General News

Second Life Bits and Pieces 2014-15

by

I posted about Tateru’s marketing post and gave my opinion on why it has changed so much in: Dwell On It: Marketing. Next I see Honour posting about Contrast & Diversity in Second Life. She points to the bias being taught in Mississippi and the ignorance of a woman (girl?) thinking she could only get pregnant if both she and her lover climaxed at the same time. I think both of those show a lack of education… at very different levels.

Honour also has a good post up on changing the appearance of water for photos in Second Life™. See: Playing With Water in Second Life.

Machinmatrix.org, the maker of AvaStar, has a list of their contest winners up: The winners of the Week (29-Mar – 4-Apr 2014). 

Read more

Drax Files Radio Hour #13

by
Drax Files Radio
Drax Files Radio

 Another show is out and I have time to listen and write about it. Ciaran and Daniel both have written about the latest show. I’ll try to add some more information to the topics.

SL Go

This week’s show gets into SL Go and its recent price changes, US$9.95 per month for unlimited use. That is a pretty good deal. SL Go also connects to Steam. So, you can play high-end games on Steam using your tablets and other low end computers.

I think many OnLive users are very happy with the service. I am certainly impressed with it. A number of SL users have commented positively about it too.

Read more

A Little Less Scary, for Second Life

by

Yesterday I posted a link to Gwyneth Llewelyn’s April Fool’s Joke. Today Gwyneth posts that she was in fact joking. See: Yes, yes, it was a prank! She includes more material for our nightmares. But, this time she is putting things in some perspective. I think this article reveals some of the real possibilities ahead and good reasons for them.

Image by: Lelani-Carve, Flickr
Image by: Lelani-Carver, Flickr

For one thing, she points out that Kitely might be a better choice for acquisition. And she points out that Facebook might be better off using OpenSim, as Kitely does, and adding in Intel’s DSG framework, which allows a region to handle thousands of concurrent users. The mix of large crowd handling and run-on-demand-scaling is certainly something I imagine the Facebook managers would like. 

Read more

Second Life Bits 2014-14

by

Facebook Photo Blocking – You may remember that Facebook blocked image posting from Second Life™. No real news on this. Oz Linden tells us the changes have been made to comply with what FB said needed to be fixed, but no word is available on when the feature will come back.

Bugs that are Cocao related are causing problems for a significant number of Apple/Mac people. The Firestorm Dev’s and Linden Dev’s have no one to put on these problems. So, on the Mac is side experiencing lots of pain and it looks like they will for some time. The newer operating systems have fewer problems.

Firestorm has an April 1 thing coming. Expect FS Support to abandon the in-world group for about a week as this spoof works it way through. They are implementing full on Duck & Cover. You have been warned. It will be interesting to see how many people bite.

Read more

Drax Files Radio Show #11: The Road to VR

by

Drax Files Radio Show #11: The Road to VR. This audio is interesting in that 40+/- minutes are an interview with Ben Lang, who is doing the Road To VR blog, link the article near 20 minute index marker. I found it insightful and Ben

As always this synopsis is what I heard. Before reacting to anything written here, take the time to listen to the original audio of the show.

Time marks are approximate, but they should get you into the audio before the subject’s starting point.

Virtualizer
Virtualizer

Jo Yardley has her Oculus Rift. Yay! We should get some interesting reports from her. I suspect there will be some stuff that is NDA by the Linden Oculus Rift project, but hopefully she’ll still be able to tell us some of what the Lab is doing.

Read more