Resident Transmission
Time to bid Flash farewell?
It is nearly five years since Steve Jobs published his “Thoughts on Flash” letter and streaming video giant YouTube yesterday announced it is making the HTML5 video player the default to users accessing the site via Chrome, Safari 8, Internet Explorer 11 and Firefox.
Calling the move a "critical step forward," YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider detailed the company's reasoning in a post to the official YouTube Engineering blog. It represents the culmination of four years of work, and was enabled by several recent additions to the HTML5 video specification.
While living nicely without flash on iOS for about 6 years, and using the excellent ClickToFlash Safari extension which would block all flash content, and only load it on demand has made surfing the web flash-free almost a reality. YouTube remained as one of the last hurdles to hitting the Uninstall button.
Adobe’s Flash player has been plagued by a series of security issues and was one of the few real attack vectors that has even been exploited on OS X for bringing malware to some user systems. Most recently, the company acknowledged a critical vulnerability in the Flash player that could allow an attacker to take over users' computers simply by directing them to a website. It has also been a CPU hog – another good reason to let it go, and even more so if you are on a laptop running off the batteries.
Mac users wanting to uninstall it should go to
/Applications/Utilities/Adobe Flash Player Install Manager.app
and click the Uninstall button.
Does Flash have a place in OpenSim?
In our view, none whatsoever.
Many of the viewers will let you use flash based content such as games in-world but we find it pointless, and it only adds more complexity, memory and processing overhead to the viewers. Every developer that lets it go from their viewer should be applauded.
The same with marketing and support sites for grids; it is time to uninstall it from your websites for good.
SecondLife follows VirWox – adds Skrill as option for purchasing virtual currency
While SecondLife users in the US have had many options for purchasing the virtual currency Linden Dollars (L$), many of those options have not been available to users in Europe, often limiting their participation in the internal economy of SecondLife.
Austrian VirWOX saw an opportunity in providing virtual currency to these users and added multiple payment options better suited for the European market to their services over the last few years. Creating an account with VirWOX not only allowed purchase of L$ for use in SecondLife, but also had the option of buying the OMC currency used by many opensim grids, in addition to currency for the Avination grid. With a VirWOX account virtual currencies can be moved between avatars participating in different grids without exchange fees. Even BitCoin can be traded for other virtual currencies.
By an announcement Jan 13, 2015 Linden Lab has now added Skrill as a payment option for the L$. The news follows an announcement made by Skrill a few days ago to integrate their Digital Wallet as a payment option for SecondLife users.
While many Skrill customers will opt to purchase L$ directly inside SecondLife, others may prefer to use their Skrill account with VirWOX for purchasing L$ for transfer to their SecondLife L$ holding. For people who want to participate in multiple virtual economies this may prove to be a better and more flexible option.
xmir grid supports the OMC currency provided by VirWOX.
Je Suis Charlie Button Badge
A button badge “Je Suis Charlie” is available on the SecondLife Marketplace, in Kitely and in-world at Hypergrid grid.xmir.org:8002
Share it and distribute to as many as you can. Make it known you don’t support attacks on freedom of speech.
New Year - New Welcome Office
The xmir welcome office you walk into just off the landing pier has gone through a bit of a shine-up for the new year. The office building that first came to life in the Concinna region of SecondLife in 2010 was moved in to opensim in 2011, and had been virtually unchanged since, only receiving a mesh version of the original texture based windows. So it was time for a change.
The reception desk and area has been made bigger and is more welcoming once you enter the front door. The old door has been replaced by a mesh door, the windows all have curtains or blinds, and pots and plants have all gone mesh.
A meeting room section has been added to the second floor and the stairs have been moved to a more natural location to ease access to the meeting area.
A coffee maker has been strategically placed in the reception with the only thing missing is a decent drinking animation for the cups not to slosh coffee all over your avatar. Good animations are still few and far between in opensim – sigh. I might have to pull out DAZ studio to make one myself…
Give it a few weeks and a cozy bar will be in place downstairs too.
Some of the new items should be in marketing both on xmir and Kitely Market in a few days – and with that, Welcome to xmir and 2015!