive print jobs for businesses. Instead of conducting endless brainstorming sessions in search of a clever campaign hook, a team led by Breen Vogel -- a former industrial engineer with experience in supply-chain management -- attacked the problem the way a government contractor might set about building a nuclear submarine.
The team started off by breaking Mod-Pac's target market into seven submarkets, including event planners, ad agencies, and not-for-profit organizations. Each of these submarkets was further broken down according to who influenced the key purchase in each category -- in some cases a secretary can have as much influence on a buying decision as a CEO, but the two need very different sorts of pitches. In the past, for example, ClearGauge has gone after doctors' spouses to sell medical supplies and lawyers to sell commercial financial services. ClearGauge then enlisted online surveys and focus groups to uncover the hot buttons for each type of purchase influencer in each submarket. Some decision makers valued sophistication in their printing company, while others placed more emphasis on creativity, and still others on low cost. Different ads were then cooked up for the different targets, so that, for example, a creative director at an ad agency was targeted with a pitch that featured a dancing, mischievous lizard mascot, while a CFO at a nonprofit got a more sober version of the lizard with glasses and a pitch that emphasized cost-savings. To make sure each pitch ended up in front of its intended target, ClearGauge studied the click-through statistics on hundreds of business-oriented websites for banner-ad placement and paid search engines to have specific ads come up in response to some 5,000 carefully chosen terms. By obsessively monitoring how many people click on each of the ads to end up on Mod-Pac's website, and then noting what each person does at the website, ClearGauge can further refine the relevance and placement of each of the ads while weeding out the less effective efforts.
Online advertisers are about to get a new tool that will vastly increase their ability to place highly relevant ads in front of prospects. Emerging now are powerful "behavioral targeting" services that can track what an individual clicks on and looks at across a range of sites over the course of weeks and months, making it possible to build a detailed profile of that person's interests, purchases, and preferences. The companies prepared to do the tracking, including 24/7 Real Media, Blue Lithium, Dotomi, and Claria, don't capture personal information such as names or e-mail addresses -- only surfing habits -- and even then follow only people who have opted in to the tracking.
But that's enough to let advertisers do a far better job of matching pitches and prospects. At least 950 out of every 1,000 Internet automobile ads still land in front of people who aren't in the market for a car, notes Scott Eagle, chief marketing officer of Claria, based in Redwood City, Calif. "If you're starting a high-end pet-food company, you only want to talk to people who have a certain type of pet and are willing to pay a premium to feed it," he adds. "We can identify those people. Why do you need to reach anyone else?" In a study, website visitors were, on average, 14 times more likely to click on an ad when it matched their profiles, claims Eagle. He says he has already lined up more than 200 advertisers for his new tracking service and expects to reach 500 by the end of the year.
Given privacy concerns, will many Internet users opt to participate in these sorts of services? Actually, they might. Because according to a 2004 survey by the Ponemon Institute, a consultancy that specializes in Internet privacy issues and has worked with Claria, two-thirds of Internet users believe better targeted ads would be less annoying, and 45% would share personal information in exchange for that advertising relevance.
But it's not just the Internet that's poised to become a bastion of highly targeted advertising. In fact, the trend to interactive, targeted advertising is starting to break its chains to the computer screen. Even television, the grande dame of conventional mass marketing, is taking steps to offer a more focused advertising experience. For starters, A.C. Nielsen and other companies have been rolling out technology to measure more accurately who is watching which shows, providing test viewers with pagers, for example, that can measure TV-watching habits outside their homes. Experian, a consumer data company in Costa Mesa, Calif., is cross-referencing this sort of detailed TV-viewer information with vast troves of other consumer behavior data so that a network can pinpoint viewers not just by age or income but also by what products they're in the market for. "If you give people a television program that indexes well against their preferences, you'll get more mental click-through," says William Engel, co-CEO of Experian subsidiary Simmons Market Research Bureau. Some advertisers are getting even finer-tuned pitches by negotiating the ability to alter their TV ad slots in response to changing conditions. Some TV ads for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, for example, have been set to run only when the temperature drops below a certain point in a given market.
