* Posts by LaeMi Qian

320 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2007

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Foam hinders Halo 3 disc scratching down under

LaeMi Qian

Likely the Australasian product...

...was packaged locally ('Locally' down here could mean SE-asia) and the packager used had a better grasp on QA than the packagers used for the European and Americo regions.

Jack Thompson sets about Halo 3

LaeMi Qian

I am genuinely interested to know...

... Mr. Thompson's views on gun ownership rights. Is he also anti-real-gun? or are guns only bad if simulated?

US teacher fired for non-literal bible reading

LaeMi Qian

I believe the snake wasn't...

...a real snake, but Satan doing a credible snake impersonation, so the talking is explained :-P

I just wish Jesus would get off his butt and come back (or have they decided he is going to give humanity ANOTHER second chance like was declared he did after he didn't show up around the end of the first millenia?) and take all the faithful off to heaven where they can sit around playing harps for the rest of eternity (how boring eternity would get after a few billion years of it) and leave the rest of us down here in peace.

Left-handeders finally unlock the closet, researchers find

LaeMi Qian

Customers

Some of my field-customers are lefties and I have learned to invert my handedness as easier than re-arranging their workspaces (and back again when I am done). Didn't take too long.

Aussie politicos in a froth over naval boob jobs

LaeMi Qian

Hmmmm...

If they are already at your navel, they are quite big enough!!! :-P

London council to use lie detectors to finger benefit cheats

LaeMi Qian

Voice alteration :-)

I wonder what a cheap telephone voice transformer would do to such a system? Call in sounding like a Chipmunk or a throat-cancer patient. Or use a speech synthesiser for a laugh :-)

LaeMi Qian

Re: using the system for political debates

Sadly, as pointed out above, habitual liars generally won't trigger the system.

Ergo, it is useless for political debates :-(

Dell laptop explodes 'like fireworks'

LaeMi Qian

Dood!

that's gonna smell!

Uranus strikes a pose for Hubble's camera

LaeMi Qian

mianus

Commonly pronounced uyr-anis, I have also heard an attempt to re-pronounce it (presumably to remove the posterial imagery) urine-ous -- which is probably WORSE!!

I have once heard a pronunciation that had no English-language issues, but I can't for the life of me recall what or who (though it may have been Carl Sagan).

Oh, and where is aManFromMars when things get topical?

IBM faces Second Life strike

LaeMi Qian

spread-out protest

most simulator regions in SL are capped to 40 avatars per 256x256m region. Congregating at corners of 4 sims will allow 160 AVs but it is going to be a rather dispersed protest at any rate.

And if IBM wanted to be really mean, they could lower the sim pop cap to 5 or something on the regions they own.

Of course it only takes one noob with a 'crazy hair' attachment (hair that uses one flexi-shape for almost every strand) and a few badly scripted 'always-online' and 'radar' devices to bring a simulator near to a grinding halt!

Girls prefer pink: official

LaeMi Qian

Pink- GAK!!!

My family is on warning that anyone who buys me a pink mouse or one of those horrid pink 'for her' PC tool kits will need a proctologist to retrieve them!

Designer breaks up trad PC design

LaeMi Qian

@ Craig

Well unless you are assuming all the inside parts run off 220VAC, there has to be a small internal power supply inside each unit.

A better way to do it would be to have a power module as the base and a custom multi-pin socket between modules to carry PCIe, DC voltages, etc.

Oh dear, I have just described PCIe/104.

Samsung says Yepp to all-girl rollerskating troupe

LaeMi Qian

no ogg/vorbis

no sale!

Down with secular ringtones

LaeMi Qian

Last I heard

the Islam faith's higher-ups had stomped on an attempt at Koran-based ringtones as rather tacky and not with the spirit of the faith (in part because people tend to cut the ring-tone off mid-sentence which is just downright rude to Allah).

Nissan rolls out drink-proof cars

LaeMi Qian

Other way

Usually hot tech from NASA filters down into general use. Maybe this tech should be filtering the other way ;-D

MIT in Matrix 'Crowd Farm' plan

LaeMi Qian

Luggage

Wheelie luggage over moving blocks! FUN!

