Metareality Podcast 2013-5

This week Metareality has a new podcast out: New Spaces. There is not a lot of new hard news in the cast, so it is harder to summarize. The discussions Gianna, Qarl, and Drax have touch on many aspects of the topics. I decided to try and get index points to the discussions. But, I’m not going to try to paraphrase them.

Metareality Podcasts
Metareality Podcasts

The following comments on the podcast are my take on what was said.

01:00 – Discussion regarding comments on last week’s podcast topic: Is the Market Place having an effect on land sales. Basically is the Market Place killing off land sales? They don’t think so. The why is interesting but hard summarize. Also the topics blur as asides are used to describe why each thinks as they do.

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Second Life DNS Login Problems – Help!

For some time we have known that some people have been having problems logging into Second Life. The error messages when dug out of the log show DNS problems. Now Monty Linden is looking at the problem. He has posted requesting help in the SL Forum. So, help out folks.

First some explanation: DNS stands for Domain Name System. This is an arrangement of servers across the world that turn ‘domain’ names, like SecondLife.com, into IP Addresses. Just like phone books allow you to look up a name and get a phone number. With the number you can make a call. It is the same with computers. They need that IP Address to make a connection.

Generally your ISP provides you the address of a DNS server. From that server you get all other addresses.

Mac users have had an especially hard time with the problem.

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Second Life Materials Update 2013-5

You may have noticed the RC channel Blue Steel is running the server side of the Materials System update. While there is no Project Viewer available yet, this suggests that it is getting close. What more confidently suggests the nearing release are these screen shots of Materials in use.

Materials System in Action - Normal & Specular - Enlarge
Materials System in Action – Normal & Specular – Enlarge

The above image shows an interesting surface. I think that is a simple cube with a normal map. 

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Second Life News 2013-5 (1)

This is short but exciting… The picks for this week’s rollouts are out. The main channel will get the Region-Crossing package on Tuesday. This package is running on the Blue Steel and Le Tigre RC channels. It has apparently done well in the RC, so it gets promoted.. Unfortunately the Interest List package has not done … Read more

Second Life 2012 Statistics

It is hard to find good statistics on Second Life™ that tells us what is happening. Nor have there been any exciting ‘statistical’ developments this year. So, I haven’t been writing much about them. I did want to summarize them for 2012. It took me some time to get around to it. But, here they are.

User Signup per Day
User Signup per Day

Signups per day tells us something. It is just debatable what exactly. We can’t separate re-signups, those creating Alts, from new users signing up. We can’t even get an idea of how many people may be going for an Alt. My belief is the majority users have at least 1 Alt.

But, we have never known and as far as I can see there is nothing that would have changed the rate of users creating Alts. So, the signup rates are hopefully consistently distorted.

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