And even bigger changes are in the wings as television starts to morph into a more Internet-like experience. Cable provider Comcast offers advertisers in parts of Florida the chance to buy ads that run only in specific neighborhoods, so that, for example, ads for a Spanish-language newspaper appear only in heavily Latino communities. The technology to target cable ads all the way down to specific homes according to household viewing habits already exists, with deployment largely awaiting the resolution of privacy concerns. Cable companies are also experimenting with interactive channels that let viewers enlist their remote controls to click on banner ads and onscreen buttons. Video games are getting with the program too. Some are already packed with ads integrated into the cyberscenery, and a New York company called Massive has developed a technique for changing those ads to match an individual player's moves and preferences.
As more networked display screens permeate our homes -- on appliances, walls, even furniture -- each one will become a potential medium for tuned-to-your-lifestyle ad services of the sort that Accenture's Fano and others are dreaming up. Think of this new breed of advertisement as "smart," in that these ads know, in a sense, to whom they will be playing and under what circumstances.
Smart ads, it turns out, won't be confined to the home and office. In three Massachusetts Stop & Shop supermarkets, an electronic tablet attached to the shopping carts asks for a swipe of the shopper's loyalty card -- and in return provides a shopping list that the store's computers have prepared based on the shopper's past purchases. Oh, and by the way, the tablet also offers targeted electronic coupons that pop up when the shopper turns down the aisle with the featured product. "Why offer a discount on your yogurt to someone who usually buys it anyway?" asks Fano, whose lab helped develop a similar technology. "You want to pitch someone who's about to buy a rival brand."
Computer screens are popping up everywhere, and more and more advertisers are thinking up ways to make sure those screens don't go to waste. Take elevators, which now often sport displays above the floor buttons. These screens are becoming prime advertising real estate as marketers grab the chance to catch businesspeople or affluent tourists on their way to the street. Targeting elevator ads to the location, time of day, and audience is not rocket science, notes Larry Harris, who heads up multicultural marketing at marketing agency Draft New York. "Bloomingdale's could boost sales 5% if it put up an ad for a one-day sweater sale in my building at lunchtime," says Harris. "Everyone in the elevator will see it because they're desperate to not have to look at anyone else."
Taxis are becoming smart-ad vehicles too. Some New York City cabs have screens inside, and some taxis in New York and elsewhere have electronic messaging signs that are tied to GPS location sensors, so that a cab can pitch a nearby store or restaurant wherever it roams. Even your own car will get in the game. General Motors has been experimenting with location-aware sponsored messages tied to its OnStar communications system -- and all the major auto manufacturers are looking into ways to hook car-based displays up to the Internet, ads and all.
Not that drivers of nonwired cars, or even pedestrians, will miss out on the fun of targeted ads. Digital billboards and posters, which function essentially as large video screens, are already popping up alongside roads and sidewalks, adjusting their displays to different audiences -- a commuter crowd during morning rush hour, moms running errands midmorning, and young couples on dates in the evening. For even more precision, Smart Sign Media in Sacramento operates digital highway billboards that detect the radio stations playing in passing cars and flash up client ads that best match the profiles of those stations' listeners. And Mobiltrak in Herndon, Va., places car-radio-station-identifying sensors in the parking lots of retail clients so they can tell if people driving into the lots have been nudged there by their radio ads, allowing them to adjust a radio campaign to get the most traffic for the least cost.
By rotating ads at the right time through these various media, an advertiser can create a campaign that hits its best prospects several times a day in different locations -- and in theory pay less to do it, since the advertiser won't be paying to put the ad up in front of a mass audience. "The idea," says David L. Smith, founder and CEO of San Francisco advertising agency Mediasmith, "is to vertically stack the ad frequency among different ad vehicles rather than to horizontally stack it within a single vehicle" -- as with a repeating television ad.
Of course, the ultimate smart-ad tool would enable a marketer to hit any individual with a low-cost, interactive message any time of day, any place -- a platform for a campaign that could identify and follow prospects through the world as if they were continuously online. Forward-thinking marketers even have a name for this dream medium. They call it...the mobile phone.
