Business Insider: Bernanke’s QE 2 Will Sink Just Like The Titanic – “The Fed is quick to point to falling real estate prices. But a drop in real estate will no more cause consumer prices to fall than the real estate boom caused them to rise. Real estate prices are too high, and the economy will never truly recover unless they are allowed to fall. It is interesting that when real estate prices were rising, the Fed did not raise rates to bring them down, but now that they are falling, the central bank feels compelled to lower rates to prop them up.“
Gwyneth Llewelyn: Technological Improvements in Second Life? You Bet! – “Granted, LL is not famous for making sense, but I still maintain that all the above shows that LL is really taking notice of what the competition is doing — and the competition are TPVs and OpenSim, not IMVU or Blue Mars, while Unity3D-based VWs might start to become the primary choice for education/business in a few years, if LL doesn’t do anything to stop that from happening (meshes are the first good step; a viewer on a Web browser is the next). But Philip, before he left, clearly pointed out that the focus is going to be on the residential market.“
DGP4SL Blog: The Project to Save Second Life – “The goal here is to present a Positive series that outlines ways the overall product can be improved and enhanced. I want to show how, with rational and realistic changes in course, goal and execution, the Second Life platform can be made more attractive to its users (new and old) and its overall ROI improved.“
Tom’s Hardware: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: October 2010: Athlon III X3 450 – “This is the fastest triple-core Athlon II available, and it sports an ideal combination of three CPU cores, a high clock rate, a low price, and respectable overclocking headroom. Despite the deceptively low buy-in, this processor delivers some serious gaming capability. It is such a great gaming CPU, in fact, that it almost renders most of the CPUs in the $100 to $130 range overkill.“
Gonzalo Lira: Signs that Hyperinflation is Arriving – “2012 will be the bad year: I predict that hyperinflation’s tipping point will be no later than the first quarter of 2012. From there, it will accelerate. By the end of 2012, I would not be surprised if the CPI for the year averaged 30%./em>”
Wired Science: Sleeping Mars Rover Finds Evidence of Liquid Water – “These layers suggest water, maybe in the form of frost or snow, seeped into the ground relatively recently and carried the soluble minerals deeper into the soil. The seepage could have happened during cycles in Mars’ history when the planet tilted further on its axis.“
Avatar Classroom: Avatar Classroom Hosting – “The Avatar Classroom is a virtual game object available for educators in Second Life and Open Sim. Once an educator logs into Second Life, they can acquire an Avatar Classroom helper robot which will automatically builda 3D Sloodle classroom for them. The magic happens however, when the robot uses its virtual radio antenna to communicate with the outside WWW. When the robot makes the connection, it will search the Avatar Classroom servers to see if the user has a classroom Website registered. If the user doesn’t our robot automatically creates and connects a supporting Moodle Website which communicates with Second Life.“
Debuggable: Test Driven Development at Transloadit – “First of all, new features always start out as a system test. Each system test boots up the entire REST service, sends an actual HTTP request to it, and evaluates the response as well as the files that were created in the process. Files are verified by looking at their meta data, as well as performing visual diffs on images against expected fixtures. For videos we are using thumbnails to do the visual comparisons.“
Trotter Cashion: I <3 Raphael – “Canvas was out on account of its lack of support in IE. SVG on the other hand… well, Raphael (a kickass javascript library) gives cross browser SVG support that works all the way back to IE6. Total Win!“
Make: Formufit Sells Maker-Focused PVC Attachments – “ Basically, Formufit sells PVC connectors intended for maker projects. They feature glossy, unmarked fittings for pipe sizes ranging from 1/2″ to 2″.“
Pierre Khawand:Tip-Of-The-Month: From 500 Hats to 5 Hats: How to Focus, Collaborate, Play, do E-Mail, and Get Accomplished! – “Put on your Focus Hat and dive deep into an important task that is going to make a difference. Meaningful accomplishments don’t come from working a few minutes here and a few minutes there. Meaningful accomplishments require focused and purposeful effort. When you are working in few minutes increments, or even seconds nowadays, you may be getting things done and getting some immediate gratification, but hardly thinking strategically and creatively, and rarely solving important and complex problems. “
In Traction: Fun With Python, OpenCV and Face Detection – “I had some fun with Gary Bishop’s OpenCV Python wrapper this morning. I wanted to try out OpenCV for detecting faces using a web cam. This could be used for instance to see if someone is sitting behind his desk or not. I used Gary’s Python wrapper since I didn’t want to code in C++.“
Ross Hudgens: 76 Powerful Thoughts from Paul Graham – “21. Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one. Some hackers are quite smart, but practically solipsists when it comes to empathy. It’s hard for such people to design great software, because they can’t see things from the user’s point of view.“
Startup Monkeys: Building a Scrabble MMO in 48 Hours – “I’m not sure what it is about these weekend coding competitions, but they’ve always fascinated me. I love seeing real life demonstrations of the fact that technology has progressed to the point where you can go from a harebrained idea to deployed and functional product in a few intense dev days. Or maybe it’s because I remember my previous life as an ASP.NET developer where the first week of a project would barely cover the schema design and data access layer.“
