Global Nerdy

Way back in my days at Crazy Go Nuts University, I had a couple of friends whose study programs were at the intersections of computer science and sociology. Had I not been a starving student, I'd have probably given them gifts such as a subscription to the then-new (and cutting edge) Wired magazine, or perhaps one of the then-hot books on the social and cultural implications of virtual reality or hypertext.

What would I get them now? That's easy. A copy of The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto: Critical Essays, a collection of academic papers ruminating on Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto of series of games.

“It is tempting,” goes one of the book's essays, “given the degree to which this world is fleshed out, to consider GTA:SA in the light of Jean Baudrillard's concepts of the hyperreal and the simulacrum…” You'll find other excerpts from the book in the Tech Digest titled Top 10 things you never knew about Grand Theft Auto (because you're not brainy enough) such as:

In both the demonization and celebration of the virtual reality offered through the GTA series, the horror and praise resulting from suburban bodies entering the otherwise impenetrable (segregated) world of gangstas, thugs, hip-hop, and ghettos, and the surrounding discourse of reception, dominant understandings of race, hegemonic rationalization (explanations) of contemporary social inequality, and the advisable methods (policies) needed to address current issues become visible.

and

The Hot Coffee patch makes sexual encounters in the game much more explicit but not any more sensual. Reduced to the stilted rock of the 'joystick', sex is quite literally mechanized. The result of the abrupt breaks with everydayness precipitated by the mechanical nude image is a 'step outside the everyday without actually leaving it: it shocks, it seems brutal, and yet this effect is superficial, pure appearance, leading us back toward the secret of the everyday – dissatisfaction.

Nope, no facile explanations like “blastin' chumps and jackin' cars is fun” here. If you've got a friend or family member with an interest in videogames who's taking life deferral — er, I mean graduate — studies, this might be the gift for him or her.

Links:

• to The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto: Critical Essays on Amazon.com
• to the Tech Digest piece on the book

Over at the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, there's an article about a device proposed by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli that sounds like it would be the 16th century equivalent of tabbed browsing:

A beautiful and ingenious machine, which is very useful and convenient to every person who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are suffering from indisposition or are subject to gout: for with this sort of machine a man can see and read a great quantity of books, without moving his place: besides, it has this fine convenience, which is, of occupying a little space in the place where it is set, as any person of understanding can appreciate from the drawing.

According to the article, the machine makes an appearance in the movies: Richard Lester’s 1973 version of The Three Musketeers.

Who knew they had ADD back then?

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Blog]

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After years of reasonable interoperability and compatibility, Microsoft has released Office 2007, which uses very different file formats:

• Word documents are now .docx files
• Excel documents are now .xlsx files
• PowerPoint documents are now .pptx files

The “X” at the end of these filename extensions stands for “Microsoft Office Open XML Formats”, but they're not terribly open — for starters, they're not stored as plain text XML, but in some proprietary binary format.

If you're running Office 2003 for Windows, you can download a compatibility pack that makes it possible to open Office 2007 docs. The Mac Business Unit of Microsoft has promised some kind of conversion utility, but there's no word on when that will see release. Over at Tucows, we're still on Office 2000 for Windows and Office for Mac, and I suspect a number of businesses are in similar situations.

Given that there are fewer and fewer reasons to upgrade — c'mon, how much more can you pack into a word processor? — I can't imagine business making the switch until absolutely necessary.

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Zune: #5 with a bullet (in the head): "Microsoft Corp.'s Zune device dropped to fifth place from second in the U.S. market for digital media players in its second week in stores, market researcher NPD Group Inc. said. Zune captured 2.1 percent of the market in the week ended Nov. 25, said Stephen Baker, an analyst at Port Washington, New York-based NPD, in an interview today. Baker said Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod remained the leader, with 39.4 percent that week, based on units sold."

Tags: Zune, iPod, Apple, Microsoft

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog points out this well-told and painfully familiar-sounding story of one entrepreneur's VC pitch meetings. Partners showing up late, that one guy who insists on asking bizarrely irrelevant questions, bored partners staring into space, or never raising their eyes from the obligatory print out of your PowerPoint deck…I've been there.

