SL-ice.net

Another video - featuring Sky Mark Properties and Heavenly Condos….

Click To Play

I have a new property availalbe for lease!

Located in Nautilus - Hanno, this region features rare, doulbe prim land! This means that there are about 330 prims available for you to use! The region is completely free of adspaces, and it will always be this way because LL restricts plots to a minimum of 1024m in size - this means NO LAG!

Checkout the video below and visit today by clicking the following link:

I have never posted photos of any of my properties here - so here are some:

Sky Mark Boardwalk - A new commercial area in Cristat to compliment Sky Mark Condos:

A New Area that includes Shopping, Condos and a Garden:

Sky Mark North - a new Estate featuring residential Land rentals and a few shops:

The Sky Mark North Commercial area is on the right:

More photos next time. -2fast

When you live in an apartment in SL or on someone else’s land, your things can get returned to you by the owner or other officer.

This article explains how to find the things that were returned to you.

When things get returned to you, they go into your Inventory’s Lost and Found folder. SL groups your things together and changes the names of your things, making it harder for you to find them. When SL groups things, it is called coalescing. The following explains coalescing and how to find your things…..

(NOTE: The text in this article is based an article in the Second Life Support Portal)


Missing Inventory: Coalesce Feature

The Coalesce feature activates when a group of objects get returned at the same time. Before a group of objects are returned, they are stuffed into a one or more objects, then returned to your inventroy.

How to find missing

1. Click the Inventory button.
2. Inside of the Inventory window, select “Sort” and then select “By Name”
3. Now select “Sort” and then select “By Date” (This makes sure the inventory is sorted by date).
4. Locate and open your Lost And Found folder.
5. Take the first object in your Lost And Found folder, drag it out. A public sandbox may be a good place to do this.
6. From top to bottom, work through the list of objects located in the Lost And Found folder until the missing objects are found.

It’s possible that your things could rez above or below you. This is important when you are in an apartment or some other place that is inside. It is best to do this when you are someplace on the ground. Float up a little so that you can see if your things rez above the ground.

The rest of this notecard gives you an example about how the features works - it’s not necessary to read this to find your things…

A resident is renting land from a landlord and has the following objects on their rented land:

* House
* Kitchen sink
* Table
* Chair
* Object

Later this Resident decides to move and ask their Landlord to return all objects owned by them. The Landlord complies and returns all objects to the Resident.

The Resident checks their inventory and the objects are missing! Or are they?

When these objects were returned, they were stuffed into one or more objects, then placed back into the Resident’s inventory.

These coalesced objects will inherit the name of one of the objects that they contain. In this case the object could be named house, kitchen sink, chair, fork or object.

Secondlife has experienced tremendous growth recently. One of the main issues is concurrent use - it peaked at 34,000 residents online sometime in February.

When the number of concurrent users is above 30,000, all of SL becomes very slow. I personally login at odd times when I need to get some work done or return things to people (to avoid loss of their items).

Today, Linden Lab announced that it may restrict logins to “Residents who have transacted with Linden Lab” during peak times. Here is a quote from the blog:

“When you open your log-in screen and see in the upper right hand corner Grid Status: Restricted, you’ll know that only those Second Life Residents who have transacted with Linden Lab either by being a premium account holder, owning land, or purchasing currency on the LindeX, will be able to log-in. Residents who are in Second Life when this occurs will only be affected if they log-out and want to return before the grid returns to normal status.”

While it may seem extreme, it is a necessary measure. I think that this move may limit growth but will improve the overall experience for most users. The growth limiting aspect will occur when the grid needs to be restricted more often as peaks in concurrent logins occur more frequently.

On the positive side, the First Look viewer looks very promising since it makes SL feel very quick and smooth (it is choppy at times these days). I have heard that the First Look viewer is also a little less resource intensive on SL’s servers – keep up the great work LL

Imagine a programmer creating systems that move people, improve people’s lives, entertain, and make people feel secure.

Imagine delivering those systems…in boxes! In fractions of a second. And handling the financial transactions easily and securely.

Imagine buying and setting up and using those systems: a simple click of the mouse to buy, open a box, a few clicks and all set. No installation, no CDs, no downloads.

Support? Completely automated, friendly….and…..effective.

Happy customers? Absolutely!

If you can imagine this….you can imagine…. 

Second Life.

Content creators and land owners are closing stores and removing their builds as a result of the CopyBot issue (discussed without naming it in the previous post here).

I am suprised about these knee-jerk reactions. More suprising is that these content creators only now realize that it is possible to copy prims since it has been possible to copy prims since SL came online.

Prims are just a representation of an object, so it can still be copied manually regardless of whether you have permission to modify it or even own the object. Granted, copying manually takes time and skill; however, it has always been possible.

The shop closures and disappearing builds, including some that are not likely to return, are in fact creating new opportunities for those that stay open. Business is booming since there is suddenly a lot less choice available.

Content creators, you are creating your own problems by making a lot of people aware of CopyBot and by assuming that your customers and people that pass by are thieves. Granted, there are people that will copy your creations and try to sell them. So what? The number of people doing that is far smaller than the number of your current and future customers.

