It's probably worth pointing out that although the SL platform itself is not a game, it does host many resident-created games within it's architecture.
Since residents can use a scripting language to program the behavior of the 3D objects in SL, they have taken advantage of this to build a variety of games. In fact, I think there is currently a game developer competition going on at the moment.
There is no official cash value for the Second Life currency (L$). You can't buy more L$ from the company that runs SL, and they will not buy back your L$ for US$.
Exchanges between L$ and US$ is done between residents (usually via third party websites), and the value fluctuates with supply and demand. See Gaming Open Market for an example of how the currency is exchanged as a commodity.
The amount of L$ in the SL economy is fixed via a specific formula and is not affected by these third-party currency exchanges.
If you're referring to SL, you only pay a monthly fee if you want to be a landowner. Otherwise, you can pay US$10 one-time charge for a Basic account, which doesn't expire or recur (landowners pay the server costs).
Currently your inventory is unlimited, so not having land isn't that big of a deal unless you want to open a store or build something you wish to persist. There are sandbox regions for people who don't own land who want to build things and store them in their inventories. And of course you can always make friends with someone who owns land and ask them permission to persist something on their land.
As far as owning land, it only gets expensive if you can't control yourself and keep feeling the need to acquire more and more land. You can go anywhere from 512m^2 for $10/month to full 65536m^2 server regions for US$200/month each.
Honestly though, there's a lot to do in SL without having to own land. Most people buy land just to plant a house down, which seems like a waste to me (why build something traditional to Real Life in a virtual world?).
In fact, there's hardly any reason to own land unless you really feel the need to -- you can even rent land with the in-game currency if you want to set up a vending machine for selling the items you create.
SL is neat, and worth checking out if you have a fast computer and broadband. It's having some scalability problems right now, so it can be a bit slow during peak hour, but I think anyone geeky enough to be reading this site would probably at least find SL somewhat nifty (ie scripting objects in 3d multiuser environment) and worth checking out.
I took Provigil for a few months, and it did seem to significantly help with my excessive daytime sleepyness, but it wasn't a miracle drug like they make it out to be. I was still feeling the urge for a nap at 2-4pm every day, but it was a lot less overwhelming.
I seriously doubt it would work well for 40 hours for most people. It did a reasonable job of masking the more overwhelming compulsion to sleep, but I still felt tired and I could still clearly feel the physical fatigue from my body; it was as if gravity had increased and my body was being weighed down, even when I didn't mentally feel that tired (an unusual sensation at first, since both usually coincide).
I will admit I didn't experience very many side effects. The only significant side effect I had with it was that it made a mild burning sensation in my sinuses, sort of like the feeling I get in my sinuses if I've been out in cold weather for an hour. This was mildly annoying and usually went away after I took a nap.
I stopped taking it after a few months because it seemed to become less effective over time. I still took it on occasion (ie when I had to drive a long distance). I noticed that even if I was getting a reasonable amount of sleep and took it on just one occasion, I would have to pay for it by sleeping more than usual the following days (even much more than the balance of lost sleep).
It is a remarkable drug in what it does, especially as it seems to have few side effects, but it's not as perfect as most of the hype makes it out to be. Sure, it may allow some soldiers to stay up for 40 hours with only 8 hours of sleep, but I'd bet they weren't feeling in top shape in the latter half of their sleep deprivation.
I like this part in the first "CSS Technique" they list:
#centercontent {
background:#fff;
margin-left: 199px;
margin-right:199px;
border:1px solid #000;/* IE5x PC mis-implements the box model. Because of that we sometimes have to perform a little CSS trickery to get pixel-perfect display across browsers. The following bit of code was proposed by Tantek Celik, and it preys upon a CSS parsing bug in IE5x PC that will prematurly close a style rule when it runs into the string "\"}\"". After that string appears in a rule, then, we can override previously set attribute values and only browsers without the parse bug will recognize the new values. So any of the name-value pairs above this comment that we need to override for browsers with correct box-model implementations will be listed below.
We use the voice-family property because it is likely to be used very infrequently, and where it is used it will be set on the body tag. So the second voice-family value of "inherit" will override our bogus "\"}\"" value and allow the proper value to cascade down from the body tag.
The style rule immediately following this rule offers another chance for CSS2 aware browsers to pick up the values meant for correct box-model implementations. It uses a CSS2 selector that will be ignored by IE5x PC.
