Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Linden Lab has just added a new flock of non-human avatars to SL. See: July Update
These avatars and vehicles are in your Library folder in your inventory, now. They will soon appear in the Basic Mode viewer.
They Lindens are saying chat lag has been greatly reduced. I haven’t heard of any new technical details since my last update on the subject. So, I’m assuming it is just old news making it to the forum.
No server updates last week. No Mesh meeting this week. So, I went down to the Hair Fair. That was an expensive adventure. But, the prices are amazing and most vendors are contributing 50% of the cost to Wigs for Kids, a worthy cause. Stop by and donate even if you don’t buy anything.
The Hair Fair is popular. Lots of people are going. Especially as they learn about the prices. So, getting in can be a problem, lots of server full messages. There is a way around that problem. Open the World Map and search for Iridium. You’ll see four regions that are obviously related; Osmium, Rhodium, Iridium, and Platinum. Find one of those areas with the fewest people and TP in there. Any area with less than 45 people will probably let you in.
A recent article tells about Google+ users getting unlimited image storage on Google’s Picasa. See: Thanks to Google Plus, Picasa Gets Unlimited Storage for Photos & Videos, Also Better Tagging. I have used Picasa and it is pretty nice. Most of my use there has been for work. I may add it to my play accounts.
Of course how can anyone be someone without a Facebook page? See: Google Plus…the Facebook Page. Personally, I think this is funny.
Another article tells about someone finding code for games in the Google+ framework. See: Games, Questions & Shared Circles: Google Plus’s Next Big Features Discovered in its Code? So, I guess that tells us Google is going to make an improved clone of Facebook.
This week saw the Mono2 update roll out to the main grid. This update has cycled through the testing process for weeks. Many were looking forward to its roll. Things did not go as well as expected. The problem, new fixes and coming fixes are discussed below.
The Mono2 roll out revealed a structural problem in the testing cycle. The percent of homestead regions in the release channels was too small to catch a problem in this upgrade. Hours after the Tuesday roll out the Lindens knew they had a problem. By noon Tuesday they knew the problem was big. None of the homestead regions were working well. By Wednesday morning they realized the scope of the problem.
The general knowledge is that there are no invites to Google+ available. ReadWriteWeb.com is saying differently.
There is a way to invite people with Gmail addresses into Google+. Marshall Kirkpatrick invited 500 people in 20 minutes. Wow!
So, how does one do it? It seems you share something with someone by their email address. There is a time limit, only so many per hour or day or something. Everything was so vague I tracked down the source; a Jennifer 8. Here is her post.
I would love an invite from someone… 🙂 hint hint
nalates DOT u AT gmail DOT com
Subtle huh?
WARNING: As of this morning (7/1) Google has a note up that the service is overloaded. New signups are stalled. They say this will change soon.
An alternative viewpoint from Gwyneth Llewelyn’s tweat, Note to Google: Microsoft Had the Right Idea
Today the Open Simulator group announced the formation of Overte Foundation, a 501c(3) entity that allows tax free donations from the USA. The foundation will hold the rights to the code that makes up the simulator, the server side of many virtual worlds. It appears the main purpose is to clean up licensing issues and head off future problems. But, what does this do for the OpenSim user? To understand we need to know a bit about the Open Simulator Project and what is changing.
One change is a uniform license is being created for those contributing code to the project labeled; Contributor’s License Agreement (CLA). Quoting the Foundation, “Under this agreement, each OpenSimulator developer, including the core developers, will continue to retain copyright over their code but will also grant an explicit copyright license over their contributions to the Overte Foundation.”
The current licensing is BSD, which does not require an author to state they have all necessary rights to contribute code to the Open Simulator Project. The CLA changes that. Nor does BSD grant a right to distribute the code to an explicit entity. The new licensing will deal with that too.