Second Life – Page 95

November 21, 2014

The Drax Files: World Makers Ep 24 – MadameThespian Underhill

An image should be here — Episode 24 Of Drax Files

Episode 24 of The Drax Files : World Makers features MadameThespian Underhill, Actor-director with the Avatar Repertory Theater and Builder/seller of Victorian homes & items, pianos, harpsichords, pipe organs and scripted music. Then there’s more, MadameThespian is one of those rare beasts in Second Life, she’s a Charter Member! Even Lindens get excited when they see Charter Members. Charter Member status means that someone is rather old in Second Life terms, in this case MadameThespian has a rez date of 18th December 2002.

More importantly Charter Members played a very important role in keeping Second Life afloat during its early days. They paid an upfront fee which I believe guaranteed them a 4096m plot for life with no further land fees. However the upfront fee they paid, around USD$160.00, provided some much needed cash to keep Second Life in development.

Virtual worlds, explains MadameThespian, are an extension to the ancient art of live storytelling. The Avatar Repertory Theater have produced many shows over the years including original productions and adaptations of existing works.

They build their own sets and create some of their own items but sometimes someone else makes a better item and they take full advantage of the fact that there are plenty of other content creators in Second Life who create suitable wares for their shows.

MadameThespian comes from, a thespian background. She was a Chicago based actor through most of the eighties but now lives in the mountains of Montana where she is a member of the Montana Shakespeare company. However there are certain areas of acting where the virtual world provides opportunities for actors where the real world may close doors.

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November 21, 2014

Linden Lab’s Promotional Images Are Great But Why No Location Links?

Linden Lab have done a great job in providing the press with some good images for Second Life related articles. This was exemplified well in a recent excellent interview Ebbe Altberg gave to Dean Takahashi on Venture Beat : Linden Lab explores VR for its next-generation virtual world (interview).

I mean that looks like my kind of village and the next one doesn’t look bad either :

The main difference between the top and bottom one is that I know where the bottom one is because Ziki Questi added a comment on Flickr. The second photo is of a sim called Venexia. Now obviously this Flickr resource is merely designed to provide decent images of Second Life, rather than the old outdated ones, but for those of us who like to explore, it would be nice if at least the name of the sim appeared.

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November 20, 2014

Linden Lab Explain The Reasons Behind Maintenance Week

Linden Lab have blogged about the reasons for the maintenance this week : The Hardware Issues Behind Recent Region Restarts. The problem, the blog explains, was down to a hardware failure which first manifested itself in July when the hardware failure took down four of Linden Lab’s new generation hosts. These things happen and Linden Lab put it down to, these things happen. I’m not surprised, that would be my first port of call too because you don’t want to think it may be a nasty hardware fault.

However in early October the same thing happened with another four hosts, which would have raised suspicions. A fortnight later the same fault manifested itself with another four hosts, at which time Linden Lab fully realised that this wasn’t just one of those things. Linden Lab’s blog post is very transparent on what happened here and also gives us some insight into how things work server side :

Each host lives inside a chassis along with three other hosts. These four hosts all share a common backplane that provides the hosts with power, networking and storage. The failures were traced to an overheating and subsequent failure of a component on these backplanes.

After exhaustive investigation with our vendor, the root cause of the failures turned out to be a hardware defect in a backplane component. We arranged an on-site visit by our vendor to locate, identify, and replace the affected backplanes. Members of our operations team have been working this week with our vendor in our datacentre to inspect every potentially affected system and replace the defective component to prevent any more failures.

Now the question some may have is “Why didn’t Linden Lab explain this at the start of the week?” The answer I suspect is that Linden Lab wanted to be sure that the issue was being fixed during this maintenance window before informing their customers of the details.

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November 20, 2014November 20, 2014

Automattic Exemplify A Sensible And Transparent Approach To DMCA Requests

Nalates Urriah has posted a very interesting blog post about about DMCA Abuse. The post highlights that Automattic, the people behind WordPress and other ventures have been Striking Back Against Censorship. The post is almost a year old so I’m a bit surprised we haven’t heard more about this in Second Life circles. Where this should be of interest to Second Life and other users is that this is about abuse of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA process is something that frustrates many Second Life content creators.

The issue for Automattic is what they view as abuse of the DMCA process to censor opinion. On their blog post Automattic write :

The DMCA system gives copyright holders a powerful and easy-to-use weapon: the unilateral right to issue a takedown notice that a website operator (like Automattic) must honor or risk legal liability. The system works so long as copyright owners use this power in good faith. But too often they don’t, and there should be clear legal consequences for those who choose to abuse the system.

However whereas this is all very good and well when the DMCA process is used in good faith, Automattic were seeing an increase in the number of cases where good faith does not seem to be being applied, they also highlight one of the issues with the DMCA process that makes people uncomfortable, having to provide your details to the person making the complaint :

We receive hundreds of DMCA notices and try our best to review, identify, and push back on those we see as abusive. Our users have the right to challenge a DMCA complaint too, but doing so requires them to identify themselves and fill out a legally required form saying that they submit to being sued for copyright infringement in a place that may be far away. If they don’t, their content is taken down and could stay down forever. This tradeoff doesn’t work for the many anonymous bloggers that we host on WordPress.com, who speak out on sensitive issues like corporate or government corruption.

So we’re talking blogging and sensitive issues here, not whether someone really created a texture. However the issues raised are similar to those that confront Second Life users in terms of the process and the abuse of the process. One of the big issues that people in Second Life complain about is that it’s too easy to abuse the DMCA procedure.

Automattic assist their users when they see what they feel are abusive uses of the DMCA procedure, they even have a Hall Of Shame where they highlight some examples of what they feel were improper takedown notices.

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November 19, 2014

Philip Rosedale At Gigaom Roadmap – Sci-Fi, Virtual Worlds And Beards

Philip Rosedale was interviewed by Signe Brewster at Gigaom Roadmap 2014 yesterday and Gigaom have posted the interview in an article entitled : The gap between virtual reality and sci-fi is shortening. Philip talks about virtual worlds, including Second Life and not surprisingly, High Fidelity.

The video is interesting because Philip talks about the past and future of virtual worlds as well as discussing how science fiction is a good influence for him. The interview runs for about half an hour and that includes a Q&A session.

There’s a really interesting part of this interview where Philip talks about body language. New devices allow virtual worlds to capture the body language of the person behind an avatar and reproduce that body language inside a virtual world. High Fidelity staff conducted an experiment where they were each interviewed in High Fidelity using the same avatar and then those videos were later played back to all of the staff without sound. The staff members quickly realised that they could recognise who was who based on the face gestures and body movements of each avatar.

When asked about what he has learnt from Second Life Philip talks about economies, virtual communities and how people will self organise. This may explain why High Fidelity is more of an open source venture than Second Life was. Philip has witnessed that people will self organise and presumably he also feels they are capable of self governance. Philip does point out that technology has changed since Second Life was created, for example there was no cloud computing back then and he does state that they tried to make Second Life as open as they could. This is a comment that has a lot of merit. Whereas Second Life isn’t open in the way High Fidelity will be, it remains very open in the concept of user generated content.

Philip talks of how reading science fiction is almost an instruction manual for building virtual worlds and his big influence in this area is, not surprisingly, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

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