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Lamorna Proctor

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Blog Comments posted by Lamorna Proctor

  1. It's also important to note that we are going to remove the “voting” feature in JIRA in one month. Today, we do not use voting to triage or to make product decisions and the last thing that we want to do is set false expectations. So, when you are interested in what action we will take on a particular JIRA, use the JIRA “Watch” feature so that you will be  immediately updated in email when there are new comments on that particular JIRA issue. We will continue to use the number of Watchers as an indication of the level of interest.

    Hosne Mubarak, a new job awaits you at Linden Lab

    As Egypt totters towards being a democracy, we now have confirmation that Second Life is travelling in the opposite direction. This is part of a trend I've seen over the past year or so, where the views of residents, "voters" if you will, are increasingly treated with contempt.

    I have been an active participant on the JIRA for several years. I hope I've made some useful, thoughtful contributions. The voting feature is a good measure of how many people want to see a bug fixed or a new feature introduced. It's not the same as "watching". I sometimes watch JIRA issues where I disagree with the feature being proposed, so I can argue the opposite case if necessary.

    If I can't vote on an issue, I'll probably give up on the JIRA. Please amaze me and many other residents, and rethink this decision.

  2. Teleport improvements are great. More than 25 groups? - well, it's no big deal IMO.

    Personally, I think Linden Lab lost its way over the last year or two. Maybe the Viewer code-base needed to be refactored, but why change the UI so radically that most long-term residents refuse to adopt it? And then there were Display Names - a huge, costly project in terms of time and money... and yet hardly anyone seems to use or care about it. And it doesn't work - names appear as ??? all too frequently. A total fail.

    LL, please look after the people who worked with you to create the world we have - the creators and scripters. Don't try to compete for new residents with Facebook. That's a battle you will never win.

    A Farewell From Jack

    Jack,

    It's always sad to see someone leave an enterprise to which they've devoted a lot of their time and energy, like you have done to SL. I've appreciated your Office Hours, which you've held with honesty and humour... sometimes in the face of extreme provocation.

    On a negative note, you will be remembered for pushing through Display Names -- probably the worst thing LL have inflicted on residents since I've been in SL. It's ill-conceived, badly-designed and its implementation has been a complete failure... to say nothing of the waste of time and resources that could have been used otherwise to make SL better.

    For that, I'm afraid I hold you guilty...

    On the other hand, I bear you no personal animosity, and I wish you the best for your future outside LL.

    Good luck

  3. I agree with everything that other people have said about the speed of cashing out. It's another aspect in which things have got worse, not better, in recent months .

    /me wants instant gratification when I cash out

    Come on Linden Lab, we are your customers... the people who pay your salaries... do something to make our lives better. I hate to be such a whinger, but nearly all the changes that have taken place in 2010 have made my SL worse, not better. I live in hope that 2011 will bring better things.

  4. As hundreds of residents have said in earlier blogs, Display Names will provide unscrupulous people with many new ways to scam and cheat people. It's a charter for Identity Thieves.

    Anyone can now masquerade as another person and steal their good name and reputation.

    There may be a few people who want to change their names for legitimate reasons, but the vast majority of SL business people, serious creators and scripters, don't want this.

    If you are worried about someone else stealing your good name and reputation in Second Life, we have a remedy.

    BanClone allows you to register your name and protect it against other people using it. For more details about it, and how to register, see http://www.slysense.com/banclone/

    Now that Linden Lab have officially released the Display Names Viewer, we will be publishing an update shortly.

    Remember, if Linden Lab won't protect your hard-won identity and reputation in Second Life... we will!

  5. 
    

    The simple fact is that Viewer 1.23.5's days are numbered.

    I totally agree with Winter. Linden Lab have stopped developing Viewer 1.23 and will let it die. You might not like this, but it's a policy that they are not going to change. Stop flogging a dead horse.

    The Viewer 1.23 code-base needed a total rewrite. Creating Viewer 2 was strategically the right thing to do. Where Linden Lab went wrong was macho management saying it must be released in Q1 2010 or else the sky falls in (I'm guessing here, but I strongly suspect something like that was said at some point). And then they fired them anyway

    This new Version 2.2 is what should have been 2.0. It fixes a lot of the problems with the UI. It still has a long way to go, but it's getting there. Embrace the change and give it a try.