If the solution to a simple but inelegant system (plain old HTML tables) is to switch to a more complex, ugly, inelegant system (CSS kludges that exploit parser bugs), I think I'll stick to the simpler, more practical system for now, thanks.
Q: What's the difference between a dissident and a terrorist?
A: Only your point of view.
Of course no such pernicious ambiguity could possibly ever occur from someone who served under the righteous moral guidance of the current leader of the United States, or could it?
Excerpt:
The [teacher's] union mobilized its forces for John F. Kerry in the 2004 presidential race, and its objections to Bush's education law prompted Rod Paige, the former secretary of education, to call the NEA a "terrorist organization."
>exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual Um... not really. Yes, nationalism is high, but not as high as when JFK said "Ask not what your country can do for you..." line. Was JFK a Fascist?
Straw man. Presenting this fact does not disprove the point.
>uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition Nope... doesn't happen. I've been threated with violence more by "peace" protestors than I have by any government official.
Another straw man. Presenting your anecdote does not disprove the point.
The Bush team has often prevented members of their politicial opposition from attending their public speeches.
>engages in severe economic and social regimentation Don't see this happening
You do not see RealID as a form of regimentation? That is clearly it's primary intent.
>engages in corporatism This could be a matter of opinion. Libs are screaming that this is the case, and with the airline bailouts, they have a small case, but I'd hardly call this a Bush thing.
Politicial corruption is growing. The corporations have a lot of money. Lobbyists are writing bills. Connect the dots.
Also, as someone who considers themself politically independent, I see both Libs and Bushies engaging in corporatism, though the latter seems to be less subtle about it.
>implements totalitarianism Again, not happening here. Has Bush declared himself emporer when I was not looking?
We will not flip a switch and instantly have totalitarianism. It comes from a snowballing effect of changes. RealID is a big clump of snow that we have now picked up on our downhill tumble.
Show some education.
Ending your post with an ad hominem does not enhance your position as a good critical thinker.
It is home to the rudest, most obnoxious, egocentric, opportunistic, agressive, materialistc scumbags I've ever met. And that only describes the people who *would* give you the time of day.
Heh, I love how some people just don't want to accept that their distant relatives are monkeys; and I would even venture to guess that these same people probably don't like being told that they are literally an animal either.
You are just an insignificant miniscule speck of meat stuck on a tiny round chunk of matter revolving around a small nuclear furnace on the outskirts of a rotating mass of stars buried away in some corner of the vast universe. And so am I, and everyone else reading this.
Get over yourself. Seriously.
I find it ironic that you're telling us the absence of something means it probably did not exist.
But hey, if your fantasies/delusions/hallucinations make you happy, that's great. Go and be happy. But realize that some of us don't want to be "saved" by you or your kind. I am among those who believe that basing my reality on fantasy and fiction would be much like your "hell".
I was denied any opportunity to attend RPG nights with the few friends I did have because my parents felt it was some kind of deviant behavior (due to some local news story about satanists playing RPGs or something).
Being a geek, this kinda shut off one of the best socializing opportunities I had. I was often invited to games by people at school, but I always had to turn them down. So I spent most of my younger days entertaining myself with solitary things like computers, electronics, LEGO, etc.
I figure this is probably why I don't socialize well these days, and have quite a difficult time dealing with people in general, even others in the INTx personality genre.
I think this also impeded development of some subconscious social skills that 90% of the population take for granted; for example, I often feel like I have to simulate social behaviors (i.e. consciously having to make eye contact, insert small talk, or interpret body language, etc) instead of them coming naturally to me as they appear to for most others.
I think RPGs are an excellent way to expand your kid's creativity and socializing skills. If I were a parent, I'd strongly encourage this kind of entertainmet, which is probably a lot more constructive than most forms of entertainment that are thrown at kids these days... =P
When reading a press release like this, it seems to be a common slip of the imagination to first assume a projected hologram instead of just a clever 2D trick.
It's not the reader's fault sometimes though. Marketing departments need to stop calling this kind of technology a "3D display" becuase it is not. They are a 2D display which do some fancy tricks to create the illusion of 3D within it's display perimiter.
And we are misled even further by bad examples. The images at the bottom of the page on the Toshiba site are not demonstrative of the technology being announced becuase they show 3D surfaces extending outside the perimiter of the display component, which is impossible unless you're projecting an actual hologram outside the surface of the display.
With this technology, the ray of light coming to your eye has to come from the display component, so it would be impossible to have something floating above it as is demonstrated in these pictures at the bottom of the page.
