Maggie Darwin

Gwyn--

"Web based access, mesh support and single user installs"?

Don't forget http://openwonderland.org , the 100% Java open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds.

Not so, Sam. Sez here: "The Linden Prize will award one Second Life Resident or team with $10,000 USD"

I have to wonder if Linden Research is claiming a charitable purpose for this award in its tax filings. Because awarding it to Sion Chickens would seem to me to endanger that claim.

You'd have to drink a *lot* of Koolade to conclude that this product is "an innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world".

Srsly.

I think it's a slap in the face to the other finalists who actually have a legitimate claim.

Whether it's Kingdon on his own, or as the proxy implementor of philosophies coming from Kapor or other VC presence on the Linden Research board, I'd have to disagree that the pioneers are ill-equipped to make use of SL.

In fact, the recent struggles to make the now-legacy Linden codebase usable by non-pioneers suggest that the pioneers may be the *only* ones equipped to use it, and putting a new skin on it isn't going to help much.

The "digital Levittown" depicted in the latest spam mail from LL is pretty far from a compelling, engaging experience. If that's the vision of SL's future, viewed by the "new residents" though the cloudy, rippled lens of the existing buggy, hacked-up tech, it's myopic in the extreme.

Linden Research needs to get over the "these aren't the customers we're looking for" syndrome that Mark Kingdon brought with him and realize that these are the customers that are paying them.

"We've finalized the features and the design, only a handful of users have seen it and they're all sworn to secrecy for three years."

When they made Ratbert a QA analyst in Dilbert back in the 90s, he invented a defect triage scheme:

Boneheaded
Vexing
Lethal

This design approach fits all three.

Jopsy:

Mono doesn't count.

Zach asked for *improvements*

@dontcompute --

Yes, several apps use the android location awareness API to trigger reminders.

ActionComplete is one of them http://actioncomplete.com

We may observe that, given current levels of customer service, creativity and software quality, Linden Research may have hit a plateau in audience level.

May I be forgiven for noting that phrasing your question as "is LL wasting its time on the market where it actually has demonstrated it can make money" might make the true answer even more obvious.

Current management seems focused on imaginary revenue from fantasy markets such as SLE, .gov and .edu (who they've been at particular pains to alienate in the person of Jokay), to the detriment of their actual already-profitable customers. (Describing them as "seemingly...unfazed by the actions of the Lab" seems to me to betray a writer who's spending more time and energy playing pundit than participating in-world....a common affliction of late.)

I'm sure when M's current ill-thought strategy falls through he has a nice pre-negotiated golden parachute awating.

What restrictions would you propose that actually would have *any* effect that wouldn't hurt the content market much worse than any beneficit they would deliver?

Especially since the extent of infringement isn't actually known? Since we don't know how much there is now, how would we even know it had been reduced?