Sounds similar to a project I started 6 years ago based on Knoppix, but you've thought it out on a much better level (single-use distro, target beginners). Good stuff.
One point of advice (you probably considered this already): try to promote your project though the 'appliance' software communities. A project like drupal or joomla would give you a lot of exposure to new users, so simply ask if they would co-host their appliance via their site. This gives them another route for new users to try out their project (next to simply download-and-install and online-demo) so a win-win in my book.
How, seriously, is Apple any better than anything else?
Well, Jobs' magical fairy dust is better than anything else.
It's the dust that makes everything worth 3x their normal price, force you to buy a toy made in China even if it means waiting in line for a day and makes you act like you're suffering from rabies if anyone were ever to say anything slightly negative about said toy. You'll even rationalize using the DMCA to limit your own freedom.
I have an iPod. It has been collecting dust for a while now, as I listen to music on my Nokia. I've had a couple of macs but since the Plus/SE time they never have actually been _better_ than a PC. The Jesusphone? Meh.
Apple has their fans. They've been the driving force behind the company since the early days. That's where Apple has been better than everyone else. But for the love of Jobs, I really don't get why.
But why is it there? Why is any of the universes there?
Mu.
Personally I find the idea of an oscillating universe (Big bang -> expansion -> contraction -> Big crunch) to be appealing. At least that's a theory that might be proven given enough time. And then it would be possible to have a universe that creates (and destroys) itself.
Furthermore, science can postulate theories that can't be observed/proven at this time. It doesn't become religion, because there might be a time when these theories can be tested (for example, a breakthrough in physics that allows extra-universe travel). Science theorized about black holes, quantum mechanics and genetics before those theories were provable. Indeed, theories that can't be proven or discarded is one of the means science moves on as it does: because we want to know.
That is the major difference between science and religion: Science offers theories that may or may not be true, after which all those geeks in labcoats get to work and might come up with an answer given enough time. Religion stamps its feet and tries to yell as loud as possible that their theories are the truth, without wanting to see the enormous evidence against their theories.
Besides, when was the last time you saw two nations go to war because they disagreed upon the theory of multiverses?
Surely the first case would have revolved around the attack by the two boys, using the knife, threats and all that. I mean, that's a pretty straightforward criminal act right there without going further to look at the proceeds of crime (data).
They were also charged for the violence, conditional jail-time of 1 and 2 months. Source for the dutchies.
There is a deeper problem with Islam than merely a lack of education or not reading between the lines of the Qur'an.
First, the Qur'an is the direct word of Allah/God. The words came to Muhammad, who wrote it down word by word (at least, so Muslims believe). This in contrast with the old and new testament, which were written by disciples. The difference is slight, but this difference means (according to Islam) that no deviation from the Qur'an is possible. Where Judaism/Christianity are able to interpret their holy books differently, Islam specifically forbids this as theirs is the direct word of God. Changing a single word would be sacrilegious, even translating the Qur'an was considered problematic (for it is no longer the direct word of God after translation).
Thus, a true Muslim will not read between the lines of the Qur'an, for he/she is not allowed to.
A second deeper problem is that Islam is more than just the Qur'an. Scribes/imams have interpreted the Qur'an in certain ways, leading to laws for Islam (Sharia). These are the laws that (in certain regions) prescribe hangings and stoning of (in our eyes) innocents.
The Catch-22 is that (again, in certain areas) these laws are unchangeable without near-unanimous support, but that wanting to change them would lead to persecution. Why? Allah is perfect, thus he wouldn't mislead the imams into making false statements about the word of god. Thus the Sharia must be correct. Over time, the laws have snowballed into something that for a Muslim from the 7th century wouldn't even be recognized as Islam.
Over time (and unlike Judaism/Christianity) Islam has become less moderate. It was indeed quite a liberal religion in the early centuries (at the time) but these two facets of Islam, often overlooked, have lead to a religion that isn't susceptible to change.
Giving the super wealthy more money is not socialism.
This is also called corporatism, ie. fascism.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. [FDR]
I don't see what's so complicated about any of this. It's pure and simple fraud on the most massive of scales.
And here is some NYT contributer who wants to blame computers and the nerds. Sure, blame the scary robotic overlords. The financial collapse can't be the fault of ordinary humans, no sir!
This is just some attention-whoring author trying to use the financial crisis in order to sell more books (even though his book has nothing to do with the crisis). Nothing to see here, please move along.
I'm not doing it till someone open-sources it, so I guess I'd stick to Linden.... I don't want to be bogged down in proprietary lockdowns, thank you very much.
