The Challenge of the Ignorant

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Hamlet has an article about those that think Linden Lab® stopped updating Second Life™ and that the recent announcement of ‘millions’ being invested in Second Life this coming year is proof Sansar is failing and the Lab is ‘desperately’ returning to support SL. (Reference)

If you follow Second Life’s development news, this probably sounds ridiculous. It is.

‘Trust me… SL is dying… horribly… heheheha’

But, I see this idea, that development of Second Life has stopped, coming up in several places. August 1, Cindy Kraai posted Will LL have any plans upgrading SL after Sansar beta? Cindy has been around since May 2010, that’s 7+ years. Yet, she has no clue what is happening with Second Life development. Reading through the thread I find the amount of misinformation and ignorance amazing, not surprising.

Then there are those that are so sorry for poor newbies that have no money ($L). (Reference) They feel these newbies should somehow be helped. You see people quickly divide into the victim (or the ‘they’ are victims you [, not me] have to do something) versus self-reliant (DIY) groups on this subject.

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Second Life News 2017 w35

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I’m a day late… busy with other things. I try to get the update out on Tuesday. That gives the Lindens a day to look at data from the weekend and decide what gets updates rolled out or queued for more attention.

Servers

The main channel was restarted and updated to #17.08.11.328152. This adds the MIME Type changes for HTTP with LSL talked about here: MIME Type changes for HTTP with LSL.

As of the time I am writing this a package for Blue Steel and Le Tigre has yet to be decided on.

● i see you ●
● i see you ●

Magnum will get #17.08.22.507928, internal fixes… Simon Linden says there are no user-visible changes… Apparently, the changes are switching built tools. Sort of like building the same car on a different assembly line.

If you are into the tech on your region, you may have noticed restarting regions restart faster now. I hear it takes about 6 to 7 minutes. But, regions are doing double restarts. The region restarts but comes back online with the same version as before the restart. Then an hour or so later restarts again then comes up running the new version.

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Linden Lab pours MILLIONS into Second Life

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Ebbe Linden has posted in the SL Forum. The post is titled Celebrating 14 Years of SL with Investments in Its Future. In it, he says they have budgeted US$ Millions for the coming year, which is awesome.

Cerridwens Cauldron_007
Cerridwens Cauldron_007 (URL)

He tells us about some of the coming changes to Second Life. Some we know about, others are new news.

One change is moving SL to the cloud. I have heard no details. So, exactly what this means is currently speculation. My speculation is this should significantly drop the cost of running the system. I imagine an empty region could be spun down and then only spun up as needed. Would this reduce land cost? It might. 

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Second Life Third-Party Dev’s UG Meeting 2017 w34

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Oz Linden starts off the Third-Party Dev UG meeting by saying there isn’t much new to talk about. ‘New’ is obviously a relative-subjective term in Oz’s use of the word. See if you learn something new about what is going on. I did.

Viewer Status

Alex Ivy, the 64-bit viewer, failed its recent QA. A fix and retest is expected to happen early next week with an update to appear then.

Cape San Blas Beach 2
Cape San Blas Beach 2 (URL)

Errors came from refactoring the launcher code. Just a couple of new bugs held back the release as the Lindens wanted to fix them before release. One problem holding back Alex is the unreliable crash reporting. Sometimes crashes report and sometimes not. Oz says they are working full time to get that sorted.

The Voice RC has gotten an update which is still in QA. When it passes QA we will see the new version out.

A new Maintenance branch will appear in RC about the middle of week 35.

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Second Life Photography Tutorials

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Flickr has a ton of Second Life™ images. Today: 2,901,249 images. Some are pretty bad, others REALLY kinky, and some amazingly gorgeous. For the people interested in SL Photography William Weaver has made 12 video tutorials. They are about using the Firestorm Viewer’s Photo and Camera Tools and controlling Windlight.

There is a well thought out design for these tools. The tutorial shown here shows how to take advantage of the tools and use them efficiently. Subsequent tutorials show how to use the various aspects of SL lighting to create great images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XiUkyPQ-w

Phototools Tutorial: 01 – Interface Introduction

This is a 4-year old starting tutorial giving an overview of the Photo Tools. The tutorials advance over those 4-years to the 12th tutorial streamed live a week ago.

Note: 2020-05 – Some of these tutorials were taken down then later put back, and now some are ‘private’. It seems to be changing. I can’t predict which will appear and which will disappear. Good luck.

I’ve covered some of these as individual tutorials over the years.

William Weaver also has a Flickr channel plus, a marketplace store, and additional art is on Issuu. Numerous SL bloggers have covered his art at various times.