Comments on: Second Life for a weekend

By: Des.

Des. — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 16:47:42 +0000

I enjoyed reading Harrys comments on second life and from my own very limited experience of SL I found his comments to be true.

My only comment would be that I feel sure this is just a taster of things to come. The pottential of SL and virtual worlds is huge and doubtless we will soon see an explosion in SL clones.

By: SL-widow

SL-widow — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 00:13:43 +0000

Very interesting views on Second Life. My husband is on it pretty much 24/7 – how is that I hear you ask? Well, he works from home, runs an internet business, and has it running all day. He “plays” it every night after work from 5.30 to 7pm at least, mostly going back upstairs to go back on it while I watch “some crapy soap” (his words and his excuse for disappearing). Then he crawls to bed ( in another room as I have to get to bed earlier for work) around midnight after spending hours typing away to some random people. Oh yes, he also takes his laptop to bed. His avatar is a woman and he hangs around with women all the time. He spends every possible moment at the weekend on it too. I’m getting worried that he’s got an addiction here… :-( What do you think?
Your comment of “Just keep an eye on the clock.” simply goes over his head….
Anyone out there want the company of a lonely lady ;-)

By: Optimus

Optimus — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 23:44:51 +0000

From experience (i started out with collaborative virtual worlds like Alphaworld in the 90s) i was initially almost hopeful that Second Life would be a brand new phenomenon bringing back to life the almost defunct client based VRML. I must admit for the first ten minutes of navigation i was almost impressed. In the half hour that followed those first ten minutes i finally realized what a pointless waste of time, resources and hardware space, Second Life was.

I am running WinXP 64bit on a AMD Opteron 1400, 1Gb DDR RAM and a Quadro FX2000. I work with Maya, Photoshop and a number of other high-end packages. I run games notoriously heavy for average systems and still Second Life managed to lag the life out of me. On top of that i have to pay for 90% of the activities within it?? what a load…

Don’t i pay enough for the electric bill and cable connection? Goodness sake, if it has to be virtual let it ACTUALLY be virtual. The way i see it, Second Life is a poor excuse for making young frustrated males spend money thinking that they are going to sign up for the next “cool” thing.

And what’s with all the porn? I even read articles (google for “Second Life Sucks”) where people have actually managed to stumble into child pornography!

May i remind all of the adults around that “adult” doesn’t necessarily means “sex-centric”! If that’s the actual purpose for Second Life to exist then it’s going to be fun to see how fast all those 14 year olds will manage to shut down Second Life as their parents accidentally knock on their room doors! LOL

You want to do something revolutionary, Linden Labs? First put some decent staff together (because it is evident that the current people suck ass since the engine is a total rip off from Adobe Atmosphere!), then come up with your own proprietary engine based on a TINY more stable platform like… umm…. OpenGL for example? And then try to come up with a concept that actually works instead of focusing on the next porn based e-Bay VR style.

Also i must say, of all the VR communities i have visited, SL has the rudest and meanest “members”. I can’t even count the times i have been verbally abused by scripted NPC’s programmed by a community seriously affected by dorkosterone, and ignored by real people in less than an hour time frame.

Oh… and did i mention that SL has been recently at the center of attention for leaking hundreds of thousands of private member’s profile informatin along with their credit card details??

If you decide to go for it… watch your credit card or you might end up having your REAL house repossessed.

Good Luck

By: glenndavid

glenndavid — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 17:35:53 +0000

i am completly new to this whole second life concept and you post/blog had helped me a lot in understanding the filosofy and idea behind it, thanks!

Glenn

By: Luke Byrne

Luke Byrne — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 08:11:46 +0000

Go and read a book called the Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. Second Life is the precursor to the central themes in this book. Its a Brave New World!

By: HarryF

HarryF — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:59:40 +0000

An operating system? No. Until it can directly manage my memory and hardware, no.

At best it’s a virtual machine.

Agreed – in the strictest sense it’s definately not an OS. Although on the virtual machine front, Second Life is also storing persistent state – reboot the machine and the state survives.

But if you broaden the definition of OS to something more human oriented – along the lines of “…allows people to create, store, change and share information” then perhaps we’re getting there. I think the point Robert Scoble was trying to make is, logically, Second Life is a step towards a platform where the network is at the heart of the system rather than being “tacked on”.

By: Hal9k

Hal9k — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:04:51 +0000

An operating system? No. Until it can directly manage my memory and hardware, no.

At best it’s a virtual machine.

By: Chip Poutine

Chip Poutine — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 11:37:27 +0000

A nice summary of Second Life. Thanks for linking my blog :) Virtual Suburbia reviews buildings in Second Life, attempting to explore what constitues appropriate architecture in a world without the usual laws of physics and forces of nature...

By: Octal

Octal — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:00:54 +0000

Nice write up. I’ve known about SL for a while being a bit of an avid MMORPG’er! but was never drawn to it. Although now they have a free account to try…

By: HarryF

HarryF — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:29:25 +0000

Thanks for support ;)

On the 3D UI front, this makes a good starting point read (focused on 3d desktops but related): http://balintmiklos.blogspot.com/2006/07/future-of-computer-user-interface-is.html . BumpTop, seems to have made from progress in defining what functions 3d objects support.