Troy McConaghy

"Jeff Barr, Senior Web Services Evangelist for Amazon.com, was giving talks about AWS in Second Life years ago. Back then, SL was a real hotbed of innovators and early adopters (and in many ways, it still is). Here’s Jeff’s SL profile." - Troy McConaghy

"I’ve also been irritated by some articles at Pixels and Policy. One that comes to mind was an article where the author called Aimee Weber’s trademark a copyright, a fundamental error in the understanding of intellectual property. I think I posted a comment noting the error. At least the Web has comments! The more people we have writing about the issues, the better, so I encourage Pixels and Policy to keep going but to learn from their mistakes. Language quibbles are often used as a tool to scare newbies away, but I think the residents of SL are more forgiving because we’re all still figuring it out." - Troy McConaghy

"Another aspect of social media is that it’s created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques, such as Internet-based tools. Most warehouses aren’t accessible or scalable in the way Second Life is. Accessible: To access a warehouse, you have to go to the physical location of the warehouse, which is a lot less accessible than “you have to go anywhere with a power supply and a fast enough Internet connection (to access SL).” Scalable: To expand a physical warehouse, you have to get materials, use time, energy, money and labor to build the new addition. You may also have to buy more real estate. To expand a similar SL-based project (e.g. a simulated art-exhibition warehouse), the costs are lower." - Troy McConaghy

"sloog.org is another thing like this. Counting votes is a crude way to gauge popularity because it will favor places that have been around longer: they've had more time to accumulate votes. Devising a more meaningful rating takes a bit more thought. A great article on "How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You can be Proud of" can be found at http://bit.ly/3Up5Gs" - Troy McConaghy

"As far as I know, Opensim isn't "built on the Linden code." It was my understanding that ScienceSim is a project sponsored by Intel as a testbed and demo for the upcoming SC09 (Supercomputing '09) conference, which will be held in Portland from November 14-20. More info about it can be found at http://www.sciencesim.com/wiki... Intel may well decide to nix the project after that conference. "We achieved our goals." and all that. Reference: Orange Island." - Troy McConaghy

"As far as I know, Opensim isn't "built on the Linden code." It was my understanding that ScienceSim is a project sponsored by Intel as a testbed and demo for the upcoming SC09 (Supercomputing '09) conference, which will be held in Portland from November 14-20. More info about it can be found at http://www.sciencesim.com/wiki... Intel may well decide to nix the project after that conference. "We achieved our goals." and all that. Reference: Orange Island." - Troy McConaghy

"For this blog, do you know what percentage of visitors are using Windows, Mac, or Linux? That might be a good proxy for SL resident OS distribution. I know Google Analytics can give you that information, but I'm not sure about TypePad's stats." - Troy McConaghy

"I'm not sure having a virtual world where everything "looks like reality" is an important or even a desirable goal. People enjoy Pixar movies. They don't come out of a Pixar movie saying it was awful because everything looked like a cartoon. Of course everything looked like a cartoon. That was expected. I don't want to simulate the dust accumulating on my virtual fireplace mantle. I don't want my SL clothes to get dirty. And I don't want to have to drive 2 hours to get from sim A to sim B because teleporting was banned due to its lack of realism. You can confidently take your insistence on realism and put it in the folder labeled "Academically interesting but ultimately irrelevant."" - Troy McConaghy