General News

Second Life Down Time

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Thursday morning (11/7) starting about 7 AM PDT Second Life™ will sort of be down. The Lindens will be doing some database maintenance. They will have the following impacts:

During this period, a number of Second Life services will be impacted. Some users may be logged off and may be temporarily unable to log in for a brief period. The maintenance may also disrupt transactions, logins, and account registration. The land store and land auctions may also become unavailable during this time. 

Of course, it is unwise to rez no-copy items, attempt financial transactions, or modifying Market Place entries. Trying to build or script in SL will likely be flakey too.

You can see the post here: Expected Downtime Thursday, November 7. They say they will update the post when the maintenance is complete.

Second Life News 2013-40

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Another third party Viewer meeting and some more interesting news.

TPV Meeting 2013-40
TPV Meeting 2013-40

Viewer Pipeline

The Lindens have promoted the Maintenance RC viewer to the main release. That makes the main viewer 3.6.7-281793. You can see the release notes here.

This release has improvements for avatar render speed and other fixes and improvements. Most notable are:

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Second Life ToS Meeting Summary

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Toysoldier has a blog post up on the ToS meeting I mentioned on Sunday. He has made a transcript of the meeting available as a PDF. See: Transcripts from Sep-29 SL Inworld Meeting on L.L. TOS Issue.

Get a Protest Sign
Get a Protest Sign

Ernie Farstrider, a RL retired academic administrator for all of a large university’s intellectual property, sponsored the meeting. Ernie states that he believes “moral rights” are unalienable. He provided links to Harvard’s pages on moral rights. Kylie Angel Skyborne facilitated/moderated the meeting.

It seems Toysoldier Thor has been pushing this issue in the creative community. He was asked to speak at the beginning of the meeting: (I’ve made spelling and grammar corrections [ ] as this was taken from a transcript of live chat. This is not a full transcript, but highlighting of the things I found of interest.) 

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Darien’s Thinking on Avatar 2.0

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There is an interesting post on SLUinverse about Avatar 2.0 by Darien Caldwell. See: A Modest Proposal: Moving toward Avatar 2.0.

Darien’s idea of making a new avatar compatible with the current avatar’s UVMaps is a deal breaker for me. That just drags those problems along. Fixing the UVMaps and attempting to use older clothing made for the previous UVMap is going to be a problem causing even more distortion.

Darien does key in on the layering problem. We can layer system clothes. We cannot layer textures on objects, like mesh avatar bodies. Adding that capability would likely be a complex change to the system. Whether it is or not, it would allow the use of even more textures. With the texture load increase coming from Materials use, that could be a serious lag producer.

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ToS Meeting Today

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Inara Pey has an article up about a meeting this Sunday to discuss the change in the Second Life/Linden Lab Terms of Service. That meeting is today, Sunday, at noon SL Time (PDT). See: ToS Changes: in-world meeting.

The meeting will be at: East, West, North Galleries Ampi-Theatre. Region: Georgiana 159/189/1800. This is a main land region from the looks of it.

I couldn’t figure out who is sponsoring the meeting. So, I went there to see what the deal is. On TP’ing in you get this note card:

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