• Worried about people stealing from your shop? Set your land to no build.
• Worried about people stealing what they have bought from you? Add value through customer support, scripting, and documentation.
• Worried about your completely unique build getting into the wrong hands? Keep your completely unique build in your inventory, wake up, realize that nothing in SL is completely unique, and come to terms with the fact that copying is not a problem - it is an opportunity.

 

This is not a big deal. Most consumers (more than 80% I think) don’t care to copy creations - they like things for what they are and prefer to buy them. 

Your responses here paint your customers as thieves.

Remember when you started hearing about the RIAA going after grandmothers and babies? Most of the people here are advocating similar responses - these are the same people that were disgusted by the RIAA’s approach.  Copying has always been possible. It is just easier now. Get over it.

Increase your quality, make your customers feel more like customers rather than Linden$ spewing purses and wallets that fill your vendors and L$ balances. Give them a reason to buy from you and they will - even if there are cheaper or free knock-offs available.  SL is becoming more like RL every day now. Embrace the change and we will survive this, just as we survived easy texture theft.

Except for the land, Linen water, and Linden trees, the content you see in SL is entirely created by its users. While the SL experience is, in and of itself, great it is the content — the people, buildings, decorations, vehicles - that brings SL to life.

A group of independent developers has been working for months to understand and mimic the communications that occur as people ‘play’ SecondLife. They have been doing this because the understanding of how SL works can lead to new ways of using SL as a platform for not only business, but also enjoyment. Imagine animating your avatar based on your hand gestures, or automating certain operations of your SL-based business while you are offline.

The group of independent developers have been instrumental in discovering and reporting exploits -  security vulnerabilities - to Linden Labs. One such exploit was the ability to bypass the L$10 upload fee when uploading a texture, image, or animation. Imagine the unfair advantage a user has over others if she were exempt from the upload fee. In addition, imagine the havoc that a user could create by uploading millions of textures or other assets (SL refers to textures, objects, pictures, animations and other content as assets) - imagine the strain that would put in SL servers, possibly denying others from logging in or getting anything done in SL.

Your view of the world changes as you walk, fly, or otherwise move through SL. Your view changes because the SL servers download information about the land, prims, and avatars around you - they download that information to your SL client that is running on your computer - it works in a way that is similar to viewing web pages in the Internet.

The SL servers have always sent this information to your computer and the ability to read that information has always been present. It just has been hidden from most users.

SL changed a few days ago with the availability of a convenient way to capture the information that gets downloaded to your system as you move throughout the world. This method acquires the information that gets downloaded and then uploads that information back into SL on your behalf. This means that people can now easily copy everything they see in SL - they can make an exact copy of just about anything in a couple of minutes and need very little skill to do so.

There is a catch. Remember the group of independent developers I mentioned? They created a test application that performs capture and upload and made it available among themselves. Someone, or some people got a hold of the program and made it freely available and are selling it on a popular SL web site.

Looking through the Linden blog, content creators are upset and want various things done to address this issue including banning the independent developers. Content creators are also discontinuing from selling their items in-world out of fear that anyone can copy them and resell them.

The reality is that the ability to copy things in SL has always been present. When you look at a great building, sculpture, article of clothing, or someone’s hair you are seeing textures and prims. Textures have been easy to acquire for more than 8 months now. Prims have always been relatively easy to copy - manually - even if you don’t own the items you want to copy. It just takes time and patience.

There are scripted solutions available too. It is possible to take an object you own and create an exact copy of it using some simple scripting.

As I said earlier, the newly available method for copying makes it simple to copy anything that is made up of prims or textures using a couple of simple steps.

So, what’s the problem? SL survived texture theft and it will survive prim duplication.

People are discussing copyright violations, filing DMCA-related complaints, and fair use. The fact is that if someone really wants to copy something you have made, they are going to get it - end of story.
We, the content creators of SL, have a great advantage over those who copy - we can create new things. We have customers that appreciate our work.

Moreover, seeing how others make their things is great since it helps make our creations better. When I started SL, I looked at all the freebie items to get an idea of how things are made. Freebie things are often high-prim and it took me a while to realize that there are very efficient ways to make things using only a few prims. I taught myself to learn the art of making low prim buildings and furniture. Now, that knowledge is broadly available and can only work to increase the quality of our creations since the black art of building is now ‘open source’(granted it is forced, but it is forced for everyone now so people no longer have a competitive edge by making their things no modify).

This could impact sales, like sales of music when services like Napster started. However, the fact remains that, today, recordings and movies still sell, rent, and make people rich. A small fraction of consumers go to the trouble of locating, downloading, and using pirated content. The rest still buy, and buy willingly since they appreciate the quality of what they are purchasing.

Am I concerned about people ripping off my creations? Yes, of course! At the same time, I am excited to see what new opportunities this will create and the overall increase in quality that will come to our world.

Some interesting SecondLife demographics data:

• 26% Female users
• Median age 26, average age 32
• 59% International
• 47%  North America
• 37% Europe (from 28%)
• 7% Asia
• 8%   Latin America

(I wonder how the total user base can add to 106%…maybe a typo)

Top 10 Countries

• United States   448,731 
• United Kingdom  88,372
• Canada  43,610
• Australia   31,501
• Netherlands 19,401
• Argentina   15,317
• Germany 15,219
• Spain   14,990
• Brazil  14,615
• Italy   10,357