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nobody remotely sane has or would ever use Mono.

Apparently Linden lab are. Although, I guess the fact their primary core business being a virtual world platform might not seem sane.

So where do you work where coming in with visible bruises regularily is genuinely accepted and not questioned?

Linden Lab

I didn't say they were in *visible* places, mind you. I wouldn't especially worry about it if they were, though. I semi-regularly do show up to work in outfits I would also show up to my local goth club in.

Even consentual abuse is not exactly healthy and could be disturbing to some people.

I'll decide for myself what constitutes 'abuse' and 'healthy', thank you very much.

I've been following a lot of similar stories recently and I don't understand why agencies and institutions wouldn't build on an opensource infrastructure that they can control (e.g., something like openlife)

Linden Labs has experience and resources.

Linden Labs clients include:

British Petroleum
Wells Fargo
NOAA
The government of Ontario
Naval Undersea Warfare Center
CIGNA
Kraft
Unilever
Disney
Northrop Grumman
Kelly Services
Cisco
IBM
Intel
Microsoft
Toshiba
British Telecom
Nokia

Second Life Work

Openlife is in beta and looks it.

As the article mentions Google ended up funding a number of Gaming projects. There are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects for a total of over 40 slots.

The following game projects have been accepted,

• Battle for Wesnoth (projects), a very cool turn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
• BZFlag (projects), the classic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
• Linden Lab (projects), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
• ScummVM (projects), an engine which lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
• Thousand Parsec (projects), a framework for building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
• Tux4Kids (projects), a group of multi-platform open source educational games for children.
• WorldForge (projects), one of the original open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

My own project Thousand Parsec got 8 slots for a number of critical features. One of the coolest is a 3d client, which should make the games much more interesting to look at.

We will also finally have a few more interesting games to actually play, including a clone of Risk in Space and a very interesting game called DroneSec. Finally, we should have some opponents for you to play against as 2 AI clients being developed for our premier RFTS ruleset.

I know I posted roughly this comment in the last GSoC Slashdot announcement but I've been told the information is really useful and some people might have missed it.

On the note about how GSoC effects our project you should take a look at our web stats since we where announced as a GSoC mentor organisation. The increase has been massive!

Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.

The following game projects have been accepted,

• Battle for Wesnoth (ideas), a very cool tu rn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
• BZFlag (ideas), the cla ssic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
• Linden Lab (ideas), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
• ScummVM (ideas), an engine whic h lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
• Thousand Parsec (ideas), a framework fo r building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
• Tux4Kids (ideas), a group of mul ti-platform open source educational games for children.
• WorldForge (ideas), one of the ori ginal open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.

This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).

Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.

One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.

The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a

Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.

The following game projects have been accepted,

• Battle for Wesnoth (ideas), a very cool turn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
• BZFlag (ideas), the classic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
• Linden Lab (ideas), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
• ScummVM (ideas), an engine which lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
• Thousand Parsec (ideas), a framework for building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
• Tux4Kids (ideas), a group of multi-platform open source educational games for children.
• WorldForge (ideas), one of the original open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.

This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).

Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.

One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.

The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a ruleset editor which will make ruleset development significantly easier in the future.

As well, the Open Source Office funded one student in a Summer of Code style outside the program. The student successfully completed the project and we hope the code will soon be rolled out.

Because of the success of our GSoC, our project has actively started to engage with educational instit

....is not an interesting problem to solve.

It's hard to argue that Gates' persistent bullying was anything but good for shareholders for at least the first 13 years of public trading. Even though the stock price has been relatively stagnant for the past few years, revenue and profit growth are proof that the company still has healthy numbers.

However, anyone considering working there needs to ask themselves what they really want to accomplish in life. Looking back, it can't be very fulfilling to say "I helped make that company successful. I fit in, by emulating the bullying, belittling style of my bosses all the way to the top, and now look what we've created!"

There are plenty of companies out there (*cough* [1]) who are trying to be successful while actually also having the kind of environment where you look forward to seeing the people you work with. Having hippy-dippy ideals creates plenty of problems, but they are way more interesting problems than the problems you find at a company like Microsoft.

1. Shameless plug

Also, all online games come with a warning from the ESRB: "Experience may change during online play."

-Aaron

Latency and bandwidth were non-issues. Why? Because the game didn't try to stream graphics or objects; it streamed actions and state changes. Clients had their own local copies of the entire "region" (a map), and their computers ran it, relying only on the action/state change information from the server.