The images at the top of that page however are quite possible, since none of the 3d surfaces extend beyond the perimiter of the display.
The problem with these displays is that you won't get the 3D effect from an wide viewing angle because it will be ruined as soon as the "projected" 3D object hits the display's edge and tries to go outside of it. The more "depth" you add, the more likely this problem is to arise.
It's probably a fair guess that whoever made the images at the bottom of that page did not fully understand the technology or felt that a slight bit of misdirection would be harmless and boost the hype. But then again, that's marketing 101. =P
Keep in mind that just because we've reached something of a plateau now doesn't mean a new killer application won't come along tomorrow and blast it to rubble.
If you've never been to Japan before, read up on cultural differences.
Does anyone know of a good and real readup for this topic? Most of what I read seems to have been passed through several layers of political correctness BS while tiptoing around taboo issues.
As someone who is interested in an extended visit there sometime in the not-too-distant future, I'd like to find something which gives a real perspective of the differences, not a glossy tourist guide version of them.
Maybe that's why they don't do it? If they did, probably more people would use the trimmed down URL to avoid the annoying ads. Eventually they'd have to add more advertisments to the trimmed down version, and we'd be right back where we started.
I remember when it was called Futuresplash Animator, and it actually had contextual menu controls that would actually let you stop the damned animation completely, and in all cases.
I've been wondering for some time, what will be the implications of battery technology becoming portable, cheap, and powerful by another couple orders of magnitude?
How long would it be before people start using "super batteries" to swipe energy from external A/C outlets that are ubiquitous everywhere?
Imagine people who swipe energy from a motel and then use it to power their home for a month.
Sounds like an interesting minor sub-topic for a science-fiction novel (if it's not already).
I don't know if many people have this problem, but I absolutely can not read text in a web page if there's something moving anywhere near the text.
This has made me furious with flash ads that contain elements that cannot be stopped even if you un-check "loop" and "play", or the ones which use an aspect of flash which can disable the context menu altogether.
I've since found a fairly effective flash blocker which lets me quickly toggle flash on and off (for the times when I do want to use it), however it's irritating to me that macromedia is making it more and more difficult for us to control the plugin to stop the animation if that is our preference.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably worth pointing out that although the SL platform itself is not a game, it does host many resident-created games within it's architecture.
Since residents can use a scripting language to program the behavior of the 3D objects in SL, they have taken advantage of this to build a variety of games. In fact, I think there is currently a game developer competition going on at the moment.
There is no official cash value for the Second Life currency (L$). You can't buy more L$ from the company that runs SL, and they will not buy back your L$ for US$.
Exchanges between L$ and US$ is done between residents (usually via third party websites), and the value fluctuates with supply and demand. See Gaming Open Market for an example of how the currency is exchanged as a commodity.
The amount of L$ in the SL economy is fixed via a specific formula and is not affected by these third-party currency exchanges.
If you're referring to SL, you only pay a monthly fee if you want to be a landowner. Otherwise, you can pay US$10 one-time charge for a Basic account, which doesn't expire or recur (landowners pay the server costs).
Currently your inventory is unlimited, so not having land isn't that big of a deal unless you want to open a store or build something you wish to persist. There are sandbox regions for people who don't own land who want to build things and store them in their inventories. And of course you can always make friends with someone who owns land and ask them permission to persist something on their land.
As far as owning land, it only gets expensive if you can't control yourself and keep feeling the need to acquire more and more land. You can go anywhere from 512m^2 for $10/month to full 65536m^2 server regions for US$200/month each.
Honestly though, there's a lot to do in SL without having to own land. Most people buy land just to plant a house down, which seems like a waste to me (why build something traditional to Real Life in a virtual world?).
In fact, there's hardly any reason to own land unless you really feel the need to -- you can even rent land with the in-game currency if you want to set up a vending machine for selling the items you create.
SL is neat, and worth checking out if you have a fast computer and broadband. It's having some scalability problems right now, so it can be a bit slow during peak hour, but I think anyone geeky enough to be reading this site would probably at least find SL somewhat nifty (ie scripting objects in 3d multiuser environment) and worth checking out.
I have to agree with the over-hype of this drug.
I took Provigil for a few months, and it did seem to significantly help with my excessive daytime sleepyness, but it wasn't a miracle drug like they make it out to be. I was still feeling the urge for a nap at 2-4pm every day, but it was a lot less overwhelming.
