Second Life News 2013-35 #2

ToS Change?

There seems to be another ToS change. I have not looked to see what it is, but I did get a prompt to agree to the ToS today. I was in a hurry to be some place, so I didn’t read it.

Main and RC Channels

All the planned changes covered Tuesday have rolled out. All seem to be working. So, there really isn’t any ‘news’ for that part of Second Life™.

The server change that allows a server to restart as soon as all avatars are out of the region is on the RC’s. For now this is a region owner or estate manager tool. But, the plan is to move it into the Server Update Roll Out process to speed up the process.

There has been some discussion of having the server trigger a shutdown-coming-event in scripting. This would allow viewers and scripts to respond to a shutdown. One could have a viewer TP you to another region rather than let you get logged out. Expect such a feature to be a third party viewer feature first.

For now this is just talk. 

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ADITI IP Tutorial Problems

Some users are having a problem seeing the Mesh IP Rights Test. If you have uploaded mesh to the Preview grid you know that you have to take the test once for the main grid and again for the Preview/Beta Grid ADITI. Only after passing the test can you upload mesh objects. Their browsers are … Read more

Oculus Rift in Second Life’s Berlin 1920

Jo Yardley has been talking with Björn-Christian Bönkost. Björn has a Rift SDK unit that he is using with David Rowe’s CtrlAltStudio Viewer. Björn visited Berlin in Second Life™ and Jo got him to write about it. You can read his account here: First Oculus Rift user visits Berlin.

[youtube zorXEWIbZYg]

I think for anyone thinking of trying out the Rift, Björn ‘s comments say it very well: “I was impressed, amazed and stunned. The city is bigger than anything you can find as a demo for the rift.” 

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Second Life Access Controls

The release candidate package running on all three server RC channels has a feature to add more access controls. We did not get much information on the feature. However Maestro Linden has posted more information in the SL Forum in response to questions.

Plus there were follow up questions and follow up answers. The idea is to make griefing harder and to give parcel owners more control. But, the controls for the feature are not in the current main SL Viewer. We will see them in a coming release. 

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Second Life and Windows XP

Microsoft is ending support for its Windows XP products April 8, 2014. That is a Tuesday  or 223 days from today, August 28, 2013. In general this would not matter much except for one thing, security updates. After all if your computer is running and doing what you want it to do, there is no need to update/fix it.

IC3
Internet Crime Complaint Center

But, the world is full of bad guys. It always has been and there is nothing that even suggests that will change. If you think advances in societal understanding and new laws are going to help I suggest you read Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice by Charles E. Silberman. (synopsis by Commentary Magazine) His conclusion as to what would work lacks a sound basis of reasoning. But, his analysis of what doesn’t work and why is well supported by documented facts. Crime is not ending any time soon. 

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