Does LL want to fix SL

[Phil Deakins]

7 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

The SL depratment has made some quantum leaps in their organization

You mean tiny leaps? A quantum is very tiny thing

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, greek Wingtips said:

we slightly gone off the beaten track here, so let's get back to the crux of the article, we can argue till the cows come home about mesh, the underlining issue is what is going to happen to SL.

Indeed. And to answer the question in the title again: Yes, LL does want to fix SL.

Linden Lab wants both Second Life and Sansar to flourish. If that turns out to be more than they can handle, they have no choice but to keep SL and let go of Sansar because SL is what pays their bills. No matter what happens to Sansar, it will take years before it shows any significant profit and LL can't afford to wait for that.

Another question though, is can they? Linden Lab still has a lot of work to do to get their act right and they lack some key personel they don't even seem to realize they need. This dog has suffered from a decade of well-meaning but neglectful owners and it's getting old anyway. Bringing new life to it would be a daunting - maybe even impossible - task for anybody. I can't see how Linden Lab can possibly be up to it - that would requrie nothing short of a miracle.

What they can do, is life extending therapy. Second Life dies hard and unless LL make some serious blunders, they should still be able to stage SLB20. 25 may be asking for too much but it's not impossible.

[ChinRey]

7 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

You mean tiny leaps? A quantum is very tiny thing

Yes. Lots and lots of tiny leaps. Each of them is barely - if at all - noticeable but they add up.

The fact that they're doing more of that is in itself a significant improvement.

[Anna Nova]

It is such an insular attitude to think that everything revolves around money.  Most things do, but not all.

I love SL, I have a mainland parcel.  I do not sell anything, although I make lots of things - I can program in LSL, and make mesh and textures, I'm learning how to do it better.  I will never make stuff to sell.  I come to SL to meet people, to love people, and sometimes to RP killing them too.  It's getting better and better.  Bento, soon Animesh, and all the other improvements LL are doing.

We have to understand that the company LL needs to make a return for it's shareholders, but that might be better served by fewer players spending more each.  However, Penny's graphs above are about players, not revenue, and it seems to me that the lines are flattening out.....

[ChinRey]

6 minutes ago, anna2358 said:

We have to understand that the company LL needs to make a return for it's shareholders

I would guess that by now most of Linden Lab's income is used to pay wages.

It's impossible to say for sure though. I Norway a limited company's financial statements are public documents by law but I understand that's not the case in the USA so we don't know the figures unless LL chooses to share them.

[Phil Deakins]

Same in the UK.

[Pamela Galli]

3 hours ago, Drake1 Nightfire said:

still 40 to 50K a day online.

 To clarify: that is concurrency. The number of people online during an entire day is far more. Would need to multiply by avg time spent inworld, and I forget what that is.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Pamela Galli

[ChinRey]

16 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

The number of people online during an entire day is far more. Would need to multiply by avg time spent inworld, and I forget what that is.

To get the number of people online during the day, we would also have to subtract the number of bots and divide by the average number of alts a single user logs on during the day. As far as I know, we don't have any reliable info about those figures but anybody who uses SL regularly should be able to make some educated guesses.

[Pamela Galli]

45 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

To get the number of people online during the day, we would also have to subtract the number of bots and divide by the average number of alts a single user logs on during the day. As far as I know, we don't have any reliable info about those figures but anybody who uses SL regularly should be able to make some educated guesses.

Well it involves math so over my head. What I said above is I think wrong but surely  someone can do the simple math.

 

ETA The recent Atlantic article says 600,000 "regularly" use SL.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Pamela Galli

[Madelaine McMasters]

2 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

You mean tiny leaps? A quantum is very tiny thing

I'm working entirely from memory here, so it's possible I'm making this all up:

We've actually got no idea how big a quantum leap is. An electron that emerges at a new orbital energy level during a quantum leap is not the one that left the previous level. All of the information contained in the original is maintained by the "copy", so we consider them to be the same for all practical (and perhaps possible) purposes. We don't know what happens to the information that's moved by the vanishing/appearing particles. String Theory is working on that. The important part of the leap, and the one that's responsible for the metaphor, is that it happens in zero time. The electron appears to move from point A to point B without ever occupying a position in-between. If we express the transition as a speed rather than a time, it becomes infinite. That's a very big thing.

