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Sunday, April 12, 2009 8:20 AM

massively multiplayer online game site

I tripped across the daedalus project this morning while I was looking for player statistics for World of Warcraft. What a great site! The author, Nick Yee, has apparently been doing user surveys to MMOG players for years, and compiling various articles
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
Thursday, March 19, 2009 9:48 AM

Interesting Cheating Talk

Jon Crowcroft pointed me at an extremely interesting talk by Dan Ariely on Cheating . Take a peek if you're interested in cheating and cheater behavior, especially as influenced by group dynamics, it'll be 15 minutes well spent.
Posted by John L. Miller | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, December 17, 2008 10:07 AM

Second Life paper answers many questions

A recent paper by Matteo Varvello et. al. answers a lot of the questions I've found myself asking about Second Life and its community. The paper Is There Life In Second Life? and if you're interested in Second Life's popularity, community, and performance,
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
Thursday, September 04, 2008 10:39 AM

Microsoft Research AutoCollage - try it now!

I work on an incubation team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. Today we released our first public offering, AutoCollage. In a nutshell, AutoCollage lets you select a folder containing images, and creates a collage synthesized from interesting bits
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, July 30, 2008 9:35 AM

Crashing WoW servers

Yesterday I was forwarded a link about retirement of a long-time player from World of Warcraft. While that in itself might be interesting, the really juicy bit was the way he went out: with a mighty 'crash' from the server. Scalability issues, or something
Posted by John L. Miller | 0 Comments
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 11:53 AM

DVE Scalability - More to be done?

Much of my last year has been spent reading about distributed virtual environment scalability. As it turns out, perhaps it shouldn't have been. A lot of research papers I've read begins like this: "DVE's consume loads of bandwidth, and there are lots
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
Thursday, January 10, 2008 8:26 AM

Distributed Virtual Environment Scalability

In the previous post I parrotted scalability figures for World of Warcraft. While investigating DVE's, I tripped across interesting figures for WoW and several other environments. Halo-3 From this press release , we can see that in the first week of Halo-3's
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
Wednesday, January 02, 2008 10:06 AM

World of Warcraft hits 9M + active subscribers!

The holidays gave me a chance to re-acquaint myself with World of Warcraft (WoW). I have to say, it's still the single most impressive online game I've ever seen. For my money, it does everything right. It literally *is* for my money, since I'm one of
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
Thursday, November 15, 2007 10:58 AM

Content versus Form

If I could go back 30 years, I would tell myself to focus on the content and intention of each message, rather than its form. I'm struggling through a technical report describing application of Bayesian techniques to a particular problem. Like papers
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
Saturday, July 28, 2007 4:30 PM

Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution and download speeds

When I talk to people about P2P content distribution, there's a common misperception. They assume that the more people there are downloading that file, the faster download goes. This isn't usually true, as I'll explain below. What is true is that a peer-to-peer
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
Friday, July 27, 2007 5:02 PM

'Managed Prototypes'

MSCD has a front-page story on research.microsoft.com . A friend of mine asked me about a quote in the article which could perhaps be misunderstood: “It is as much as eight times faster than our original managed prototype, and it’s great that customers
Posted by John L. Miller | 0 Comments
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Thursday, July 26, 2007 10:45 PM

MSCD links to download Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

If you're interested in using Microsoft Secure Content Distribution to download Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, just click here , install and run the downloader, and you'll be off and running! This version of MSCD will be available for four weeks, so you have
Posted by John L. Miller | 4 Comments
Thursday, July 26, 2007 5:06 PM

Microsoft Secure Content Distribution

A few years ago, Pablo Rodriguez and Christos Gkantsidis applied Network Coding to Peer-to-Peer file swarming, calling their system 'Avalanche' . I was lucky enough to be involved in their project. Over time, Cambridge Incubation at Microsoft Research
Posted by John L. Miller | 2 Comments
Sunday, July 15, 2007 8:46 AM

Second Life - Reality sets in?

Earlier I commented about the disparity in numbers quoted for Second Life's population. It's not that any of the numbers are wrong - for what's being expressed, they're no doubt correct. Rather, it's a question of what's being measured. For my money,
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
Friday, June 29, 2007 7:27 AM

Data persistence in a digital world

A while back I read a news article pointing out an issue largely overlooked, namely the transience of digital data. For thousands of years, institutional and personal memory were stored solely in physical written form, on paper, papyrus, wax, stone, you
Posted by John L. Miller | 1 Comments
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