  6. Thank you, thank you! Detachable multiple profiles!!

    I am what you might call a dogged believer in Viewer 2, despite all my friends who are agnostics. This release confirms my faith in it.

    But now, I have some special pleading for scripters. Is anyone looking at all the problems with the Script Editor, collected under JIRA meta-issue, VWR-19479? In particular there is the excessive time to load scripts (VWR-20094, and the various problems with cursor positioning caused by the use of a proportional font.

    My guess is that few serious scripters are using Viewer 2 because of these problems. They really need to be addressed.

  7. Jopsy said:

    
    

    New and Casual residents tend not to get involved in "SL Issues" nearly as much as those of us who have more invested in SL.   Most probably glanced at the announcment and shrugged and didn't read past the title.   If they even read that at all.

    I agree, but with the amount of controversy this has caused, you would have thought Linden Lab would have mobilised people with a bit of an inside track to explain the alleged benefits.

    My point is that, with a few exceptions, such as people partnering or someone wanting to be "Michael Jackson" in a tribute band, I just can't see what is so wonderful about this feature. I am willing to be enlightened, but apart from a few tweaks to the UI, the overwhelming negative response has been received with stone-cold silence.

  8. Having read all the comments here and in the previous blogs over the past few weeks, I am struck by something. People tend to fall into two camps as far as Display Names are concerned:

    1. This is horrible. It will cause chaos and I don't want it.
    2. Eh? I can't see much point to it, but maybe the concerns are overblown.

    What I see very little evidence for is the huge raft of people who think:

    "Wow! This is a really great new feature; the best thing since sliced bread and extra-crunchy peanut butter. I can't wait!"

    At the risk of giving a hostage to fortune, where are all these people, Jack?

  9. 
    

    darnit, now I've probly given LL the idea to make it a perk of Premium to keep your name safe.

    It's a reasonable suggestion and you're by no means the first to propose it. Unfortunately, there is no sign that Linden Lab will offer this.

    I'm in a rather weird position here. We have developed a service that we will charge for, in response to a demand that we have seen. If Linden Lab force Display Names through essentially unaltered, then we hope to make some money out of the investment we have put into BanClone. Personally, I am completely unabashed about this. I am a SL creator, scripter and entrepreneur -- it's what I do.

    On the other hand, part of me wishes that Linden Lab would relent and totally rethink the whole design of Display Names.

  10. 
    

    Someone decides to register my account name with you and I'm going to be banned for being myself?

    @ Calamity and Jopsy... At the risk of turning down a sale, I think there is a misunderstanding. We will not allow anyone to register a Display Name that is the name of any pre-existing "old-style" Account Name. Only the original account holder can do that.

    From your point of view, the incentive to register is to inhibit people going around SL pretending to be you. If your name is registered, any impostor will be ejected and banned from land protected by the BanClone system. If your name is not registered, the impostor will be warned that their Display Name is that of an original account holder, but they won't be ejected.

  11. @Molleh. You are of course perfectly entitled to your opinion and you don't have to make use of our BanClone system if you don't wish to. However, the fact is that many people are interested in it and we have already had a large number of people sign up.

    It won't be for everyone, but we are providing a service that Linden Lab seem not prepared to offer, despite the demands of many people who have asked for it. If you run a business making part of your RL income (like I and many others do), L$500 (or less than $2 in real money) is a small price to pay to protect your good name.

  12. @ Ponsonby.

    
    

    Be that as it may, I've finally figured out some things. Not easy since all my efforts to get into the Beta have failed (I finally joined the Server_Beta list and find that apparently Beta was closed down September 17.)  But from a useful YouTube video I've figured out that people AREN'T accessing Unicode scripts (families of characters) from the viewer, which means they must be cutting-and-pasting from their word-processing programs. (It seems obvious now, but you'd be amazed at how little information there was on this.)

    A couple of points:

    • The beta is back up. I have been using it to test this morning.
    • It depends what language and keyboard people are using when they enter a new Display Name. With a UK or US keyboard, the easiest way for me to enter foreign characters is by copying and pasting from a word processor, as you suggest. However, a Spanish keyboard can natively type accented characters such as in "Señorita" without clumsy keystroke sequences. A Japanese keyboard can type Japanese directly. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout for a mind-boggling description of the various keyboard layouts that are available for different languages.