In the quantum world, information is king (and queen... we don't know which until we dethrone him/her by collapsing the wave function). Particles can become entangled when they interact with each other, causing them to share information. They can then be separated (by theoretically arbitrarily large distances) where they can transfer their entanglement to other particles. The entanglement can then be probed (collapsing the wave function), conveying that fact of probing between the two distant points in zero time. The Chinese recently did this over a distance of 1200KM. We're also now able to entangle objects on a macro scale, meaning we can entangle far more than two particles (dunno what the record currently is). So, the distances over which quantum effects can be observed (and more importantly, used) and the size of objects that can we can entangle, is rapidly increasing.

The metaphorical use of "quantum leap" has been, more or less, to describe making an unexpectedly large change in something (technological progress, political ideology, etc) over a period of time so short as to make it seem magical, or nuts.

SL has made changes that seem like one, the other, or both.

[Phil Deakins]

4 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

The metaphorical use of "quantum leap" has been, more or less, to describe making an unexpectedly large [...]

It's actually been in general use to mean simply 'very large'.

I think the word was coined by a chap concering electromagnetic radiation - light. A quantum (or is it quanta?) is the smallest possible size of light. I.e. it isn't continuous and it has to be emitted in packets, called quanta. Summat like that. Anyway, it's tiny

Quantum mechanics deals with the very tiny,. Even if it can entangle over large distances, what's being entangled is very tiny.

[ChinRey]

7 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

It's actually been in general use to mean simply 'very large'.

I may be willing to admit that by sheer luck, my post was one of those ultra-rare occasions where two wrong did indeed make one right.

But it does actually fit either definition. The overall progress has been huge but - with a few expcetions - each steps has been very, very small.

[ChinRey]

28 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

Well it involves math so over my head. What I said above is I think wrong but surely  someone can do the simple math.

In a different thread a week or two ago, I posted a formula for calculating the actual number of active users - active users defined as sentinent entities (probably mostly RL humans although we don't know). The formula is easy enough to make and we can put it in a spreadsheet and let the computer do the math for us. We can make a similar formula for daily visitors too, no problem.

The challenge is to find reliable data. Not even Linden Lab has that. They don't really know how many alts and unregistered bots there are and both those numbers are rather significant.

If the "best guesstimate" numbers I managed to come up with for the active users formula are in the ballpark, the number of people logging on during a day shuold be somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000. That's a big if though - and a rather side range too - so take it with a grain of salt.

[Pamela Galli]

 For my purposes as a creator/seller, it probably does not matter if someone is using an alt or not, since they buy things for alts. I just know a lot of people are making a lot of money selling things, so there have to be quite a few people buying. Bots, of course, should not count.

[Madelaine McMasters]

31 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

It's actually been in general use to mean simply 'very large'.

I think the word was coined by a chap concering electromagnetic radiation - light. A quantum (or is it quanta?) is the smallest possible size of light. I.e. it isn't continuous and it has to be emitted in packets, called quanta. Summat like that. Anyway, it's tiny

Quantum mechanics deals with the very tiny,. Even if it can entangle over large distances, what's being entangled is very tiny.

A quantum leap is not the same as a quanta. Max Planck had no idea what weirdness his theory of quanta would unleash, particularly the quantum leap, that very "spooky action at a distance" that so riled Albert Einstein. In theory, that distance can be virtually infinite. Conceptually, the magical idea that you can go from point A to point B without ever being anywhere in between is the basis of the metaphor. Regardless of the size, it's the magical nature of the change that's important.

[Phil Deakins]

45 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

A quantum leap is not the same as a quanta

But the 'quantum' in 'quantum leap' is from the word 'quanta', which is very tiny, and is misused.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

 I just know a lot of people are making a lot of money selling things

I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you there, Pamela.

