Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Spore tip: species for terraforming

There is no quicker way to make money than to develop a bunch of T3 planets that are close to one another and which produce valuable forms of spice. Getting planets to T3 can be a pain, however. This is largely because you will need three species of small, medium, and large plants; six species of herbivores; and three carnivores or omnivores.

The easiest way to get them all – and avoid repeats – is to dump all the species you are carrying, visit an existing T3 planet (like your homeworld) and collect a dozen or so of each species present. You will then have a hold full of terraforming goodness.

Frustrated with Spore

There are aspects of Spore which are excellent, but far too much effort needs to be expended to keep the game from being absurdly frustrating.

When you visit other empires, you see things much as they ought to be. They have large numbers of attack and defense fleets, consisting of mother ships and fighters. These fleets will attack you if you enter their space. They will leave their space to attack nearby enemy colonies and thus capture or destroy them.

By contrast, regardless of the size of your empire, you will always be the only competent ship in it. Allied empires will provide one ship each, but these will behave like missile magnets, die almost immediately, and lead to the friendly empire blaming you for the loss of their ship. As such, it is up to you to personally defend your entire territory, as well as personally attack other systems (basically the only way to end wars once they start). Indeed, ending wars is a very tricky thing to do, especially considering that you can start one when your ship automatically returns fire on a ship that attacked you in an enemy system. Ending wars either requires conquering so many planets that the enemy sues for peace (only some races do this) or waging a genocidal campaign across their entire empire, which can easily take hours. Of course, whenever you are at war, you will be constantly attacked and obliged to manually defend whichever system(s) they have chosen to target.

There are also pirate attacks. These should ideally be ignored, since they are almost as much of a pain to fight off as attacks from rival empires and ignoring them has only a trifling consequence. Unfortunately, the only way to know for sure if it is money-stealing pirates or civilization destroying enemies attacking is by flying across the galaxy to check manually.

Even more maddening are ‘ecological disasters.’ In these, a random planet somewhere within your empire or those of your allies gets five sick animals of a particular type somewhere on it. Even if your empire consists of hundreds of interconnected worlds, you are the only being that can kill these animals. Fail to do so, and the ecosystem on the planet gets destabilized, eventually destroying your colonies. Also, killing too many of the healthy animals moving in herds with the sick ones causes the extinction and makes you start over, hunting sick animals of a different kind.

Overall, the game was billed as a big universe that you could explore and experiment with however you like. Unfortunately, the frustrations built into the game make that very challenging. Implementing the following suggestions would significantly improve things:

  1. After five ‘ecological disasters,’ you win a badge. Having this badge means that your colonies have learned to deal with these things on their own. At the most, they should ask for some money with which to fund the five animal cull.
  2. If you accidentally start a war by firing upon a ship, you should have the chance to apologize diplomatically and pay compensation to avoid full-scale fighting.
  3. It should always be clear whether pirates or an enemy empire are attacking you.
  4. Enemy empires should be more willing to end wars.
  5. Your colonies should be more capable of defending themselves.
  6. Alternatively, much more powerful weapons should be available late in the game, so as to diminish the frustration of destroying fleet after identical fleet.
  7. Multiple AI modes should exist for escorts. In at least one, they should flee when near death.
  8. The game should make the status of ongoing battles clearer. At present, there is no easy way to tell when you have actually lost control of a star system.
  9. One option to consider is giving colonies two options for wealth production. In one mode, they behave as in the current game: they produce ‘spice’ which you need to personally fly around to collect and sell. In another mode, they produce spice which is sold automatically through intermediaries. You get about 30% of the profits.

Reducing the degree to which the player needs to micomanage the galaxy would probably do the most to improve this game. Hopefully, future patches will shift things somewhat in this direction.

Deletionpedia

On Wikipedia, there is an ongoing debate between ‘inclusionists’ who feel that any factual information – no matter how trivial – is suitable for inclusion and ‘deletionists’ who think only articles with a certain level of importance should be kept. Regardless of who wins on Wikipedia itself (or rather, which balance between the two views becomes stable), another site is automatically archiving everything that gets deleted from Wikipedia: Deletionpedia provides a fairly valuable service: both by being willing to archive information of limited importance to most people, but perhaps some use to some. Also, it lets people keep tabs on what kinds of articles are being removed from Wikipedia, which should provide editorial oversight.

Help design WordPress 2.7

For all those who complained about recent changes in the WordPress administration interface, there is a survey out collecting data on what people would like to see in version 2.7

Personally, I am perfectly happy with the design of the current system. I just hope the next version is a bit less touchy when it comes to autosaves and mysterious publication failures.

Hackers in the Large Hadron Collider

Apparently, hackers managed to take control of a website related to the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment: one of the five detectors within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This isn’t terribly surprising, since high profile websites get vandalized reasonably frequently. What is rather more disturbing is that the hackers were apparently “one step away” from the control system of the detector itself. While I don’t know the details of the design, not connecting the computers that control the machine to the internet would seem like an elementary precaution. Not connecting them to publicly accessible web servers, even more so.

Apparently, the beams circulating in the LHC will eventually have as much kinetic energy as an aircraft carrier going 12 knots – all concentrated into bunches circling the accelerator 11,000 times per second. Preventing outside access to the control systems for the sensors that will make sense of all the data seems like common sense, even if the output from those sensors is getting sent around the world for analysis.

