Second Life News 2017 w09

Servers

This week (Tuesday) the main channel is not being updated or restarted. The RC channels are getting an update and that requires a restart.

[Pose with me] Virile
[Pose with me] Virile
Mazidox Linden writes the Deploys announcement even more briefly than Caleb did. Comparing the version number going to each of the three RC channels it appears they are all getting the same package.

The Release Notes list some improvements and a known bug. 

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Second Life: What Viewer Statistics?

If you have ever pressed Ctrl-Shift-1 to reveal the Viewer Statistics panel and wondered what all the stuff means, there is a good explanation of the items in the panel over at the Firestorm Viewer Wiki. See: Firestorm Viewer Statistics. Almost the same information is available in the SL Wiki: Viewer help: Statistics.

Network Transfer Rate Comparison

I think on both sites they have simplified the text for the less techy users. I think that is a bad idea, as the people looking for explanations of how the items in the panel work are likely tech savvy.

The first four items listed on the pages are the source of a lot of confusion; FPS, Bandwidth, Lost Packets, and Ping. So, I’ll provide a bit more information.

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Climate: NASA Temperature Adjustments

For NASA warming is a $2± billion a year business, from a $200 billion a year budget. There has been no government money for any climate study that does not include warming for the last 20 (?) years. The NASA budget is currently being decided by the US House of Representatives. The Senate has had their say passing a NASA bill: S.442.

What should you tell your representative? Spend more? Less? Close NASA Earth Sciences (ES)? Save ES?

You’ll find the information about what the House is doing in the House’s appropriations bill, a continuing measure as Pres. Obama stopped preparing a Federal budget for submission to and approval by Congress as required by US Law years ago. We now stagger from financial crisis to crisis.

A point in deciding what to tell your representative would be to look at the facts of what NASA ES has been doing. Francis Menton has been publishing a series of articles detailing just that. Francis’ latest (14th) article is about how NASA has been adjusting the temperatures from a weather observatory near his home located at Falls Village (Town of Canaan), Connecticut. It is worth reading before deciding.

Second Life: Using YouTube for Media

YouTube is a fun site and offers lots of handy features. When we start to build things in Second Life ™ we run into some challenges. YouTube gives us some help.

Nkechi
Nkechi

See: YouTube Embedded Players and Player Parameters. As you scroll down the page you’ll eventually find the commands to add to a URL to get the video player to do what you want.

There are people that have figured out lots of tricks that can be done with the YouTube player. For instance, see: 10 YouTube URL Tricks You Should Know About.