Category Archives: General Computer Stuff

Internet News 2014-27

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Every so often I pass along news about the Internet. Mostly US centric. This summer lots of things are stacking up that are mostly never mentioned in the mainstream media.

Stop Drama w/Dramamine

Facebook Guinea Pigs

This week news broke that Facebook experimented on 700,000 of their users without their knowledge. The idea was to see of ‘mood’  is contagious in the digital world. To do that they added either more positive news or negative news to the test subjects’ feed. So, you aren’t just seeing an unedited feed at FB. It can be manipulated.  Continue reading →

Adobe CC 2014 Released

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Today Adobe released an update of their Creative Suite of graphics tools. I never expected to see a large update like this since the start of creative cloud and subscriptions. But, I was wrong there is a new one out.

If you have a product subscription and your Creative Cloud app is not showing the various CC packages with ‘(2014)’ appended, you need to log out of the CC app. The log out is in Preferences_>Account (tab). When you log back in, the new apps will appear.

My downloads this morning were very slow. In addition my computer was slow while the process was ongoing. So, you may want to wait to start your update until late this evening.  Continue reading →

Feedly Down

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Today Feedly, a news aggregator, is down. That means I am out of touch with the world. Here is their announcement:

Denial of service attack

Posted on  by 

2:04am PST – Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.

We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized.

We will update this blog post as soon as we have more information:

Thank you for your understanding,

/Edwin and Seb

The time shown in the post cannot be right. That is probably a time zone error in a server setting.

Oculus Rumors 2014-22

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Engadget originally reported that Samsung was racing with Oculus Rift to market a gaming VR headset first. Now the rumor has shifted. Samsung wants Oculus tech for media display not gaming and is apparently willing to give Oculus first priority on their high-definition display screens.

This seems to make lots of sense as Oculus was/is having a problem getting parts. Enough so that they delayed the release of the Oculus Rift DK2.

For more details see Road to VR: News Bits: Samsung Partners with Oculus on New ‘Media Focussed’ VR Headset?

Scale for VR?

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In Second Life™ we talk about scale. Some of us are big on getting people and things to RL scales in our virtual world (VW). I’m a fan and I’ve written several articles about building to scale. Now people interested in Virtual Reality (VR) are thinking about scale at entirely new levels. The site Road to VR has an article up about how the fashion industry may use VR to allow people to model RL clothes in VR prior to purchase.

Second Life Fashion

Second Life Fashion

Imagine you could specify your avatar based on your RL shape… that could be a good or bad thing. :/ But, the fashion industry is thinking of using the idea to allow us to try on clothes in VR and decide if we like the fit. I suppose if it fits then we can order it and an Amazon drone will deliver it. Well, it is a dream at the moment. But, an Australian company has a proof of concept demo out for the Oculus Rift.

The idea is also to get away from sizes. Ladies know that sizes from various designers vary, often varying as a way to attempt to flatter the female ego. ‘Oh, I can wear a size 2…’ Personally the miss sizing for psychological advertizing just annoys me.  Continue reading →

Second Life Bits 2014-19

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Servers

There are no roll outs this week.

Viewers

The main viewer remains: 3.7.6-289164

RC Viewers

No changes since the last report.

Bit of News

Jo Yardely posts about Ebbe’s saying new avatars are coming. Originally he said they would arrive in March. It looks like they will get released this month now. So, we will have more ‘Library Starter Avatars.’ This will make it easier for new users to not look so noobie.

That of course assumes they don’t walk around nude flashing everyone. (face palm)

  Continue reading →

Oculus Rift – Funny Ouch

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There are great possibilities for the experience provided by the Oculus Rift (OR). But, the talk about using it with augmented reality tasks may be premature. Watch the funny video that has now started showing up everywhere.

This does look like a DK1 lash-up. I would expect the OR’s ability to improve with time and probably has in the newer DK2. But, somewhere there is a physical limit to how fast information can be moved, processed, and displayed.

In computers the CPU speed limit is about 8.429 GHz, the current Guinness World Record held by AMD. For consumers the limit is around 3 GHz. Parallel processing via multiple processors increases power demand and consumption to get things done faster. Battery technology is currently deficient for what we need in mobile devices. Thus the larger format phones somewhat from the need to accommodate larger batteries.

So, this is probably going to be a matter of figuring out how to do things smarter. The video shows the state of things now, which while exciting is not yet ready for prime time in AR applications. But, may be this year…

Google+ Second Thoughts

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Google+

Indigo Mertel has supplied me with links that are a counterpoint to the Tech Crunch article on Google+ Walking Dead. So, I was asking myself if Tech Crunch had blown it or not and I by piling on. So, this morning I started looking at various articles written about Google+ (G+) in recent days.

Forbes has an article out on both the Tech Crunch claims and what Google is saying. See: Is Google+ Really Walking Dead? The article dose not really answer the question its title asks. But, they too point out that G+ is failing to compete with Facebook, which seems to be general knowledge uncontested by Google.

The article does point out the value G+ has for those doing SEO work (Search Engine Optimization). Everyone wants placement in the research results. Of course Google’s challenge is in keeping people interested in buying their advertising. To do that they must keep people searching via Google. That means providing good results for your searches. G+ has significant advantages for those wanting search placement and for those trying to find things.  Continue reading →