Curious definition of failure. I can't speak about the Oasis, but Second Life continues to thrive and remains the largest active MetaVerse with a functioning economy, user-maintained content, and a global population.

Oh to have a moderation point or two! That one was somewhere between funny and insightful!

Okay ...

You're way off topic, that's true, but what you're attempting to discuss is valuable and thought-provoking. I'd love it if you'd include a link to a place where this post is being actively discussed. Instead, here in the midst of a completely different topic, this post blows out into an empty void and gets lost in the vastness ... like the Xenomorph from the first Alien movie.

I don't think I agree. I've wanted a serious, virtual desktop for my computers for over a decade. Virtual monitors that wrap around me and can be positioned to accommodate my workflow. Possibly even virtual keyboards and mice/trackballs.

Ah, so if we agree this is offensive, do we then also agree that it's only one's appearance that matters in relationships? Asking for a friend.

A friend of mine, in response to my own theory that most of the active body of the Flat Earth Society are just troll'n the rest of us, likes to maintain that it's a way to gather names for mailing lists of gullible people to whom one can market get-rich schemes, homeopathic cures, magical crystals, and books about the dangers of vaccinating your kids. Such mailing lists must be like gold mines to certain publishers and marketers.

Reporting in as ordered, Capt'n! I like my resource consumption as light as possible. The more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain!

They never reached any adoption level specifically because they were so expensive. That and the fact the key mechanism was soft and unresponsive and was a pain to actually type on. Bring the price down to under a third of the Optimus Maximus final price, put the displays on the surface of keycaps for mechanical keys, and then you'd see adoption. The difficult problem that needs to be addressed is putting the display on a surface that moves up and down tens of thousands of times a day. Optimus solved this by making the display surface fixed with a transparent keycap that moved around it; an elegant solution, but it compromised the feel and spacing of the keys.

We're talking about sites where people spill all the details about everything from their dinner to their sex life, what kind of expectation of privacy should there be when that kind of abandon is displayed by the users? Facebook repeatedly deleted anonymous and pseudonymous accounts; a clear demonstration they don't respect anyone's privacy. They outed cross-dressers by linking their entertainment/professional accounts to their personal ones. Facebook has been consistent all along in this. The problem is that people seemed to think extravagant exhibitionism is the norm when it shouldn't be. When Facebook shut down accounts of people trying to protect their privacy, there should have been outrage and a mass exodus of users.

Jeezus H. Quisp, AC, I've already told you once before that I paid much Linden Dollars for account from old coot. Is good money and good account full of great wisdom and much upvotes.

Excellent response with plenty of empathy for your folks. I remember trying to teach my mom the fundamentals of programming decades ago as a teen and feeling nothing but frustration with her inability to comprehend even simple concepts.

"You're looking at it rather narrow-mindedly ..." That's typical for Anonymous Coward, unfortunately. While he (or she) sometimes has informative, insightful posts, more often than not, he's a mean-spirited ass. I guess I should cut him some slack, though; he's extraordinarily prolific here on Slashdot, and has been for years. Every article has dozens if not hundreds of (mostly useless) Anonymous Coward quips, and he often argues with himself. In the end, I guess he's just a lonely savant; sheltered and disabled and living a life in solitude except for the meager relief derived from Slashdot.

And where did you read it was stable at atmospheric pressure?

Yeah, I don't believe you, either. I'm running on a desktop I built in 2009, and experience none of that.

I loved the later versions of Unity. That weird Amazon deal felt out of place, but I had control of the lenses. My biggest problem with it was how much of a CPU and memory hog it was for my aging desktop. I found XFCE worked wonders for older hardware, and made the system feel like it had a big upgrade. Getting away from Compiz also contributed to that feeling.

What?! Wait. What are you using as a browser, iBrowse?!