Second Life and Virtual Worlds
We are seeing articles in various places lamenting how slowly VR is being adopted. It remains expensive and requires a powerful computer. That problem is being worked on.
Intel is developing what they call Project Alloy. It is written about in the article: How Silicon Valley Is Trying to Solve Virtual Reality’s Biggest Problems.
According to SuperData Research people spent US$91,000,000,000 on games. Billion… This is an all-time record. But, they are hyping things a bit. In 2015 Statistica shows $91.5 billion spent and $99.6 billion in 2016. I suppose it depends on where one gets their numbers and categorizes them. Game revenue is notoriously flaky as companies like to hype their increasing sales and keep decreases secret.
Still that is about a 10% increase year-to-year. Eight billion isn’t chump change, unless your spending $10 trillion on credit, like some governments…
They break the revenue down into subcategories. Handheld games are dying. Smartphone games are the hot item. They show the largest growth from 2015 to 2016 and that is expected to continue, which seems reasonable as smartphones are selling well.
In 2005 smartphones sales were just $3.8 billion. Eleven years later in 2016 sales of smart phones was $55 billion, a 1,447% increase. So, as more people get smartphones there are more possible users of smartphone games. According to Statistica a little less than half of the 2016 game revenue was from smartphone gaming.
Today I find a new scam is popping up on the Internet. Basically blackmail, a really old crime. The media is giving it a new name to describe a specific kind of crime: sextortion.
Sextortion is the scam of getting someone into an online sex thing where it can be videoed or pictures taken. This is apparently most prevalent on Facebook. The threat is they will show your kink to your family, friends, and/or business associates.
The Intel HD Graphics 2000 and 4000 series chips have a driver problem. This has been a thorn in my side the last 3 months as clients want it fixed and Intel has yet to resolve the problem, AFAIK (Nov 2016). It is known to be in their driver… or what Microsoft has Windows 10 do with it.
I keep hoping for a fix and update. If not soon, I probably will put cheap video cards in the desktop machines and tell the laptop users they are pretty much screwed until Intel or Microsoft fixes it.
The problems on the MAC/Apple side are bad enough the Lab has been holding up release of a 32-bit version of the MAC viewer.
The latest information I have seen is here (Nov 2016):
I’ve been trough every fix I can find for machines using HD 4000 series video chips. Some machines continue to have problems. Restarts help.
Ever since I updated to Photoshop 2017 I’ve been having trouble finding various tools. Where did Dodge go? And that healing brush?
This video explains how to get them back.
This has made my use of Photoshop much easier.
You may not have noticed your drive filling up with empty folders. They are out of the way in AppData. Adobe products are creating folders as a place to save temporary files, which get deleted. The programs just forget to delete the folders. It is a bug and it has been around for a few months.
See: tempzxpsign…… temporary files filling up TEMP drive
The more you use Adobe the more folders you have.
The basic story is once all the Adobe programs have been closed you can delete all the folders. You’ll find them in: C:\Users\[Windows_Login_ID]\AppData\Local\