Your a time wasting apologist then, thanks a bunch!

"The system requirements are similar to most online games these days".

That's great, but get this - Second Life isn't a game. For SL to succeed, it needs to be accessible to it's target market, which is a market which does not need (nor care about) higher spec PCs.

Have you seen the state of the PC games market recently? Exactly.

I'm not an employee of Linden Lab, so, I have no obligation to be professional. I'm just a user. The system requirements are similar to most online games these days. Second Life works in ways that are different from most games, so, even with a high end computer, you may not get over 20fps. That's just how it is.

But OK, so am I.

But, (dissing the competition aside), I'd just like say thanks very much for addressing the issue of the unrealistic system requirements.

Very professional of you.

Second Life is a completely open ended enviroment, you can create ANYTHING, even things that could be considered porn, legally. Therefore, Linden Lab has a legal obligation to keep minors out of Second Life -- the best way to do that is to require a Credit Card.

Second Life is not a 'cheap' version of There. There.com is basically the AOL of the virtual worlds. Easy interface, lots of hidden costs, lots of 12 year olds looking for sex. Great for a month, then you smack yourself in the forehead when you realize you've been secretly charged $60 for a hoverboat. Second Life, on the other hand, won't charge you RL$ for in-world objects. It only costs $10 for lifetime. The SL Mac version *is* a beta test, but the world itself is NOT a beta anymore. This isn't a traditional beta, you're only beta testing a specific client.

I know this was a pretty long post, sorry about that. Freel free to contact me in Second Life if you have more questions. The name's James Miller.

anybody tried it yet? I stopped at the whole credit card deal.

Panther is pretty much brand new, plenty of people don't have it yet, not great business sense if you ask me. Especially when you consider that this an Avatar client, not even a game.

Could the logo be a more obvious rip-off of the Uru logo? That's definitely close enough to be sued.

Speaking of which, I hope Cyan gets funding for Mac Uru soon.

"There" looks kinda cooler. Aw man. They should hurry up a little making There for mac lol.

Ummmm... pay to beta test a game?
Do people playing the "Beta" pay the same amount as the people playing the officially completed version?
strange days indeed...

*goes off to sign up with a beta version of his credit card.

Using Mozilla (1.7a Nightly Build in both cases) on an XP machine at work the Second Life website comes up all Flash animated n stuff- really nice. Access the site at home, using Mozilla/OS X.3.2, regular static, boring HTML.

Having to give a credit card number for a free trial is BS, too- that's like GIVING AWAY VALUABLE information: your credit card info, your address and contact information- valuable commodities being GIVEN AWAY. Expect more junk mail, spam after this...

Blah blah blah

Panther is probably required because of the improvements and additions made to the OpenGL API. More and more people are upgrading to Panther as each day passes, so the requirement is not ludicrious.

But look at that, Panther min. Does somebody want the Mac client to fail before it gets off the ground?

If so, they are really going the best way about it, this reminds me of the bad old days when Mac ports were created by people who didn't actually use (or particularly care about) Macs.

You have to give them a credit card number to try the 7-day free trial.

I really don't like that at all. I not comfortable with throwing my CC# around online.

This also looks like a cheap version of There. (http://www.there.com/)

Interesting to see that their still settling for those slightly insane CPU reqs, brave.