Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Hamlet Au writes about the competition that Project Sansar® will be facing. It is an opinion piece. See: Project Sansar Faces Heavy Competition from Major 3D Platforms & Needs “Something Special” to Survive.
A point brought up in the article which I had not thought of is the Linden Lab ToS (Terms of Service). If the same ToS is used for Project Sansar that is in place for Second Life™, some think it could render Project Sansar DOA.
Hypergrid Business has an article up about the rumor that a free VR Gear head set comes with the preorder purchase of a Galaxy S7. The headsets go for US$100.
See: Rumor: Free Gear VR with Galaxy S7?
Maria sends us to 9 to 5 Google for details.
As expected, there are no server updates this week, probably next week. My home region has not been restarted since 2/2/2016, two full weeks. The region seems to be working OK. The server stats shown in the Viewer Statistics Panel all look good.
Not much visibly happening with viewers. But, we may see a viewer promoted this week.
I’ve been using the Linden, Firestorm, and Catznip (R10) viewers recently. I have less problems and better performance with Catznip. That is not a test result. I haven’t done organized testing. But, my subjective experience is Catznip is behaving better right now.
I do see texture thrashing when using Catznip… less of that with Firestorm. It takes some time to get there, generally over an hour for me.
In 1915 Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted there would be measurable gravity waves. One hundred years later they have been detected. This opens the door to new ways of studying gravity and the universe.
Quoiting news releases:
The gravitational waves were detected on Sept. 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (9:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA.
My first question is what’s a LIGO? (lī•gō)We know what a laser is, a device that produces collimated, monochromatic, and synchronized light, synchronized with itself. The meaning is each light wave is in step with all its sister waves, all waves are the same length, and all are going in the same direction, parallel. (Reference)
“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
Thomas Huxley
Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.
Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.
You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.