Congratulations, you just described a static, precompiled world, which is what most 3D games are.

SL is not this. In SL, anything can change at any time. This includes the geometry, the sky, the land, textures, colors, particles, sounds, videos, avatars, motions, gestures, etc. There are no precomplied maps in SL. There aren't even any BSP trees to make ultra high frame rates possible. If someone rezzes a 1000-primitive object, it has to stream that geometry to everyone within viewing range as quickly as possible, and then download and apply all of the textures if they aren't already cached.

LL has some *very* bright, technically brilliant people. Don't assume they haven't already tackled the problems you think you can solve so flippantly. In fact, if you really think you are up for the challenge, they are hiring.

The makers of Second Life have taken a very unique approach to player rights with in the game.

In Second life, the content player create, is owned by the player and not the company .This is totally against the grain of most online games where the company owns it all.

Additionally, they have started tying in real currency to the in game currency. I know this not unique, as Project Entropia does the same thing.

I personally hope this is the way games will go--giving ownership of virtual property to the players and allowing them to use it, sell it, convert for real $$$. I find these environments more enjoyable and rewarding that environments like Everquest, where Sony pretty much owns you.

The makers of Second Life have taken a very unique approach to player rights with in the game.

In Second life, the content player create, is owned by the player and not the company .This is totally against the grain of most online games where the company owns it all.

Additionally, they have started tying in real currency to the in game currency. I know this not unique, as Project Entropia does the same thing.

I personally hope this is the way games will go--giving ownership of virtual property to the players and allowing them to use it, sell it, convert for real $$$. I find these environments more enjoyable and rewarding that environments like Everquest, where Sony pretty much owns you.

The makers of Second Life have taken a very unique approach to player rights with in the game.

In Second life, the content player create, is owned by the player and not the company .This is totally against the grain of most online games where the company owns it all.

Additionally, they have started tying in real currency to the in game currency. I know this not unique, as Project Entropia does the same thing.

I personally hope this is the way games will go--giving ownership of virtual property to the players and allowing them to use it, sell it, convert for real $$$. I find these environments more enjoyable and rewarding that environments like Everquest, where Sony pretty much owns you.

Second Life is also available as a Mac Beta. It has pretty steep hardware requirements but runs well.

One aspect of Second Life that seperates it from other virtual worlds such as There and the Sims Online, is the degree to which the "players" are in control of the contents of the world.

Also, items created in Second Life belong to their creators under the Creative Commons liscense.

Second Life Residents To Own Digital Creations

In Second life, the content player create, is owned by the player and not the company .
This is totally against the grain of most online games where the company owns it all.

Additionally, they have started tying in real currency to the in game currency. I know this not unique, as Project Entropia does the same thing.

I personally hope this is the way games will go--giving ownership of virtual property to the players and allowing them to use it, sell it, convert for real $$$. I find these environments more enjoyable and rewarding that environments like Everquest, where Sony pretty much owns you.

In Second life, the content player create, is owned by the player and not the company .
This is totally against the grain of most online games where the company owns it all.

Additionally, they have started tying in real currency to the in game currency. I know this not unique, as Project Entropia does the same thing.

I personally hope this is the way games will go--giving ownership of virtual property to the players and allowing them to use it, sell it, convert for real $$$. I find these environments more enjoyable and rewarding that environments like Everquest, where Sony pretty much owns you.

In Second life, the content player create, is owned by the player and not the company .
This is totally against the grain of most online games where the company owns it all.

Additionally, they have started tying in real currency to the in game currency. I know this not unique, as Project Entropia does the same thing.

I personally hope this is the way games will go--giving ownership of virtual property to the players and allowing them to use it, sell it, convert for real $$$. I find these environments more enjoyable and rewarding that environments like Everquest, where Sony pretty much owns you.

Second Life will initially be available for Windows-based PCs, with Mac and Linux versions following by the end of 2003.

If you're not finding much on "Linden Labs", it's because the company name is "Linden Lab". Yes, even among the beta testers, everyone calls it Linden Labs. Yes, it's a source of much confusion.

For the record, the company URL is lindenlab.com.

by Linden Labs called Second Life is currently in closed beta, but are accepting applications. Your avatar's appearence is fully configurable, you can buy land and build on it, and you can create (3d model) just about any object you can think of and script its behavior using their java-inspired scripting language. Upload texture and sound files to use in objects. It is a great MMOG for techies.