New 270 nVidia Driver
NVIDIA has released a new driver that marks the change to version 270 (270.61 actual release). They are making lots of great claims for the driver. Like a 13% speed improvement for single video card systems.
Photobucket has been down a couple of days now. Apparently it was down a couple of weeks ago. E-Bay users are pissed. Tinypic is also down and I understand it is owned by Photobucket. Photobucket went down some time last night. It’s been down all day so far.
You can see which pictures I host in my blog and which I host from Photobucket. I may have to rethink where I host images.
What happened is unknown. I know the notices say maintenance. But, when I noticed that Photobucket was down there were no ‘maintenance’ notices. I got 404’s or time outs. That is not the behavior of an orderly maintenance shutdown. All we can do is speculate.
Yay! I came back up! 4/13 about 5:30 PM PST.
Ok… its out. Here is a preview of the coming physics for Second Life avatars. The new system will include:
[youtube rt-zIMaMD24]
Notice they show the control menus near the end of the almost 3 minute video.
In July 2010 Phillip Linden (Phillip Rosedale – CEO Linden Lab) announced that the Burning Man celebration in SL would be handled by a resident run group rather than Linden Lab. Ok. Now 6 months later I get news that I can visit Burn 2. A friends LM sent to Deep Hole and I didn’t believe that was the main Burn 2 location. So, I chase down a Landmark to get me there, which is not the easiest of tasks, thanks to the broken search in series 2 viewers. You can find it in Destinations… grumble gumble… But, my friend’s link was the right one.
The Burn 2: Burnal Equinox ends at 10 PM March 27, 2011.
Burn 2: Burnal Equinox
This is not the SL Burn event you are used to. It was a frustrating trip for me. Part of that frustration was caused by me. Using the Firestorm Preview #2 (a pre-alpha version viewer) was probably not a good idea… taking pictures was a nightmare. That takes 15 to 60 seconds and drives the viewer into ‘Not Responding.’ Also I cannot fly in the region (not a viewer issue, fly is off in the region). Grrrr. But it isn’t that bad because the area is small and doesn’t take that long to walk through. The FS Preview #2 gave me lots of problems.
New Virtual Worlds - Jibe via Reaction Grid - Browser Based
In October and November (2010) Second Life was testing browser based viewers… or saying, replacing the viewer with your browser, may be more accurate. See: Second Life in a Browser. Today New World Notes has an article (Jibe, a Unity/Web-Based Virtual World from ReactionGrid) about another Linden Lab alumni opening a new virtual world. This world is a Reaction Grid world and uses a browser in place of the specialized viewer we normally use.
While all the stuff about RedZone has been bad enough, now we find out that the misuse of the database is even worse. A group of crackers penetrated the ISellSL web site and databases. They have revealed what they found in the database and web site.
Not only were user ID’s being associated with IP addresses, the software was working to crack people passwords… not just the bad guy copyboters passwords, but the RedZone customers too.
Read through the details on the Alphaville Harold in the article: zf Redzone Security Breached – SL Passwords Compromised?
If you have not changed your password in some time, it may now be time.
You have probably heard, the SL Blogs, Forum, Knowledge Base, and Answers are open for posting. The new community system integrates them, which is supposedly better than the previous system.
Torley has a spiffy looking new tutorial on the new system of Blogs, Forum, Knowledge Base, and Answers. See: Torley’s Welcome to the New Second Life Community Platform
To set your avatar picture in the new system, you’ll want to watch the new tutorial. The information is at about the 5 minute mark. Not exactly fun and easy… but not too bad.
If you use a reader (RSS Subscription), you need to create new subscriptions.
General Discussion seems to be missing in action. The new Answers section has this: Is there a place for general discussions here? – Not much help. The General Discussion (GD) section of the previous forum was a topic of many threads. Many felt it should be removed. It was sort of like having a miscellainous section in filing, which creates filing problems. Whatever the case, it appears the GD section of the forums is gone.
SL's Numbakulla Closing
Darn.
Numbakulla is closing. It opened in July 2005. A long run for a Second Life game.
Numbakulla is a Myst Style puzzle region, a game like Myst or Uru Live. The Myst series of games includes Riven, Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation, and Myst V: End of Ages. Uru Live (MMOG) was a spin off and is now revived for the third time and free to play. Numbakulla is the same style.
I understand Numbakulla will remain open through next weekend, then poof. It will be gone. We may see a reincarnation on an OpenSim grid. We can hope…
Sniff, sniff… 🙁