General News

AvaCon Abandons SLCC 2012

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AvaCon is the group that arranged the Second Life™ Community Conventions. They provided the service to Linden Lab™ via a paid contractual arrangement. This year the contract terms were unacceptable to AvaCon. They are not saying what the deal buster was. Of course I haven’t heard anything out of Linden Lab either way.

Whether the Lab will retain another company, arrange the event in-house, or just forget it, we don’t know. But, it doesn’t look good. Someone will have to be hustling to arrange the convention.

Daniel Voyager apparently noticed the post on AvaCon’s blog. He has an article about it: SLCC 2012 Cancelled, which seems a bit overly pessimistic to me, but he may be right.

I am sure someone has a call into a contact within the Lab to see if they can get a statement. I don’t have those kinds of contacts within the Lab. I won’t give up all hope until I her something from a Lab spokesperson. I also won’t be betting against Daniel’s conclusion.

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Fund Raiser DMCA Abuse

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You may or may not know about some of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) abuse that is happening. I’m a free market supporter and in general believe in protecting Intellectual Property Rights. But, this 2001 law in the USA, with similar laws in other counties, violates some of ideas expressed by the founding fathers of America. This law uses guilty until proven innocent logic, which is about as anti-American and anti-freedom as one can get. The remedy to prevent misuse, which opponents of the law said would never work, is a law suit for damages.

Fund Raiser in Pulse

The problem is a DMCA Complaint is easy to file with almost no downside. Fighting it is difficult and there is no real up side. The recording industry and related companies liked that it was difficult to fight and easy to use. DMCA has consistently been misused for coercion and elimination of competition. We are seeing its misuse in Second Life™.

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#SL ADITI Fixed

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If you use the ADITI grid for proofing your various types of builds, you’ll be glad to know that Maestro Linden has just changed the status of SVC-7727 – Aditi grid problem. After changing my password to cause my inventory on Aditi to update, my inventory no longer saves changes made to it from session … Read more

Sailor’s Dilemma: Havok Upgrades

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One of my readers is into sailing. Sailors have been having some problems with region crossings. We all have. Region crossings are an old problem that the Lab has worked on for years. It is a complex problem unique to Second Life™. The current Havok upgrade arriving with Pathfinding is a concern for the sailors because of know problems, which lead to the following in-world note.

Hi.   I’m a reader of your server and scripting blogs, an active sailor, and Head Race Director for one of the clubs.  

I was talking yesterday to our Estate Owner who is contemplating a bulletin to our members warning about what I think some are calling “Hell week”.  

I have not been in world as much as normal over the last couple of months because of RL. So, I’m not fully up to speed on what’s going on.   I’ve done some spelunking around and think I’ve got a rough notion of the issues at a superficial level anyway.    I’ve drafted a note (which I’m dropping on you) that we might send round to our members.   I would really appreciate it if you could take a look at it and set me straight if I have got the situation wrong.  

I’ll be checking Oskar’s forum for specifics on this week’s roll, I haven’t seen anything yet.

I won’t relate the attached note card. The preliminary bulletin ties Havok and Pathfinding to closely together, but it was pretty much right on and the sentiments understandable. There is a problem with Havok Physics Engine upgrades. The problem comes from how Havok handles moving-mesh-objects or dynamic objects like a vehicle or boat. The Havok people are constantly improving their system, as is every company that makes physics engines for games.

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MetaReality Week 27

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This week the podcast is interesting. Lots of opinions are voiced and lots of SL news is touched on. There is not a lot of what I think of as hard news. But, you’ll gain an idea of where some things are headed and probably some insights.

Metareality Podcasts

I’ve provided time marks and my take on the discussion. I have not tried to relate the opinions, I would likely get that wrong and I see that as unfair to the MetaReality cast. So, listen to the audio to get the opinions and apply your own personalized interpolations.

MetaReality Podcast: Healthy Competition

00:00 to 02:15 – Introductions

02:30 – Review Mesh Deformer developments.

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#SL News Week 26 & 27

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Lots of things going on RL & SL. So, I keep getting behind on the general news. This should catch us up on some of the interesting things happening.

Content & Mesh Meeting

Cloudy Blurry Avatars

In today’s (7/2) Content & Mesh User Group Nyx Linden brought up the Shining Changes announced last Friday. I covered Shining in Second Life Changes Coming. Nyx’s announcement… or maybe it is better to call it an explanation… follows:

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