Spore and DRM

One of the most talked about aspects of the computer game Spore is the digital rights management (DRM) software being used to prevent unauthorized copying. The SecureROM software restricts each copy to being installed on a maximum of 3 computers. Beyond that, you can call Electronic Arts and beg them to let you install it more times. Given that hardware upgrades can make your computer count as a ‘new’ one, this might happen to a lot of people.

As DRM software goes, this really isn’t that bad. It doesn’t run an annoying program in the background, like the awful Steam system that accompanied Half Life 2. It also lets you play the game without the DVD inserted.

Arguably, the key to this issue is the following: somebody is always going to crack the DRM and release pirated copies of the game without it online. As such, DRM does not stop unauthorized copying, but does inconvenience the people who actually shell out the money for the game. As such, DRM is both useless and unfair to legitimate customers. As the Sony DRM debacle demonstrates, it can also open massive security holes on the computers of those who run it.

P.S. I will write a full review of Spore once I finish it. My first impressions are quite positive. One major suggestion to anyone trying it: play a very aggressive species for the first four stages (basically winning by killing everyone). Then, start a new game at the space stage with a blank state species. If you bring your hyper-aggressive species out into the galaxy, you will spend all of your time manually defending each of your planets from attack. It is infinitely less frustrating to build an empire based on trade and teraforming, earn lots of badges, make alliances, buy some awesome weapons, and then start busting people up if desired.

The world’s most extensive data centres

In an article for Nature, Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, describes some of the world’s most colossal data centres. These include facilities for gene sequencing, particle physics, internet archiving, and so forth. The article includes some vivid descriptions of the massive scale at which data is being interacted with, as well as some of the technologies associated. Describing the ‘PetaBoxes’ that contain copies of much of the web, he explains:

[H]oused in these machines are hundreds of copies of the web — every splenetic message-board thrash; every dry e-government document; every scientific paper; every pornographic ramble; every libel; every copyright infringement; every chunk of source code (for sufficiently large values of ‘every’, of course).

They have the elegant, explosive compactness of plutonium.

Far from being static repositories, many of these places have been designed for a near-constant process of upgrading. They maintain spare capacity into which 1 terabyte drives can be installed when the 500 gigabyte drives become dated (and then 2 terabyte drives, and then 4 terabyte drives). The ones with the greatest capacity use huge arrays of magnetic tapes, archived and accessed by robotic arms. The data centre at CERN (where the Large Hadron Collider will soon begin collecting data) includes two robots, each of which manages five petabytes of data. That’s five million gigabytes: equivalent to more than 585,000 double-sided DVDs.

One of the most interesting issues described is heat and the mechanisms through which it is addressed. The section describing how emergency shutdowns need to occur in the event of a cooling failure definitely comes across powerfully. Describing a facility in the Netherlands, it says:

The site manager Aryan Piets estimates that if it broke down and the emergency system didn’t come on, the temperature in the centre would hit 42 °C in ten minutes. No one could cleanly bring down all those machines in that time, and the dirtier the shutdown, the longer the subsequent start-up, with its rebuilding of databases and replacement of crashed components. Blow the shutdown and stuff starts to melt — or burn.

The main system being discussed is actually surprisingly climate friendly, since it uses cool lake water and pumps rather than air conditioning equipment to keep the drives and servers at an acceptable temperature. Hopefully, it is something that other firms with massive server farm needs are paying attention to. The article mentions Google several times.

For the geeky and the curious, the whole article deserves a read.

Paper backups of digital files

One thing well illustrated by history is that the records that endure are the ones that got chiseled into stone or, failing that, at least put on paper. Given the issues of long-term reliability relating to hard drives, flash memory, and writable optical media, someone wishing to preserve information for the distant future might be well advised to make a paper copy of the parts that are most critical.

PaperBack is a mechanism for facilitating exactly that. It includes software to convert about half a megabyte of any kind of data into a pattern that can be printed onto paper. For some kinds of highly compressible information, it can manage three megabytes per page – as much as two old 3.5″ diskettes. It also includes code for scanning the data back into a digital form. While I doubt anybody will be doing this for multi-gigabyte video files, it may be a worthwhile thing for some kinds of information. Anyone building the modern equivalent of an ancient Greek tomb might be especially well advised to consider the software. Hopefully, future generations will prove as capable at deciphering JPEG images as those in the recent past did at deciphering Linear B.

A compiled version of the software is available for Windows. Mac and Linux users will need to compile the code for themselves.

Google’s web browser

Google is in the process of rolling out a web browser, called Chrome. The defining characteristics are mostly on the back end, in terms of how it deals with processes and memory addressing. That being said, the foundation is being laid for what ought to be an unusually stable and secure browser.

The whole thing is explained in this comic book. The beta version is available for Windows, but we Mac users need to keep waiting for a while yet.

P.S. Another piece of software I am excited about is Spore. I have been a big appreciator of SimCity, SimAnt, and the like. The opportunity to evolve intelligent organisms on my shiny new computer is one I anticipate eagerly.

Frontline episodes

The entire archive of the PBS investigative journalism program Frontline seems to be available online for free. Some of the more interesting topics covered include:

There is certainly a consistent – and fairly critical – focus on the controversial actions of the second Bush administration. That being said, the quality of the programs seems to be quite high.