"Mobile-phone marketing today is where Internet advertising was in 1996 -- it's about to take off. There are already more mobile phones in use worldwide than televisions and computers put together."
Okay, turning your prospects' cell phones into ringing spam machines is probably not your idea of cultivating goodwill. And it's not likely to happen. Unlike e-mail, mobile phones aren't readily accessible to marketers -- mobile phone privacy is zealously guarded by big carriers like Verizon and Nextel, as well as by law. There's an opening, however, and smart advertisers are preparing to drive a truck through it. Provided a consumer clearly opts in -- say, by dialing or text-messaging a certain number -- carriers are slowly becoming more or less amenable to letting marketers return a text message, or even an audio or video file, to that consumer's phone. Mobile phone ads are already big in some parts of Europe and Asia, and it's just starting to take hold here. McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts are among the companies that have beamed coupons to U.S. cell phones, eliciting coupon-redemption rates as high as 17%. "Mobile-phone marketing today is where Internet advertising was in 1996 -- it's about to take off," says Michael Baker, president of Boston-based mobile-marketing firm Enpocket, which ran the Dunkin' Donuts campaign. "There are already more mobile phones in use worldwide than televisions and computers put together."
Throw in location tracking, a capability U.S. mobile phones are getting right now, and you've got a device that can prompt you with a coupon for a discount oil change just as you're driving by the lube shop. Enpocket has already run such a "location aware" mobile-phone campaign in Singapore on behalf of Intel. And it won't be long before you can pay for goods and services with a click of a cell-phone button, too -- something many mobile-phone users in Japan can do today.
While lack of relevance may be the single biggest shortcoming of conventional advertising, it's not the only one. Even if an ad ends up in front of potential customers, they won't necessarily pay attention to it -- especially if it comes up as part of a stream of other ads. To have a chance of getting past our mental filters and influencing our decisions, ads have to grab attention and be compelling. In a way, advertisers have to learn to make their ads less adlike and more entertainmentlike.
Take television advertisers. They've always had to deal with viewers running out of the room to grab a snack when the commercials come on, but now they're facing TiVo and other digital video recorders, whose owners already fast-forward through 70% of commercials. Meanwhile, fast-growing video-on-demand services that enable viewers to order up programs provide another means to go commercial-free. These developments have pushed marketers to jump into alternative forms of television advertising, including product placement (Coca-Cola cups in the hands of American Idol judges), sponsorship deals that get brand names into the titles of shows (as in College Sports Television Network's Nike Training Camp show), and "long form" video ads designed to be entertaining or relevant enough to attract video-on-demand viewers on their own (as with Canada's all-commercial Advertising on Demand Network).
On the Internet, too, advertisers are finding more ways to intertwine marketing messages with entertainment. Online travel agency Orbitz has managed to entice Web surfers to bask in its marketing messages by embedding them in online pop-up ads built around simple interactive sports-themed games like Sink the Putt. Not only that, but players who like the games often forward links to them to friends and colleagues, spreading the message at no extra cost to Orbitz. LiveVault, a Marlborough, Mass., data back-up and recovery provider, got the same sort of free ride when it produced and released on the Web a short comic video about backing up data, starring John Cleese. LiveVault CEO Bob Cramer claims the $500,000 price tag for the video promotion was a bargain, given the big response. "It ended up all over the Internet," he gloats.
This sort of viral approach is getting a boost from some sophisticated technology. A San Francisco company called Pulse has developed software that can turn any image of a person or animal into a semi-animated talking head, complete with moving lips and a voice that delivers any lines typed in by a user -- and the resulting blabby little cybercreature can then be e-mailed to buddies. Sandwich chain Quizno's, online greeting-card site Sympatico, and cruise line Royal Caribbean have all made these online characters the centerpieces of successful Internet campaigns. At one point a third of all visitors to Royal Caribbean's website had come because of the characters, according to Dan Hanrahan, president of Celebrity Cruises, a sister company to Royal Caribbean. It may seem like a silly gimmick, but there's a powerful draw to this sort of approach, notes Byron Reeves, director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. "Persuasion is very much a social and emotional exchange," says Reeves. "An automated face provides some level of that."
