Gaming and Culture

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion to the mega-popular online game, sold 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours last week, setting what its publisher said is an all-time record for PC games.

According to Blizzard Entertainment, Wrath of the Lich King, broke the one-day PC game sales record of 2.4 million copies, which was set 22 months earlier by The Burning Crusade, the first WoW expansion.

'Wrath of the Lich King,' the second 'World of Warcraft' expansion, sold 2.8 million copies in its first day, netting Blizzard Entertainment a one-day PC game sales record.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

The new expansion was launched simultaneously in North America, Europe, Chile, Argentina, and Russia.

And at $40 a copy, the game would have brought in $112 million on its first day, though Blizzard would get somewhat less than that given that retailers pay the publisher less than full sticker price.

There are currently more than 11 million WoW players worldwide, and some analysts had predicted that as many as half might upgrade to Lich King. Given that, to play Lich King, players would have had to also upgrade from the original WoW to Burning Crusade, and that they pay a $15-a-month subscription fee, many have estimated that WoW is at least a $1 billion-a-year franchise.

And since the economy is heading into a serious worldwide recession, it is notable that the new WoW expansion has done so well out of the gate. Many are worried that retail sales will be down across the board. Some argue however that video games will do better than other products because people tend to want to spend money on entertainment when times are tough.

IBM and several university partners have gotten a DARPA grant to work on a cognitive computing project designed to simulate the brain's sensation, action, interaction, perception and cognition abilities. At the same time, the project's leaders will be attempting to recreate the brain's low-power consumption and size.

(Credit: IBM)

IBM and five university partners have been awarded a DARPA contract to work on a cognitive computing project that will, essentially, attempt to simulate the brain's power and efficiency.

According to Dharmendra Modha, the manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative, the idea is for him and his team to try to re-create the brain's perception, cognitive, sensation, interaction, and action abilities, while also simulating its efficient size and low-power consumption.

"The mind has an uncanny ability to integrate information from a variety of sensors, such as sight, hearing, touch, smell and can create categories of time, space and interrelationships effortlessly," said Modha. "There are no computers that can even remotely approach the capabilities of the mind. The mind arises from the wetware of the brain."

But he and his team feel that the time has finally arrived for computer scientists to at least begin to approach the brain's abilities. That's because, he said, of the convergence of three things.

First, neuroscience has made incredible strides forward. Second, supercomputing technology has reached the ability to create massive simulations in real time. And third, nanotechnology has made it possible to imagine creating simulated synapses, the very element of the brain that enables it to work at speeds and efficiencies computer scientists have so far only dreamed of.

"Together, these three trends allow us to uncover the function, computation function of the brain," he said, "while rivaling its remarkably low-power consumption and its small size."

The IBM project, just the first phase in DARPA's long-term contract, is expected to last nine months.

Already, Modha said, scientists have managed to create computing tools that have rivaled the abilities of a rat's brain.

But is it a good thing for science to try to re-create the brain's power?

"The questions are so technically challenging and it is so engaging at this point to begin to put the puzzle together, and the whole part is still not completely visible," Modha said. "I think it is premature to worry about what if."

A scene from 'Lively,' the virtual world Google launched in July and which it said Wednesday it is closing at the end of the year.

(Credit: Google)

Once thought to be its answer to virtual worlds like Second Life, Google's Lively launched this summer to much fanfare.

Lively was Web-based and allowed anyone to set up virtual spaces, such as rooms, that could be embedded onto blogs or Facebook pages.

But the project never picked up much steam.

Now, Google has decided to shut the project down.

"Despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year," Google said on its official blog Wednesday evening. "It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."

The post said that those who were working on the Lively team would be reassigned to other areas within Google, suggesting that the move does not mean layoffs.

Google also said that because the project is being shut completely down, it is encouraging "all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms."

Disclaimer: My wife works at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

This photograph of then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy, was taken in April 1960 on the night of the Wisconsin presidential primary. The image is one of the millions of photos now available from Life's archives via Google.

(Credit: Life/Stan Wayman)

Life magazine announced Tuesday that is is making more than 10 million of its archival photographs publicly available through a partnership with Google.

The archive includes many iconic images from throughout the 20th century taken by famous photographers like Gordon Parks, Margaret Bourke-White, and Dorothea Lange.

This 1936 image is of migrant worker Florence Thompson, taken in Nipomo, Calif. Another Lange photo of Thompson became one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression.

(Credit: Life/Dorothea Lange)

Currently, many of the photos--searchable by keyword--are available through Google Image Search. And many more will be added in the coming months, Life said.

The project mirrors one introduced in January in which Flickr began hosting thousands of images from the U.S. Library of Congress as part of its "The Commons" initiative. Between the two different efforts, the public now has access to a wide range of photographs from the 20th century, many of which are among the most famous images of the century.

