Dwell On It » People

A grand lady

Tateru Nino — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:27:04 +0000

As you’ve probably heard by now, actress Elisabeth Sladen has passed away from complications relating to cancer at age 63.

Weekly Linden account changes (week 41, 2010)

Tateru Nino — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 18:58:19 +0000

Not many changes showing up in the Linden Lab databases this week. My confidence level that it is delivering good results, however, is low.


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Poll: Linden Lab Q3 report-card

Tateru Nino — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:39:46 +0000

Well, Philip’s been back in the saddle as Linden Lab CEO for just over three months now. I thought it might be interesting to do up a report-card for Linden Lab just to see how well you all think it is meeting its promises. Acta non verba, to paraphrase Philip.


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Weekly Linden account changes (week 40, 2010)

Tateru Nino — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 08:34:19 +0000

Well, the grid won’t admit to more than 279 Linden accounts this week (down from 310 last week). I’ve been hitting the databases on and off for two days (which is why it is a bit late this time around), so I don’t think the results will be any better this week.

Part (or all) of that is certainly due to the termination of Linden accounts for UK staff late last week, after the last sample.


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Is that a sim in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Tateru Nino — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:47:17 +0000

Thanks to John Lester (AKA Pathfinder) for putting this one about. You can get an opensim installation that you can run from a USB stick (or pretty much any portable media).

Our Future in Virtual Worlds available via Amazon and BookRepublic

Tateru Nino — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:32:58 +0000

Peter Ludlow, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University [whom I personally remember most distinctly for having referred to me on a couple of occasions as “an idiot SL blogger who is a legendary sycophant”, though we’ve never actually spoken; trust me, that kind of sticks in your mind] and described by the Community Manager at 40K Books as “one of the 10 most influential video game players of all time” has an essay called Our Future in Virtual Worlds.


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Linden Lab explains slashing education/non-profit discounts

Tateru Nino — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 05:25:29 +0000

When I looked at the announcement of the elimination of the discount for educators and non-profit organisations yesterday, the only explanation that seemed to make sense was some kind of profit crisis at Linden Lab. A need to pull an ill-informed short-term increase in cash from groups that are poorly-positioned to be able to pay more.

I invited the Lab to offer a better explanation than mine, and I have received a response from a Lab spokesperson.


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Millions of Gaia Online Members to Guest Judge 2010 New York Comic Con Masquerade

Tateru Nino — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17:54:27 +0000

Gaia Online users get to proxy-vote at the Comic-Con masquerade live via webcast on 9 October. Cool notion.

Linden Lab to double pricing for education, non-profits

Tateru Nino — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 04:40:51 +0000

Last I looked, there were in excess of two thousand educational and non-profit organisations with estates in Second Life. Today, with a shade less than 3 months notice, Linden Lab announced that the discounts traditionally applied to those estates would be slashed from the start of the year, effectively doubling the cost of those installations.


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Play it now – Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home

Tateru Nino — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 19:52:13 +0000

Something a little unusual this time around. One that you can play right away.

From the very skilled – and I might even be inclined to suggest ‘artistic’ and ‘spectacular’ – Andrew Plotkin comes a sterling piece of short interactive fiction. It’s compact and lovely, and not too difficult.

Why leak?

Tateru Nino — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:04:29 +0000

The question that’s been nagging at me over the last few hours is “Why would Lab staff leak information about a buyout offer?”

Well the Lab itself is notoriously closed-mouth, but individual staffers tend to be chatterboxes, often about all sorts of things that they probably rightly shouldn’t. Why this though?

Weekly Linden account changes (week 39, 2010)

Tateru Nino — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:36:40 +0000

Looks like some solid results from the Second Life grid databases this time. You may already know that Tofu, Aimee and Spike are finishing up at the Lab this week.


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Heart and soul

Tateru Nino — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 03:27:30 +0000

Goodbye Aimee Linden and Tofu Linden.

The keys to the kingdom

Tateru Nino — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:06:25 +0000

Back when the Internet was already old, but the Web was just starting out, a small company formed that was based heavily around transaction security and digital deliverables. The initial heart of the company were two men with money, one man who pretended to know technology, and a musician who had learned an obscure dialect of BASIC and imagined that he knew everything there was to know about software security.

Wow

Tateru Nino — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 03:35:24 +0000

Okay, so my reaction to the announcement of Bioshock Infinite was almost extraordinarily lukewarm.

Linden Lab doesn’t back Oz on KDU library

Tateru Nino — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 04:33:52 +0000

The big thing on my mind back at the beginning of the week was whether the new position on the KDU library was indeed the official position and whether the Lab was serious about the erroneous statements about GPL-violations.

Over the last few years, it has quite often been the case that the Lab and an individual Linden (or a team of Linden staffers) have disagreed or had differences of understanding on certain key matters.


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Linden Lab out of Amsterdam

Tateru Nino — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:38:32 +0000

In my sleepy, under-caffeinated haze yesterday, while I noted that Catherine Smith had left the Lab (something which had come up earlier in the week when an email to her about another matter bounced), I omitted to mention that the Lab’s Amsterdam office is going to be shutting down after all.


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Weekly Linden account changes (week 38, 2010)

Tateru Nino — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 10:23:25 +0000

I’m not even sure how much veracity to give the Second Life grid databases when it comes to querying it for user-accounts. Instead of what Linden accounts are there, it’s more a case of what Linden accounts will the grid databases admit to?

Nevertheless, it looks like a much more stable result this week. Who knows what next week will bring? You think someone would fix this stuff.

Planet Michael

Tateru Nino — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 05:57:39 +0000

In the news today, a virtual world as a tribute to Michael Jackson.

Corporate missteps and empty suits

Tateru Nino — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 05:52:00 +0000

Luke Halliwell, formerly a technical lead at the pretty-much defunct Realtime Worlds, has a multipart post-mortem up on how the company went wrong, blew through $100 million bucks in funding and went out of business just ten weeks after launching its flagship MMOG.