That same sort of social interactive playfulness can also be put to work in advertising away from the computer screen. Accenture has designed a 10-foot-wide, high-resolution touchscreen display -- the world's largest -- intended to allow crowds in malls and buildings and on the street to interact with characters, games, information, and other images on the screen. Accenture has also integrated "focused sound" technology into the system, so that appropriate music, dialogue, or sound effects can be directed at individuals interacting with the display while passersby hear almost nothing. All of it, of course, would be mixed in some way with an advertising message.
You don't even really need a screen to get your interactive message out to the crowds. Reactrix Systems in Redwood City, Calif., offers a system that projects a colorful image on a sidewalk, wall, piece of furniture, or anything else, and that tracks the motion and gestures of people on or near the image to make it interactive. Ten or more people can stomp on or wave at the several-feet-wide image at once, kicking around a virtual soccerball or splashing in a virtual pool, all while ogling a sponsor's logo blended into the image. McDonald's, Sam Goody, and the MGM Grand have been among the clients, along with movie theater chains and malls, where the devices routinely attract enthusiastic crowds. According to Reactrix CEO Mike Ribero, studies have shown that as many as 86% of the people who interact with the Reactrix image can recall the sponsor days later, compared with 5% for prime-time television advertising. "In a world with a lot of advertising clutter, this sort of thing provides advertisers with a consumer's attention for an unprecedented amount of time," says Ribero. "Advertising has been built around reach and frequency, but depth and duration of experience is going to be the next big metric." What's more, he says, getting an advertising experience out closer to the stores can have a stronger influence on buying decisions.
And if you really want to reach out and grab the attention of people out in the real world, why not actually, well, reach out? Zebra Imaging in Austin produces large, lifelike holographic images that appear to float in 3-D in front of a filmlike panel -- no goofy glasses or goggles needed. People can even walk around the ersatz object to examine it from different angles. Zebra has created car-show-stopping holograms of automobiles for Ford to showcase new designs, as well as holograms of celebrities for promotions. As the technology's cost comes down and quality improves, says Zebra CEO Robin Curle, these startling images could eventually be popping out routinely at consumers on the street and in stores.
Karen Breen Vogel, for one, is hesitant to be among the first to reach beyond the Internet to tag people in intimate, surprising ways. "It's the next wave for us," she says. "But right now we're in investigation mode."
Advertisers may drool over the promise of smart ads, but many are also wary of invading the public prematurely with clumsy, personalized, unignorable pitches on billboards and cell phones before anyone has a chance to get used to the idea. ClearGauge's Breen Vogel, for one, is hesitant to be among the first to reach beyond the Internet to tag people in intimate, surprising ways. "It's the next wave for us," she says. "But right now we're in investigation mode."
Until marketers can read consumers' minds, there will always be uncertainty about the most effective ways to deliver messages. And mind reading, at least, is a technology that's still a long, long way off. Oh, wait -- scratch that. Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology and Baylor College of Medicine are already using high-tech brain scans to measure people's responses to marketing messages. So stay tuned.
As if you had a choice.
source:http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050801/future-of-advertising.html
Intel’s Pentium 4 Overclocked to 7.1GHz, Sets World’s Record
A Japanese overclocker has managed to overclock Intel Pentium 4 670 microprocessor to 7.132GHz and even run certain benchmarks on the system that was cooled down by liquid nitrogen.
In order to accomplish the extreme overclocking Japanese enthusiast Memesana, who published his results at XtremeSystems web-site, used ASUS P5WD2 Premium mainboard based on Intel’s i955X core-logic, Corsair PC2-5400UL 512MB memory modules as well as Intel Pentium 4 670 processor with stock speed of 3.80GHz. The processor system bus was overclocked to 1520MHz; processor’s voltage was pumped up to 1.70V, significantly higher than default setting; memory latency settings were CL4
According to the posted statement, the system managed to calculate π (pi) number to 1 million decimal places in 18.516 seconds, which is currently the world’s record.
