Second Life

Things about SL

Bits and Pieces 2013-30

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Ciaran Laval has a post about the 50% discount for educational groups coming back. See: Educational And Non-Profit Ventures See The Return Of The 50% Discount. The original Linden announcement is here: Updated Pricing for Educational and Nonprofit Institutions.

This is probably a good thing. But it is also probably a bit late.

A number of people think the cost of a region is too high. But, that is in the eye of the buyer. I was over on Lost Paradise today looking at Ae’gura. There were 6 users on in the last 24 hours and 17 over the last 7 days. At the same there were 50,000+ concurrent users logged into Second Life™.

Lost Paradise rents regions for US$40/month, the Lab $300±. For daily possible visitors in a day that is $6.67 per user in LP and $0.006 per user in SL. If you are doing business, SL is way cheaper. I know that is not a accurate cost per visitor comparison, but the cost ratio per visitor is accurate.

For educational groups that tend to bring their own students, a discount seems to be reasonable thing that should help everyone.

Hypergrid Business has articles this week on AviWorlds going offline and a how to tell when your grid is about to fold. Hmmmmm… 

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KokuaViewer.org Down

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I’m not sure what’s up today. The kokuaviewer.org blog and wiki are down today, just when I need a copy of the viewer for my new Win7. I’ll use an older copy. The domain name is still working but PING is dead and a TRACERT dies in Comcast’s LA area. So, I don’t know if it … Read more

Viewer Pipeline Update

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The Viewer Release Candidate pipeline is operational. Get ready for some surprises. Remember. I’m writing as a Windows user. Things may be different on a Mac.

Open Source Meeting 2013-30
Open Source Meeting 2013-30

Oz Linden explained some of the thinking about and intended operation of the new pipeline. Part of the explanation was getting my terminology straightened out. Words convey meaning and people have to have the same meanings for the words being used to communicate. 

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Second Life News 2013-30

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I’ve been hoping the SSA feature would roll to the entire grid. The Lindens just aren’t listening to me. The main channel is going to get the Experience Tools package, which is an infrastructure upgrade that is basically invisible to us.

Content and Mesh Meeting 2013-30
Content and Mesh Meeting 2013-30

Blue Steel get the package that ran  on Le Tigre last week. This is bug fixes and a change to Materials handling to improve performance. It gets the Experience Tools upgrade and may be a fix or two.

Magnum and Le Tigre are going to get the SSA package. It updates to include the Experience Tools update and a couple of fixes. The combined region count for Le Tigre and Magnum is near 4,000 regions.

The way this is going we might see all three RC channels running SSA in week 31.

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New Second Life Viewer Pipeline

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As reported before, a new viewer pipeline with various release candidates is coming online. It is mostly in place now. I don’t see where any recent announcements have been made by the Lab. Inara over on Living in the Modem World, has written about it. But, I think we are all a bit unsure how things are going to work. I know I am. I’m experimenting with things now.

I’ve updated my machine to use Win 7-64 in a dual boot scenario. This gives me a clean starting place for experimenting with the new viewer pipeline. Until today the only viewer I had installed was the main SL Viewer. I have all the other viewers on the other side of the dual boot in Vista 32. So, I can get to them. But, not from Win7.

I have clean AppData folders as a new Win7 user. Plus caches and log areas are new and fresh. 

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Second Life Graphics Crashers

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You probably know there is a griefers tool known as a graphics crasher. What you may not know is there is a defense. The blog The Green Lanterns has an article on how to defend against these crashers. See: Debug settings to make graphics crashers obsolete.

I have yet to try these settings. I have not been running into crash problems. So, you are on your own.

The The Green Lanterns site is mostly interested in griefers/anti-grifers and what they and the Lab is doing related to griefing. I have yet to decide if this is another vigilantly group or a responsible activist group. I tend to avoid griefer and anti-griefer discussions considering both sides mentally unhealthy. But, The Green Lanters blog seems oriented towards helping people, at least that’s my first take.

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