Second Life: Stipend Delay

Premium Stipends Delayed by Status Linden on ‎2016-07-12 08:56 AM [Posted 8:55 AM PDT, 12 July 2016] We are aware that not all premium members received their weekly stipends. We are currently investigating this issue. Please keep an eye on this [the Linden-SL Grid Status] blog for further updates. Reference

Graphics Cards and VR

The site Road to VR has an article about Nvidia and the changes they are making to improve VR performance and that tech moving into game engines. See: Unreal Engine and Unity to get NVIDIA’s New VR Rendering Tech.

Waiting for my ship
Waiting for my ship

Until recently video cards were given geometry (the mesh world), lights, and a camera position and they rendered an image. As the camera moved the geometry was reloaded shaded and rendered again with mesh and lights in relation to the camera. (Which is technically saying it backward. Consider the camera fixed and to change the view we move the world. Think of your computer screen as the camera. It sits on your desk never moving. Everything displayed on it moves. Thus the reason for reloading geometry.) 

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Free Speech Attacks

This past week has seen more and more attacks on free speech and civil rights than any time I can remember. I don’t see where anyone is actually tabulating the frequency or even the number of attacks. So, I can’t provide hard data to prove an increase. But, there is no doubt there are attacks and they are legion.

We expect attacks on or systematic elimination of citizen speech in Communist countries. But, I find it amazing Socialists are gaining support as they attack rights and Progressives are joining in…

Hate Speech is Free Speech
Hate Speech is Free Speech

Germany

Free Speech Under Attack

As our report shows, curbs on free speech have grown tighter. Without the contest of ideas, the world is timid and ignorant.

In all areas of life, free debate sorts good ideas from bad ones. Science cannot develop unless old certainties are queried. Taboos are the enemy of understanding. When China’s government orders economists to offer optimistic forecasts, it guarantees that its own policymaking will be ill-informed. When American social-science faculties hire only left-wing professors, their research deserves to be taken less seriously.

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Second Life VR Door Closed?

No Oculus Rift
No Oculus Rift

Oz Linden has spoken. See Oculus Rift – CV1 Support.

 ‎2016-07-07 12:14 PM

Thank you for experimenting with our Oculus Rift Project Viewer and offering your feedback. Unfortunately, the Project Viewer that we recently made available didn’t meet our standards for quality, and so we’ve now removed it from the Alternate Viewers page.

By definition, Project Viewers aren’t ready for primetime. The purpose of these experimental Viewers is to share with you the earliest possible version of what we’re working on, so that you can see what we’re up to, help discover problems, and provide feedback. In this case, though, we’re not ready for that, as those of you who tried it have seen.

We can’t say at this point when or even if we may release another Project Viewer for experimenting with the Oculus Rift in SL.

We want to prioritize our development efforts around initiatives that we know will improve the virtual world and bring more value to SL Residents, and due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience. (In fact, this is one reason why we’re creating Project Sansar a new, separate platform optimized for VR).

We greatly appreciate the interest in trying SL with the Oculus Rift and are grateful that several of you took the time to try the Project Viewer. We regret that the quality was not up to our standards, and we will of course keep the community posted if we release a new Project Viewer for VR in the future.

Jo Yardley caught the post and published it on her site. Many of us are disappointed. But… 

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