Creationism, is it?

Kurzweil’s delusions and Philip Rosedale

I don’t and will not deny the man’s many accomplishments nor the fact that he is genius.

But Philip Rosedale fell considerably in my estimation when I saw him in the full throes of his singularity mania ala the Singularity University video. In which he seemed quite enthusiastic to volunteer all us SL users as guinea pig feed to the AI Singularity super brain.

Love Machine is built on old principles that never die in CA. Such as EST.

Rosedale will learn a lot more about the human condition reading “The Wind in the Willows” than he will following Kurzweil’s delusions.

— melponeme_k, Second Thoughts: Philip Rosedale: The Long View

Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon resigns

— SL7B Exhibit Snapshot

Linden CEO Mark Kingdon has abruptly resigned, during the SL7B celebrations. Another big blow for Second Life in terms of stability - an abrupt CEO change usually signals something is deeply wrong within the company.

Oh Well. Best Wishes for Mark Kingdon. Clearly, running Linden Research wasn’t the best job for him, with a whole heap of challenges to overcome and too little time/experience. Also, best of Luck for Interim CEO Philip Rosedale (yes, Philip Linden has returned), who now has the mammoth job of fixing all the (major) broken aspects of Second Life and make it appealing once more.

Though, I can’t shake the feeling that this was all orchestrated by Linden Management (the board, perhaps) months ago… I’m not the only one who thinks something suspicious is going on.

Shouldn’t Mark Kingdon at least write a farewell letter to all of Second Life’s loyal “residents”, aka Customers? That is, if he really cared about the platform and the loyal customers, who keeps on coming back despite all the horrible  changes.

Philip (Linden) Rosedale leaves Linden Lab, forever

It’s official: Philip Linden, founder and ex-CEO of Linden Research (Linden Lab), is planning on leaving the company he built up, onto yet another Virtual World orientated startup.

Great news for Linden Lab’s Second Life Virtual World? Not really. Hardly any forward-looking progress has been made since Linden Investors told Philip to stand down. Except a tenfold increase in Aggressive marketing, created by the Marketing-orientated CEO Mark Kingdon and his team.

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Reprint of my reply on the Linden Blog:
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The “Life in a Box” metaphor is getting really old now, Philip. All it does, is make mentally handicapped hardcore cult-Kurzweil supporters jump up & down.

Listening 100% to Investor’s suggestions will be the ultimate downfall of Linden Research, Philip. Your Marketing-based *replacement* seems to be a marketing “whore” (excuse my language: no offence intended), unable to make real progress with the minimal amount of resources, like you (Philip) have done.

Has your *replacement* made any significant progress over the last year or so? None whatsoever, except more agressive marketing. The soon-to-be-unpopular Viewer 2009 project seems to be delayed, with Linden Research/Linden Lab/the *replacement* gently forcing people to adopt pro-LL && anti-customer (biased) “partnerships”.

On that note, I fear that Ann may be right, that some deeply unsettling, root-pulling event is going to take place (by Linden Research) in the near future.

Anywho, it’s quite sad to see you (Philip) fully moving on from Linden Research. The old, warm & cosy days are now officially over, I guess.

p.s: Philip, how come your *replacement* was absent during the SL6B Opening/Closing performances? Shouldn’t the CEO be present during “his” company’s annual events?

To me, it looked like the *replacement* isn’t really passionate about all this, unlike you, Philip.
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The Darkest Hour of Linden Research (Linden Lab), perhaps, is almost here.

Philip, Look! It’s snowing outside!

Linden Lab just released a ‘trunk’ version of their GPL’d viewer - their second attempt at C++ multithreading.

With LL ex-ceo/Founder Philip Rosedale on-board as one of the principle developers.

Their much anticipated bandwidth hog, Project Snowglobe. A must for explorers as Snowglobe offers a much quicker texture loading rate, loading textures in batches (using thread pools) rather than sequentially loading them like they have been doing so far.

Complements it’s multithreaded texture decoder quite well, even though the mulththreaded texture ‘decoder’ is turned OFF by default. You can switch to a multithreaded decoder via the “advanced” debug menu.

Ideal for: exploring different simulators without having to wait a while for everything to load. Simulators with few object textures  (Sandboxes, Low-texture hangout areas), in-world shopping, making machinimas. People with high data caps or unlimited data plans.

Not ideal for: People on low data caps - Snowglobe can consume ~100MB in just five minutes! Hanging out in texture-orientated simulators (uninteresting/ordinary textures), General SL usage where fast texture loading isn’t really a priority.

Like First Look & Release Candidate viewers, Snowglobe carries the “use at your own risk” label, though I haven’t found any problems with Snowglobe yet. Similar stability/performance with the buggy “official” 1.23.4 viewer. Platform-independant - Mac/Linux/Windows builds on-site. Try it out - don’t forget to keep an eye on how much bandwidth it’s using if you have a datacap.

“Simplified Class Diagram”.. They should just use standard UML notation for all their diagrams, while making sure everyone knows UML. It isn’t that difficult to learn.

[Image from LL wiki - http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/HTTP_Texture ]