Qie Niangao

For sanity sake, I'm going to assume this is a full-primmed sim, not a Homestead or OpenSpace. There's a single Object Bonus Factor that applies to the entire region, set by the Estate manager on the Region UI. Evidently this region is currently using a bonus factor of about 2. (The math works out to 2.035, somehow.) With no bonus factor at all (that is, a setting of 1.0), a 4352 sq.m. parcel should get 996 prims, so shrinking that down to only 800 prims would require a bonus factor of 0.8, but the documentation says it can only go down to 1.0. I can't test to confirm that myself, however. [ETA: This is very hypothetical, but I doubt you really want to do that anyway, simply because, if it worked, it would affect all parcels on the sim. Not sure what would really happen then, but it might end up limiting the whole sim to 80% capacity -- that is, 3000 fewer prims than it would otherwise have. I mean, regardless of object bonus, you can't rez more than 15,000 prims, total, but if it were possible to have an object bonus less than 1.0, I'm not sure how/where you could rez the objects beyond the parcel limits to make up for the lower object bonus.]

Not that it particularly matters, but just for completeness, it's Oz, the new Technical Director, who doesn't wear shoes, and I always assumed that was somehow associated with the vaguely Zen look of his overall avatar -- but admittedly, I never looked that closely. Pete, the Communications guy, wore sneakers. I have no idea if he picked his own avatar, or if they "have people for that." The thing I was pondering about the whole arrangement was that the Lab chose to do this on FIrestorm's sim, presumably by invitation from Jessica. I'm not sure how to interpret that choice of venue. The event comes on the heels of Ebbe's initial statements about SL2 which was at a TPV dev meeting. It's probably true that most SL users now invest more credibility in Firestorm than in Linden Lab, so perhaps the Lindens were just being practical and leveraging that. I know some Firestorm folks were making a tremendous fuss when they first heard that SL2 would start out closed-source. That made them look fairly silly, so maybe they realized that by themselves, or maybe a Linden helped them come to that understanding, but anyway they seem to have STFU about that now. No idea if the choice of venue for this was related at all.

Too soon to tell, I think. I'd feel better about it if they also had business changes to announce now -- like an immediate start to shifting their revenue sources from such a near complete dependence on Land to some transaction-based "tax", but that was something Pete Linden was clear they weren't going to announce now. Other than that, honestly, I've come to realize that we really have no clue how similar the new platform will be to SL1. Right now (and my sense of this shifts all the time), I'm thinking SL2 will be so different from SL1 that most of us won't have any more interest in it than, say, a new release of Grand Theft Auto. Other days I think it will be so similar to SL1 that we'll all just naturally migrate over to it, our Inventories nearly intact. In fact, either of those extremes would be fine with me; it's the space in between where I think their business is at risk, and where it would be extraordinarily tricky to plan communications I'm sure later, we'll be able to look back and say that it should have been obvious, and it was all telegraphed by what they communicated and when they communicated it. I'm not seeing it yet, though.

FWIW, I lived most of my life in the US, part of the time in the telecom industry. For my sins, I moved to Canada, where I was shocked to discover it's actually even worse. (And don't get me started on wireless telecom up here!) There's a strange difference, however, in that the tech community in Canada seems to be uniformly disgusted by the mess our government has made of this. (This all notwithstanding Harper's truly bizarre advertising campaign, griping ineffectually about the same scummy wireless providers. The mystery is why the Tories thought it would advance their cause to demonstrate how helpless they've been to fix what everybody -- including themselves -- recognizes is indefensible.) In contrast, US techies include a hyper-Libertarian faction that is outspokenly against Net Neutrality because it involves government in the Internet -- as if the US government has ever not been intimately involved in the business of the Internet!

Qie Niangao wrote: I think the communications on this have been very carefully managed. I also think it's quaintly charming, how folks imagine that the CEO just blurted something out accidentally, as if there weren't a detailed plan worked out in advance. For example, as I type this, Oz is currently talking at the Firestorm meeting about SL1 going forward. Later today there will be an announcement (complete with Torley video) about Experience Tools -- something we've been trying to get details about for a year, and I think there's no coincidence that the communications about it have been delayed until after the new platform was announced. Oz also mentioned releases just around the corner for: group chat improvments, better embedded web support -- e.g., Media On A Prim -- replacing WebKit with Chrome Embedded Framework, and continued improvement of texture loading speeds (HTTP pipelining). Some are known quantities, but they're ready to talk a lot more about them. (For these, cause and effect of the timing is debatable, I know. But the obvious delay in the Experience Tools stuff, in particular, sure seems to have been intended to make this exciting news follow the new platform announcement.)