And I can just see the uneven and slightly wobbly footing tripping people under trains!

Just stick a big metal prong in the backs of our heads and be done with it!

Second Life turns on screams of horror tool

LaeMi Qian

SL is (was) over-hyped and the backend is cuddy. Nice front-end tho!

For all LL's harping about OSS, the voice client is not available in the Linux client as their tech supplier doesn't support all their client platforms. Being a Linux user is therefore the ultimate excuse for not participating in the voice option ;-)

My own interest in SL is largely in building 3D stuff for the amusement of myself and others - I basicly treat it as a virtual Lego-technic/Meccano set. It is much more like a free-form play toy than a 'game' with an explicit objective, hence people who are used to living by canned objectives (kill the monster get the gold in VR, or, do the job get the house/car/HDTV in RL) tend to be disappointed ;-)

While I can think of a number of VR systems with vastly superior back-ends, SL's UI is the only one I have encountered that doesn't actually require you to be a programmer or 3D expert of some sort to make your own in-world stuff. That is honestly the only reason I use it.

As for the busines world, good on LL for milking lots of development capital from big-business 'managers' who should (but never do) know better than to be sucked in by novelty and promises. OTOH, advertising write-offs might be a very carefully thought-out move on their behalf, so I probably shouldn't assume stupidity (though on past record, it is a pretty safe assumption with most big-business). That isn't to say that SL has no business use, but it isn't the 'new-era' by a long shot. Just as in the long-distant past, private companies could pay for brand placement in Lego sets (I assume Shell paid for that), there is a case for some sort of presence in SL, but probably no more than there is for a presence in a PlayStation game road-side/field-side billboard. A corporate presence in SL is not much use unless the presence is more than a huge 3-D billboard. If I want to see a company's products, their web site is a more usable alternative to wandering a virtual showroom.

As far as the market slump goes, in my own recent experience you are spot-on. Over the past 3 weeks I have noticed a serious flattening in the in-world marketplace for my sales of some of the stuff I made that others seem prepared to pay for (my aim is to cover my online costs, not to actually turn a proffit for RL, and in that I have been more-or-less successful so-far).

SL is really free-play. A small number of people have turned their play into a profession, but most just play for the sake of play and some are like my brother's garage band who are happy to make enough at pub gigs to cover the costs of petrol and to get new instruments occasionally. Don't be expecting to give up your day job for a virtual one any time soon!

Virtual narcs boot Second Life casinos off the island

LaeMi Qian

be black

Of course, anyone who bothered to read the AV customisation tutorial on the intro-path at Welcome Island (RTFM!!) would know that any skin colour (including rainbow ones) are a completely free slider-control away.

My south-asian AV started as the rather white "Girl-next-door" and was fully altered in 5 minutes of fiddling in control panels before I left welcome island still with all my Lindens intact.

My own interest in SL is largely in building 3D stuff for the amusement of myself and others - I basicly treat it as a virtual Lego-technic/Meccano set. It is much more like a free-form play toy than a 'game' with an explicit objective, hence people who are used to living by canned objectives (kill the monster get the points in VR, or file the report, get the house/car/HDTV in RL) tend to be disappointed ;-)

Teens using M-rated games to vent anger

LaeMi Qian

Don't forget...

> video games/ heavy metal music/ violent porn/ roleplaying games/ other misunderstood scare story of the week.

Don't forget those other standards of youth corruption: television, talking pictures, silent pictures, the printed word, travelers from the next village south... which were, in their own days, branded with much the same claims!

I saw aliens at Roswell, claims dead PR man

LaeMi Qian

Humanoid aliens? Again?

What proportion of creatures on this planet resemble us physically? What are the odds of something developing in an entirely different planetary body's conditions even remotely resembling us physically?

Humanoid aliens are the domain of sci-fi TV/movies without the budget for decent animatronics. And the weak-of-imagination.

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