Zero Hedge: Guest Post : Two Decades Of Greed – The Unraveling – “Reagan cut taxes and doubled spending during his eight year reign. This initiated the launch procedure for a US government debt rocket. It sent a message to the world and to its citizens that debt was not a bad thing. Interest rates were in the midst of a quarter century long decline, so the debt became more serviceable as time progressed. There was no reason to save and invest when government and consumers could borrow and buy what they wanted today.“
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks: The Future of Virtual Worlds: No Fate but What We Make – “At this moment in history, people are facing a great deal of change and uncertainty around the future of virtual worlds. In particular, people with a vested interest in Second Life are understandably concerned about the future of the platform, unsure of what Linden Lab has planned for the future. Only time will tell what Linden Lab chooses to do. My own personal hope is that Linden Lab will continue to improve Second Life for the benefit of all its users, and that Second Life will evolve into a platform that can eventually interconnect with other virtual world platforms. I see connectivity as the key factor for any specific virtual world’s long-term success, which is why my attention is so focused on the current work involving OpenSim and Hypergrid these days.“
Brian Solis: Introducing The Conversation Prism Version 3.0 – “One of the aspects that make social media so fascinating is the conversations that define the culture and value of each community. While many of us operate on the information that fill public streams, sometimes the most interesting aspects of a story take place in the back channel. The Conversation Prism has its own story and I’d like to share it with you.“
Millin Arund Choudhary: Linux Boot Process – Code Commentary – “Linux has grown from a system that used to boot from a floppy providing no luxurious features to the user, to the current jazzy Linux systems. It is important to have an insight of the Linux boot procedure. Say for Linux to serve the purpose on embedded systems, the generic boot procedure must almost always be modified to meet the needs of the target application.“
Wikipedia: Emoji – “Emoji is the Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese wireless messages and webpages. Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means e “picture” + moji “letter”. The characters are used much like emoticons elsewhere, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets. Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing (apologizing) businessman, a face wearing a face mask or a group of emoji representing popular foods (ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, Japanese curry, sushi). “
MCDM Flip The Media: All the Multimedia Gear You Need for Under $1000 – “Don’t get me wrong, I love drooling over the latest DSLR features or bloviating about the superiority of Final Cut Pro. But the equipment doesn’t make the journalist, and the people with the best story to tell usually aren’t the ones with the most money to invest in equipment.“
Brando: USB Super 16-Port Hub – “USB Super 16 ports Hub allows you to connect 16 USB devices quickly and easily. You can enjoy high speed access to your USB devices such as USB thumb drives, USB lights, fans, and other USB accessories.“
Scott Berkun: How to Write a Book: The Short Honest Truth – “Here’s the short honest truth: 20% of the people who ask me are hoping to hear this – Anyone can write a book. They want permission. Truth is you don’t need any. There is no license required. No test to take. Writing, as opposed to publishing, requires almost no financial or physical resources. A pen, a paper and effort are all that has been required for hundreds of years. If Voltaire and Marquis de Sade could write in prison, then you can do it in suburbia, at lunch at work, or after your kids go to sleep.” Amen.
Dumb Little Man: Are You a Slave to Your Email? – “
Almost everyone I talk to feels that email takes up too much of their time. If you work for an employer, in a traditional office environment, you might have your email open from the moment you get into the office until the moment you shut down your computer at the end of the day.
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Pooky Amsterdam: SLCC Machinima Presentation at Metanomics Forum – “After a successful presentation at the Second Life Community Convention, the Metanomics team asked Pooky to give her talk live inworld. Here is a brief history and some tools of the trade.“
MovieStorm – “Make your own animated cartoons. Loads of styles and 3D tools. A complete virtual movie studio. It’s fast, fun, and and free to try.“
Lifehack: The Not-Do List: 9 Things You Need To Stop Doing – “Get started on your most important projects now and stop putting them off. Out of all the people I’ve met in all my life, I’ve never come across anyone who gets authentic joy and happiness from procrastination.“
Yahoo! News: Most Massive Galaxy Cluster of Early Universe Discovered – “The most massive conglomeration of galaxies ever spotted in the early universe has been found, astronomers say. This behemoth galaxy cluster contains about 800 trillion suns packed inside hundreds of galaxies. And it’s not even finished growing.“
500 Startups: Announcing Twilio Fund for 500 Startups – “Today we’re excited to announce Twilio Fund, a $250,000 micro-fund for investments in startups that are powered by Twilio’s APIs for phone calls and text messages. Via Twilio Fund, we’ll offer investments of $10,000 in up to 10 companies for a 1% stake in the company.“
Second Life Blogs: Mesh Import Open Beta Starts Today – “As previously blogged, I’m very excited to announce that the Beta for Mesh Import is now open to all Residents. Mesh Import allows you to bring models into Second Life from the many popular 3D tools such as Blender or Maya(t), using the COLLADA file format. We see this as an important step to empower content creators to make the inworld experience an even richer and more creative one than it is today“
PookyMedia Films: The Troubleshooter – “Joining Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Sclera Design, to craft a series introducing The Troubleshooter, PookyMedia gives the Old West a Second Life. See what happens when the Troubleshooter rides into town. “