So I can set up my own second life server, using the open sourced SL server code? Oh wait, there isn't any!
With the same reasoning: I can view microsoft.com with Firefox, thus microsoft.com is open source!
I'm going to be working on a project in a short while which will require the use of GTK and twisted together in a sort of network scanner system with asynchronous results.
You don't need threads for this problem. The issue is that you have two main loops (MainLoop/MainContext with GTK/GObject and the twisted reactor), you merely have to make them work together in a single event-driven loop.
Use the iterate call in GObject's MainContext to run a single iteration using twisted's task.coiterate method. This way, twisted runs an iteration of GTK for each iteration twisted does. Read up on both and if you don't figure it out google it. You're probably not the first who ran into this problem.
It is possible to use threads for this problem, but it isn't necessary so long as the designers of both libraries have added a way to join together event loops. It's also a bit more messy, IMHO.
Threads, Lesson 1: Only use threads if there's no other way. Threads, Lesson 2: Remember lesson 1.
However, they also want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results for the original open source project itself, even if done separately, in my free time.
Have you discussed your situation with them?
If you simply note that such a clause isn't acceptable, you would leave the choice to them. You could listen to the/.'ers that aren't in your position about such clauses not being legal, but you are on the receiving end if you decide to ignore the clause after you're done.
Explain to them that you are only willing to work on their project if the clause is removed, that such a clause would make your further work on the open source project impossible and that the nature of open source is that changes are put back into the main project. This is the professional way to work out such issues.
If however they insist, it's up to you to decide how much leverage you might have with them. If you mention that this is a deal-breaker, they might cave in (you are an expert on the project and would do a much better/quicker job than someone new). If they don't I would walk away from the project myself. There will always be other opportunities.
Isn't MS doing exactly as suggested in getting involved with ODF to make the format suitable for use with MS Office?
Nobody argued that MS should hijack the standard. It should be the other way around: Instead of trying to make ODF suitable to MS Office, they should make MS Office work with ODF as it is.
I agree completely with this. If only the FSF used the term "Freedom Software" instead of "Free Software" a lot of misconceptions would have been avoided. It isn't perfect, but it's a lot less ambiguous than both "Free Software" and "Open Source".
(Mind you, there online documentation could be better - PHP's site for example, is so much friendlier).
They're actually hard at work on that problem too. In addition to Python 2.6 being released, the Python documentation is now generated using Sphinx. See for example the new tutorial output. Big WTF the first time I saw it, but it's a decent improvement with more in the pipeline.
If you looked a bit further than the N810, you'd have seen that Nokia offers Python for S60. I've played around with it a bit on my N95 and it works as advertised, the S60-specific modules work great. You even have a shell for hacking python on the go (if you enjoy coding with a mobile phone, which I can't imagine).
Now I'd really like to have the S60 python module work over multiple platforms, I'd love to target both the N8x0 and S60, for instance.
Hell, I'd love not having to rewrite stuff for every new phone on the market, regardless of the programming language. All those different platforms are just making it harder and harder for third-party developers to develop software for any large portion of the smartphone market. But that's a whole different topic.
It's valuable to me to see things like (approx, guesstimated) geographic location of users and the like.
Google could simply store the totals per region (they probably already do so). Anonymization is very much possible for Adwords/Analytics, as users simply get the big picture and not the unique IP addresses of every visitor anyway. I can't see proper anonymity after X months hurting Adwords in its current form.
Perhaps Google wants to keep the whole IP address in order for Adwords-users to target specific groups of users unrelated to their current search queries, but instead take the user history into account (everyone who searched for "dishwasher discount" in the last 7 days, for instance). But even then anonymization wouldn't be a problem after any length of time for advertisers. Google simply doesn't want to throw away data, period.
Once I have a specific idea, what are next steps? Then, in general, what do people do at this stage (and this isn't specifically a software question; it would apply just as well if I thought I had a good design for a new engine or a new type of beer)?
If you have an idea, ask a few friends (with software engineering experience) to join you to the local pub. Simply ask them what they think about it.
What might happen is that they tell you it won't work, will be too costly, nobody will be interested and/or simply not possible. If this is the case, ditch the idea. If you are able to get them interested, you can move to the topic of actually getting a few people to look at this closely and/or make a prototype. If your friends don't have the time, they probably will know a few others who might be interested.
A lot of ideas jumped straight to implementation-phase during the dot-com age, with the results we all know. A lot of dead/defunct sf.net projects exist. Ideas are cheap, good ideas are scarce.
