Gun Confiscation in California

This is a political and controversial topic. Skip it if you cannot handle intellectual debate in a civil manner. – We are hearing from mainstream media that the right wingers’ fears of gun confiscation are unfounded. The mainstream media has for weeks said that could not and would not happen. The proof that gun confiscation is a real threat has come to California. The state legislature has submitted the bills. Read these articles:

There are some things the media is not telling people. Let’s take two of the basic tenants of gun laws. The idea of a 10 round magazine being unnecessary for self defense is common. What people do not consider is that most hand guns have magazines of 10 or more rounds. So, the law effectively makes most hand guns illegal.

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Firestorm Q&A

There is an announcement on the Firestorm blog about a coming Q&A meeting. See: Wednesday Question and Answer Meeting.  

Phoenix Firestorm Support Meeting Auditorium
Phoenix Firestorm Support Meeting Auditorium

The plan is to have Jessica Lyon moderating and developers available for questions. Everyone is welcome. However… the region will only hold 70 people. It is first come first served.

The meeting will be Wednesday February 13, 2013, at 1:00 PM SLT/PST (or 13:00 military time), which seems a bit ominous with all the 13’s. The location is in the region: Phoenix Firestorm Support.

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Second Life News 2013-7

We have had about a week with the new rollouts. There doesn’t seem to be any major problems. Nothing had to roll back. I’m not clear whether the Interest List or the maintenance package will roll to the main channel this week. We’ll see something post later today when the Lindens make a final decision.

This seems so like SL -
This seems so like SL –

Interest List

The bot users have seen a huge drop in the data being delivered to them. Even beyond the amount added with the Interest List bug. Andrew Linden was considering what changes, other than the bug fix, may account for the saving in bandwidth use.  Some of those items are:

  • Removal of the data needed for the old particle clouds.
  • Fewer wind data updates.
  • Improved server side culling.

The whole point of the Interest List update was to improve server side culling, meaning to have the server only send object information for the objects an avatar can see. That has improved.

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Metareality 2013-6

Metareality released a podcast Friday titled: Delusions. The Zanex people are going to love Drax.

Metareality Podcasts
Metareality Podcasts

Again I paraphrase rather than quote. So, listen to the podcast before reacting to anything you read hear.

0:00 – 03:00 Zanex talk… yadda yadda

03:00 – About my blog – I am going to have to have a sex change so I can stalk Drax…

04:25 – Linden Lab told scheduled guest they ONCE AGAIN couldn’t talk on the podcast about …some subject, so they were again a no show. This happened last week too.

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Crazy Fish Test

Ener Hax has a post titled: use fish to test your hardware graphics! With a title like that I had to look. Ener has found a site with a test for graphics processing of HTML5 graphics. It uses fish as a test of hardware handling of HTML5.

HTML is the Hyper Text Markup Language and the ‘5’ indicates the version. I think the HTML5 test gives us an excellent way to compare desktops and mobile devices.

Comparing Performance
Comparing Performance

Your web browser knows how to render HTML. In most cases that means displaying formatted text and pictures along the lines of what one would see in a magazine. HTML had its beginnings in 1980 and the concept originated with Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN back in the day. Tim implemented a browser and server that could display, deliver, and react to HTML. By 1995 the use of HTML was spreading.

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Second Life News 2013-6 (2)

Kelly Linden has been working on fixing some problems with avatar banning from land. Those fixes have rolled out. BUT… there is a problem in the Phoenix Viewer. One can ban an avatar using Phoenix and it appears to be banned. But, that data is not getting to the server. So, the system does not ban the avatar.

The work around is to do bans with a viewer other than Phoenix.

Server-Sim-Scripting 2013-6
Server-Sim-Scripting 2013-6

Whirly Fizzle described it this way: “Oh, re estate bans, Zi Ree, one of the Phoenix/Firestorm developers found a bad bug in Phoenix viewer yesterday which *may* account for some reports of estate bans failing. Phoenix has an estate ban feature called GTFO. If a user bans a resident using this option, the residents name will be added to the estate ban list but the resident doesn’t actually get banned. If anyone sees reports of estate bans being ineffective, please make sure they didn’t ban using Phoenix viewer. I’d so, remove the ban & reban using Viewer 3/Firestorm etc.

Simon Linden noted, “I don’t remember the details, but I believe Kelly did find some cases where he thought bans could be bypassed, or issues when the ban list was full.

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