Earlier this year another overclocker has managed to push hit Intel Pentium 4 570J chip to 7.22GHz, but at that clock-speed the PC could function only in BIOS. The maximum speed at which he could boot Windows XP operating system and perform memory testing was 6.60GHz.
source:http://www.xbitlabs.com/web/display/20050811231553.html
Quake 3 Source Code to be Released
source:http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/13/0350222&tid=112&tid=8
Did Microsoft Invent The iPod?
According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent applications that cover much of the technology associated with the iPod were submitted by Microsoft, which has been on a patents tear recently filing thousands of patents.
If the patents hold up on appeal, Apple could be accountable for royalties on the spectacularly successful iPod. Jobs and others associated with Apple filed for patents covering the technology in October, 2002, but that application was rejected by the patent office last month. AppleInsider.com reported the rejection this week.
Apple won't take the matter lying down. "Apple invented and publicly released the iPod interface before the Microsoft patent application cited by the (patent) examiner was filed," said an Apple spokesperson in a statement. Apple also noted that the firm has received other patents for technology relating to the iPod and in addition has other patents pending on the iPod.
The documents in the Patent Office do not mention the iPod by name. The documents describe a "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player" that can manipulate MP3 music files.
Microsoft's claim appears to center on the work of John C. Platt, a senior researcher in the Knowledge Tools Group at Microsoft Research. According to media reports, on behalf of Microsoft, Platt applied for the patent in May of 2002 some five months before the Apple filing. Platt's application was rejected in December 2004, but he amended it in April of this year and Microsoft's pending patent was subsequently approved.
According to a citation on "Platt's home page, he and other colleagues at Microsoft developed a paper in the 2001-2002 timeframe discussing AutoDJ, "a system for automatically generating music playlists based on one or more seed songs selected by a user."
Apple's iPod dominates the MP3 player market. The NPD Group has reported that Apple has shipped nearly 22 million iPods. Predictions that Apple's strength in the MP3 market would slip haven't borne out, and Apple accounts for about 75 percent of MP3 players sold in the U.S.
So far, Microsoft hasn't been able to dent the Apple iPod dominance, although the software giant has said it is working on music playing devices that it plans to introduce later this year.
source:http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/168601146
Logitech unveils three new gamers products
According to the press release, the G15 keyboard will have a built-in auxiliary LCD display, and 18 programmable keys. Users will be able to program the LCD to show in-game information and even information from other applications. It should be interesting to see what other uses that the LCD will have for gamers. The product will retail for about $80.
The G5 is a corded device and the G7 is a cordless laser mouse. Both devices will have a resolution up to 2000 dpi, which can be adjusted on the fly (just like the Logitech MX518). Although Logitech claims that the G7 will have no lag or interference, it will be interesting to see if that is really true. Users can expect to see the G5 and G7 gaming mice sometime in September, with the G5 retailing for $69.99 and G7 retailing with a $99.99 price tag. To read more about both of these mice, head over to the Logitech website.
Update (08/12): We had the pleasure to briefly talk with Erik Charlton, senior product-marketing manager at Logitech, who shared a few ideas and details on Logitech recently announced products, please read on for the full interview.
I'm a senior product-marketing manager at Logitech, responsible for our performance line of mice. The products I help to manage include the MX1000, MX518 and our new G-Series mice designed especially to meet the demands of PC gamers.
TS: The MX518 is arguably the best gaming mouse on the market right now, so how does Logitech plan to top that?
Thanks. We are very proud of the MX518. We think it is a great mouse too.
But, we are always looking to improve our products by better understanding the extreme demands of PC gamers. Earlier this year, we introduced drive-free sensitivity-switching in the MX518. This feature idea was born out of a conversation with a few local gamers. Today, that feature is standard for our premium gaming mice.
Since that time, we have gathered feedback from literally thousands of gamers. We sought information from all types and levels of gamers on a worldwide basis – and we used this information to create some truly awesome extreme performance mice. On August 11th, we announced the launch of the Logitech G5 Laser Mouse and the Logitech G7 Laser Cordless Mouse.