My understanding is they have the LHC linked to universities/research firms/supercomputers all over Europe simply in order to process the massive amount of data that thing generates.
You're correct (I did an internship recently on data management with the LCG/EGEE network). It's a massive multi-tiered network of datacenters (something like 50k nodes, 15PB of dedicated data storage, but don't quote me on these figures), all required to distribute the enormous amounts of data collected in the experiments to the researchers capable of processing the data.
I'm not going to be an ass and piss too much on the work of thousands of others, because it took quite a bit of effort to set this up, but them getting hacked doesn't really surprise me. The architecture they set up (even for only data-distribution) is very complex, and a lot of software they use has been written in-house or has been forked (years ago). Oh, and it's all open source, readily available for whoever looks for it. With the LHC being such a high-profile target, this is IMHO a security nightmare waiting to happen.
In what I've seen, I'm crossing my fingers that this break-in isn't related to the grid network, and that the next few months will go smoothly, but the grid has been primarily designed for high throughput, not security. Sure, they have certificates you need to access the grid systems, the policies are there, but technically I have my doubts.
Re:Offshore platforms, not ships
on
The Google Navy
·
· Score: 1
This was attempted by HavenCo on the Sealand platform. They weren't self-sufficient, but they had a datacenter running (barely).
It sounded like a good idea, but in practice things were a lot more difficult than they imagined. The wikipedia-articles are a great read though, as are the articles referenced.
Interesting how Lindenlabs are trying to foster creativity (as they do seem to think it's important, otherwise they wouldn't have tried this). It's actually a pity SL hasn't gotten very far (I certainly had higher hopes for it), but it's still an interesting experiment to see what works.
Tell me, are your friends like yourself. Are they "traditional hardcore geeks"? SL isn't for you.
Alas, of all my friends I'm the weird little geek. The take-up of social networks is enormous, but SL? Most haven't even heard of it. If SL isn't for geeks, and isn't interesting enough to non-geeks, a question begs: for who is SL?
Second Life is the http to There/IMVU/Actiworlds/VRML's gopher/veronica/archie. SL is the NCSA Mosaic of virtual worlds, primitive and cludgy in certain ways, but still there's nothing that comes close to it. It's the virtual world to beat.
Interesting that you mention VRML, as I think that comes syntactically and conceptually a lot closer to initial HTML than SL does.
The problem here is that, while Mosaic had quite an uptake and was quickly superseded by better browsers, this isn't happening in the case of SL (and it has been around for longer than it took Netscape and later Microsoft to wake up). Why? Because no one cares. Companies are realizing SL is barely more than hype, and users couldn't care less.
MMORPG's have one thing virtual worlds like SL don't have: Users, and plenty of them.
SL - if you build a virtual world, will they come? Barely.
MMORPG's - if you build a captivating game within a virtual world, will they come? Sure as hell.
Maybe user-built MMORPG's are the way. I don't know. We'll see.
What did people do with early websites in the beggining.
At first, they were just boring static pages that were either a horrible marketing attempt. How far has the internet come now that there are things like collaborative Encyclopedia building (Wiki), Google docs, YouTube, Ebay etc.
Wrong. The first websites were very effective at the dissemination of information (for instance at CERN), there was nothing else that came close. Marketing only jumped on the bandwagon at the end of the 90's, which lead to the internet bubble.
Wikipedia, Google docs, YouTube, Ebay, all these examples illustrate what makes the web a great place: it's an ideal medium to disseminate information, by both sides. So my question is this: what does Second Life offer above and beyond IRC/IM and the web that makes sense of the hype? SL is poor when it comes to disseminating information. What is the sell to users? Why should they care?
Also, I wouldn't exactly call IBM a furry or weirdo. Nor would I say that Cisco is either. There are also a growing number of universities colleges using the space.
That's why I mentioned the corporations jumping on the hype. My university has a virtual meeting place in SL. I've been to dozens of IBM presentations about SecondLife (I was an intern there for quite some time). I tried to figure out exactly the same reasons why users would actually want to use SecondLife.
One presentation was about virtualizing servers. A red light above a server would notify administrators if something went wrong. So, what do you expect from your administrators? Sit and watch a virtual datacenter all day? Isn't a simple SMS-notification service a lot more effective, so they can actually do other useful stuff in the meantime?
SL might be useful, but for the vast majority of applications it seems like a solution in search of a problem. Without users. I've already seen a few news articles of companies scraping their SL 'presence' because nobody came along. SL simply isn't worth all the hype.