Okay, in that case, I'd strongly recommend renting somewhere else (or buying, or whatever -- I'm not trying to drum-up business here), and use the rest of your lease to transition your customers... special deals at the new location to get them using a new landmark or however you need to get them coming to the new location -- while making your business as "location independent" as it can be, for the future.

It would be sleazy if they raised the price and applied it to rent you already paid, so your two-week payment didn't last the full two weeks. I'm guessing they didn't do that. I'd also guess, however, that it was just a mistake. There's nothing illegal about raising the rent at lease renewal time, but it's very uncommon, for simple business reasons. (If a landlord has a good, paying tenant, why risk losing them?) So I'd suggest just chatting nicely with the landlord and see if they'll "fix" the price back where it was. And if not, if I were you, I'd find a different arrangement immediately. But that's just me.

I think the communications on this have been very carefully managed. I also think it's quaintly charming, how folks imagine that the CEO just blurted something out accidentally, as if there weren't a detailed plan worked out in advance.

Callum Meriman wrote: Possibly if people in the USA accepted a fee per GB of data they consume then the companies who actually pay for the electricity and the interconnect points and the cables in the ground wouldn't mind everyone freeloading on their equipment as they would all be paying? I don't think that would matter too much. It's true that in the US and especially Canada, the standard metered data fees that regular broadband subscribers pay in other countries would be such a massive improvement that we'd all be thrilled. That's certainly relevant to the ability of consumer-level broadband users to participate in distributing services such as HiFi, but those aren't the fees affected by the dismantling of Net Neutrality. Rather, what's threatened is tiered service for content providers to get access to those local, "last mile" pipes. (That's distinct from the peering arrangements and other fees those content providers pay to get their content on the internet at their access points.) Maybe you already know that and are suggesting that the metered data fees would incentivize proper service. I'm not seeing how that would work, but I may just be too cynical about our situation here in North America. I'm not sure it's possible for outsiders to appreciate just how corrupt and collusive the industry has become, behind the veil of utterly fictitious "competition" and "deregulation" overseen by regulators completely owned by the industry they're pretending to regulate.

Sure enough, the scrolls of the elders saith: I can't access all of the content checkboxes. Why are they unavailable? By default, each Resident account has access to General and Moderate content. If you are at least 18 years old, set your preferences to view content with the Adult designation. So that looks like an error. In theory, one would file a jira to get the knowledgebase article fixed. I'm not sure, however, that LL still has anybody maintaining the official knowledgebase now. As written, it exposes an historical oddity in SL's maturity rating system. At one time, it was a hassle to be able to access Adult content, but now it's really just a preference you can set once you're 18 -- the same time when you can access Moderate content. Rewriting everything to reflect that change must have been a huge effort, and it's not surprising some stuff got a little glossed-over. None of which helps, of course. Minors' accounts aren't allowed access to Moderate areas. That's not for the protection of the minors.

I have no idea how Zindra land dealers make money. (There are several quite large ones still active on Zindra, although I can confirm that all but one of them seem to have gotten out of the Kama City area, so that's interesting.) What does "[y]ou can only have so much tier per avatar" mean? Also, I don't understand what the complaint is about auctions. That's how it's always worked, LL never just sold such large abandoned parcels without an auction, especially not on Zindra -- and especially not freshly abandoned: that would be completely unfair compared to an auction, where everybody can bid. So, if a dealer won the auction, they bid more than everybody else did. I don't see a problem with that. It doesn't cost any more to bid what one is willing to pay, right up front; trying to "play" the auction game by timing bids for the last minute is fine for entertainment, but no way to buy land.

Callum Meriman wrote: You are in the Alpha too I gather to speak with the knowlege you suggest you have, so your comment makes me curious to have a look... let me know the domain you see are slow so I can check too, I can likely rally a chunk of TPV people to look what is going wrong. Heh, certainly not in the Alpha; pretty much everything about HiFi is public. Philip is known for saying everything he knows -- and then some. Anyway, it's not about slowness, it's about scalability. But you know as I write this, I've been thinking that this might be more clever than I thought. Nothing to do with performance (other than some regional distribution which might be more accidental than not), it could be a smart play that benefits from the failure of Net Neutrality in the US and Canada. By spreading out the network demands to a large number of service points owned by fat-pipe participants, he may be able to hide just how large the distributed service has become, and thus avoid paying the carriers their ransom for acceptable last-mile delivery to normal end-users. That might actually work for quite a while. (What can't work is true peer-to-peer distribution, which is what I was fussing about originally. At least not in the US and Canada, where the carriers collude with regulators to overcharge consumers for very poor bandwidth.)