Life said that as many as 97 percent of the photographs it will make available have never been seen by the public before. These likely include shots taken at the same time as some of those that have become famous. An example is a photograph of migrant worker Florence Thompson in 1936 by Dorothea Lange that was clearly part of the same series of shots that produced what many would say is the single most famous image of the Great Depression, a close-up of Thompson with two of her children tucked into her shoulders. The newly available image shows a wider angle of the woman.

Click for more photos from the project

For years, Boing Boing was one of the most popular blogs around, and with the rare exception of a guest writer or two, it was written entirely by a group of four accomplished co-editors.

If you were interested in the culture of technology, there was a pretty good chance that Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, David Pescovitz, and Mark Frauenfelder were your heroes. Even as other blog networks, such as Gawker Media and Weblogs, sprouted up, Boing Boing stuck to its original, successful formula.

A little more than a year ago, the four editors finally broke that mold and launched Boing Boing Gadgets, with Joel Johnson as the editor. Then came Boing Boing TV. Now Offworld, written and edited by former Gamasutra news editor Brandon Boyer, is joining the fray of offshoots.

As Pescovitz puts it, "Boing Boing Offworld is a hub for gaming culture that cultivates the joy of discovery, sense of wonder, and celebration of innovation that all of us, and you, thrive on. Offworld will mix no-nonsense game reviews with profiles of designers, game industry news with level-headed think pieces, how-tos with actual games you can play. And of course, community! Gaming is a social (phenomenon)."

To be sure, there are now scads of game blogs. There is, of course, this one--though it differs from pure game blogs in that we also focus on many different topics, and don't do straight-up reviews. Then there are Gawker's Kotaku, Weblog's Joystiq, Wired's Game Life, and many more. (Not to mention game-centric sites such as CNET's GameSpot.) So Offworld will certainly have its work cut out for it.

Of course, being published by Boing Boing should win Offworld some fans right off the bat, and being written by Boyer may attract readers of his former employer, game blog Gamasutra.

So, as someone who will be both a competitor and a reader, I say welcome. And good luck.

Former Sony Pictures Digital president Yair Landau is running a competition in which he's looking for user-created animations of individual shots from a short film hes making. The idea is get a variety of high-quality sequences and to incorporate them into the finished product. The competition is being run on Facebook using tools from Aniboom.

(Credit: Mass Animation)

Are you a stud digital animator who hasn't quite managed to find a venue for your work?

If so, a new project being run by former Sony Digital Pictures president Yair Landau could be your ticket to the recognition you deserve.

Starting Monday, Landau--backed by several corporate partners--is opening up a competition which will give Facebook users the opportunity to animate one or more sequences in a short film that he is making.

Called Mass Animation, the competition tasks users with taking storyboarded shots from Landau's planned short film, Live Music and creating animations of them. The idea is that Landau and a team of judges will pick the best submissions and incorporate them into the finished film.

The competition is being run on Facebook and utilizes a new application from a company called Aniboom that earlier this year ran a competition to animate a Radiohead music video.

Live Music is based largely on Romeo and Juliet and follows the story of Riff, a rock and roll guitar, who falls in love with Vanessa, a classical guitar.

Animators who want to participate will be able to do so starting Monday, and can send in as many submissions as they want through January 30, 2009. And while there will be official judges, the submissions will also be subject to community voting, which will open on November 24.

When the Space Shuttle Endeavour launches Friday afternoon, assuming it is not delayed, the astronauts onboard and the technicians on the ground at mission control will have at their disposal new software that could streamline the process of problem reporting and analysis.

The software, called the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system, was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA's Ames Research Center, and is designed to give a wide cross-section of people in the Space Shuttle ecosystem access to a single database package for tracking problems with the Shuttle and its associated infrastructure.

According to Alonso Vera, the lead of the Ames Human-Computer Interaction Group, the single, universally accessible PRACA package is replacing a set of more than 40 different database systems that had been used over the past 30 years by the many different parts of that Shuttle ecosystem.

And, like a related database system known as Items for Investigation (IFI) that is used for tracking International Space Station issues, the new PRACA was written using open-source Bugzilla tools that will save NASA considerable amounts of time and money.

Vera wouldn't say exactly how much the new systems cost to build, but he said they were an order of magnitude cheaper than what was being used before, closer to $100,000 than the $1 million it would have cost in the past.

More to the point, Vera explained, by using open-source Bugzilla tools, technicians will be able to make changes to either PRACA or IFI more or less on the fly, rather than having to submit any proposed changes to the publishers of proprietary software, steps that often took weeks to achieve.

The PRACA system is used, Vera said, to help anyone trying to diagnose problems with the Shuttle find reports of similar issues from the past to see how they were resolved. The IFI system, by contrast, is used by those involved with the Space Station to report new problems for later analysis.

Already, the new PRACA systems are being used in NASA's Constellation program, which will replace the Space Shuttle after 2010. But Friday's launch will be the first live test of the system, given that Constellation has yet to go into space. However, since it's only a test, the existing PRACA system will also be used.