I seriously doubt it would work well for 40 hours for most people. It did a reasonable job of masking the more overwhelming compulsion to sleep, but I still felt tired and I could still clearly feel the physical fatigue from my body; it was as if gravity had increased and my body was being weighed down, even when I didn't mentally feel that tired (an unusual sensation at first, since both usually coincide).
I will admit I didn't experience very many side effects. The only significant side effect I had with it was that it made a mild burning sensation in my sinuses, sort of like the feeling I get in my sinuses if I've been out in cold weather for an hour. This was mildly annoying and usually went away after I took a nap.
I stopped taking it after a few months because it seemed to become less effective over time. I still took it on occasion (ie when I had to drive a long distance). I noticed that even if I was getting a reasonable amount of sleep and took it on just one occasion, I would have to pay for it by sleeping more than usual the following days (even much more than the balance of lost sleep).
It is a remarkable drug in what it does, especially as it seems to have few side effects, but it's not as perfect as most of the hype makes it out to be. Sure, it may allow some soldiers to stay up for 40 hours with only 8 hours of sleep, but I'd bet they weren't feeling in top shape in the latter half of their sleep deprivation.
Snoring can also be related to Sleep Apnea.
If someone you know is overweight, tired all the time, and snores excessively, they may have Sleep Apnea.
If the solution to a simple but inelegant system (plain old HTML tables) is to switch to a more complex, ugly, inelegant system (CSS kludges that exploit parser bugs), I think I'll stick to the simpler, more practical system for now, thanks.
Of course no such pernicious ambiguity could possibly ever occur from someone who served under the righteous moral guidance of the current leader of the United States, or could it?
Excerpt:
>exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual
Um... not really. Yes, nationalism is high, but not as high as when JFK said "Ask not what your country can do for you..." line. Was JFK a Fascist?
Straw man. Presenting this fact does not disprove the point.
>uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition
Nope... doesn't happen. I've been threated with violence more by "peace" protestors than I have by any government official.
Another straw man. Presenting your anecdote does not disprove the point.
The Bush team has often prevented members of their politicial opposition from attending their public speeches.
Here are modern techniques of propaganda. This one is especially well themed to the current sub-topic.
>engages in severe economic and social regimentation
Don't see this happening
You do not see RealID as a form of regimentation? That is clearly it's primary intent.
>engages in corporatism
This could be a matter of opinion. Libs are screaming that this is the case, and with the airline bailouts, they have a small case, but I'd hardly call this a Bush thing.
Politicial corruption is growing. The corporations have a lot of money. Lobbyists are writing bills. Connect the dots.
Also, as someone who considers themself politically independent, I see both Libs and Bushies engaging in corporatism, though the latter seems to be less subtle about it.
>implements totalitarianism
Again, not happening here. Has Bush declared himself emporer when I was not looking?
We will not flip a switch and instantly have totalitarianism. It comes from a snowballing effect of changes. RealID is a big clump of snow that we have now picked up on our downhill tumble.
Show some education.
Ending your post with an ad hominem does not enhance your position as a good critical thinker.
Like this?
I used to live in Boca Raton.
It is home to the rudest, most obnoxious, egocentric, opportunistic, agressive, materialistc scumbags I've ever met. And that only describes the people who *would* give you the time of day.
Heh, I love how some people just don't want to accept that their distant relatives are monkeys; and I would even venture to guess that these same people probably don't like being told that they are literally an animal either.
You are just an insignificant miniscule speck of meat stuck on a tiny round chunk of matter revolving around a small nuclear furnace on the outskirts of a rotating mass of stars buried away in some corner of the vast universe. And so am I, and everyone else reading this.
Get over yourself. Seriously.
I find it ironic that you're telling us the absence of something means it probably did not exist.
But hey, if your fantasies/delusions/hallucinations make you happy, that's great. Go and be happy. But realize that some of us don't want to be "saved" by you or your kind. I am among those who believe that basing my reality on fantasy and fiction would be much like your "hell".
As Viggo Mortensen said about America commenting on parallels between war in Iraq and LOTR, "We are the evil guys".
A more apt movie comparison is Star Wars.
I was denied any opportunity to attend RPG nights with the few friends I did have because my parents felt it was some kind of deviant behavior (due to some local news story about satanists playing RPGs or something).
