July 2009
124 posts
“Responding to being asked whether SL can have adverse effects on its visitors,...”
– [Rosedale continues]:
“The question should be, ‘Is SL making you a better person?’ ‘Is it helping you evolve and improve?’ and ‘Is the thing that you are doing in front of the computer more or less challenging and enriching than what you might be doing in the real world?’”
via Second...
June 2009
105 posts
“The Australian Minister for Censorship has today confirmed what I’ve been...”
– Confirmed: Second Life, online adult games to be banned outright in Australia
— To all our friends down-under: It was really nice knowing you. But no worries. The new Socialist government now in-place in the United States means we won’t be far behind you.
Even though Linden Lab is right...
Land-flippers Rejoice →
I won’t go into massive detail on all this stuff and you, dear reader, are among the highly-informed and already are clearly versed in the situation and like me, are preparing for the vitriolic mad…
“Windows users in the U.S. will be able to preorder Windows 7 Home Premium for...”
– via Macworld
[There is no way anyone can tell me Microsoft is not quaking in their boots over Apple, Inc.’s offerings, including OS X and Linux along with the way Netbook manufacturers are relying on Linux to found their machines.
This is an obvious reaction to Apple’s Snow Leopard OS...
“Grass mud horse n. Wildly popular on YouTube, this mythical, alpaca-like...”
– —Jonathon Keats
via Jargon Watch
“Michael Jackson has been rushed to a Los Angeles hospital, police confirmed to...”
– via Fox News
Microsoft OS X and Apple Windows? →
Like Operating Systems (OS), there are many Grid Viewers; MS Windows, Apple OS X, (many variations of) Linux; Unix; Xenix (yes, it’s still used) and so on. Also there are many iterations of grid…
“The weirdness started at the gate in Beijing’s airport, where I noticed the...”
– via Flying The Communist Skies
““Today we’re introducing the beta version of a new dashboard on the...”
– SL Website Dashboard Beta - Features - Second Life Blogs
“If you find someone who earnestly asks, “Help me understand what you...”
– Torley Linden via Torley Lives: Things you can expect about communicating on the Internet
“Humans may excel at pattern recognition, but computers aren’t very smart at...”
– “Our brains can immediately identify photos of famous landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty or Great Wall of China, but computers are typically clueless without text tags as a cheat sheet. This may be change, however, if a Google research project in “computer vision” pans out.
via Google:...
“…hypnotic, powerful and immersive.”
–
“Academics and corporate pundits universally agree that San Francisco-based Linden Lab’s Second Life (SL) has become a technological and entrepreneurial phenomenon that’s in its early growth phase.
“Created by visionary Philip Rosedale, SL has been described as a hypnotic, powerful...
When an Emerald is not a stone or a color →
Then I found out about the Meerkat viewer , which offers some serious features not available anywhere else; specifically the ability to back-up your creations to your local machine, and restore them…
“Human-computer sexual interaction - whether using interactive stimulus-toys or...”
– Tiffany Crawford
via Canada.com / Canwest News Service
The Über-Deviant-Brothel Continent? →
Alphaville Herald posts a question about how “child-themed” avatars in second Life can cause some hyperbolic discomfort among witnesses to them, especially if witnessed in a mature setting - such as…
“And so, at that point, you can even argue that it’s not a failure. It’s part of...”
– Corner Office - On Will Wright’s Team, Would You Be a Solvent, or the Glue? - Interview - NYTimes.com (via torley)
Among my favorite quotes is:
“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”
Official Second Life Viewer Sinks Like a Rock →
Another issue I have found with 1.23 is receiving a payment from an object (and possibly directly from an individual) - the blue notice widget (menu) doesn’t appear and the L$ balance does not update…
“After a nuclear holocaust, the only thing left alive will be roaches… and...”
– “The company that thinks it owns some lines of Linux – and that everyone else thought was fated for Chapter 7 bankruptcy death this week – has instead revealed to the world that it is the immortal Highlander.”
via Channel Register
[Yo, SCO: just DIE already!]
