December 2012 – Page 3

December 24, 2012December 24, 2012

Tyche Shepherd’s Awesome Mainland Census December 2012

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd has again unveiled the magic powers of her survey bots to produce the latest quarterly mainland census over at SLUniverse. The survey was last ran in September 2012. The latest census, which should be read in full in the link, reveals that mainland regions are at a record high, but that the number of parcels, owners and estimated income are all down since September’s survey. Abandoned land has reached a record high.

Keypoints

Overall number of parcels down 3.1% from 153,263 to 148,524.
Unique parcel owners down from 69,773 to 68,664.
The top 22 Non-Linden owners increased their mainland holdings from 6.2% to 7.4%.
The top 3 Non-Linden owners increased their holdings from 3.1% to 4.2%.
Abandoned Land at around 10.6% to 11.6% of all Mainland – an equivalent of 714 to 783 full regions an increase from around 9.8% to 10.9% or 714 to 783 regions.
Estimated Monthly Mainland Tier US$926,089 , down by an estimated US$17,846 or 1.9%.
Number of mainland regions 6,729 a record high, up 2 from 6,727.
Linden Home Regions occupied plots 41,435 (97%) down from 41,689 (97.6%).
Land For Sale 30,556,368Sqm down 11.7% from 34,618,224Sqm.

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December 24, 2012December 24, 2012

User Groups And Wiki Need Greater Visibility

I was recently taken to task over my suggestion that Linden Lab’s communications are poor because I don’t go to user group meetings. I used to go to a lot of office hours when I was a lad in Second Life and after they were changed into user groups, I went to a few of them. User group meetings are not vastly different to office hours, even back in the day some office hours had agendas, such as Bridie’s bug triage meetings, whereas despite Jack’s best efforts, agendas never really took off with Jack’s meetings. However the point that I don’t go to user group meetings and therefore miss out on discussions is a fair one, discussions with Lindens do happen at user group meetings.

The thing here is that there are just four user group meetings officially listed:

Content Creation/Mesh Import – Discussion on content creation, currently focused on mesh import.
Server/Sim/Scripting – Simulator issues and technology.
Open Development – Open source policies, resources for contributors, and progressing contributions through the Snowstorm process; for open source contributors.
Server Beta – Anything pertaining to server changes and public beta testing.

There used to be something like four a day covering a wide variety of topics, now we get around five a week (Open Development is scheduled for Monday and Wednesday). However leaving that aside, these meetings are useful, user groups provide a high level of richness, although they are poor in terms of reach. The minutes are usually updated on the wiki for each user group, so if you can’t attend the meetings when they happen, you can catch up via minutes of chat logs.

However finding out about the existence of user group meetings isn’t exactly straight forward and surely something can be done about this. I know where the wiki is, but when you look at the main second Life website, it’s really not obvious that user groups even exist, let alone that there’s a wiki.

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December 24, 2012December 24, 2012

Private Estate Losses Reach 12% For The Year

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reports a net loss of 106 sims this week in her awesome survey post over at SLUniverse. Linden owned regions increased by 16 this week, but private estates were down 122. This makes the year to date loss of private regions from the grid 2,863, which is 12% down for the year.

The increase in Linden Regions comes from the arrival of 18 Linden Realms staging regions, so it looks like we may get some new fun sims to explore. However amongst the losses are sims owned by Dell, IBM, The US Army and The British Council. However the vast majority of the 122 losses are not corporate sims.

The good news for Linden Lab is that the size of the main grid still stands at 28,097, of these regions 20,994 are private regions with the other 7,103 being Linden owned. This means there’s still a very healthy amount of usage, but the trend remains downwards.

By my estimates private region ownership is somehwere around the level it was at in June 2008, although in June 2008 we had seen some large growth during the year.

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December 23, 2012December 24, 2012

The Lord Of Dee And The Secret Of LindenWorld Islands

So there I am on the beta grid unable to find Sandbox Cordova, or any other Sandbox. I’m stuck on a snowy hillside, although unlike yesterday I can move. My quest to upload a Mesh roof is being foiled again, I’m having awful trouble with Mesh roofs, largely because they end up being solid and you can’t rez inside them. Anyway my plans abandoned I return to the main grid, feed and set duties for my Dwarfins and then … I go hunting for the secret and mysterious LindenWorld, where Lindens roam and nobody else does.

I discover a world of lobbies, marketplaces, executives and no access!

The Lobby, this looks very suspicious and I suspect there’s a hidden mineshaft to a secret bunker here, with a lift that only works with fingerprint access.

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