Brooders.net

Australia’s Sydney Morning herald is reporting That Outback online is Second Life but Peer-to-Peer.

“Outback Online is a virtual world system that will be on your computer 24/7, and we don’t yet know what changes that’s going to bring, but we’ve got an inkling that will be pretty profound,” Mr Leeb-du Toit says.

In the new world, an ‘outback’ is equivalent to Second Life’s islands - a hub for users.

It’s an environment in which one can talk, build and play. Yoick’s Phil Morle calls it “a huge box of Lego”. You can develop private outbacks for friends or a concert for 5000 visitors.

Sounding like the “walled city” from Gibsons Idoru where the members have their private world distributed among their computers.

Of note, (from the SMH article)

The P2P architecture overcomes some obstacles that prevent such a gathering in Second Life but Mr Morle, a consultant who worked on Outback’s development, says the visual quality is greatly improved.
….
Mr Morle, the former Kazaa CTO, has assembled an expert team experienced in P2P applications that includes development director Marty Poulin, formerly online technology director at Disney’s Buena Vista Games.

“While I was at Kazaa it was a common conversation to dream up ways of using peer-to-peer in 3-D worlds,” Mr Morle says.

P2P has worked for Skype, having the free basic model and the paid enhanced services. I have used Skype for work and home with great success. Conference calls, transferring files, and chat. How much is the application versus the network I don’t know. But, this give some hope that the Virtual World may be more responsive than my experience in Second Life.

I wasn’t that impressed with Second Life, I still need to try it out again (now I have a much better video card) .. but I didn’t really find it that enthralling.

It will be interesting to try “Outback Online” .. it seems as though VR worlds are back in fashion, even if older technologies have faded.

If you want to jump on the mailing list for when Outback online opens, visit their website Outbackonline.com.

Altered Carbon was a great read. Action packed and gritty with a slightly different, but very cyberpunk feel to it.

Why Cyberpunk?

• Mind Uploading/Downloading
• Body Augmentation (drugs, enhancements, wired)
• Artificial Intelligence
• Vast Megacorps (family owned due to virtual Immortality from Cortical Stacks)

Courtesy of Amazon, the book blurb

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself.

Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or sleeve) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats existence as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . .

Cool Concepts from the book:

• Meths (Methuselah - Biblical reference meaning someone who has lived centuries)
• Mind uploading and downloading - even for meetings in other countries
• Imprisonment means being stored in a facility - the individual will face culture shock when they come back
• Borrowing Bodies - renting someones sleeve (body) because you like the look of it, and the owner can’t afford to keep exclusive when in prison
• Biological Attraction - When the mind is transferred to another body, the biological attraction does not occur, but the memories still exist

Some worthy excerpts:

Up there, you got the comsats. Raining data. You can see it on some virtual maps, it looks like someone is knitting the world a scarf …. Some of that Scarf is people. Digitised rich folks, on their way between bodies. Skeins of memory and feeling and thought, packaged up by numbers.
If your good, like she was, and you’ve got the equipment, you can sample those signals. They call them mindbites.

Excerpt when one clone is talking to it’s original self, about why they should talk, even though they both have the same memories:

‘Sometimes, it helps to externalise things. Even if you talk to someone else about it, you’re usually talking to yourself. The other guy’s just providing a sounding board. You talk it out.’

A somewhat refreshing change to the hard noir Gibsonian cyberpunk. Well worth the read, I know I am going to have to hunt down some other Richard Morgan titles. An interesting exploration of what makes people human, is it their memories, their physical being, or as this book suggests a combination of both. Also questioning what death actually is in a world where you can be “resurrected” providing your memories encoded in your cortical stack are still intact. The concept of Real Death only occuring when your memories (stack) are destroyed.

In good cyberpunk questioning, the “what is humanity?” and what happens to ethics when technology frees us from past certainties like death or lifespan, intrigues throughout the novel.

Rating: 8.5/10

The following video is an interesting use of a online wiki spreadsheet by embedding a youtube video.

You will notice the use of the The web is us/ing us video. Nicely executed follow up meme, embeded with the original meme video.

These ideas challenge the current methodology of how things are supposed to work. Who would have thought about embedding a video in a spreadsheet? but once the medium of display has changed (excel to web browser) and is more open, more uses are now possible.

The WikiCalc shown in the video is available from Dan Bricklin’s Software Garden - Products - WikiCalc.

(Via Ook - sometimes embedding is a good thing)

Interesting and scary .. predictions of the future in video

Nanotech, fusion reactors, AI, cyborgs, Mars Colonization !!

This is the work of Peter Pesti, who is maintaining a list of which predictions come true or not.

(Via A visual trip through the 21st Century )

Update: - Worth taking a look at the comments from Pesti’s site. Interesting how people are thinking that power and global warming are real issues, and that Kurzweil might be oversimplifying AI and the human brain.