Being a geek, this kinda shut off one of the best socializing opportunities I had. I was often invited to games by people at school, but I always had to turn them down. So I spent most of my younger days entertaining myself with solitary things like computers, electronics, LEGO, etc.
I figure this is probably why I don't socialize well these days, and have quite a difficult time dealing with people in general, even others in the INTx personality genre.
I think this also impeded development of some subconscious social skills that 90% of the population take for granted; for example, I often feel like I have to simulate social behaviors (i.e. consciously having to make eye contact, insert small talk, or interpret body language, etc) instead of them coming naturally to me as they appear to for most others.
I think RPGs are an excellent way to expand your kid's creativity and socializing skills. If I were a parent, I'd strongly encourage this kind of entertainmet, which is probably a lot more constructive than most forms of entertainment that are thrown at kids these days... =P
that aren't subject to hijacking or spyware
Hmm I read this a little too fast and accidently merged the two words into "spyjacking".
I'm surprised this word only has 2 hits on Google. =)
We're not talking holograms here
When reading a press release like this, it seems to be a common slip of the imagination to first assume a projected hologram instead of just a clever 2D trick.
It's not the reader's fault sometimes though. Marketing departments need to stop calling this kind of technology a "3D display" becuase it is not. They are a 2D display which do some fancy tricks to create the illusion of 3D within it's display perimiter.
And we are misled even further by bad examples. The images at the bottom of the page on the Toshiba site are not demonstrative of the technology being announced becuase they show 3D surfaces extending outside the perimiter of the display component, which is impossible unless you're projecting an actual hologram outside the surface of the display.
With this technology, the ray of light coming to your eye has to come from the display component, so it would be impossible to have something floating above it as is demonstrated in these pictures at the bottom of the page.
The images at the top of that page however are quite possible, since none of the 3d surfaces extend beyond the perimiter of the display.
The problem with these displays is that you won't get the 3D effect from an wide viewing angle because it will be ruined as soon as the "projected" 3D object hits the display's edge and tries to go outside of it. The more "depth" you add, the more likely this problem is to arise.
It's probably a fair guess that whoever made the images at the bottom of that page did not fully understand the technology or felt that a slight bit of misdirection would be harmless and boost the hype. But then again, that's marketing 101. =P
Keep in mind that just because we've reached something of a plateau now doesn't mean a new killer application won't come along tomorrow and blast it to rubble.
Maybe they could sell the 18 extra server clusters to Blizzard; they could certianly use them. =/
If you've never been to Japan before, read up on cultural differences.
Does anyone know of a good and real readup for this topic? Most of what I read seems to have been passed through several layers of political correctness BS while tiptoing around taboo issues.
As someone who is interested in an extended visit there sometime in the not-too-distant future, I'd like to find something which gives a real perspective of the differences, not a glossy tourist guide version of them.
Maybe that's why they don't do it? If they did, probably more people would use the trimmed down URL to avoid the annoying ads. Eventually they'd have to add more advertisments to the trimmed down version, and we'd be right back where we started.
Heh. Here's one: Arista Optical Digital Audio Cable
Is there any point to having 24k gold-plated contacts on an optical cable other than 'bling' factor?
Another great site for Doomsday scenarios is Exit Mundi.
They also address this particular genre of doom: http://www.exitmundi.nl/vacuum.htm
If Dell shiped AMD procs.. Intel would die overnight.
Probably not happening anytime soon...
February 23, 2005 19:08:32 (ET)
UPDATE 2-Dell decides against building AMD-based computers
I remember when it was called Futuresplash Animator, and it actually had contextual menu controls that would actually let you stop the damned animation completely, and in all cases.
I've been wondering for some time, what will be the implications of battery technology becoming portable, cheap, and powerful by another couple orders of magnitude?
How long would it be before people start using "super batteries" to swipe energy from external A/C outlets that are ubiquitous everywhere?
Imagine people who swipe energy from a motel and then use it to power their home for a month.
Sounds like an interesting minor sub-topic for a science-fiction novel (if it's not already).
I don't know if many people have this problem, but I absolutely can not read text in a web page if there's something moving anywhere near the text.
This has made me furious with flash ads that contain elements that cannot be stopped even if you un-check "loop" and "play", or the ones which use an aspect of flash which can disable the context menu altogether.
I've since found a fairly effective flash blocker which lets me quickly toggle flash on and off (for the times when I do want to use it), however it's irritating to me that macromedia is making it more and more difficult for us to control the plugin to stop the animation if that is our preference.