Kategorie: General

Pham Neutra is asking in one of his blog post what’s so outstanding about Second Life that so many people are criticizing it right now. He only knows one another thing where the discussion about it is equally emotionally heated – nuclear plants.

Well, so why are so many people criticizing it? Because it’s new, it’s hip to criticize it, they don’t have a clue. Just take a look at earlier things like Rock’n’Roll, Skateboards, whatever – when they first became mainstream, many criticized them, there’s a thick, red line of such debates in history. Period.

The Second Life Herald is running an article about Plastic Duck’s job inquiry at LL and how the CEO responded. Well, beside the obvious commentary from Prokofy Neva (gna… if he’s so horrible, just shut up and sue him!) it’s a rather heated debate.

Well, from the point of view of Lindenlabs Plastic Duck must be somewhat hard to come by. He’s caused much trouble all over, but also seems to be a very good programmer who knows, what he’s doing. But would it be wise to hire him from LLs point of view, if he really wanted to join LL? I guess not. Therefore it seems he’s done too much in the past to be accepted by the community. Period.

Gentle reader, you always wanted to know from which URL the music is streaming into a hip location, but the owner of it is sitting on this like a secret and using network sniffers like Wireshark is beyond your capabilities? Fear no more! I’ve got the solution right for you, it’s plain and simple in your standard client, just a view fingertips away!

So, this is inspired by a post of Torley Linden about the still outstanding teleporting issues and what to do against them, since this is know to be buggy since quite a time.

So, the first step you should do is simple – just press Ctrl+Alt+V. This gives you access to menu entries in the client, which are normally available to Linden Lab employees only. It’s safe, since those are not going to work for you anyway, but this step is crucial.

The second step is simple: just go to the location, of which you want to know the stream URL, open the „About Land“ dialogue and go to the media tab. The stream URL is now going to be displayed to you no matter if you are the land owner or not. That’s it, it’s so simple.

And as a demonstration how this might look is here an in game snapshow of the stream URL of Phat Cat’s; the most vital part is grayed out by myself in this screenshot, since I don’t want to spoil the URL here. But trust me, it works, give it a try, if you’re interested in.

Mario Sixtus, a well known German freelancing journalist, wrote a very critical article about Second Life and the hype around it in his blog. Translated it’s called somewhat like „My ultimately last words about Second Life“.

His message is basically this: modern web platforms have reached today an abstract level, that constantly refuses to be compared with RL equivalencies. Journalists actually have to learn something new if they want to write about those services.

On the other side there’s Second Life: nice, colorful pictures, you can actually show nice movies of the world in your articles, no need anymore to show boring sequences with someone just hacking onto his keyboard, and, oh, look, how convenient, it’s all about sex, so let’s write about it! Ah, a millionaire already? Let’s write about it!

It’s also no wonder, according to Sixtus, that the industry is hailing SL as it’s saviour, since old strategies did not work very well in the WWW and you actually have to learn something new.

In Second Life it’s just like in the good old times[tm]: making ads, opening branches, having nice launches and so on and on… and even better, this time you’ve got the press on YOUR side! Amazing!

Sixtus‘ conclusion is: Second Life is not the internet, it’s a biotop, a bubble for people who fear the future.  So it’s target group is for people who still think in terms of the old century; it’s basically the past, but not the future.

…like the CTO of Lindenlabs who dreams of an infrastructure that can support 10 millions of concurrent logins or like the CEO of Lindenlabs who dreams of 1.5 billion people online in Second Life or virtual worlds (the statement is in the current Avastar) but at the moment I and most other people would be very glad already when SL would scale better when more than 30.000 people are online at the same time.

This seems to be the magic number at the moment after which SL goes haywire.