Similarly, the Space Station program has now phased out its older IFI system and turned on the new version.

Vera said that the Space Shuttle program has yet to commit fully to the new PRACA system, though the Space Station program will do a full switchover in March 2009.

A desalination plant built by IDE. Cost-effective desalination could help solve the worldwide water shortage crisis, but the technology is not widely available today.

(Credit: IDE)

I was thinking recently about the many problems facing our fragile planet--economic crisis, global warming, massive water shortages, and so on--and got to wondering what can be done to solve them.

In part, this stemmed from the recent American election and what it meant for our country and the world, but also from thinking about the ongoing alternate-reality game being run by the Institute for the Future, Superstruct, which tasks players with coming up with ideas that could help stave off a fictional extinction of the human race.

One problem, it seems to me, is that there are so many critical issues to deal with we sometimes feel that unless we can solve all of them at once, there's no popular will to deal seriously with any of them.

But that mentality likely leaves us trapped in stasis, as it's almost impossible to imagine being able to tackle everything at once. On the other hand, if we grapple with one or two major issues at a time, we might start to make some real progress before it's too late.

So, I thought I'd put it out there publicly to see what readers like you think are the individual innovations and changes we could make that could most positively impact our world--and get us on the path to a stable future.

For me, I think the worldwide shortage of drinking water is the one that, if solved, could most benefit the planet. Because while water crises in countries like India and China are well-known, and while political battles between countries like Israel and Syria may in the end have more to do with water than ideology, there are less understood water problems everywhere, including here at home.

In the American West, for example, there are several states sharing water from the Colorado River basin. Yet, even as places like Las Vegas use more and more, the supply is rapidly dwindling as an extended drought gets worse and worse.

So, for my money, the single-most valuable innovation I can imagine would be cost-effective, massively deployable desalination technology. After all, there's a limitless supply of salt water available, but to date, there's simply no efficient way to convert it. Were such desalination possible, it wouldn't solve the crises overnight--you'd still have to figure out how to pay to pipe in the new supplies of fresh water to inland areas--but it would go a long way to a future in which everyone has suitable drinking water.

But that's me. I want to know what you think would be the single innovation that could make our world a better place.

I'm not looking for pure fantasy here, but rather something that is feasible, even if it's a ways off.

If you have an idea, please post it in the comments section here, or e-mail me at daniel.terdiman@cnet.com or Twitter me at twitter.com/greeterdan.

I'll post the best answers in the next few days.

The crew of STS-126, the Space Shuttle launching Friday, will be delivering to the International Space Station a wastewater regeneration system that will recycle astronauts' urine.

(Credit: NASA)

If you're the kind of person who wants to do research on the International Space Station, it appears that you may need to cross some boundaries of taste many of us wouldn't even consider.

According to a BBC News story Friday, the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday afternoon, will be handing off to their Space Station colleagues a water regeneration system designed to, among other things, recycle urine for reuse as fresh water.

The system, which will ionize, filter, distill, and oxidize wastewater, "will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee," one astronaut told the BBC.

The idea behind the $250 million system seems to have been to figure out a way to ensure that residents of the Space Station had a supply of fresh water. To date, the Space Station has had the luxury of getting water deliveries from newly arrived Space Shuttles. But the Shuttle program is slated for retirement after 2010, and that looks to end the program's role as, among other things, the Space Station's personal water truck.

Still, the system won't be implemented right away. First, NASA wants to be sure that it works, as designed, in a zero-gravity environment.

On Earth, astronaut testers are apparently convinced that the filtration technology works just fine.

"Some people may think it's downright disgusting," Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper told the BBC, "but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth."

Some who have tried the recycled water did report a faint taste of iodine, but they didn't see that as a problem.

"Other than that, it is just as refreshing as any other kind of water," said Bob Bagdigian, who ran the system's development. "I've got some in my fridge. It tastes fine to me."

Despite a slowing economy, sales of U.S. video games and hardware soared 18 percent from the same month a year ago, according to data released Thursday by market researcher NPD Group.

Hardware sales were up 5 percent to $494.7 million, led by Nintendo's Wii game console. Wii held onto the top spot by selling 803,000 units in October, up from 687,000 in September. The Wii, which has been plagued by shortages, has sold more than 13 million units since its release in November 2006.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 held onto the No. 2 spot by selling 371,000 units, a 7 percent increase over September following a price cut that month. Sony's PlayStation 3 came in third with 190,000 units sold, an 18.2 percent increase over the prior month.

Software sales were up 35 percent to $696.8 million, led by Microsoft's Fable II, which sold 790,000 units. Second place went to Nintendo's exercise game Wii Fit, which sold 487,000 copies.

Meanwhile, sales of portable video games were down 14 percent.

The video game industry faces a tough holiday shopping season, following a bankruptcy filing by retailer Circuit City and a revenue warning from rival Best Buy.