Nalates' Things & Stuff

Windows 8 Hands On

2012/12/14 by Nalates Urriah

Yesterday I was helping a friend with a new Windows 8 Laptop. Best Buy had an awesome deal for two days, about 70% off. Yay!

The previous laptop died and we recovered the hard disk and put it into an external drive case. All I needed to do was move the files over and get MS Office installed.

Since I had heard the Metro interface could be turned off, I started looking for how to turn it off. Plus there are a number of programs that purport to do it for you. One is supposed to let you switch back and forth. Well… they don’t work and Microsoft has removed the ability to turn off Metro.

Improving Second Life Player Retention

2012/12/132012/12/13 by Nalates Urriah

Penny Patton writes thoughtful articles on various aspects of Second Life™. Penny is the one that got me motivated to make a better and more proportional and to scale avatar and she has inspired me to write a few articles. She is currently writing about some of the challenges in Second Life retaining users.

Penny Patton's Latest — Penny Patton’s Latest

The first article is: A Critical Look at Second Life – Part 1 “Presentation”, which I’ll summarize. Read her article to get the full sense of her thoughts.

Player Retention

Penny questions something I seldom think about, why do people leave Second Life? I tend to look for what keeps people in SL. The difference is in whether one looks for things to do more of or things to do less of to keep people interested. Looking at both is a good thing. Whatever, Penny decided to take a ‘comprehensive’ look at the reasons people leave.

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#SL News Week 50

2012/12/12 by Nalates Urriah

Once again, there is no roll out to the main channel. Bugs in the release candidate channels prevented a promotion.

Blue Steel & Le Tigre

These channels will get the same package as last week, but with fixes for the found bugs.

Magnum

This channel get a slightly different package. It is the same package as is running on Blue Steel with the addition of additional bug fixes, an improved fix for the memory leak fix, and a new feature: longer animations.

In a short article I mentioned the animation change. Animation files were previously limited to 60kb. That limit has been changed server side to 120kb. The change will allow for 60 second animations that are more complicated.

A viewer change is required before we can take advantage of this server side change. No one is sure when the viewer change will hit Dev or Beta viewers.

Just Interesting

2012/12/12 by Nalates Urriah

This will eat up a bunch of time. It is the second OH! If you didn’t get the hint… ask.

Another Part of the Steam Puzzle

2012/12/12 by Nalates Urriah

We have all heard that SL is coming to Steam. We have some sort of lame reasons for why that is good for Steam and Linden Lab. But, a new thing is coming from Steam. See Erik Kain’s: Why Valve’s ‘Steam Box’ PC-Console Will Be A Game Changer. It seems Steam is introducing its own … Read more

From #SL Griefing to Extortion

2012/12/11 by Nalates Urriah

This article got way longer than I intended. Even after I went back and did a trim pass to reduce the size. But, I did not want to write another piece on griefing that didn’t place a new perspective on the subject. Griefing is advancing and getting more sophisticated and dangerous. I’ve pointed out those dangers and possible defenses. Also, anti-griefers are starting to become self-righteous griefers abusing others in the name of fighting griefers. It is a mess.

In RL we see the same mess with Pro-Life and Pro-Choice people. The idiots on one side kill doctors that perform abortions. The idiots on the other side try to force people with religious objections to pay for abortions. Both are insane and display disregard for their ‘stated’ principals. Getting the rational people on both sides to work it out is the only solution.

In recent months griefing has progressed to include extortion. Extortion is a RL crime. Griefing in Second Life™, particularly in the SL fashion industry, has been a part of the drama of SL. Griefing via extortion is probably only a new-to-some-of-us thing. The old song the Lab does nothing continues and is lame now as it always has been.

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