    I'd also like to respond to a couiple of points made by Jopsy Pendragon yesterday.

    
    

    One thing your service won't provide, is the right for people to freely use the display name "John Smith" as a display name, once john.smith registers with you.  While protecting unusual names will no doubt be valuable to many... do you have an algorithm that's smart enough to reject registration attempts of common names?   Of course not.

    As it happens, John Smith is already registered as an Account Name. If someone tries to register this name, our system won't let them, even if the original John Smith hasn't registered. However, unless he registers, it won't prevent cloned John Smiths from running around SL traducing his name and reputation.

    If we consider the case of Dave Smith, which has never been a SL Account Name, it will be first come, first served. After Display Names are implemented on the live grid, the first person to change their name to this and register it will claim the name. Another Dave Smith will have to do something to distinguish himself, such as using a middle initial. I've made the analogy before of Michael J. Fox, who couldn't register plain Michael Smith with Equity because someone else with that name was already a member.

    
    

    Nor is your system likely to respect someone who sets  their display name to, say, "Omegatrix", long before someone else creates a user account of "omegatrix".   So while the person with the display name may have been using it longer... the person who creates an alt can easily use your system to harass them

    In a post Display Names world, the first person to register a name like this will get it. If the new Account Name of "omegatrix" tries to reserve it as their Display Name, they won't be able.

    Our main concern here is to protect the grandfather rights and reputation of "traditional" SL resident names. When the new-style Account Names are implemented, people will have to protect their names in a different way. We will provide a service for new residents to look up Display Names that are already registered with us, so that they can ensure a name they want to use is not already spoken for.

  13. @ Ponsonby, You are mixing up fonts with character-encodings. They are two different concepts. Times New Roman is a font; so is Arial. I forget the name of the font SL uses for name tags, but it is a single font that supports characters from many languages using the Unicode standard. This includes English (standard Latin characters), accented characters used in other European languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc, etc...

    Many systems perform case-blind comparisons. The easiest way to do this is to convert strings to entirely lowercase and then compare them. For instance, "Lamorna Proctor", "LAMORNA PROCTOR" and even "LaMorna ProcTor" all become "lamorna proctor", which are therefore considered to be equivalent.

    Our BanClone system extends this concept, so that foreign characters that look like an English letter are converted to the lowercase English letter. Thus, "Lamorna Proctor" with a Greek Capital Rho (which looks like a "P"), is also converted to "lamorna proctor" and thus considered to be equivalent to the three examples I gave before.

    In constrast, "Λαμωρνα Προκτωρ" (my name transliterated into Greek) may be pronounced similarly, but looks different, so we would not regard it as equivalent.

  14. Actually, Jopsy, we reckon we've got a reasonably workable solution to the Unicode problem, and we've been testing it successfully on the beta grid. I won't repeat my commercial message here, but those who are interested can find my earlier post in this thread.

    Going back to the main point; at his Office Hours last Thursday, Jack Linden said (paraphrased slightly) "Maybe 100 people in SL want to be John Smith and with good reason as it’s a common name." Of course this is true, if you're really called John Smith and want to have your own name in SL.

    But it completely misses the point... "John Smith" may be a common RL name, but "Lamorna Proctor" or "Jopsy Pendragon" isn't. My account name is my brand name and my reputation, just like on Ebay.

    To business people like me, Second Life is far more like Ebay than Facebook. This is a very good point my partner made to me yesterday, and I don't think it has been mentioned before.

  15. Jack Linden said:

    
    

    Some of you have suggested disallowing the Display Name from matching any previous Username, but as we have used many millions of names for accounts already that would make Display Names very hard to use as most names would be blocked.

    This is disingenuous. Whilst millions of names may have been registered, there are still billions of new names available. All existing names have been chosen from a limited number of last names specified by Linden Lab. They should be protected against Identity Theft.

    I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If Linden Lab won't protect the names of existing residents, we will! Our BanClone system will prevent anyone from using a name registered by an existing resident.

    See http://www.slysense.com/banclone for more details.

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