Just participated in a seminar by the Chair of Systems Design (Prof. Frank Schweitzer), which was about Evolutionary Prisoners Dilemma Games. Interesting stuff, although it put lots of emphasis on modeling, which I am not very familiar with. It’s nice to have a look over the chair horizon from time to time.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=495538&in_page_id=1811

A (not so funny) play by Mark Pilgrim on the DRM’ed (Digital Right Management) future of reading. Here is act I out of 6:

Act I: The act of buying

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this. -Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s CEO), Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content. – Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

Received August 30, 2004. This paper was with the authors 9 months for 5 revisions. Published online in Articles in Advance Nov 9, 2007.

This line cannot capture the amount of work, frustration, and effort that has gone into our article “Code reuse in open source software” (article only available to INFORMS subscribers, sorry, available version will be published here as soon as we may do it) which is being published in Management Science.

Abstract: Code reuse is a form of knowledge reuse in software development, which is fundamental to innovation in many fields. To date, there has been no systematic investigation of code reuse in open source software projects. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data gathered from a sample of six open source software projects, to evaluate two sets of propositions derived from the literature on software reuse in firms and open source software development. We find that code reuse is extensive across the sample and that open source software developers, much like developers in firms, apply tools that lower their search costs for knowledge and code, assess the quality of software components, and they have incentives to reuse code. Open source software developers reuse code because they want to integrate functionality quickly, because they want to write preferred code, because they operate under limited resources in terms of time and skills, and because they can mitigate development costs through code reuse. Implications for research and management practice are discussed.

A blogentry of the developer who ported the game to Unix confirms that game publisher Electronic Arts will release the source code of the classic “Sim City” as GPL’ed software.

Electronic Arts plans to donate the original version of the popular SimCity computer game to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project for inclusion on the XO laptop, reports another blog.

I loved SimCity and had been playing it for days and days when I was younger. I wonder how it would feel to play the original again now.

Found via prolinux

The Journal for Computer-Mediated Communication published a special issue on ‘Social Network Sites’ . I don’t know this Journal, so I can’t comment on its quality, nor have I seen the articles yet. But it is interesting to note that social networking has entered the field of academia.

Table of Contents

• “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship” by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
• “Signals in Social Supernets” by Judith Donath
• “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances” by Hugo Liu
• “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites” by Eszter Hargittai
• “Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site” by Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun
• “Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com” by Dara Byrne
• “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball” by Lee Humphreys
• “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube” by Patricia Lange

found this on BoingBoing.net