Second Life and Virtual Worlds
It seems there is a new prototype of the Rift out. I saw the notice on Facebook. It leads to an article about the new features. See: Oculus unveils new Rift prototype. Also, see Engadget’s: Oculus Rift’s latest prototype.
In the picture you’ll notice a Kinect-like position tracking device camera. Not noticeable in the pictures is the change in the display ‘screen’. They have changed over to an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display for less persistence to reduce motion blur.
Recently we have seen a number of people complaining about getting disconnected, repeatedly. No one has determined if it is an SL problem or just problems local to the users being disconnected.
The main release SL Viewer today is: 3.6.12-284506. I expect that to change this week.
The RC viewers are now:
We have more project viewers this week:
There is a huge amount of money at stake in the climate change debate. As warmers and skeptics debate more and more facts and science is revealed. A key factor in the debates come down to whether or not temperature is actually changing. A new citizen driven effort is now underway and help from more citizens is needed.
Frank Lansner is collecting raw data sets of temperature data to compare to data being reported post adjustment. His effort is to collect raw temperature data sets before adjustments are applied. He reports on his current success and failure here: Original Temperatures: Summary.
His preliminary analysis from the data he could obtain shows definite trends in how temperature data is being used and reported. Simply said, any data that would suggest cooling is ignored by most government agencies and government funded universities.
If you have access to historical raw temperature measurement data sets, get in touch with Frank Lansner. Those data sets are needed to find the truth.
If temperature is consistently changing in relation to some human activity, it would be important to know that. Skeptics do not trust those with an agenda to explain why we should give up modern life and our living standards to pay them enormous sums. Government officials tend to live very well at our expense now.
There is an interesting thread over on SLUniverse. Imagin Illyar started Avatar Evolution and posted images of her avatar from 2008 to 2013. It is an interesting progression.
Others have joined in and are doing the same.
Join in: Avatar Evolution
More blogs are noticing that Messages sent from My.SecondLife.com (Direct Messages) are not working. See: Second and Real Life Tidbits 2014. We have no clue from the Lab that the feature will or won’t return at some point.
It should be easy and possible to block non-resident users from using the web site’s message feature. If that is the problem, then I expect to see the feature return. I suspect the problem is how to block and limit residents that are spamming. If that is the problem, we may see the permanent removal of the feature. But, it shouldn’t be all that hard to limit messages sent. So, I have hope the feature will return.
Honour has a post Protecting My Second Life From the Tricksters with some great images of a Japanese-themed sim: Yokai. Honour is on about the ransom-ware thing called CyrptoLocker. A piece of malware that has been prevalent in Europe for some time and that came to the USA in late 2013. To learn more about it see: Virus Warning. This is a devious bit of malware best protected against by a good backup strategy with the backups being separated from your computer. If the CryptoLocker Trojan can find a file on your system, usb and network drives included, it will encrypt them.
It is early in the year and not much is happening at Linden Lab. I see the SL-blogosphere covering all sorts of things. Even the Subscrib-O-matic’s seem to be sending out old stuff. So, I’m skimming news and watching for anything interesting in between playing with Blender and Avastar. A few of the things I think are interesting:
Inara has a post up about Profile feeds direct messaging: Lab confirms “turned off”. If you have used the web site My.SecondLife.com to send IM’s, you won’t be able to do that anymore. Peter Gray of Linden Lab confirmed to Inara the feature has been turned off due to spammers.
Honour Mcmillan has posted and article asking for volunteers to help with her primary focus in of creating and growing a corps of LEA Volunteers. For details and the type of volunteers needed see: Calling for Volunteers in Second Life.