The thing I try to hint at for most is, look at all the different news articles about 3D virtual worlds in general. How many different categories to they fall into? Economics, scams, porn, politics, social, collaboration, business, marketing, play, serious, military, health care... and more. Something that is looked at in so many different ways has huge potential as a medium.
I can't help but remain skeptical. Maybe it's due to having read too many articles on El Reg, but maybe, just maybe, all those articles about Second Life are just attempts from Linden Labs to keep the hype running? I don't know a single person who has stayed in SL beyond simply trying it out.
3D virtual worlds naturally have a future. Looking at the numbers of users however, that future is with the MMORPG's, not with Second Life and the like.
In what way is a "chatroom" more efficient with regards to multitasking? I'm not sure I get this one. What kinds of things are you thinking of?
Multitasking as a human, not as a computer. I can have an IRC client running in the background while I'm working and get a popup/alert when someone is talking to me. SL, and any other virtual world, assumes you are doing nothing else besides SL. Thus, its use as a background application is limited.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds similar to a project I started 6 years ago based on Knoppix, but you've thought it out on a much better level (single-use distro, target beginners). Good stuff.
One point of advice (you probably considered this already): try to promote your project though the 'appliance' software communities. A project like drupal or joomla would give you a lot of exposure to new users, so simply ask if they would co-host their appliance via their site. This gives them another route for new users to try out their project (next to simply download-and-install and online-demo) so a win-win in my book.
Just my 2c.
Well, Jobs' magical fairy dust is better than anything else.
It's the dust that makes everything worth 3x their normal price, force you to buy a toy made in China even if it means waiting in line for a day and makes you act like you're suffering from rabies if anyone were ever to say anything slightly negative about said toy. You'll even rationalize using the DMCA to limit your own freedom.
I have an iPod. It has been collecting dust for a while now, as I listen to music on my Nokia. I've had a couple of macs but since the Plus/SE time they never have actually been _better_ than a PC. The Jesusphone? Meh.
Apple has their fans. They've been the driving force behind the company since the early days. That's where Apple has been better than everyone else. But for the love of Jobs, I really don't get why.
Mu.
Personally I find the idea of an oscillating universe (Big bang -> expansion -> contraction -> Big crunch) to be appealing. At least that's a theory that might be proven given enough time. And then it would be possible to have a universe that creates (and destroys) itself.
Furthermore, science can postulate theories that can't be observed/proven at this time. It doesn't become religion, because there might be a time when these theories can be tested (for example, a breakthrough in physics that allows extra-universe travel). Science theorized about black holes, quantum mechanics and genetics before those theories were provable. Indeed, theories that can't be proven or discarded is one of the means science moves on as it does: because we want to know.
That is the major difference between science and religion: Science offers theories that may or may not be true, after which all those geeks in labcoats get to work and might come up with an answer given enough time. Religion stamps its feet and tries to yell as loud as possible that their theories are the truth, without wanting to see the enormous evidence against their theories.
Besides, when was the last time you saw two nations go to war because they disagreed upon the theory of multiverses?
Mod parent up. I nearly bought the .localhost TLD.
They were also charged for the violence, conditional jail-time of 1 and 2 months. Source for the dutchies.
There is a deeper problem with Islam than merely a lack of education or not reading between the lines of the Qur'an.
First, the Qur'an is the direct word of Allah/God. The words came to Muhammad, who wrote it down word by word (at least, so Muslims believe). This in contrast with the old and new testament, which were written by disciples. The difference is slight, but this difference means (according to Islam) that no deviation from the Qur'an is possible. Where Judaism/Christianity are able to interpret their holy books differently, Islam specifically forbids this as theirs is the direct word of God. Changing a single word would be sacrilegious, even translating the Qur'an was considered problematic (for it is no longer the direct word of God after translation).
Thus, a true Muslim will not read between the lines of the Qur'an, for he/she is not allowed to.
A second deeper problem is that Islam is more than just the Qur'an. Scribes/imams have interpreted the Qur'an in certain ways, leading to laws for Islam (Sharia). These are the laws that (in certain regions) prescribe hangings and stoning of (in our eyes) innocents.
The Catch-22 is that (again, in certain areas) these laws are unchangeable without near-unanimous support, but that wanting to change them would lead to persecution. Why? Allah is perfect, thus he wouldn't mislead the imams into making false statements about the word of god. Thus the Sharia must be correct. Over time, the laws have snowballed into something that for a Muslim from the 7th century wouldn't even be recognized as Islam.