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: Midnight Mania and Lucky Chairs? Nope. Those might sometimes attract an actual customer -- that is, someone who isn't a complete freeloader. (Maybe.) Goldfish. Think goldfish.

Darkness Anubis wrote: The other reason MP became king is the ability to skip the Real money to L$ step and just buy with real money on the marketplace. We can't do that in world. Oh good heavens, I hope not! Have you ever calculated the effective L$ exchange rate on Marketplace RL-currency sales? On the other hand, that would prove that buyers are fine with spending an extra 30% on commissions. I generally advise people never to use a "Market Buy" order on the LindeX because they can do about 3.5% better with a "Limit Buy", but that's dwarfed by the penalty for using RL currency on the Marketplace. Sorry for the tangent, but our OP doesn't love us anymore, so now we're free to do whatever we want with this thread. Yippee!

Monti Messmer wrote: SL is big enough to stroll around without invading others space - paid space !!! I know lots of people feel that way and we're expected to respect the sentiment -- probably much of virtual land ownership depends on it now. But really, a baby-step back from the immersion, it all sounds mighty similar to "how dare you load my webpage in your browser -- I pay for its hosting!" [ETA, it's great that we have the ability to enforce some level of privacy -- and considerably more than we had for years, thanks to the "parcel privacy" setting. I just think it's crazy and counterproductive that we seem to have adopted a default etiquette of "assume private until proven otherwise." It's just a very weird assumption, especially considering the enormous cost of making it possible for people to share all the virtual world.]

Ah, now I understand. I was going to say how hopelessly stupid those olde timey merchants must have been, but then I remembered that there's a very similar system operating still. I'd definitely get in trouble if I mentioned the name: they're pretty protective of their brand, and have many spies in the form of deluded merchants. Can't say, then, that this makes particularly compelling evidence that SL is dying. (There are many clues pointing to that same deduction, so the threshold is high.) And in this case, the same scam appears to be thriving, with only slightly better graphics.

Shroom Steinbeck wrote: But I'm curious about the history. How did it get this way? I think it is correct that there's been a subtle shift towards an emphasis on "privacy" and we could speculate about why that happened. Waves of griefers probably had some effect, but yeah, the default assumption now seems to be that one should have to obtain permission to explore a parcel, and that is a weird bit of role-play to drag in from RL. I've seen folks actually justify this with an analogy to wandering into RL houses uninvited. I suppose that's a reaction from "immersion" but it's hard to distinguish from paranoid delusions when applied to pixel property.

VoteboxRepairMan wrote: They want traffic. We provide it and get paid for bothering to spend 5 seconds in their sims. Really? Are you sure you're remembering this correctly? Or, if you do, were the votebox owners all duped by whoever ran this votebox scam? Going all the way back to Dwell, traffic was (supposed to be?) based on total time on sim, so if five second stays ever improved traffic by an amount worth counting, it must have been a bug in Traffic calculation. (That certainly could have been the case but I don't remember it, and there sure were a lot of systems based on total time in sim; remember "traffic cones" for example?)

gregthos wrote: Ok, so let's say I buy a Homestead from another player for $200. After I buy it will I then be making a monthly payment to LL and if so, how much? You can't do that, in fact. Homesteads can only be owned by estates that already have at least one full-primmed sim. LL would simply not make the transfer to you. Or, there is an even more confusing bit of language abuse: You can "buy" a parcel the full size of the Homestead from the estate owner. This means nothing other than granting you permission to pay rent to the estate, so it's at best misleading that this is called "buying" anything.

kiramanell wrote: So, giving content creators a freebie, as it were, whilst taxing the consumer heftily, that may not work out as favorably as he may think. No. Content creators do not consider a higher commission on their sales to be a "freebie" -- especially not compared to land costs, which is borne disproportionately by "residential" not "commercial" landowners. (In the past, that balance of land use was very different, with most land owned by stores and venues. Now in-world sales are much less important, even for the relatively few businesses that even bother to have in-world stores.)

