Slashdot Mirror

If you're the RIAA that's all you need to sue.

If you're the RIAA or some other Democratic crusader, that's all you need to sue.

There, fixed that for you...

Oh, you didn't know, **AA are solidly Democratic? Then you have not been paying attention...

Snapzilla http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/

There are a few genuinely interesting people in Second Life still, and some of them do genuinely interesting things.
Yes the game is full of total whackjobs and idiots, but people with their heads screwed on straight tend to gravitate
toward / build locations that are simply too boring (to the griefers) to ever be messed with.

Of course, I tend to ruthlessly avoid interaction with players who hide their Real Life identities. That pares the field WAY down, which suits me fine.

I'm a musician in SL. It's really difficult for an artist with a recognizable style to hide his or her identity, and I consider it folly to do so.
I also think it's funny that people are actually concerned about the fact that, whatever the numbers are, X% of the avatars are female and X+Y% of the players are male. When you narrow your interactions down to only those players who are willing to be upfront and honest about their Real Life identities, those things are no longer a subject of consideration, and then you are simply dealing with interesting people, just like any other social networking or what have you.

I found a screenshot over at Snapzilla.

This is what Snapzilla is for. Or an image gallery on http://pics.livejournal.com/shatterstripes/gallery /00006bp6>Livejournal or Blogger or whatever you prefer, or on your own website. Fickr is for photographs, not general image hosting. Screenshots of a video game are not photos - if they were, we'd call them that.

Of course there's always Snapzilla, which was made for exactly this purpose.

I have a paid-for flickr "Pro" account, I wonder if this affects them too? Doesn't really matter though, as I rarely use it anyway.

So why don't people use Photobucket or Snapfish or Snapzilla or VillagePhotos or Zoto or TinyPic or SmugMug or Greatest Journal or...

My personal favorite DeviantArt?

There's not much of a story here except that if you commit to one hosting service, you run the risk of them being complete jerks with your content choice.

If I'd known about all this, I'd have signed up months ago.

This is not a scam.
Second Life is just like the web, but wrapped in a pretty 3D virtual world - it is primarily a place where you can create and host content for others to enjoy (and purchase).
Land is a metaphor for server space. The money you pay is for the server resources. There is a finite amount of them per server (65536 sq.m.)and if you want, you can even buy your own server. Some people own more than one! Even major RL corporations are starting to hit SL - if you're a student, or unemployed, you could get yourself a real job!
Artist? Programmer? Just plain bored? Join Second Life - I've been there for over two years and will never look back.
You can build just about anything out of simple geometric shapes and make it come alive with a powerful, yet simple scripting language that uses C/Java style syntax and an event-driven paradigm.
Check out the language reference and see for yourself!
Second Life even includes a full fledged physics engine called Havok, which is rapidly becoming the industry standard.
It is truly a geek's dream come true, and no one on SLASHDOT of all places should dare criticize it - we have a whole section devoted to LEGO and SL is at the very least LEGO on steroids :)
Heaps of screenshots

Callum Linden and I are the two developers at Linden Lab working on Mozilla embedding. Some details:

Why bother? We want to allow people running Second Life full-screen to access our web site. Right now, if you want to bid on a piece of virtual land, or read the scripting language wiki, you have to either run in a window or switch out to your browser. That sucks, so we're fixing it.

The second goal is to get to third-party web sites. I want to trade SL currency on Gaming Open Market while staying in-world. Our internal scripting language supports e-mail into and out of the world, as well as XML-RPC. Lots of people have used this to build cool web sites that tie into the virtual world. See the postcards on Snapzilla postcards and the Second Life del.icio.us tag for examples. Getting these connected into the world would be a big win.

Why Mozilla? Could there be any other choice? :-) Our competitor There.com uses Internet Explorer to do their internal web browsing, but they only support PCs. We love open source tools and use LGPL stuff extensively in both server and client. Plus, we need support for Win32, Mac and Linux.

Working with the Mozilla codebase has been interesting. It's huge, and very complex. But I'm proud to say we've found and fixed a couple bugs in Mozilla, and contributed the changes back to the Mozilla folks. I'm looking forward to Firefox 1.1 and the potential for the new Cairo/OpenGL rendering subsystem -- that may really help with embedding for 3D worlds.

So despite the linked description, Callum and I are working on getting an interactive 2D browser working first. Web pages on the surfaces of 3D objects may not ship in the next version (1.7). It'll ship as soon as it's done.

As an aside, if any of the Mozilla developers are reading this, we could use some help with embedding, specifically how to post mouse-click events into an embedded instance, please send me mail.

Cheers,

James