It depends on how you define "a lot" of course but the total gross revenue at the Marketplace is slightly less than 23.5 million US dollars a year according to Linden Lab. The way I understand what "a lot" means, that's enough for some people to make a lot of money or a lot of people to make some money.

The average gross revenue for an MP store is about 115 USD/year but that number doesn't really say much since many stores are empty and inactive.

I have no idea how much inworld sales are but I wuold be surprised if it amounts to anything near MP sales.

The total amount of money taken out of Second Life by all kinds of entrepeneurs - merchants, land barons, escorts, DJs, you-name-it - was a little bit over 60 milion in 2015.

All things considered, it's unlikely there are more than 500 people who are able to make a full time living from items sold in SL and even that number is probably too high. 200 is perhaps a more realistic estimate but there are so many unknown factors so we can't say anything for sure.

Edited November 20, 2017 by ChinRey

[Pamela Galli]

Well you could be right, we don't have enough data to know.

[ChinRey]

37 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

Well you could be right, we don't have enough data to know.

That's right. But one thing we do know for sure, is that there aren't thousands of merchants making more than a basic average RL income from SL. That's how I would interpret "a lot of people making a lot of money" but of course, the "a lot" phrase can have a lot of different meanings.

[Tari Landar]

I will never understand why someone with such a negative attitude towards damn near everything involving something they take part in...doesn't just walk away. I mean, clearly, something *has* to be keeping someone around. I'm not sure pissing and moaning 24/7(which is really what some folks read as, even if they don't realize it) about *everything*(especially when one is completely wrong, lol) is very conducive towards making anything better.

It's one thing to offer *constructive criticism about a product, and another entirely to do nothing BUT *****...about....everything.

Good gravy,  if I hated this place as much as some folks SEEM to, I sure as hell wouldn't still be here, regardless of how much money I've spent....but that's me. I'm not often one to say "just walk away"....but sometimes, it's pretty darn applicable, lol. 

 

But, carry on

[Madelaine McMasters]

49 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

But the 'quantum' in 'quantum leap' is from the word 'quanta', which is very tiny, and is misused.

The use of "quantum leap" to suggest a big change is correct. Yes, the Planck Constant (the quantum limit) is a very small thing, but that's not the point. Max Planck went to his death abhorring the implications of the mathematical trick he'd use to explain his observations. He never believed it was real. Einstein had great difficulty with the implications as well (and went to his death abhorring his own mathematical trick, the Cosmological Constant). Neither of them ever made the crude literal interpretation you're using at this moment. It's not the smallness of the quantum that makes it extraordinary. It's the fact that you can't go smaller, that you can't know more. Compared to the infinitesimal endpoint imagined by much of science until Planck, his tiny constant is as huge as the paradigm shift from classical to quantum mechanics.

And perhaps you've missed other quantum metaphors that refer to the irreducible smallness of something? From Sir Ian Fleming:

"The Governor paused and looked reflectively over at Bond. He said: "You're not married, but I think it's the same with all relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn't care if the other is alive or dead, then it's just no good. That particular insult to the ego - worse, to the instinct of self-preservation - can never be forgiven. I've noticed this in hundreds of marriages. I've seen flagrant infidelities patched up, I've seen crimes and even murder forgiven by the other party, let alone bankruptcy and every other form of social crime. Incurable disease, blindness, disaster - all these can be overcome. But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners. I've thought about this and I've invented a rather high-sounding title for this basic factor in human relations. I have called it the Law of the Quantum of Solace."

Those using quantum metaphors may not fully comprehend their etiology, but usually seem to use them correctly. By possibly getting the etiology wrong, you're highlighting an amusing juxtaposition while missing the much larger point.

[KanryDrago]

9 hours ago, greek Wingtips said:

I not dodging the mesh bodies because my article was not about that, I am happy to discuss with you mess that LLs caused allowing creators make the mesh bodies and causing all types of grief, I know mesh clothes creators that have to create loads of versions for all the mesh make bodies out there, no mean feat , The meshprojectbody I now been waiting for ages for them to give creators the platform to add tattoos to thier mesh bodies, they not even created the appliers yet . so there is an example.

