Cory @ O'Reilly

Some cool stats mentioned...23000 hours per day? Wow. I found this through /. today:

http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/feature/feature-the-creative-power-of-second-life-158961.php

There are several mis-quotes, but still a good read; I'm sure Cory said "70% of residents who have logged in" and not "70% of residents", for example.

Regards,

-Flip

What?

Thanks, Flip.

What do you mean by "what"?

I mean as far as I was aware, we don't yet have in-world browsers and RSS readers. Did I miss something?

I'm guessing Cory may have been showing demos of future clients.

Maybe, but that doesn't make it 'commonplace' now does it?

Yeah, some fact checking on the author's part would have been good; I still find some of the stats interesting.

As questioned on the IRC channel, "what percentage of those artifacts created by 70% of the residents just happened to be plywood cubes 0.5x0.5x0.5?"

Yeah, that's a good point too. What defines an 'artifact'?

"This neolithic sexball was used before custom animations were discovered......."

Or maybe it's what the author was fed. *shrug*

Yeah, I wondered about that too, if Cory was demonstrating features that don't even have a release date, why wasn't that made obvious? Seems like a pretty bad misrepresentation. People might read that and sign up, then pull up Live Help and go 'Where's my browser?!'

Linden Lab increasingly go in for vapourware where new features are concerned.

Havok 2/3 - vapourware
New renderer - vapourware
HTML on a prim - hmmm, maybe not, but I'll believe it when I finally see it (the two above were also developed seperately then it proved too difficult to integrate into the SL core - could HTML on a prim be the same?)
FULL XML-RPC - feet-dragging, whole new definition of vapourware
Mono - meh, it's vapourware at the moment

Most of the time I'd say an author misquoted, where LL are concerned I'm not so sure any more. It's all probably just some nice spin that they can say they were misquoted on - who's going to know.

And nope, I don't trust them, in case you were wondering.

Actually, the joint Philip/Cory presentation to Google gave a figure of 90,000 manhours per day. That's like 11 years worth of work. LOL!

However, my favorite part of the entire presentation was the following statement:



*OK, he didn't really say that. But I bet he could have. For proof, see below.





P2

what is with the chain-mail codpiece?

It was a joke. Thats the way his avatar dresses like in SL - they ran off and found the same cloths in RL and had him wear it during a meetup.

Re: vaporware.. I wouldnt be too sure about that. I think that LL's biggest problem isnt vapourware as much as feet-dragging. All the mentioned features ARE coming - they ARE working on it - problem is, they're working on it very slowly... to the point of almost turning it into vaporware.

I guess that they could use some extra staff over there.

Sorry, but it's vaporware when it's talked about for so long and never appears. When they finally appear I'll change my mind but, let's be honest, Havok's been a constant "coming" since the beginning of my time here (2 years+), the renderer snapshots came at the start of last year (1 year+), XML-RPC never got finished and HTML on a prim was promised ages ago and still hasn't appeared. It's all vaporware, especially considering the time scales we're talking about here.

I'm wondering what will be released first. Duke Nukem Forever or Havok 3 in SL...

Neither. Microsoft Windows Direct Neural Input Edition will beat both of them to market.



P2

http://www.ubrowser.com

Cory is so dedicated to this project that he works on it *on his own time* in addition to working on it at LL. He is also footing the bill himself for hosting ubrowser.com. LL isn't paying for that domain. Also see Cory's blog at http://secondlife.blogs.com/prompt. Cory really is working hard on the project and even attempting to keep us in the loop on development.

He's got some smart people working with him. The Mozilla team is helping and John Gaunt from Netscape is working on plugin interactivity.

The sourcecode for the browser is available. Any l33t coders out there can help improve the browser. Second Life's own Vince Plunkett has already solved a few problems with the code.

Wow his own time, and paying his own hosting fees! What a soldier he is. Except it's not Cory, it's Callum I believe. Cory last posted about it on his blog a month ago. Plus, this is at the top of the front page:



Now, call me cynical, but that doesn't imply that it's coming any time soon. Recently we've had two Lindens admit that new features aren't arriving any time soon because they were developed seperately and couldn't then be integrated into the core of SL: Andrew Linden said this about Havok, Steve Linden (I believe it was Steve) said this about the new renderer. Any reason to believe that this will be any different?

Anyway, weren't we promised this in 1.7? And then it suddenly got pulled. It wasn't even close, and I don't think we'll see it for another 6 months at least, no matter who's working on it. It's still vaporware as far as I'm concerned, as it's a seperate, incomplete implementation. When it arrives in a prim in Second Life it will cease to be vaporware.

You're cynical.

Hehe, yes I am that. The thing is, there still seems to be a lot of work to do on the uBrowser even before it gets integrated into the client. Maybe I'm being over-optimistic in giving a time frame of 6 months.

My cynicisim on the vaporware that are new features in Second Life only stems from the fact that Linden Lab repeatedly excite and entice and repeatedly fail to deliver. Increasingly more so.

Ha! Nice one Phoenix, you got me.

As for vaporware, let's not forget the time frame we're talking here. Sure, LL has always made somewhat ridiculously optimistic launch time-frames, but we're not talking Duke Nukem 3-D yet; the 2.0 renderer and HTML on a prim were all announced about a year ago, a Havok 2 was supposed to launch, what, a year and a half ago? Those are fairly reasonable development times for a development team of 20 working on these tasks, as well as others...let's not forget the recent feature-freeze to focus on scalability and bug fixing (that's been going on for a year now).

Also, we are starting to see pieces of these features being launched; the new map in 1.7 is a direct result of code in the 2.0 renderer, for example. I'm sure there are other "under the hood" improvements being made in anticipation of these long term goals.

And yes, Moopf is extremely cynical!

Regards,

-Flip

Sigh, that is dismaying. The no-longer-new map is slow, can't make up it's mind whether to be blurry or not, often shows as gray loading textures, is made of squares that sometimes move not at all well synchronized, appears sometimes with no terrain, just icons, or as it did today, with no avatar green dots on the main continent. There were people there, just no green dots for avatars on the main continent.