SpaceX Unveiling Dragon Mark II

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The US government under the direction of Pres. Obama gave up developing spaceships. This is an endeavor that has been pursued by private free market enterprise. Thanks to Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin suggesting the US use trampolines to get to the International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX is unveiling their new ship tonight (May 29) at 7 PM PDT.

This is a ship that can carry 7 astronauts or some mix of astronauts and cargo. Watch the announcement/unveiling here: Livestream.

For images of SpaceX’s current ships and rendering of planned future ships see: First look at Dragon V2: The first manned spaceship by SpaceX (Updating).

 

Scale for VR?

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In Second Life™ we talk about scale. Some of us are big on getting people and things to RL scales in our virtual world (VW). I’m a fan and I’ve written several articles about building to scale. Now people interested in Virtual Reality (VR) are thinking about scale at entirely new levels. The site Road to VR has an article up about how the fashion industry may use VR to allow people to model RL clothes in VR prior to purchase.

Second Life Fashion
Second Life Fashion

Imagine you could specify your avatar based on your RL shape… that could be a good or bad thing. :/ But, the fashion industry is thinking of using the idea to allow us to try on clothes in VR and decide if we like the fit. I suppose if it fits then we can order it and an Amazon drone will deliver it. Well, it is a dream at the moment. But, an Australian company has a proof of concept demo out for the Oculus Rift.

The idea is also to get away from sizes. Ladies know that sizes from various designers vary, often varying as a way to attempt to flatter the female ego. ‘Oh, I can wear a size 2…’ Personally the miss sizing for psychological advertizing just annoys me. 

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1920’s Berlin Birthday

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Jo Yardley has a post up reminding us this coming May 30 will be the fifth anniversary of her 1920’s Berlin project. See: The 1920s Berlin Project celebrates its 5th anniversary!

For the Open Door Day (May 29 – Thursday) Jo is saying that any attire will be permitted in Berlin. So, if you have put off visiting because you play as a furry, other non-human, or just do not have 1920’s era clothes then this is your opportunity to visit.

Also, on Open Door Day you will find Open House signs on some areas that are normally private. This means places we cannot normally visit will be open.

See the full schedule of events on Jo’s site here: 1920’s Berlin Project.

Visit 1920’s Berlin (SLURL) – Remember. Any day other than May 29 requires conforming to the region dress code; human only and 1920’s attire… and that is  not the Roaring 1920’s styles I think most Americans associate with the era. There are free clothes and retail shops with era clothes at the landing point outside the main project area.

 

Second Life News 2014-22

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Yesterday afternoon at 3:25 PM PDT Linden Lab posted to the Grid Status page that a previously planned service outage would be scheduled for this Wednesday. From 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM, so as you read this, the work is complete and an all clear was posted at 6:51AM.

During that time various backend services were offline and logins were offline. You can see the break in the graph of concurrent  users.

Graph via etitsup.com - 2014-05-28
Graph via etitsup.com – 2014-05-28

Presumably this was the outage planned for last Thursday, before Tuesday’s problem when the login servers ran out of assignable user numbers. (I am guessing that fix is still in progress, but there is no official statement.) If this is the rescheduled outage then some hardware change was being made to some of the many components of the various databases.

While the Lindens think there may be some small improvement in performance they also suspect it will be small and probably not noticeable. I call these types of gains ‘stop watch’ gains, because they are smaller than we normally can notice unaided.

Second Life Bits and News 2014-22

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The Memorial Day holiday is over in the United States. I’m back and staff is back to work at the Lab.

Content UG 2014-21
Content UG 2014-21

Servers

This week there are no server rollouts.

I’ve seen a couple of comments about unusually intense griefing. But, I haven’t seen it happening in my travels, but SL is a big place. I know there are some places that get lots of attention from griefers. Other regions like mine seem to seldom see a griefer.

I do get noobies coming from a landing hub that get trapped in my house and can’t figure out how to get out. It is sort of like having flies in the house… they fly around bumping into the walls.

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Second Life Materials Scripting 2014-21

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What we can do to automate materials is limited by the lack of script functions to change materials. The legacy materials have scripting functions. Those however only change the older material properties. There is no script control for normal and specular maps.

Simon Linden is working on LSL functions for materials normal and specular maps. Maestro Linden has been testing them. This week (21) Simon did not see them ready for any testing in ADITI. But, that they have been working on them and playing with them is great news. 

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