What is AVASTAR doing?

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If you are an AvaStar user, you paid about US$22 for the program. It was supposed to come with lifetime updates. The developer had no idea what they were promising when they set that financial model. They are finding to stay in business they are going to have to make some changes. They announced those changes a couple of days ago.

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PAGE 319

See: Avastar new Product Definitions

We now have two products; Avastar-1 (Infinite support) & Avastar-2 (Annual renewal). Sounds like AvaStar-1 is the way to go. But, realize that AvaStar-1 is what people have purchased up to this point. It is this product that is sort of coming to an end. 

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Ebbe and Lab Chat

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Canary has a nice summary of the First Lab Chat meeting. See: The Linden Lab Chat summarized in 7 minutes. It is a 5 to 7 minute read. This one is like 2,700 words. At 200 to 250 words per minute that is 11 to 15 minutes read time. Way less than listening to the 90 minutes audio of the meeting.

I put my thoughts at the end, page 4.

Mohana
Mohana

The meet makes it clear, at least to me, that the Lab is working to promote Second Life™. They are spending ad money and actively working to figure out what works best with new users via A/B testing in SL. They say they are making small advances at several levels.

When asked about gateways, Ebbe tells us that the current ‘beta’ (?) gateways are not producing any better results than the Linden Welcome and Learning Islands. We don’t know much about the current gateways. We do know Firestorm has theirs in place. But, some concerns about the current gateway API they can use has stopped them from pulling their promotional trigger. To me that calls into question the importance of a statement that no gateway has outperformed the Linden entry points. 

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Will Love Stop ISIS?

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Canary Beck wrote an article titled Hatred does not cease by hatred – hatred ceases by love. It is about the reaction of France to the attacks by ISIS. I am going to look at the ideas expressed in the article. I disagree with most of the thinking Canary expresses in this article. You can see if you think she or I see things as they are.

I find Canary’s article horribly incomplete. The presuppositions, biases, fallacies, and reality are unlikely to be pointed out by the politically correct. But, I am not PC… so… I’ll give you the other side.

Canary is concerned when world leaders express thoughts like France’s President Hollande did, We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless. One should be worried whenever there is talk of a war, pitiless or otherwise.

But, nowhere does she express a concern about ISIS and their stated goals. But she may not even know what ISIS’ goals are. After all Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, in speaking about the thinking driving ISIS has stated, “We do not even understand the idea.” 

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Who in Second Life has a clue?

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Hamlet posted an odd one… Mid-Week Open Forum: Say Anything About VR, AR or SL. The post is obviously to encourage input from readers and see what’s on people minds, which isn’t odd. At least that’s what I infer from it. The odd part is in the comments. But what are people thinking and saying? And are these people exemplary of who is reading Hamlet?

Jan 2012-Oct 2015 Concurrent Users
Jan 2012-Oct 2015 Concurrent Users

First the comments then I have some push back.

To summarize the comments:

Linda Evans thinks the decline in SL regions is due to Ebbe Altberg… really!?! 

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Ebbe Altberg Interview… another?

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Yes, sort of. Ebbe was on a panel at a get together  (Web Summit) in Dublin, Ireland. The Guardian, a UK news  outlet, lead a panel to discuss what might happen if machines could read and understand our emotions.

Little Prayer [Just last the year]
Little Prayer [Just last the year]
See: Is virtual empathy the ghost in the machine for AI? – Tech Weekly podcast. Jo Yardley points out in her coverage of the discussion that Ebbe comes in about the 17 minute mark. 

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