The Bloj

Is there a Firefox of gaming?

Posted on June 28th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Games, General/Misc..

Idea in one sentence: Develop a platform that enables a high performance gaming experience over the internet.

Consider it the Firefox of gaming, if you will; bridging the gap between Yahoo Games and Half-Life 2. Where is it?

0 comments.

Patterns to the rescue again.

Posted on June 22nd, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Politics, Product Design, UI Design.

Reddit linked to an interesting article in the Economist:

Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder

The

most interesting thing I discovered about it though, was not the article’s basic conceit

- that Americans are being subdivided into different cultures, but how it was discussed. Naturally on Slashdot, Reddit, MetaFilter, and others, you have certain standards of discussion. I generally find Reddit to be the most politically confrontational.

You could

argue

that it’s the community–

the people in it

that decide whether a website will be a meeting of parliament or a Hello Kitty fan club. But I think there are other things to look at.

Interestingly:

I was also recently looking at a Yahoo! blog on patterns for designing a reputation system. Basically, a pattern is a recognizable formula that a lot of sites use. For example, both Digg and Reddit use a “points” system. Users can award each other points when they like each other’s posts.

The most interesting thing,

however,

was taking Yahoo!’s reputation systems and using them to

reverse engineer sites like Reddit,

Digg, Slashdot, etc. and see the results.

From http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=points:

(Emphasis Theirs.)

Problem Summary

In some communities, participants want a tangible measurement of their accomplishments for personal satisfaction and to make comparisons with other competitors.

EXAMPLE:

Use When

Use this pattern when the community is highly competitive, and the activities that users engage in are competitive in nature (e.g., player-vs-player contests, or coaching a fantasy football team).

Points are generally discouraged, except in cases where the fundamental, primary purpose of the community is competition, such as fantasy sports or games.

The competition isn’t just because the people on Site X

are jerks

• political extremists
• or sexually frustrated

The design of the site is built to promote competition.

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Just some numbers, no analysis (that’s your job)

Posted on June 14th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Politics.

Nicolas Sarkozy, elected 5/07: 37%

Yasuo Fukuda, assumed office 9/07: 25% – 40%

Gordon Brown, assumed office 7/07: 25%

George W. Bush, elected 9/04: 28%

Kevin Rudd, elected 12/07: 56%

Silvio Berlusconi, elected 5/08: 59%

Vladimir Putin, currently not PM: ~75%

(Note that Putin isn’t the prime minister now. But, oddly enough, people still treat him like he’s in power. I wonder why?)

[1], [2]

0 comments.

Economics and its Consequences

Posted on June 4th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris.

I am a free market economist. I don’t believe that the market is some sort of a magic entity that allocates resources–rather, as a free marketer, I believe that the selective absence of government bureaucracy and authority produces a better outcome than intervention. This does not, however, guarantee a good outcome.

In the long term, food production and consumption are both somewhat elastic. Farmers can expand to more fields; and long term increases in the price of food are likely to reduce some of the demand for extra foodstuffs.

In the short term, food production and consumption are both somewhat inelastic. Harvests are yearly, and global shipments of food need not change immediately.

If you’re not an economist, don’t worry about the charts and try and follow along with the argument. If you are an economist, forget the charts.

What do the charts represent? To an economist, both of these charts represent the choices of a society. As the price (P) gets higher, less food is demanded (Q goes down). How does Q go down?

In the short term, Q is immediate changes in food demand. These include moving to cheaper foods which are less economically dear, reducing stock buildups, and starvation. Note that demand changes along the margin – those who are least willing or able to pay for their food stop buying it first.

If person A has $10,000 and person B has $1, it doesn’t matter if person B has a 100% interest in some good. Satisfying the mild preference of person A is worth more to the market than anything person B could want.

The market places more value on my iPod than your starvation.

(I should have probably warned you that I was heading there before I got there. Sorry about that.)

What do you do?

1 comment.