Linden Lab shuts down the fun in Second Life

On wednesday Linden Lab announced a new policy which bans all forms of gambling within Second Life to comply with the American government's outlawing of online gambling which came into effect last October. A large amount of revenue is generated in Second Life from the many casino owners who buy land from Linden Lab and the fear is that those people will be forced to sell their land and may even leave the virtual world altogether. This will cause a massive drop in land prices but Linden Lab itself may not recover the money lost due to the new policy.

To me this seems to be an example of how laws and policies are unable to cope with an entity such as Second Life which has thousands of non-American "residents" and who shouldn't really be subject to American law. Many of the casino owners weren't American but they are having their businesses shut down because their virtual land is on a server which is physically located in America. It could be said that it'd be good for each country to have a server farm for its residents to connect to Second Life which would allow those who connect access to those activities that the country says are legal, but this is really missing the point of Second Life. It's supposed to be an international community which regulates itself. Linden Lab itself advertises "Your World, Your Imagination", but really it's "American World, Your Imagination (within limits)".

Oh yeah, I ended up in the Linden Village last night and found myself part of a rally against the new anti-gambling policy. There's me in the front holding the small banner !!

Environ-Mentalism targets Google

Slashdot reports that a blogger by the name of Mark Ontkush claims that Google, with its white background, consumes 74 watts of power whereas if it changed the background colour to black it would "only" use 59 watts. Heap Media, listening to these claims have created a black version of Google's search page appropriately named Blackle. Really though, the saving in energy is negligible and is apparently so small as to be within the error margin of most power meters. The Wall Street Journal did an investigation into Mark's claims and concluded that turning down the brightness of the monitor had a far greater effect than any change of background colour could produce. The small power saving is also only applicable to those using CRT monitors (now in the minority) as LCDs consume the same (small amount) or power no matter what is displayed on screen.

iPhone vs Blackberry for corporate use - and the winner is....

The Blackberry, hands down. Well at least according to a contributor to TechCrunch who has been using a Blackberry 8800 and an iPhone side by side for a few weeks. The useful comparison chart shows that while the iPhone is great as a mobile phone/music player for the home user, it just doesn't have the capabilities required for use in business. Such things as intelligent push email and email data synchronization are completely lacking in Apple's product. Still, the product isn't really marketed to the "suits" and they don't really need to worry about being unable to penetrate this market due to the demand from the ordinary consumer still going strong.

Digital Divide still growing...

The BBC reports that the usage of computers, the internet, and other digital devices is still dominated by male under 55 year olds. This continuing trend is despite government efforts to try to get older people and women using the internet. The report also states that those on a lower income and without further or higher education are less likely to be using the internet (which is fairly obvious I would've thought- if you're not earning much, you're not likely to be able to buy a computer and pay a monthly broadband subscription are you ?!!!).

The report also mentions that 42% of students have created a profile on a social networking site such as Facebook or MySpace as opposed to just 15% of the employed and only 2% of retired people. This is not really that surprising since students tend to have a lot of free time on their hands to use such sites whereas the employed are generally working (duh !) during the day and relaxing at night. I think retired people's reluctance to join such sites is probably due to their reputation as a "young person's thing" and so don't hold much interest for the older person (the exception being my 64 year old uncle who has a Bebo profile, but then again he also has a Honda Goldwing with neon underlighting so maybe he's not your typical retired person !!!).

If you think 24mbps is fast, think again...

Engadget reports that the fastest home broadband connection has been installed for a 75 year old Swede. The fibre connection gives reported speeds of 40Gbps meaning that you could, theoretically, download a full high definition dvd in about 2 seconds !!! The 75 year old is the mother of Sweden's "internet legend" (whatever that means !) Peter Lothberg. Apparently such speeds are possible due to a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between routers up to 2000 kilometres apart with no intermediary transponders. I think we'll be waiting a looooong time to get those sort of speeds over here though...

AjaxLife - Second Life viewer created by a 15 year old

Reuters' Second Life news page has an interview with Katherine Berry, a 15 year old British girl who has coded a Second Life web browser viewer - apparently she coded all 2000+ lines of it in a weekend !! At the moment it's fairly limited in that you cannot walk around or teleport, but the fact that she has created a client which can connect to the Second Life Grid and allow chat and IM is a great first step to a fully working viewer which will remove the need for a large client download. And all this from a 15 year old - sickening !!!
NB. When I tried, I could not connect to the viewer as it looks like Katherine's server is being hammered by all the people wanting to try it - I'll let you know when I've had a go though !

"I've fallen and I can't get up" - Is this you ? Then I have the solution !

ETRI's Bioinformatics Team have developed a mobile phone which connects to a belt sensor which detects falling motion. This was developed, primarily, for elderly people who may be prone to falls. When the sensor detects the falling motion, the mobile phone sends a message to a computer sitting in a hospital and this computer then automatically calls the phone to find out if the person is hurt. The phone is equipped with GPS so that an ambulance can easily find the injured person.
Nice solution, but not if you're an grandmother who enjoys bouncy castles....

MASSIVE 70" Touch Screen PC - now if only it was running OSX...

Engadget has a story on a new 70" all in one touch screen PC which is soon to be available (although it is aimed more at companies than individuals - you'd need a pretty big living room to house it after all !!). It's a shame that one of the pictures shows an XP error message though !!

Even more social networking sites - noooooo !!

It seems that both Yahoo and Google are now jumping on the social networking bandwagon and are due to launch the "interestingly-named" Yahoo Mosh, and "more conventional-sounding" Google SocialStream respectively. TechCrunch have a good description of both including a video description of the SocialStream product. SocialStream seems to be an interesting cross-over between RSS feed reader and social networking site, allowing you to see clips of your friends' recent postings on SocialStream itself as well as blogger and others.

The problem is, there's now so many social networking sites that people can't keep up with them and it'll be tricky persuading Facebook users, for instance, to change their primary site due to the fact that friends tend not to move to other sites without good reason. It'll be interesting to see who comes out on top now that the likes of Google are involved !

Vista Migration in a year ? Hmmmmmm...

In this week's IT Week magazine there's an article which quotes Dell saying that "businesses should expect a migration to Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system to take up to three years" for firms without current plans. This means that if we started planning the Vista rollout now, it could be 2010 before we see the migration completed ! The article argues that the application testing and packaging phase of a Vista migration, and the end-user training, can take up to a year (this includes remedial work required for the 20 percent of applications which currently do not work under Vista). Better start now !!