Linden Lab – Page 153

March 9, 2013

Project Viewer Available To Assist Those With Direct Delivery Migration Woes

Since the announcement that magic boxes are to be retired in April for ulimited quantity items, the merchants forum has seen posts from people to migrate. Dakota Linden has been given special dispensation to assist and Jessica Lyon from Firefox has also been offering advice there too.

CommerceTeam Linden (CTL) has also posted a FAQ, with FAQ’s …… I think you could have worked that out for yourselves! This is useful because it links to the direct delivery migration guide, which is a pretty essential source in this case.

However, there’s also a merchant outbox project viewer now available from the alernative viewers page on the wiki. The blurb for this viewer says:

“This viewer resolves remaining issues with the Merchant Outbox as laid out in WEB-4600”

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March 8, 2013

Land Wars Episode IV – No Hope (AKA Five Years On From The Openspace Fiasco)

March 8th 2008, the skies darkened, dark forces were at work, Jack Linden posted a blog entitled: Announcing changes to the Openspace product. This would be a post that would ultimately lead to bloody battles in the forums and blog comments, it would pit resident against resident, Linden against Linden, resident against Linden, it would get ugly, but initially everything looked sunny as Jack (AKA The Land King) made the announcement:

“An Openspace is a type of private island intended for light use countryside or ocean. Unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU, sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).

Openspaces will no longer have to be purchased in sets of four at a time, as they have been so far. They can be bought singly, for a setup fee of USD$415 followed by a fee of USD$75 per month.

All other island services are therefore available for single Openspace regions, at the usual region rates, and Openspaces will no longer have to be placed together on the grid, they can be placed apart.”

Somewhere someone sniggered “This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Jack, and will soon see the end of the rebellion.”

The Better Announcement

Another post from Jack appeared on April 10th : Details on the Q2 2008 Island Price Change. In this post Jack informed us that the setup fee for an openspace would be reduced from USD$415 to USD$250. Many people cheered, others scratched their beards and wondered what was going on. However how could we raise our concerns when there were so many happy campers, protest would be futile as someone mused: “What are we going to do? We’ll be sent to the spice mines of Kessel and smashed into who knows what.”

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March 8, 2013

From The Huffington Post – Second Life: How a Virtual World Became a Reality

I saw a post over at SLUniverse from Cristiano (SLU head honcho) linking to an article by Peter Diamandis on The Huffington Post – Second Life: How a Virtual World Became a Reality. The article is based on an interview with Philip Rosedale, AKA Philip Linden, once Second Life’s head honcho. The post makes for an interesting read, although it should be pointed out that Peter Diamandis is a friend of Philip Rosedale, which he states in the article.

This means the article is positive, hurrah! What I like about the article is that you get a glimpse of how excited Philip was about creating a virtual world, Second Life may or may not have turned out how Philip expected, I’m pretty sure he once said he expected it might look like New York. However he envisaged a virtual world and he got one and it will go down in history as being revolutionary.

The key to a virtual world going from being a dream to reality was, it seems, tied to broadband over DSL. This breakthrough left Philip realising that a virtual world was indeed a possibility. However just how expensive these dreams can be is also explained in the article, Philip had USD$1million to invest , largely due to making money when Real Networks, where he worked, went public. However this was not enough to get started, Phlip is quoted as saying: “Unfortunately, even with my $1 million it wasn’t fundable.”

However some people such as Mitch Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3 fame were on hand to provide help and Second Life was born.

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March 7, 2013

Tyche Shepherd’s Private Region Survey For February

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s private region survey for February 2013 revealed a couple of stark points:

The large estates now hold a bigger percentage of the grid.
Older hardware in the shape of class 5 regions is declining, whilst newer class 7 and 8 regions rise.

As this is a survey there are margins of error in the results, so they may be slightly out, but not by much …. I think I’ve got that right! Now February continued the decline in private regions on the grid, there was a net loss of 146 regions, so if you held steady during February you’d hold a larger perentage of the grid. Let’s take a hypothetical example here, imagine you owned 10 regions and there were 100 regions on the grid, you’d hold 10% of the share. However if 10 regions disappeared, you’d now own 10 regions out of 90, making your share 11.1%, so without doing anything yourself, your percentage of land holdings increases when there’s a decline.

However February’s overall decline was 0.7%, which is healthier than January’s 1.5%. However when it comes to the top twenty landowners, their holdings went up by 3.8% (+/- 1.3%) in February, giving them 38.9% of private regions. Tyche also comments that taking list prices, their holdings are up 2.3%, meaning they pay around 31% of all private region tier.

Tyche also looks at the top 10 owners and figures out that they hold 29.1% (+/- 1.2%) of regions and pay 21.4% of private region tier. This backs up Tyche’s statement that larger estates own more homesteads than smaller estates.

The big mover in February was the ACS owned Azure Islands, up 0.8%. Anshe’s estate holdings don’t show so well in the full list as there are individual estates, but overall they amount to 14.7% ( +/-0.9%) which is up 1.6% on January.

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