So I am back up at school right now, and I have set up the Blue Beast. I ordered some parts for it before I left home. I got a Hitachi 500GB SATA HD. I had to look up some information about my motherboard because it was so old. It can only have serial ATA hard drives. I also bought more RAM memory. 2 GB of Kingston DDR will double the current amount of memory in the Blue Beast. I will also replace the sound card with a basic Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy card. I placed the order for these parts last Thursday. Hopefully they should be here in a couple days so that I can install them. The owner’s manual to the Dell XPS was my guide for the most part when I bought these parts. While the motherboard and CPU are still good, they have already been outdated. Once I get these parts installed I will partition the 500 GB HD, and put two more operating systems on (Linux and Mac).

My Family’s old computer was retired in late October and replaced with HP. This four year old Dell XPS didn’t run for more than five minutes before freezing. This was most likely due to the massive about of malicious software and zounds of applications that had been installed on it throughout the years. On top of that, the ATI video card didn’t work have the time and eventually burnt out in the end. The sound card was shot as well. I found this to be a very opportunity to learn more about computer hardware. I had been planning for a while to start playing around with Linux. The Dell XPS would be the perfect computer to learn it on. All I needed to do was clean it up and replace a couple of parts.
I started out by getting a new video card so I could have a working display. A cheap ATI Radeon HD 256 Mb sufficed. I then reformatted the hard drive. I deleted the C partition and created a new one. I used an old Windows XP installation disk to install an operating system. Throughout the next couple of days I downloaded and installed updates. I used CDs to install the drivers for the ATI video card (Windows didn’t recognize the card until I got the SP2 update. I installed AVG Internet Security suite and updated it as well.
This is how far I have gotten over a period of three days. A big obstacle that I face while doing this stuff at home is my Satellite Internet service provider. It is very unreliable, sluggish, and has a 128 Mb daily bandwidth limit. I reached this in a couple of hours, my ISP then kicked me down to sub-56k levels.
I plan on buying a TV-tuner card , 320 Gb hard drive, sound card, and 2Gb of memory. I will install this hardware when I am back up in State College next week. My Linux ambitions have lead me to Ubuntu. I will continue resurrection of the Blue Beast in the near future.

Sun Microsystems has multiple locations in Second Life. The general location for visitors interested in Sun Microsystems is the Pavilion. The first thing I did was take a guided tour of the island in hopes of learning a little about what they had to offer. The tour guide was this silver rocket chair that flew me around to various places on the island. It told me a lot about the history of the company and various features in the Pavilion parcel.

Sun opened their presence on SL in 2006, and they have the title of being the first Fortune 500 company to hold a conference on SL. From perspective of their guided tour, I found the Pavilion to be very well designed and visually appealing. The textures where detailed, and there weren’t really dull areas anywhere. Sun Microsystems doesn’t have any dedicated website for their SL presence, but there are many press releases on their main page.

In the center of the parcel there is a media center with a lot of seats and large video display screens. There was an information booth that told me Sun used this to display new products. Other Sun affiliated locations offer a tour of their new supercomputer which they showed at the 2007 conference in Reno, Nevada. Inside the visitor center there are also rooms for SL meetings and conferences. A recruitment center and press briefing lounge are located here as well.

Sun showcases their products in one of the building in the Pavilion. All of their servers are set up. You can actually open them up and see what they look like inside.

One thing that I really liked was a nifty little marketing ploy. Sun gives away free SL clothing that has the Sun Microsystems logo on it. The shirts are pretty cool, and it promotes their company as well.

I was a little disappointed in the amount of Sun employees on the site. During the time that I was touring the site I saw only one person there. The map revealed that there were only three people on the entire island. To improve their SL presence, Sun needs to get more people actively involved during the day to roam there island and talk to visitors. Without people there, Sun’s island appears very desolate and empty. I would only really recommend this island to a friend who is interested in buying products or services or looking for a job with Sun Microsystems.

IBM has a very similar island layout. Like Sun, IBM focuses on using SL as a communications and marketing platform. They have a plethora of confrence rooms and media centers, they even have a large theater. Unlike Sun, IBM seemed to have more employees on the island, and people specifically working there to help visitors out. They even had their own sandbox that had various projects under construction. Based on my tour of Sun Microsystem’s Pavilion, and a brief stint in IBM. It seemed to me that IBM had a better and more complex island.

In light of yesterday’s events (Hookers in Istania), I have decided to look into SL’s prostitution and escorting economy. I find that the demand for VR prostitution and escorting in Second Life are very interesting issues from the perspective of an economist. How does the industry make money? What marketing techniques do they use? How does Second Life’s interface affect the business cycle. Before the hooker’s where expelled yesterday from Istania I had a chance to talk to them about their business associates and employers.

Exotic dancers Rachel and Zimmy work for a SL company called Club XTC Elite. According to Rachel, “I can make around 2000 Lindens a day on average.” I asked Zimmy more about her SL employer and she told me, “XTC has about 25 dancers working for them, and their own island.” That is 50,000 Lindens per day (estimated).

I’m sure people wonder who is really behind the mask. For all we know, one of these dancers could very well be a man. Rachel and Zimmy both claim to be college students and girls. Zimmy goes to UCLA, and Rachel goes to Texas A&M. Marketing and Business Supply Chain majors respectivley. These stories (if they are true) make sense. Two intelligent college students in business majors trying to bring in the Lindens on SL. Rachel even calimed to have a boyfriend in RL. If these two SL hookers are telling the truth, it is great insight into what kind of people get into this business into SL. These people are not necessarily in a lower socio-economic group like their counter-parts in RL. “I do this job just to get Lindens for clothes in SL,” says Rachel, “It saves me a lot of money from shopping in real life.”

Second Life’s features allow XTC to have virtual ads almost anywhere. And a query for XTC retrieved multiple XTC affiliated locations. XTC is one of many producers in this particular market as well.It would be interesting to see a report on the economy in general of Second Life.

“There is a very high demand for our business in Second Life.”
—Rachel

A group of hookers/escorts invaded Istania today in search of business. They created objects in the sandbox and engaged in X-rated activities. Even when Istania admins where notified of the situation, the Hookers attacked with a C4 bomb which blew everyone in the sandbox across the map in different directions. The Hookers then continued to evade the authorities for the next couple of hours, while a single Berk’s admin bravely pursued them. A heated battle took place in the late afternoon. The Berk’s admin harnessed the power of a black hole to “black” them into voluntary exile. The Hookers rallied and counter-attacked by filling the entire sandlot, top to bottom, with SL porno ads in the shape of giant triangles. Theses triangles cannot be removed by the Istania admins…the Hookers were really good scripters. We must wait for the all-powerful, all-seeing, all-mighty Tarkus Octagon to lay the smack down on these Hookers and protect the citizens of Istania.

LONG LIVE TARKUS OCTAGON!

Here is what remains of this spectacular SL battle:

Confounded

(Matt and Eric)

I Need Sleep

(Paul)

Editing

(Matt, Martha, Eric)

Karma

(Paul)