Why did the dismantling of NSFNet aid commercial activities on the internet?
The user agreement for NSFNet prohibited the use of it for commercial purposes ( ie monetary gain ). Upon the dissolution of NSFNet ISPs were allowed to offer commercial services from e-commerce to subscriptions for games and services.
‘The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat’ by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer (1990) is a paper that was presented at The First Annual International Conference on Cyberspace. You can download a PDF copy here: The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat (also provided in the resources page for this part).
Read the paper (this should take no more than 30 minutes), then extract some key points about Habitat. Note that the paper uses the term ‘avatar’ to refer to a figure in the environment that represent the user – I will explore this term in more detail later in this session.
Habitat was one of the first online social environments where large numbers of users could interact in real-time.
Through the Commodore 64 and it’s joystick many people could interact with each other and the environment making the experience richer and more immersive.
Much of the environment was interactive and functional.
It was through Habitat that early pioneers of online interaction realised that the internet would become a social medium, and that standardising data would be essential for this to take place.
A designer cannot possibly predict every way that every user will interact with their environment and each other.
Interestingly, even at this early point they came to the conclusion that ‘you can’t trust anyone’. A point made again on an other game, the MMO-RPG EVE online, where corporate espionage and theft occur regularly.
Developers and players coexisted best when all parties were subject to the same rules ( again there was a recent event in EVE online where a member of the dev staff exploited the in-game world to the benefit of the developers in-game friends ).
Online game must recognise that people will not change their behaviour to fit the in-game world, and will instead try to exploit the in-game world in a similar fashion to how they do the real-world.
Why were adventure games forced to use text descriptions on early microcomputers?
The use of text was largely driven by the poor cross-compatibility of applications and the low quality of graphics generally on early personal computers, and finally the lack of storage space ( text was much more efficient compared to images ).
Ten years ago, the term ‘virtual world’ would have been meaningless to all but a very small sector of society. In fact it would probably be true to say the same of six, five or even four years ago. Yet these days, though it is by no means ubiquitous, the term has started to spread into much wider general use, and many of us have heard of virtual worlds in some context. So before you read on in this part, take some time (up to 20 minutes should be about right) to jot down some of your own thoughts about virtual worlds. You might like to be guided by the following questions:
To me a virtual world is somewhere online that allows people to interact and share information through a rich media experience, some examples of virtual worlds I can think of include IMVU and Second Life. Generally I think of virtual worlds as an evolution of social media sites such as Bebo, MySpace or LinkedIn.
I use IMVU a lot ( much more than I use Facebook ) to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances in an informal nature, whereas if I need help with a project, or to exchange information I tend to use community sites and forums, the ability to customise and interact through avatars in an interactive and customizable 3D chatroom makes IMVU moch more fun, distracting and immersive that a text-based chat.
I know that Second Life is used extensively by a lot of companies and institutions including fire fighters, and IBM to train employees, as well as the USAF purchasing a large amount of virtual property in Second Life ( SL ). So to me a virtual world can be something whimsical and far-fetched, or an accurate simulation of the real world to help train people to improve real-life skills.
If much of England experienced pollution from Laki, what would you expect to see in the mortality records?
For the year, going from what is stated in the course information, I would expect to see a more steady death rate, as states, usually in the late summer and early autumn, the death rate drops, but the increase in mortalities due to the toxins in the volcanic eruptions would cause this to rise. If I were to compare the death rate at that time of year to the previous years, I would expect to see a definite increase in deaths for that year.
How does the Rosetta Project try to guarantee the survival of languages?
The project library is widely available and free, with copies both online, and hard copies available throughout the worlds libraries, and on DVD.
Use the information you have just read on the Long Now Foundation, and any other sources you choose, to write a short report on how the Rosetta Disk has been designed. You should write your report for an interested non-specialist audience such as an adult member of your family. You should aim to explain how and why the disk has been created and some of the techniques used to guarantee its survival into the future. Your report should be no more than 400 words, excluding the citations for any additional sources you use.
In this report it is my aim to tell you about the Rosetta Disk project, and the techniques that the team have used to ensure the longevity of the disks themselves.
With the advancing rate of obsolescence apparent in digital technologies the Long Now foundation began the Rosetta project to help draw the publics attention to the fact, and also to explore alternative archiving techniques and how they can be applied to such situations. It was the foundations intent to create a physical, durable archive of the worlds languages in use by the population at the time for prosperity.
The disk itself has information from 1,500 different languages on it’s surface, and is a modern analogue to the Rosetta stone, which was instrumental in the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The disks surface has multiple copies of the same text, but translated into each of the 1,500 different languages; this technique is called a ‘parallel set’ of information. Most of the texts are transcribed narratives, but there are also translations of the beginning of Genesis, and the US Declaration of Independence. On the surfaces are etched thousands of pages of information, not just text on it’s own, but pronunciation guides and other pedagogical information necessary for an understanding of each language.
Each Rosetta disk is a 3″ circle of Nickel, encapsulated in a 4″ sphere of steel and glass, and should last for thousands of years with minimum care necessary, and as the information is presented as written text ( in all the various alphabets of each language! ), there is small chance that it would be rendered obsolete as languages progress.
The Rosetta Disk is a time-capsule of our languages, independent of any single standard, or the obfuscation of digital storage, and given it’s construction, is hoped to carry our languages forwards into the future for thousands of years.
Long Now Foundation (n.d.) The Rosetta Project [ online ], San Francisco, CA, The Long Now Foundation, http://rosettaproject.org ( accessed 21 January 2012 ).
Wikipedia (2010) ‘Rosetta Project’ in Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia [ online ], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Disk ( accessed 21 January 2012 ).
The Wayback Machine is a fascinating glimpse of the Web as it used to be. In the resources page associated with this part on the TU100 website, you will find instructions on how to explore it.
Choose the collection relating to 11 September 2001. The attacks on New York and Washington were one of the first global news events to be covered in great depth on the Web. Read the overview page and try to answer the following questions.
The 11 September 2001 Archive.
Some aspects of the original IBM PC can be described as ‘open’, others as ‘proprietary’. Give some examples of each.
The only proprietary part of the IBM PC system was the BIOS, the PC itself, and the manual were open resources, providing the information openly, requiring no license fee to be paid to IBM who had developed it.
Which three decisions made by the team behind the IBM PC made it possible for other companies to copy their design?
What was the benefit to software developers of Office XML becoming an open standard?
Office XML becoming an open standard benefits software developers for the following reasons:
What are the two main advantages for Adobe in making PDF an open standard rather than a proprietary one?
The advantages of .PDF becoming an open standard are that it will be more widely used, and that anyone can create software that is compliant with the format.