Both feature 2000 dpi, a precision Gaming-Grade™ laser tracking system, full-speed USB, and advanced software that can be customized for gaming. The corded G5 provides gamers with the ability to tune weight and balance for superior control. The G7 mouse is Logitech’s first cordless mouse to be considered truly gaming-grade - offering twin fast-swappable, ultra-lightweight, LI-Ion batteries. For improved glide, we also introduced ultra-smooth gaming feet on both mice. We think gamers are going to really enjoy these mice.
TS: How closely does Logitech monitor the competition?
At Logitech, we are deeply focused on watching and learning from our customers: PC gamers. While it is always fun to see what competitors might be doing, we try not to get distracted from what matters most: creating an awesome user experience.
Gamers are our most demanding customers. When we get it right, everyone loves it. When products are poorly made, even the slightest imperfections or oversight are noted and then referenced in thousands of forums. Gamers are a very tight community. It is to our benefit when we do things right… so attention to detail is critical. We spend a lot of time and effort just following our customers evolving needs… by doing that; we stay ahead of the competition
TS: How hard is it to design new prototypes for new mice?
Creating a new gaming mouse is a totally exhilarating process. It is an amazingly complex process of integrating market research, human factors, psychology, industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering and even manufacturing process engineers to create a single product. It is both exhausting and rewarding. What I love about Logitech is the commitment and passion of our team. This group never seems to rest… the result is products that our whole team is proud of.
TS: The MX1000 was a stellar all-around mouse, what are your plans for laser technology, should we expect more breakthroughs of this kind?
We feel that laser tracking will have a sweeping impact on PC gaming. Our new Gaming-Grade mice sport 2000dpi laser engines that churn images at 6.4 megapixels / second. They support screaming fast 20g moves up to 45 inches / second...and even higher, depending upon the surface. Laser tracking will be the new standard for high-performance gaming mice.
TS: What kind of methods does Logitech use to try and design a comfortable mouse?
There are a lot of factors that go into making a truly comfortable mouse. Issues such as the shape, material and weight are all essential considerations. Regarding the shape, we meet regularly with an ergonomic specialist. He helps to provide us with a great baseline understanding of how to fine-tune the shape for superior long-play comfort. In addition, we create many, many shapes and show them to gamers. We study gamers seriously. We watch them play. We videotape their moves and record their keystrokes. We do everything we can to understand the optimal hand posture. For Logitech, it is the best way to help guide our shape creation and tuning process.
In addition to the shape of the mouse, materials play an essential role. For example, with the G5 we are introducing a new "dry grip" material. Gamers, even with sweaty hands, don’t have to worry about the mouse slipping in their hand at a critical moment. Some have suggested that we offer even softer materials, but we find that there is a fine balance between grip and control. A spongy mouse is too hard to move precisely. But we look into new innovative materials everyday here at Logitech.
Last, but in no way least, weight is an important aspect of the mouse to consider. For gamers, the optimal weight is highly subjective. Some gamers like a bit more weight and inertia. They feel that it gives them greater control. Others argue that heavier mice are harder to control and can be tiering during long gaming sessions. That is why the G5 Laser Mouse offers gamers the opportunity to tune the weight and balance of their mouse. The G5 ships standard with 16 mini-weights of 4.5 and 1.7 grams. Gamers now have the opportunity to tune the weight for the ultimate in personalization and control.
TS: Something that many people mention to me is that there aren't very many mice designed for people that are left-handed. What does Logitech plan to do about that?
As a left-handed gamer, I understand the issue. There is definitely an opportunity for a left-handed gaming mouse, and we will continue to explore that. That being said, we have nothing to announce at this time.
TS: Is there anything that you would like to say to TechSpot readers?
I just wanted to say how much I enjoy your site and the role it plays in the gaming community. I would also like to let all of your readers know that we are always looking for ways to improve our mice. So, always feel free to speak up and have your voice heard. I can’t promise to make everyone happy, but together with the gaming community, Logitech wants to create some even more amazing products.
source:http://www.techspot.com/news/18332-Logitech-unveils-three-new-gamers-products.html
The Hidden Boot Code of the Xbox
source:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/12/133227&tid=222&tid=211&tid=137