Second Life: R.I.P. (Not)
“Doomsayers rashly declared it “dead and buried” and the media lost interest, but virtual world Second Life continues to prosper as the real economy falters, a virtual world commentator says.
“After a few years of immense hype, reports late last year chronicled Second Life’s apparent malaise, as companies faced having to ditch their virtual presence as users lost...
“Rita J. King, a/k/a “Eureka Dejavu” in Second Life, asks the...”
– Here’s Mitch Wagner’s answer:
“Twitter and Facebook can either bring us together or alienate us, depending on how they’re used. People make real-life social and business connections on social media, it happens all the time.
“On the other hand, you also see people...
2 tags
Copybot Deluxe? →
It is somewhat sad to see regions shut down by their owners for affordability reasons; knowing full well that the content cannot be ever easily restored later - I personally hate to see it when this…
5 tags
Opera 10 = Safari-killer?
Firefox is hands-down the Internet Explorer-killer. Safari 4 is definitely and undeniably the FireFox-killer (we’re talking in terms of performance and and such).
But will the new Opera be the Safari 4 killer?
One of the new features WebMonkey speaks on may mean it’s true…
“Why would you want your own web server on your local machine? For answers, you have to go back to...
3 tags
Virtual World Currency →
“Sci-fi MMORPG EVE Online’s world full of player-run banks and corporations got one of its first tastes of virtual white-collar crime. The top executive of the player-run EVE financial institution Ebank, intended as an in-world business that would let other players safely deposit and borrow amounts of in-game virtual currency ISK, embezzled a substantial but unknown sum of ISK...
8 tags
Zindra: Blank Canvas
The Zindra thread at the SL blog is 95% whiners and crybabies.
So, what else is new?
My input is here:
”@ Jack: [who posted the article]
Isn’t it amazing how unlike first life where you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, in Second Life, you can’t please any of the people any of the time.
/me sighs
@ the detractors: [a.k.a....
7 tags
“Isn’t it amazing how unlike first life where you can please some of the...”
– Antonio Rocco says:
“I gotta admit, from looking at pics and stuff, this is the un-sexiest Adult Continent I’ve ever seen. Shouldn’t there be…I dunno…plush hearts and vibrating mattresses everywhere, or Barry White music playing or something? At least give us some...
6 tags
WatchSweet! Torley points to a cool tool in-world to test voice set-up in Second Life. This is a cool tool that is much-needed in-world.
At least you can hear for yourself how you’re coming through.
Should be required for all voice users - maybe they’ll actually give a care about how they sound.
Then again, maybe not.
[QUICKTIP] Voice Echo Canyon
Which is worse to you: Nazis or Lindens? →
So part of the search system overhaul will be where you will have the ability to filter (important word here: “filter” is not the same as “censor” as many detractors of this project will proclaim)…
“Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Public...”
– via Virtual Worlds News
[I still am amazed how many are getting grants (not loans) that rank in the thousands upon thousands of dollars, all to play in Second Life and other virtual worlds under the pretense of a “study”. I think I need to study “How drama affects people in...
Penis Is a Naughty Word! (Not.)
Linden Lab is restructuring the search engine and it is still a hefty work-in-progress. But people keep forgetting that and treat what they see as the finished product.
Their reactions cause me to think they will begin having cardiac arrest and aneurisms or something.
C’mon people, get a clue!
Here is my response to a short burp by Moni Duettmann at her blog called “Real Life...
Concerning Computer-screen Font-smoothing
Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.
Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.
via Joel on Software
My...
“Europe’s top antitrust regulator said in a statement released overnight that it...”
– via Macworld
I’ll bet you a dime to a dollar the “remedy” will be a requirement to bundle a CD ROM that includes Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Chrome at a minimum.
/me snickers
I love to hate to love to hate Microsoft, but there is way too much Government...
End User: Mac Pro... Gamers? - The EVGA GTX 285... →
Stunning.
Simply. Stunning.
torley:
Wow, I wouldn’t have expected this. I wonder how it stacks up to the Radeon 4870 on Mac Pro? Watch the video demo, it’s pretty funny.