JPG0809 wrote: The new platform doesn't even have a name yet. I'm much more interested about what that'll be instead. You're kidding, right? Cathy got it right. We may not know exactly how land will work in SL2 (or whatever it's called), but Ebbe has said that he intends for our current levels of "property tax" to be adjusted downward, replacing that revenue with other "taxes" including, yeah, higher sales commissions. I wouldn't expect more detail until they announce the exact date when that land will be available to buy -- assuming the project gets that far.

kiramanell wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: I'm not saying this will or should happen, but one doesn't have to ignore anything Ebbe has said about the changes to conclude that a vast majority of SL content could be transparently available in SL2 without constraining that new platform to real backwards compatibility. Much as I'd love to see my many homes ported to SL2, at this point, it's hard to imagine even mesh, let alone prims, will come out looking unscathed 'on the other side.' And if the new scripting language would require just a few tweaks to the old LSL to make stuff work again, then why even bother with an entirely new language at all?! A new language for SL2 would be desirable for the same reasons there are multiple languages at all, even when they all compile down to the same machine code. I mean, LSL is really primitive just as a language, to say nothing of the library of functions in the API that it gets to use. Even within SL1, it would be completely possible to improve the language binding to that API -- and indeed that was the plan for a long time while Babbage was still at the lab. I'm actually saying something more radical than that, however, which is that even if the future API is not a proper superset of the current library's functionality, enough of it will necessarily be present in one form or another that a very large share of real currently running scripts could be automatically recompiled in an environment that would make them work almost all the time. As for built objects (as opposed to scripts or animations), it really is analogous to the "compile down to the same machine code". The requirement is to automatically produce something in the new representation that looks the same in the viewer as did the item in SL1. It doesn't have to use all the new features, and even if the representation is not very efficient it could still be practically useful. (That's a contentious claim -- but I never heard anybody argue that Mesh Studio should be blacklisted, so I'm not sure why suddenly the demand for such geometric purity.) And in fact I am trying to explore the technical feasibility of making pretty much everything in one's SL1 inventory available on the new platform, with a one-time import on demand, without constraining technology choices for that new platform. And I'm allowing that it probably won't happen, but only for business reasons.

Mony Lindman wrote: [...] So what will you do with your SL avatar after you magically teleport to SL2 with your whole inventory as you say it should be possible? You would be a cloud (at best) , your lsl scripted AO will not work , starting animations by hand wont work either and whatever you will try to rez or wear from inventory will just NOT WORK. So why telport at all under these circumstances ? I think you're probably right, but I also think that's largely a business decision, not a technical one, even granting that SL2 won't maintain backwards compatibility in all the ways Ebbe has mentioned. Incompatible changes can be made without making it impossible to import old content with reasonable success. The business decision is about how much value that has, compared to the cost of developing importers. One example is LSL scripts. Now, SL2 will (almost certainly) run scripts in a Mono engine. Yeah, they could adopt something else, but I don't think it's likely; rather, I think it will just be one or more non-LSL languages compiling to Mono. There's no guarantee that the same functions will be exposed in SL2's API (for example, llGetMass() may simply have no counterpart in SL2), but probably 99% of actual scripts use only function calls that will have equivalents. So it's not rocket science to have those run on the new grid, with at most a recompile. Similar sleight-of-hand could convert SL1 animations to SL2, as already discussed. And every prim or sculpt is already a textured mesh, however inefficient. I'm not saying this will or should happen, but one doesn't have to ignore anything Ebbe has said about the changes to conclude that a vast majority of SL content could be transparently available in SL2 without constraining that new platform to real backwards compatibility.

Okay, I'm confused. "Wonderland" had something to do with sexual age-play, right? So... are you finding that everywhere with a beach turns into a hangout for sexual age-play? Surely not; I've been to lots of beaches and never once encountered sexual ageplay at any of them. So maybe you're complaining that every beach tries to support itself with an ugly stripmall. Now that I have seen. It's certainly silly, but... you know, if ugly stripmalls bothered me, I'd just not go to those beaches.

Is there some reason you don't just try it for yourself and find out? Also, I don't think I understand the hypothetical case you're proposing; it's not possible to llAttachToAvatar anything owned by somebody else. That's possible with llAttachToAvatarTemp, but it seems it's specifically the former function that's the subject here. So... before the -Temp version of the function, it was common to keep an intended attachment rezzed in-world, then attached to the intended wearer when they bought it as original (not a copy, so not going into their inventory first). I'm not sure if that's the scenario you have in mind, but once attached, such objects are in the recipient's inventory and stay there after detachment, too.