Second Life and Virtual Worlds
From Second Life’s Third Party Developer’s meeting we learned the Lindens have been thinking about the issues people have filed in regard to how System Damage is working …or not working. They now have a list of Simulator and Viewer changes to support the planned behavior changes:
Oz Linden said little about what is going on with viewers at the July 31 Second Life™ Third Party Developer’s (TPD) meeting. What we do know is:
RC Second Life VMM Viewer version 3.8.2.303891 – A new version came out in week 31. They had little in the way of stats at the time of the meeting. But, so far it was looking good. This will likely be the next viewer promoted, if things continue well… basically baring any catastrophic problems. They seriously want to release it. So much so they did not release a viewer last week when one would normally release. That was done to avoid releasing two versions close together.
At the Second Life™ Third Party Developer’s (TPD) meeting (7/31) Brooke Linden spoke. So, we know as of Friday, all merchants have been migrated to VMM. Only minor problems were encountered. They are working on fixing those. Brooke and Skylar are working with a few merchants that have run into issues from the migration.
The plan moving forward is to shut down MagicBoxes August 17th. On that date MagicBoxes will STOP working. The XStreet market, the current marketplace, will come down on August 27th and they will run solely on VMM.
The blog Mesh Body Addicts is making the news. SL Blogger Support (Canary Beck) has an article about its success, 85,000 page views per month. The article is about blogs that serve a niche. See: How one Second Life blogger niched her blog.
Thinking about the idea of making a niche blog they omit a major point. In a changing world, your niche may, likely will, become passé or vanish altogether. I used to cover viewers in great detail. If a person was considering changing to a new viewer, this was the blog to read before changing. But, with the arrival of Oz Linden and enforcement of the ‘shared experience’ concept the Lab has pretty much taken control of viewer development. The whole field of viewer development changed, at least for what it means to me.
The latest rave on UFO’s is the supposedly massive ship (size of the state of Idaho, USA – which is a WAY ambiguous comparison because of the state’s frying-pan shape) caught in a video of the sun released by NASA from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on July 15, 2015. Note: NASA was not claiming it was a UFO.
On another scientific (tongue in cheek) front a Muslim cleric has discovered Galileo was wrong. The Earth doesn’t orbit the sun.
If you haven’t heard, the Android devices using the Stage Fright media library are vulnerable to hackers. There are reportedly 950 million devices that are vulnerable.
If you are running an Android operating system 2.2 or older, you are safe. Otherwise you will need an update. It is unclear which carriers are pushing the fix to their customers. But, the fix has been sent out by Google.
Anti-virus programs will provide you some protection. But, many require manual updates. So, run your update process.