- CNNmoney.com has an interesting interview with John Zdanowski about the Linden Dollar. It’s from the 8th December 2006, but still worth a read.
- Also in CNNmoney.com, from the 10th November 2006 actually: „No, Second Life is not overhyped.“
- Packagingessentials.com – I am linked there as an „expert source“ under the category „3d graphics“, „virtual reality.“ Well. A big welcome to all readers from over there!
- An older report in the German magazine „Focus“ named „Neue Freunde, guter Sex, echtes Geld.“
- More to come next time…
Annoying objects for nobrainers
Don’t we all know it? The famous „Pyramid system“, which brings many people to litter other people’s sims with it in the hope to make some cheap money without much or no effort at all?
Every time I see this type of garbage I want to barf. Some people just need to grow a brain, somewhere, somehow – and very fast, too!
Those types of schemes are not working! Not yesterday, not today, or tomorrow! No, no, never!
The only people making money with it are in the 1st and 2nd level of the pyramid actually, the rest gains nothing. Nothing at all, well, not really true, perhaps they gain anger and want to kick themself in the ass for being so dumb to actually pay money for such kind of rubbish!
If you don’t want to believe it, well, take a very close look to the article about pyramide scheme in the Wikipedia. If you still want to pay money for such a scheme and are not in the 1st or 2nd level of it actually – well, better read it again.
Actually such schemes are a violation of the Terms of Services of Lindenlab. So littering such a thing makes you a receptive for a Abuse Report.
Well, at least the author Disq Hern got the message, he’s not selling these pyramides anymore since the mid of December 2006. You can get now a device for free at his shop, called „Pyramid stopper“, to get rid of this rubbish even when you are not the land owner or tenant of a parcel. Just go and grab it in his shop at Insula Inferi West.
Search changed
As many might have now noticed (or not) – the implementation of the search feature in SL has changed.
According to this article in the SL blog it is now this way:
You may have noticed that Search > Places returns slightly different results after today’s update. Previously if you had a place with a description like “clothingshirtshoes” a search on “shirt” would find that place. Now our searches work more like Google, Yahoo, ect. and will only find full words. Thus “clothing shirt” and “clothing, shirt” will be found, but not “clothingshirt”.
This, to say it simply, hurts business until the word spreads around under the users and still then some might not know how to do it otherwise.
(Yeah, some people would just right now say: LL is to blame for using the „toy database“ MySQL, why have they not used Postgres or $insertyourfavoriteenterpriseRDBMShere from the beginning? Guess what? Stick this statement in your ass, those flamewars bring nothing new…)
Ah, and of course, the inevitable Mr. Prokofy Neva has written an article about it, too, using much more words to get the same message to the people like I did. I’d like to see him as a Rebel without a clue from now on.
Second Life goes Opensource – so what?
Yesterday was one of these days – out of the blue happened one important thing, about that already many rumors spreaded around lately. The client part of Second Life was released under the GPLv2 license, which means: it became opensource.
Well, some expected it sooner or later, because there were already interviews around in which the CEO of Lindenlabs, Philip Rosedale, was very open about it. So now the first step happened. We are going to see, if they are also opening up part of the server side or not. But, and this is the important message: the cat is out of the bag right now and no way to get it back – anymore!
So, the important questions to ask are: why did it happen and what can I, the user, expect from it in the future? What does it mean to me personally?
Home visits and the consequences
Yesterday I visited the new home of my dear friend Lu Stapleton. It’s a very nice and modern house somewhere on the mainland, which is definitely a good fit. She was quite impressed by the work of the builder and for sure is going to recommend him to others.
While I was there, some classic music played on the parcel. She told me that she bought SLTunes, a nice interface for iTunes to set the media URL on the parcel based on the radio station list in iTunes. It was a cheap buy, doesn’t get in the way and gets its job done. A well thought out piece of software, just like all software should be. A tool that doesn’t get in your way!
Well, I was curious, so I used Google to find some information about this tool and stumpled upon the website of the maker, Darius Lehane, named „Darius Lehane’s Second Life.“ Doh!
Ok, the name of my blog isn’t exactly brilliant, either, but I gave the site a try and it was worth it. First, if you want to buy some nice software, you can get some very good things there.
But, more important and fun to read for me, was Mr. Lehane’s „Hall of Shame“. It’s a list of 8 points and listing some of in his opinion bad developments in SL. And guess what? He’s right!
For example he mentions empty malls (even the idea of opening another mall is bad), Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong and other stuff. It’s worth a read!
Well, he also has a short list of three points of „Top Places“ in his opinion, also a very nice read.
And last, but not least, his very interesting article „Guide to Land: How to Own Land and Make Money (or not spend much).“ It has some very good tips you should consider when buying land and tells you in all glorious details why it sometimes could be better to buy land from a land baron, and sometimes it is better to buy on mainland and the differences between these two fundamental choices.