Hypergrid Business has an article up about the rumor that a free VR Gear head set comes with the preorder purchase of a Galaxy S7. The headsets go for US$100.
See: Rumor: Free Gear VR with Galaxy S7?
Maria sends us to 9 to 5 Google for details.
Second Life News Week 07
Servers
As expected, there are no server updates this week, probably next week. My home region has not been restarted since 2/2/2016, two full weeks. The region seems to be working OK. The server stats shown in the Viewer Statistics Panel all look good.
Viewers
Not much visibly happening with viewers. But, we may see a viewer promoted this week.
- Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 4.0.2.310660
- Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 4.0.2.310545
- Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 4.0.2.310127
- Second Life Project Bento Viewer version 5.0.0.310099
- Second Life Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296
- Second Life Obsolete Platforms Viewer version 3.7.28.300847 :/
I’ve been using the Linden, Firestorm, and Catznip (R10) viewers recently. I have less problems and better performance with Catznip. That is not a test result. I haven’t done organized testing. But, my subjective experience is Catznip is behaving better right now.
I do see texture thrashing when using Catznip… less of that with Firestorm. It takes some time to get there, generally over an hour for me.
Gravity Waves… Hi?
In 1915 Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted there would be measurable gravity waves. One hundred years later they have been detected. This opens the door to new ways of studying gravity and the universe.
Quoiting news releases:
The gravitational waves were detected on Sept. 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (9:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA.
My first question is what’s a LIGO? (lī•gō)We know what a laser is, a device that produces collimated, monochromatic, and synchronized light, synchronized with itself. The meaning is each light wave is in step with all its sister waves, all waves are the same length, and all are going in the same direction, parallel. (Reference)
Thinking
“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
Thomas Huxley
Firestorm Team Thank You
Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.
Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.
You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.
Photo No Longer Available – Flickr
I follow Dolls and Demons via Feedly. I adore the images Alles Klaar creates for her (I think her not his) blog. Today the article Escaping the Octopus has a Flickr image message rather than the intended image: This photo is no longer available. I was puzzled by its appearance as she is the owner of the blog and Flickr image. So, what happened?