Aren’t they tired of this ritual? Well, in this company’s case, yes. Blackberry man is probably asking his girlfriend where to meet for dinner. Gotta-meet-me man is thinking about some other deal. Condescending man keeps jumping in with curveball questions so I am not able to get into the flow. Intent man works for the wrong company. MAN … get out of there!!! Don’t you guys want to see the product?

In an otherwise ever-changing world, it gives me comfort to know you can count on some things always remaining the same.

In truth, though these awkward meetings happen all too-often, they're more than made up for when you wind up in a room with smart people who, for whatever reason, happen to buy what you're selling (even if only figuratively).

As for Koral's Mark Suster, all I can say is "So, what's your plan for when Microsoft enters this market?"

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Tags: VC, Koral, pitching

It must be pretty clear by now that we here at Global Nerdy have more than a passing interest in the way content delivery over the network evolves. After all, one of the few bits of evidence that Opencola ever existed is Swarmcast.

Very few people, outside of the veterans of the Great P2P Wars of ought-one (or, VotGP2PWo01), have heard of Swarmcast, but everybody's heard of BitTorrent. As we've noted elsewhere, that's partly because while Swarmcast (and other companies like RedSwoosh and Kontiki Networks) have decided to play an infrastructural role in grid content delivery, BitTorrent's always put their brand in front of the individual user.

Somewhere north of $20MM in VC, and several deals later, BitTorrent.com's pushing that strategy further by becoming an online media store. In an interview with Wired News, BitTorrent's Bram "I'm Still the CEO" Cohen makes the case for BitTorrent The Brand:

WN: Do you think BitTorrent has gained enough mass-market recognition to be a destination for people to find and download online video? Right now, they can get movies from Amazon, Apple or Wal-Mart. Why will they use BitTorrent?

BC: Currently, when people want high-quality video they turn on the TV or get a DVD. The space is wide open in terms of gaining mindshare for an online download site. We're going to excel both in having a comprehensive catalog so people can reliably find something they want and in having a simple, friendly consumer experience.

Let's leave aside for a second the fact that the "simple, friendly consumer experience" Bram describes seems somewhat at odds with the fact that BitTorrent.com will be delivering their wares locked in Windows Media DRM; that should strike fear in the hearts of anyone who's been Played for Sure.

The interesting thing is that BitTorrent.com has opened up a war on two fronts. First, they've got to keep whatever perceived technology lead they have over other companies with pretensions to the content delivery crown. There are a lot of companies, from Akamai, to InterNAP, to RedSwoosh, to Swarmcast, quite busily trying to one up each other with better, faster, and (effectively) cheaper. BitTorrent.com's appeal to the customer is in the experience, and if anyone else does it faster, BitTorrent.com loses. If anyone else does it basically as fast, but cheaper, BitTorrent.com loses.

The second front is the one Wired News discusses in the interview: BitTorrent.com also competes as an online media store, a retail destination. The competition's pretty stiff here, wth Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart being just a handful of the brands in the mix. Bram must think there's a lot of demand for high-quality video, because he's betting $20MM of other people's money on that fact alone protecting BitTorrent.com from irrelevance.

Zudeo, the commercial incarnation of the Azureus BitTorrent protocol client is, aptly enough, cloning the BitTorrent.com strategy as well: a technology play as well as an online media store brand.

This is one of those classic "Why fight in the war when you can be an arms trader to all sides?" setups. BitTorrent.com's arming itself for conflict, while the others are ready to sell to all the combatants. It'll be interesting to see who's standing when the smoke clears.

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Tags: BitTorrent.com, Zudeo, Swarmcast, Kontiki Networks, RedSwoosh, Akamai, Apple, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, BitTorrent, Azureus

Let's face it: nobody does high weirdness like the Japanese, and as this Gizmodo article featuring illustrations from the Japanese safety manual shows, new technologies give rise to new weirdness.

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