No, this is not about Europeans having now to pay Value Added Tax to Linden Lab — I’ve covered it on SLOG already — but something far more unexpected: Havok4 Is Here On The Beta Grid!

In a completely unexpected turn of events, it seems that a “secret team of Linden developers” have finally managed to change the server software to implement a much more recent version of Havok (it’s currently on 4.5, shortly launched before Intel bought the company that created Havok)

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Just read Cat Gisel’s poem. It’s hilarious!

It seems like yesterday, when a group of about 60 people or so opened up their self-governed, democratic community in the old mainland snow sim of Anzere. Three years later, in spite of constant predictions to the contrary, Neufreistadt (Confederation of the Democratic Simulators) and their sister group on the mainland, Port Neualtenburg (Funadama), are still alive and kicking, viciously fighting their political struggles on the Representative Assembly and on their public forums.

But this weekend is time for the political parties bury their axes for a bit, dress up in their Dirndls and Lederhosen, and come out to the streets and dance to silly Schlager music at this year’s Oktoberfest, which is being commemorated simultaneously by both communities.

Well, I don’t know, but you’re welcome to discuss it at the New World Notes :) 

Thanks to Hamlet Au for publishing the article! 

Although it doesn’t come as a surprise to many of us, Linden Lab has slowly gathering up momentum on their future development strategy for Second Life, which, as we all know, is making the whole code open source.

We know now that the major reason for doing so is not simply “being nice” (which they certainly are ). The whole point is that Linden Lab is unable to hire the thousands of programmers it needs to make Second Life, as a product, do everything we wish. And I’m not simply talking about “fixing bugs” (which is always the first thing that everybody mentions) or “getting rid of lag” (which would be the second one!).

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Thanks to Rad Hand for having demonstrated Vlad Bjornson’s fantastic animated, morphed scupties. How does this work? It’s very clever: you send a QuickTime stream that has several sculpties in sequence. These, in turn, will make the sculptie’s texture be changed as the QT stream enters your computer. As sculpties are generated on your computer — and not on the server — this happens automatically and quite fast.

The results? Pure art using SL!

Encouraged by Hamlet Au’s article on how Japan is growing its number of SL residents, I thought I should do some statistics as well, just to keep everybody amused in what you can find out about Second Life.

Hamlet has this breakthrough announcement that “Japan Residents Surpass Europe”. What he really wishes to say is that Japan has more residents than any European country, but the title is misleading. As you can see on this spreadsheet, just the European Union has about 40% of all users of Second Life, compared to Japan’s 8%. If you add the rest of the European countries, it’s close to 50%, which is not surprising: Europe has 800 million inhabitants, compared to Japan’s 128 million or the USA’s 300 million. I would be very surprised indeed if there were more Japanese in SL than the whole of Europe put together; in fact, Japan has about a sixth of the population of Europe, and so those ratios make sense. There is also one American for each 2.66 Europeans, so the ratios between the US residents and the European ones are also close to what they should be.

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So, identity validation is upon us “soon”. Having let the message sink in — after all, it’s no surprise, Linden Lab has been talking about it for quite a while — it’s time to try to understand the implications. In other words, like LL likes to call it, a post-mortem analysis of what this might mean for our fellow residents — the kind of thinking that sadly LL does not do a priori, or, if they do, they almost never tell us why.

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