Posts

Well, the teleporter bug in the client is still unfixed (don’t we love it all?), how to work around it, was explained by Torley Linden in the knowledge base. Simple: press Ctrl-Alt-V, then you’ve got the button back again.

But well, not everybody reads the knowledge base or spreads the word around, many are still complaining about this unfixed bug. Some are trying to make money with it, selling their own teleportation tools right now.

How about fixing the bug or spreading the word to render this device unnecessary, again? This would be great, don’t you agree?

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.

Ok, this has got nothing to do really with SL, but it was too funny to bypass, so here is the Mad TV parody: Apple introducing the iRack!

It’s nowadays not funny anymore to do business or events in Second Life. The rule of the thumb is: the more people are online the same time, the more instable and slower the grid becomes. We had an event yesterday in the garden, the sim is able to hold 40-42 people at the same time. The owner even requested a reset of the sim one hour before the whole thing started.

And what happened: About 30 minutes after the event started, the sim was full, the whole sim crashed. We were lucky it crashed only one time, though, other sims have been reported to crash several times on Saturday while being full, e.g. for a wedding.

So, what are the consequences you should make? Well, it’s obvious, though SL is an excellent platform, that it has got major scaling problems at the moment. So, if you really want to do events in it or make serious business or teaching, better find dates where not so much people are online, to get a better experience of the grid. It’s probable that when there are many people online that the grid is going to behave strange and has hiccups, again, and this is getting worse day by day at the moment.

…since Plastic Duck’s real life identity seems to be revealed by himself, if now Prokofy Neva is going to sue him for stalking. Well, we’re going to see…

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.

…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.

The scientific service of the German Federal Parliament has published a small whitepaper (just two pages) about what Second Life is in a nutsthell. The PDF is in German only, of course, but if you’re interested, you might want to give it a read.

There’s a new hype in the town called “Web 2.0” hype - it’s being called Twitter. What it is about?

To cite themself:

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

So it’s basically about you telling the rest of the world what you’re doing right now in your pitiful life. Not more or less, period.

Frankly said: why should I care about that rubbish at all? I value my privacy and for sure I am not going to tell the whole Internet what I am doing right now, where it still can be found after years and forever!

For an example, how this might look like, just follow this link. So it’s basically a very stripped down form of a diary with some community features around it. Period. Boooring…

I’ve found more coverage on Croquet in my rss aggregator, especially on the eLearning blog of Tim Wang.

So, some more facts about Croquet are:

• it’s hard to understand at first, it sems. Wang states that it took him months to understand and appreciate the power behind the system.
•  they’ve shifted from SL to Croquet because of the costs and - much,  much more important - you can import models from tools like Blender, 3d Mx or Maya 3d without problems at all into Croquet! That’s quite an important point where SL still lacks greatly, so this is of course a great plus.
• Croque detects other computers around automatically, that run Croquet, too, and seems to be able to link with them
• It allows appliation sharing between different operating systems.
• Builtin video conferencing and communication tools.
• Other things.

BTW, here is an presentation done by Julian Lombardi about Croquet. Looks interesting to me.