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Here is an interesting read about the average power consumption of an avatar per anno (German only).

When you take in count the about 4000 servers used for running the grid, the computers used to control the avatars and coolant systems in the data center of LL one avatar consumed about ca. 1752 KWh per anno. The average power consumption of an inhabitant from Brazil seems to be 1884 KWh.

So what should we do with these measures? Nick at them, it is an interesting number, but meaningless all the way for all other except LL, who has to pay the energy bill for its datacenters.

He’re is a funny quote from there:

There are three kinds of death in this world. There’s heart death, there’s brain death, and there’s being off the network. – Guy Almes

Well, not only means being off the network “death” to an avatar, but also lost money, if someone wants to do business, of course!

After the Copybot-incident (another article from the Washington Post about it) there was one project many blamed actually for this: Libsecondlife. Many people would have liked that this project would be shut down, perhaps even forcefully, or at least that Linden Labs is not endorsing it anymore. But nothing like that has happened. Why?

Well first: because SL is here to stay. Second main reason: many big and not so big companies are entering SL to make their business in, too, or at least to market their RL business. And here starts the problem.

Many RL companies have experiences in standard industry 3d tools like Maya, Poser, AutoCAD and so on. But you cannot use any of them to build anything in SL, since the client or just SL itself lacks a defined interface for 3rd party applications.

Enter here: libsecondlife. The people there have made deep efforts to reverse engineer the protocol used in SL to create such an API. Even if companies want to extend their programs in a way to work with SL directly don’t use libsecondlife they can use it as base for their own efforts. The protocol of SL is documented in the source code of libsecondlife, more or less.

Right now we had a massive griefer attack at the garden. First some avatar named Mxxx Ax came to me and asked me what I am looking for. I askes him: “why?” He told me on an instant message, that he is a pimp and wants to sell me the services of his whores for about 10 L$. I told hime: “Fine, thank you, but my girlfriend would mind.” Then this moron said something like “Well, than I must cage you” and began caging all people in the entrance of the garden. Another friend of his, named C.H. came in, too, and helped him.

Here is some transcript of it, anyway:

Mxxx Ax: barth You: hi mxxx. Mxxx Ax: what do u play this game for sex? You: Why do you ask?

[15:33] Mxxx Ax: cause im a pimp and im selling hoe’s if u want sex i can sell u a gurl for 10L$ [15:33] Bartholomew Gallacher: no, thanks, my girlfriend would really min. [15:33] Bartholomew Gallacher: +d

[Mehr]

There seems to be a new blog in town: Official EuroSLCC 2007 Blog. Welcome!

I’ve stumbled across some interesting blog posts and magazine entries about doing business in Second Life. Here they are:

• Going pro in SL. Aimee Weber discusses the topic of turning your passion into your profession, what to expect and how to do it. Very interesting read. Also some comments are very interesting, but some advises are just sooo obvious. For example, write an invoice. If someone wants to become a pro and does not think about that - ouch. Or “put your pants on” - double ouch. You can sum up all advises under a single rule - be on good behaviour and if you want to be a pro in SL, than SL == RL. And, of course, you are not going to have much time after this step to play at all nor is it a fast way to become rich or a guaranteed source for a steady income. So better be sure!
• Another big content builder, doing custom builds: Millions of us. They have links to some interesting articles, an own blug and other stuff, worth a read.
• “Second Life Lessons” from the Business Week. It’s basically about how a real life company could enter the universe of SL and what they should consider if they have no experience and knowledge about SL at all and about some possibilites only SL offers to the customers.
• “Hot to Get a Second Life”, also from the Business Week. Some rules and advises what you should do before you setup a shop in SL. Also a very interesting read.

In the infamous Heise Forums there is a humorous post about the advantages (and disadvantages) of 1st Life! The author praises the perfect framerate, that dates feel much more realistic and so on. A very funny read, it is available here, in German only. For a rough translation in English just try this.

I wish you a Happy New Year and that your wishes for 2007 do come true!

Personally, my own start in 2007 was very sad. A very good friend and neighbor of mine, 86 years old, died at 0:30 am in hospital today. He was there for a little bit more than one week, he went into hospital before christmas and the last time I saw him was at Thursday. He was sleeping and not well, so I just took a look into his room and went away quietly.

He would have had his 60th marriage anniversary in about one more month. If you take a look at this, most emotions and stuff in SL seem so hollow compared to that.

A funny joke found in the profile of Top Tank:

How many Linden Lab employees does it take to change a light bulb?

[scroll down] Answer: Please, everyone, be patient, we’re doing the best we can, it’s not fun for us either, check the blog for updates, and in the mean time, here’s our Torley with “10 Super Fun Things To Do in the Dark!”

Sadly there’s much truth in it.

Many people think that a game like Second Life is better than real life. They are wrong and right at the same time.

They are right, because you just can go away if someone bothers you.

But they are also wrong, because people are people and ever the same. And in SL many people are on a even more rude behaviour than in RL because of the (false) anonymity  an avatar gives you. Many are trying to do things in SL, which they would never do in RL. This is part of the charms of the game and of course not bad, but there always some people who cross the line, then. And this is bad.