Second Life Viewer for GNU/Linux Goes Beta

Now Linux users can enjoy the same capabilities as Windows and Mac users to explore, create and socialize!

The beta includes several features we’ve added in recent months, such as:

* 3D voice support
* Media playback - play back any in-world media supported by GStreamer
* Lots and lots of bug fixes, polish, and performance improvements

What's particularly interesting is the view in the comments attached to this post that the GNU/Linux is already more stable than that for Windows.

Digg, Dugg, Dugg

The perils of being Dugg:

At around 4am PST today, the last of the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release candidate builds appeared on our public FTP. This was mistakenly reported on Digg as the official release of the first Firefox 3 Beta. It’s extremely flattering to get this sort of attention, and we know that it’s motivated by the very best of intentions, but it does cause us three major problems:

1. The release candidate builds have not been thoroughly tested by our QA group,
2. we haven’t completed all the steps required for a beta release (see below), and
3. these builds aren’t being mirrored properly on our servers.

Perhaps they should give would-be downloaders a little coding test before giving them access to ensure that they are *really* serious hackers.... (Via Linux Journal.)

Second Life Gets Local Governance (a Bit)

One of the unresolved issues for virtual worlds is governance. If, as Second Life appears to do, there is a claim that this is a user-generated world, then it makes sense for users to run the place, too. Moreover, since users certainly pay a tax for the pleasure of living in Second Life, they should arguably have some form of representation. The first baby steps towards this have just been taken:

Many moons back, a portion of Linden’s Community Team developed a project meant to deliver better local Governance control to the grid. What does this mean? Many things. For starters: The Estate Level Abuse program which we’ve been Beta Testing since January. This was a test designed to allow estate owners to receive and resolve their own abuse reports in the method in which they best see fit. No longer subject to Linden’s ideas on how abuse could be handled, estate owners in the test had abuse reports filed on their land sent directly to their email.

Under the Blogger Beta Bonnet

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that this blog is now running on the new Blogger Beta (with all the downsides that this implies). It turns out that the code behind the new Blogger is, well, pretty frightening: here's a brave soul who's plunged in. I predict a flood of books explaining it all will follow in due course. (Via Slashdot.)

A Rough Cut of the Beta Book Idea

Books are lovely objects, but problematic in terms of their content - once they're published, you can't correct the errors easily. But here's an idea: publish beta versions of books, so that at least some of the bugs can be ironed out before they're published.

O'Reilly have taken the plunge, and kudos to them. One thing: given that the beta-testers are adding value, shouldn't they at least get the nascent titles free? (Via Linux-Watch.)