I have a tmp body and tattoos work just fine with it so not the issue you make it out to be.

To the main point of the mess that ll caused allowing creators to make mesh bodies. Thank god they did. The only way an ll mesh body would work to help creators is if ll disallowed creators to make mesh bodies then you can watch as every user has other than a human avi walks out the door unless you think ll will also create all those bodies too. If ll creates a mesh body and still allows creators to do so then you will still get people using non ll mesh bodies, you will merely have one extra to cater for

[CallumBH]

[Klytyna]

3 Pages ago... Somebody might as well have written...

Quote:

"Hi, Whiny Self Entitled Premium Madlander here, I just wanna know...

Why don't LL give even more free stuff to the people that really count in SL, like... ME!

Everyone knows that the Dollar a month that LL get to keep from the annual Premium fee, after refunding 60 bucks worth of free L$ that you can take out of SL, that Dollar a month is what KEEPS SL OPEN, and not the massive amounts of cash that non premiums pour into SL to pay rent to Premium Slumlords who pay their tier with it, or buy products from Premium Store owners, who pay their tier with it... 

No Sir, none of those Free-2-Play rabble matter, it's ME LL should be looking after, and speaking of looking after me, I think LL should abolish mesh bodies because, I just cant figure out the 60 second process of turning my uploaded tattoo textures into Omega Appliers, it's too HARD!

I'm a Premium Landowning Madland Lastnamer, and that dollar a month means I am ENTITLED, god-damn-it... LL better listen up or it's the end for them..."

: End Quote

Hmm why does this thread seem familiar? Oh yes... Same Old Same Old...
 

[Bobbie Faulds]

15 hours ago, Drake1 Nightfire said:

NOTHING!!! Not a damn thing will happen to SL. People like you have been screaming for a decade that "SL IS DYING!!!" "LL NEEDS TO FIX SL OR EVERYONE WILL LEAVE!!!" Good lord. Grow up and learn how things work. There is a decline since the huge influx of user when CSI did an episode about SL and even bought several sims. Big deal. still 40 to 50K a day online. which is more than twice what it was when i joined almost 11 years ago. Hell, a good Saturday night back then was 12K. It is currently 4 am in SLT and there are almost 30K online. 

Nice of you to dodge the replies to you about the mesh bodies though.. 

I remember the first time the grid had 35K in at one time and the whole thing crashed for several hours. 

As for the dying off, LL made a huge mistake when it closed down the SL Mentors program and the original Orientation and starter islands and started dumping people in a spot with very minimal instruction on how to move or even open a box. Then they had TPs that supposedly sent them to an area they were interested...ie Shopping, Roleplay, etc. It would randomly dump the new players in the middle of a sim with no help. People gave up with SL...I set up an avi and tried the Roleplay and was dumped in the middle of the Insilco sim rather than some of the other active RP sims like CoLA or NoR. The Shopping dumped my avi into an empty shopping center that half the stores were empty. (I  was making NPC's for RP in the sim that I admin in)  At least they are bringing back the gateways where there are people to help.

As for the mesh bodies, my understanding is that SL can't change the base avi without breaking all the content for avis...including hair, skin, clothing, etc. That would have players up in arms. The default mesh, if you look at it in wireframe, has few polygons and are oddly placed so you get peaks on curve surfaces, such as calves, arms, shoulder, buttocks and breasts. The current mesh bodies have higher polygons and have fixed that problem. The default avi also has flippers for feet with lines on them. The mesh bods have real feet. With the new Bento skeleton, courtesy of Sansar btw, the rigging allows for hands that move normally and allow heads that are rigged to the new bones that allow the flexibility of the head sliders in the default head. It also allows for better animation of the face, including motion capture, rather than the older poses.

SL has come a very long way from the beginning. https://gyazo.com/e33b839f36b81aeb9d55c7e3531ee902 is what I looked like when I first rezzed. https://gyazo.com/be607611317c0f0d8dd04c085e747909 what I look like now with the Tonic Fine body, Lelutka head