Over time (and unlike Judaism/Christianity) Islam has become less moderate. It was indeed quite a liberal religion in the early centuries (at the time) but these two facets of Islam, often overlooked, have lead to a religion that isn't susceptible to change.
This is also called corporatism, ie. fascism.
And here is some NYT contributer who wants to blame computers and the nerds. Sure, blame the scary robotic overlords. The financial collapse can't be the fault of ordinary humans, no sir!
This is just some attention-whoring author trying to use the financial crisis in order to sell more books (even though his book has nothing to do with the crisis). Nothing to see here, please move along.
So I can set up my own second life server, using the open sourced SL server code? Oh wait, there isn't any!
With the same reasoning: I can view microsoft.com with Firefox, thus microsoft.com is open source!
Go back to your furries, AC.
You don't need threads for this problem. The issue is that you have two main loops (MainLoop/MainContext with GTK/GObject and the twisted reactor), you merely have to make them work together in a single event-driven loop.
Use the iterate call in GObject's MainContext to run a single iteration using twisted's task.coiterate method. This way, twisted runs an iteration of GTK for each iteration twisted does. Read up on both and if you don't figure it out google it. You're probably not the first who ran into this problem.
It is possible to use threads for this problem, but it isn't necessary so long as the designers of both libraries have added a way to join together event loops. It's also a bit more messy, IMHO.
Threads, Lesson 1: Only use threads if there's no other way.
Threads, Lesson 2: Remember lesson 1.
Have you discussed your situation with them?
If you simply note that such a clause isn't acceptable, you would leave the choice to them. You could listen to the /.'ers that aren't in your position about such clauses not being legal, but you are on the receiving end if you decide to ignore the clause after you're done.
Explain to them that you are only willing to work on their project if the clause is removed, that such a clause would make your further work on the open source project impossible and that the nature of open source is that changes are put back into the main project. This is the professional way to work out such issues.
If however they insist, it's up to you to decide how much leverage you might have with them. If you mention that this is a deal-breaker, they might cave in (you are an expert on the project and would do a much better/quicker job than someone new). If they don't I would walk away from the project myself. There will always be other opportunities.
Nobody argued that MS should hijack the standard. It should be the other way around: Instead of trying to make ODF suitable to MS Office, they should make MS Office work with ODF as it is.
I agree completely with this. If only the FSF used the term "Freedom Software" instead of "Free Software" a lot of misconceptions would have been avoided. It isn't perfect, but it's a lot less ambiguous than both "Free Software" and "Open Source".
They're actually hard at work on that problem too. In addition to Python 2.6 being released, the Python documentation is now generated using Sphinx. See for example the new tutorial output. Big WTF the first time I saw it, but it's a decent improvement with more in the pipeline.
If you looked a bit further than the N810, you'd have seen that Nokia offers Python for S60. I've played around with it a bit on my N95 and it works as advertised, the S60-specific modules work great. You even have a shell for hacking python on the go (if you enjoy coding with a mobile phone, which I can't imagine).
Now I'd really like to have the S60 python module work over multiple platforms, I'd love to target both the N8x0 and S60, for instance.
Hell, I'd love not having to rewrite stuff for every new phone on the market, regardless of the programming language. All those different platforms are just making it harder and harder for third-party developers to develop software for any large portion of the smartphone market. But that's a whole different topic.
The Seinfeld ads weren't a failure.
At least, not for Seinfeld.
Not really. If you're a daytrader who went short on LB or ML a week ago, you'd have made a killing.
Besides, eventually the markets will pick up again. Hopefully...
Google could simply store the totals per region (they probably already do so). Anonymization is very much possible for Adwords/Analytics, as users simply get the big picture and not the unique IP addresses of every visitor anyway. I can't see proper anonymity after X months hurting Adwords in its current form.
Perhaps Google wants to keep the whole IP address in order for Adwords-users to target specific groups of users unrelated to their current search queries, but instead take the user history into account (everyone who searched for "dishwasher discount" in the last 7 days, for instance). But even then anonymization wouldn't be a problem after any length of time for advertisers. Google simply doesn't want to throw away data, period.
If you have an idea, ask a few friends (with software engineering experience) to join you to the local pub. Simply ask them what they think about it.
What might happen is that they tell you it won't work, will be too costly, nobody will be interested and/or simply not possible. If this is the case, ditch the idea. If you are able to get them interested, you can move to the topic of actually getting a few people to look at this closely and/or make a prototype. If your friends don't have the time, they probably will know a few others who might be interested.
