General News

Second Life: Fast Money

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It is splashing across the Second Life™ blogosphere that the Lab published an announcement: Faster Credit Processing & Upcoming Changes to Fees. The Lindens think 75% of the SL users taking money out will be able to do so in 2 days, working days.

I Forget Which Side I'm On
I Forget Which Side I’m On

Fees are going up. You can read the announcement to see why, but the info is:

As of April 5, 2016, instead of charging a flat fee of $1 (USD) per transaction, we will charge a fee of 1.5% of the transaction value, with a minimum fee of $3 (USD) and a maximum of $15 (USD). Additionally, the fee for purchasing L$ on the LindeX will increase 10¢, from $0.30 (USD) to $0.40 (USD) per transaction.

This is a good thing for most of us. But, see this thread: Anyone received this email from LL?

Marketplace Beta Search: Better?

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I am one that has bitched about ‘search’ in Second Life™ for years. The results have always been a confusing mix of items related and unrelated to the search target/term. Now the Lab is making the new search, Marketplace Beta Search, easier to find and use.

Marketplace Beta Search Link
Marketplace Beta Search Link

In November 2015 Linden Lab posted an article about the Beta Marketplace Search. See: Introducing Marketplace Search Beta. They updated it later the same month. Now they seemed to have moved to broader testing and have placed a link to the new search on the landing/home page of the current Marketplace or I’m just noticing it. 

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Second Life Bits Week 8

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Ciaran Laval writes RL is taking time away from his blogging. He’ll be a bit sporadic about posting. See: Brief Update. Darn. Ciaran is good.

group cover
Group Cover

Inara Pey is responding to those saying they will never visit a Project Sansar world if there is no World Map… or I suppose in the case of Sansar it would be more of a Universe Map. See: Maps as metaphors: Second Life and Sansar.

Anyone saying what they are NOT going to do something because of what something is going to be before they know what it is going to be… is obviously a shallow thinker… if they think.

Inara in her updates mentions the Gray Box problem, which has to do with regions crossings while attached to a vehicle. I can’t remember when I last crossed a region boundary with a vehicle. If you are running into that problem more information is here: SL project updates 16 7/1: server and viewer.

Your SL Firsts

SLUniverse has a kind of fun thread running. It is about your First ____________ in Second Life™. Check it out here: Your SL Firsts.

Firestorm Team Thank You

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Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.

Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.

Firestorm Support Jacket - Link farther down the page
Firestorm Support Jacket – Link farther down the page

You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.

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