transparency
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Linden Lab sharing customer care statistics
Linden Lab, certainly when compared to the game companies, presents lots and lots of data about how Second Life is doing. Finding the numbers of residents, active accounts, information about the economy, information about crashes, information about how fast people manage to render scenes and so on is all easy. Discussions regarding their plans for the future are harder to find, but are there, and are sometimes acted upon.To this impressive list, Linden Lab is now producing a set of statistics about customer care. How many calls, how quickly they are answered, the percentage of tickets solved, and how well the caller rated the service. Little things like about 75% of callers felt the support they received was OK, good or excellent. Of course this means 25% or so were less happy - but that's reasonably good numbers, and there are about 20,000 new support tickets a month. This is a starting point, it will be interesting to see how their care improves over time.
We don't need your officer chat, we don't need your guild control
Tipster Nurz from guild Hellscreams Mercenaries emailed us to mention that his guild has a very interesting policy. He claims that their intention from the start was to form a 'differently run guild', one without officer chat or hidden decision making processes invisible to the rank and file membership. So they abolished guild chat and make all decisions in a guildhall channel open to all members, discussing recruiting, member performance and other such topics openly and in front of everyone. If you visit their website, it seems to be working out for them so far.What this makes me ponder is, are they just lucky or is this kind of transparency something you could apply to any guild? I mean, I like my current guild a lot but even so we have personality clashes from time to time, feelings are hurt, people feel slighted, runs go bad and the temptation to point a finger is always there. Are the Mercenaries simply on a countdown to some player or another going ballistic over a hurt ego or have they in fact found a way to avoid guild drama altogether by doing everything out in the open, in front of everyone? Could this work for your guild? It's tempting to imagine a guild where everyone has a say in what happens, but at the same time when I've been in dedicated raid guilds it's always been my experience that a few people who work the hardest preparing strategies and gathering the proper mats for every encounter end up running the show. Is it inevitable, or has the better way just never been found until now?As long as it keeps working for the Mercs, more power to them. I don't know if I'd be able to function in such a guild, but I know I'm debating bringing it up with my guildmates in the future as we move into more serious raiding.
Your average inkjet can now print Super 8 / 16mm film
No doubt about it, vanilla inkjets seem to be garnering a whole lot of attention these days, and while the latest trick won't yield circuits or OLED displays, it could make filmmakers who long for days past quite excited. Jesse England has apparently discovered a fairly easy to automate process to print video frames onto transparency film. After discovering the dimensions for both Super 8 and 16-millimeter film, he simply made a template, arranged the filmstrip using Adobe's Premier and Photoshop, and printed it out on an everyday Epson inkjet. The noticeably manual task of punching out sprocket holes was still left to a hand-powered box cutter, but we're sure there are less tedious solutions just waiting to be implemented. As expected, the actual video quality was deemed "terrible," but the emotional impact was bittersweet indeed. Be sure to hit the read link for the whole low-down and to see a couple of video demonstrations to show you what the fuss is all about.[Via BoingBoing]
Afloat - window floating and transparency at the stroke of a key
Afloat is a killer System Preferences utility that adds a 'float on top' option and customizable transparency settings to virtually any Cocoa app in Mac OS X. Once installed (and you restart any Cocoa apps that were running), new keyboard shortcuts and a couple of options under the Window menu will offer all sorts of handy wndow management and see-through goodness. Great for those times when you have windows layered on top of each other and just need to glance at something underneath, and when you're using a bittorrnet client to download a Quake 4 demo and you're sick of it falling underneath Adium every time you switch to chat - or just for those times when you want to show off with some sexy transparency. Check out Afloat's ReadMe (PDF link) for more details. Afloat is freeware, a Universal Binary, and available from Emanuele Vulcano's site.
