November 2012 – Page 9

November 4, 2012November 5, 2012

Private Estate Losses Slow To Lowest Decrease Since June

Tyche Shepherd’s weekly report of the size of the grid has revealed this week that we lost just ten private regions this week. One Linden region was added, making a net loss of just nine regions, the smallest fall in regions since the week ending June 24th, which was actually the last time we had growth in the number of regions on a weekly basis.

Now considering that this is a much smaller loss than recently, it could very well be an outlier, rather than an indication of a change in trend. Time will tell. The same can be said of the net loss of over one hundred regions reported on October 21st, that was much higher than usual trends and thankfully looks like an outlier, that was linked in with the Royal Properties estate going belly up.

Tyche has also reported the results of her October 2012 private estate survey, which is based on a random survey of 5,000 private regions to determine the results.

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November 4, 2012November 4, 2012

Failed!

So there appear to have been some technical issues overnight, which are continuing, unscheduled inventory maintenance has been followed by unscheduled login maintenance. When I try to login to the main Second Life website I get the message above, a plain white screen with the word Failed, at the top left. This is actually a rather user friendly message that tells me all I need to know, basically, something is borked. However it’s not as much fun as the old gorillas with hammers image that used to appear, it’s still a to the point message.

However a point worth noting is that outages of this length and bumpiness are infrequent these days, their service has improved a lot, but sometimes things still go tits up. Older residents have more experinece of problems, I arrived in 2007, when once a week there would be scheduled downtime and then lots of people trying to login at the same time when the grid was supposed to be backup, followed by a flood of forum posts complaining it still wasn’t back, in between posts along the lines of “I’m back in! neener neener! At times that could get quite funny. However as I said, things have improved over the years.

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November 4, 2012

Oskar Appears To Have Left The Building

Prokofy Neva broke a story on November 3rd that Oskar Linden had been fired. SLUniverse had a thread regarding rumours that Oskar had been fired. NowLinden’s don’t comment on departures, ever. I’ve been to office hours before where people ask a Linden whether someone has been fired, and they never tell you!

Now, I don’t know if Oskar has been fired, but a couple of things here, love him or loathe him, Prok generally doesn’t post malicious rumours. I can’t see Prok making a post like that without having investigated the issue and spoken to sources.

In the SLUniverse thread, Jessica Lyon of Phoenix viewer development fame pretty much confirms that Oskar is no longer working for Linden Lab and that Oskar was surprised to have lost his job.

I’m always disappointed when we lose a Linden, I can’t recall a single Linden whom I’ve been happy to see go, and that includes Daniel, whom got a bad press over putting his name to an infamous blog post in the past. I mean I’m not saying I think they were all the bees knees, but they play their part and do their best and even when I’m critical of them, I respect them. The thing is, I admired Oskar.

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November 2, 2012November 2, 2012

The Problem Of PG Guidelines

There are a couple of issues doing the rounds at the moment, which initially seem unrelated but at the heart of them there is a link, well I’m going to link them anyway!

The first issue is the Star Trek CBS Copyright infringement thread. The thread has some interesting commentary, in particular on page 4 where KellyO Mayo suggests Linden Lab come to an arrangement with CBS and introduce a system that pays a percentage of sales to a CBS account in return for allowing Star Trek items to be sold on the grid.

Edie Shoreland gives the idea short shrift and suggests it should be residents who negotiate any such deals.

Both of them make good points, but really, there should be room for both arrangements, the glaring problem for a Linden Lab initiative is that the grid is not PG only and many brands get the heebie jeebies about being associated with any sort of image of a female nipple, although they’re happy as Larry to see their brands being perused on beaches in hotter climates where there are female nipples aplenty. I won’t get into a rant on the silliness of this but it does tie in with another issue, the IHeartSL fashion feed has gone PG according to reports, including a report over at New World Notes by Iris Ophelia.

One of the suggested reasons for the IheartSL change of heart …. oh dear… oh where was I, oh yes, one of the suggested reasons for the change of policy is that IheartSl runs Google Adsense and the guidelines for participating are basically that your site should be PG. Which links in with the issue of whether Linden Lab would be able to gain traction with brand partnerships whilst large parts of the grid are not PG.

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November 1, 2012

Pathfinding Provides Builders With Linkset Conundrum

Pathfinding is now widely available, although the tools are not yet in the main viewer, they are in the latest beta viewer which is available from the main Second Life client download page. Inside the viewer you will find the build tools:

An Image Should Be Here — Pathfinding In Build Menu

Now the issue for builders to consider is whether or not they want to consider making their buildings pathfinding compatible. There are certain things to consider here, fortunately Linden Lab have a good resource on the wiki: Pathfinding Tools In The Second Life Viewer. I heartily reccomend builders read that but I’ll briefly go through some of this.

Pathfinding works on linksets, not objects in linksets, that’s a big conundrum for builders and I’ll explain why.

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