Dear Pat Robertson, I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll. You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

"Not how I roll"

In the email address, type in multiple addresses separated by a semicolon. In fact, I even modified my skin XUI files (floater_postcard.xml) to automatically populate this for me since I always post to the same addresses – pics@slbuzz.com;pics@slpics.com;pics@bloghud.com

yay Dedric & Talia!

Shava Nerad/Shava Suntzu in SL says:

September 5, 2009 at 2:26 am

In 1982, Vint Cerf told me once, I was probably one of the first fifty women engineers on the Internet. I was Chief Software Engineer at DEC, matrix managing a group of 40 creating prototype applications for the first commercial multimedia authoring system in the world, IVIS.

That was the year I got into email, ftp, and USENET (back when USENET was useful, a decade pre-spam). I tried to explain to my parents what I was doing, communicating and collaborating with people continents away without even having to be at work the same hours.

My parents, born in the early 20’s, probably had images of 1950’s B movie computers, with me donning a heavy helmet with Tesla coils, to communicate with people across the world. They didn’t understand it, they didn’t get it, and they didn’t really think it was anything real.

It was confusing, silly, a little scary, and they didn’t really see how it worked, or how it would ever be useful. It’s a good thing some people have more perspective than snark.

Interacting in virtual worlds is as real as interacting via email, ftp, chat — probably more “real” than interacting via Facebook. Some people use Facebook for their professional life, but most folks use it for fluff.

Some people use Second Life as an art authoring platform (DC Spensely), an educational collaborative (Harvard), a way to have low-budget international meetings and conferences (IBM), or more personal technical support (Cisco). Like any medium, most people will use it for fluff.

If you’ll remember, about thirteen years ago, you were probably all thinking the web was silly, because all it had on it was porn and geeks.

Let’s revisit this question in a few years, and we’ll see who is smirking, eh?

You are looking at the VERY FIRST photo ever published on the web!

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"

Silvano de Gennaro

We, as in every consumer and company in this mixed-up industry, need MMO social networking interoperability. 

If you play more than one title, you probably already know exactly what I mean, and can skip a few paragraphs. Everyone else, pay attention during the case study. 

Let's say you regularly play an MMO, such as "World of Warcraft" or "Atlantica Online" with a dozen or so friends. Your group is close, like guild members with custom titles close. After three years of completing quests, capturing flags in battlegrounds, and raiding endgame bosses together, the officers of the guild have grown closer to one another. As the fearless leader of the ragtag group, you've even recruited dozens of new members! In fact, your guild is now the second largest on the server! 

You're proud of your management and social networking abilities, and list "Guild Master of the Poo Poo Dumb Dumb Heads" on your resume. Life's great. But things get a little funky when "The New MMO" is eventually announced. 

You want it ... NO! You need it. The void begins to grow at an alarming rate. Eventually, you make the decision to camp out in front of retailer GameStop for 14 hours to guarantee your copy of the MMO's Limited Edition. 

A few months later, and an additional 14 hours of battling mother nature's worst intentions, you get your grubby little mitts on that game.

Racing home, you become overwhelmed by a depressing realization. In last weeks' guild meeting (held in the chat client Ventrilo), other members expressed interest in playing "The New MMO." Being the fancy pants social networking guru guild master that you are, you once again assumed the leadership role and said you'd add everyone to your friends list and create a guild. 

All the interested parties listed the account names they planned on registering, as well as the desired character names, in a separate forum topic, which you then compiled into a neat little Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. 

Here's the dilemma: By spending the first few hours in the MMO adding people to a friends list, you're missing out on crucial launch day gaming. But by immediately jumping into the MMO, you're forced to initially play by yourself and put your hard-earned reputation as a reliable guild master on the line. Had both MMOs instituted some kind of social networking interoperability, this situation would've never surfaced. 

Alright, keep that in mind. We're stepping away from games for a minute. 

You have a Facebook account, right? How about one on Myspace? Yes to both? Good. 

If you're like me, you made the big switch over from the latter to the former months, even years, ago, leaving Myspace far, far behind. 

The changeover was easy. Most of my friends were already in my Gmail, Yahoo, AIM, and MSN address books, so I told Facebook to take a gander at them and pull the contact info. In just a few clicks nearly everyone I wanted to communicate with rested comfortably in my new friends list. Easy. 

If I wanted, I could flip the scenario and switch from Facebook to Myspace and it would be just as simple. Myspace offers, as far as I can tell, an identical service. So do new(er) platforms like Twitter.

But MMOs don't, and it looks like that's how it will remain for awhile. Oh, sure, IBM and Linden Labs announced they managed to transfer a "Second Life" character from the virtual world's Preview Grid to "an OpenSim virtual world" (which was using a "Second Life" protocol client), but neither company announced if data such as friends lists were maintained in the transfer. 

Still, Linden Labs has the right idea. In the Q&A section of the announcement, the company wrote: "Linden Lab sees interoperability as essential for virtual worlds to reach their full potential. In addition, interoperability will enhance Resident experience and the new architecture will improve scalability and stability." I couldn't agree with them more. 

Playing in an MMO or inhabiting a virtual world can sometimes feel like an isolated and very private experience without the company of friends. By creating a universal platform or unifying friends lists into easily transferable data, each end user will find greater value in the social online experience, potentially leading to an increased number of hours logged each session. Word of mouth could also spread faster, but that's both good and bad for developers and publishers. 

We get to talk to each other across titles, and/or share friends lists, and in return we spend more time in these companies' games. So ... why is this functionality not available? Especially for publishers and portals that offer multiple MMORPGs?

Posted by Kyle Stallock
July 23rd, 2009

BE AWARE OF HOLES IN YOUR HEAD

texture info getting trapped like flies in amber