A lot of ideas jumped straight to implementation-phase during the dot-com age, with the results we all know. A lot of dead/defunct sf.net projects exist. Ideas are cheap, good ideas are scarce.
You're correct (I did an internship recently on data management with the LCG/EGEE network). It's a massive multi-tiered network of datacenters (something like 50k nodes, 15PB of dedicated data storage, but don't quote me on these figures), all required to distribute the enormous amounts of data collected in the experiments to the researchers capable of processing the data.
I'm not going to be an ass and piss too much on the work of thousands of others, because it took quite a bit of effort to set this up, but them getting hacked doesn't really surprise me. The architecture they set up (even for only data-distribution) is very complex, and a lot of software they use has been written in-house or has been forked (years ago). Oh, and it's all open source, readily available for whoever looks for it. With the LHC being such a high-profile target, this is IMHO a security nightmare waiting to happen.
In what I've seen, I'm crossing my fingers that this break-in isn't related to the grid network, and that the next few months will go smoothly, but the grid has been primarily designed for high throughput, not security. Sure, they have certificates you need to access the grid systems, the policies are there, but technically I have my doubts.
This was attempted by HavenCo on the Sealand platform. They weren't self-sufficient, but they had a datacenter running (barely).
It sounded like a good idea, but in practice things were a lot more difficult than they imagined. The wikipedia-articles are a great read though, as are the articles referenced.
Interesting how Lindenlabs are trying to foster creativity (as they do seem to think it's important, otherwise they wouldn't have tried this). It's actually a pity SL hasn't gotten very far (I certainly had higher hopes for it), but it's still an interesting experiment to see what works.
Anyway, thanks for your tidbits!
Alas, of all my friends I'm the weird little geek. The take-up of social networks is enormous, but SL? Most haven't even heard of it. If SL isn't for geeks, and isn't interesting enough to non-geeks, a question begs: for who is SL?
Interesting that you mention VRML, as I think that comes syntactically and conceptually a lot closer to initial HTML than SL does.
The problem here is that, while Mosaic had quite an uptake and was quickly superseded by better browsers, this isn't happening in the case of SL (and it has been around for longer than it took Netscape and later Microsoft to wake up). Why? Because no one cares. Companies are realizing SL is barely more than hype, and users couldn't care less.
MMORPG's have one thing virtual worlds like SL don't have: Users, and plenty of them.
SL - if you build a virtual world, will they come? Barely.
MMORPG's - if you build a captivating game within a virtual world, will they come? Sure as hell.
Maybe user-built MMORPG's are the way. I don't know. We'll see.
Wrong. The first websites were very effective at the dissemination of information (for instance at CERN), there was nothing else that came close. Marketing only jumped on the bandwagon at the end of the 90's, which lead to the internet bubble.
Wikipedia, Google docs, YouTube, Ebay, all these examples illustrate what makes the web a great place: it's an ideal medium to disseminate information, by both sides. So my question is this: what does Second Life offer above and beyond IRC/IM and the web that makes sense of the hype? SL is poor when it comes to disseminating information. What is the sell to users? Why should they care?
That's why I mentioned the corporations jumping on the hype. My university has a virtual meeting place in SL. I've been to dozens of IBM presentations about SecondLife (I was an intern there for quite some time). I tried to figure out exactly the same reasons why users would actually want to use SecondLife.
One presentation was about virtualizing servers. A red light above a server would notify administrators if something went wrong. So, what do you expect from your administrators? Sit and watch a virtual datacenter all day? Isn't a simple SMS-notification service a lot more effective, so they can actually do other useful stuff in the meantime?
SL might be useful, but for the vast majority of applications it seems like a solution in search of a problem. Without users. I've already seen a few news articles of companies scraping their SL 'presence' because nobody came along. SL simply isn't worth all the hype.
I can't help but remain skeptical. Maybe it's due to having read too many articles on El Reg, but maybe, just maybe, all those articles about Second Life are just attempts from Linden Labs to keep the hype running? I don't know a single person who has stayed in SL beyond simply trying it out.
3D virtual worlds naturally have a future. Looking at the numbers of users however, that future is with the MMORPG's, not with Second Life and the like.
Multitasking as a human, not as a computer. I can have an IRC client running in the background while I'm working and get a popup/alert when someone is talking to me. SL, and any other virtual world, assumes you are doing nothing else besides SL. Thus, its use as a background application is limited.