Second Life Bits and Pieces 2014-15

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)

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Firestorm: A Joke… Not So Much

Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

 The Firestorm Viewer Team is thinking. Their recent April Fool’s Joke about the Dynamic User Interface (DUI), the detachable control panels, has been the goal of many developers for some time. Now Firestorm Team member Nicky Dasmijn has built a proof of concept version of the viewer with those detachable panels. In this version window and panel layouts can be saved for later use.

There is no release version of this viewer, beta or otherwise. But the team is releasing the code some other developers can work on the project. The Firestorm Team is hoping the code will inspire developers to come up with new innovations for the Second Life viewer.

See the official announcement here: The real joke… DUI is no joke!

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Second Life Money Exchange

In August of 2009 I wrote an article on the Linden Currency Exchange for Second Life™. See: XStreetSL Currency Exchange Tutorial and Second Life Currency Exchange Extended. Back then things were a bit different. There was competition in the Second Life money market. The US government has ended that. Now, Linden Lab is the keeper of L$ and the only company officially converting L$ to RL currencies. There are black markets in Lindens and there is a reason they are called black markets.

Buy Sell Orders 2014-15
Buy Sell Orders 2014-15

What has not changed is people not understanding currency or currency markets. Someone in the Answers section of the SL Forum was asking why their Sell L$1/US$1 order had  not been completed when other similar orders had been. 

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Second Life News 2014-15

Viewers

The main viewer is  version 3.7.4-288138.

Immersiva Photoshop Night Vision
Immersiva Photoshop Night Vision

This is the version that got the FMODEX fixes that solved a race condition. For the less geeky, a race condition is a common problem in multi-threaded programs. You can think of the threads as separate processes or programs that run at the same time. Once up on a time computers had only one CPU running programs and race conditions were not as common. Now with 2 to 8 cores (CPU’s) built into a single CPU chip the computer can do more than one thing at a time.

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Penny Patton on Land Cost

I like to think I am well informed and think about issues related to the subjects that interest me, Second Life™ being one of them. However, Penny Patton often points out things I completely miss. She has a new article out on land cost and Land Impact costs on tier. It is well worth reading. See: The Cost of Second Life Land vs. The Perception of Value OR Land in SL is Cheap! I took a little liberty with the title.

Image by Penny Patton – Can you find her in both images?

Penny says her avatar is in both images. I found her in the top image. Click, it enlarges. But, have yet to find her in the bottom image. 

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