Mano Monk

After reading most of the posts, again, sense less complains. SL viewer doesnt influenciate 3rd part viewers, it is the lazy programmers for 3rd part viewers that doesnt bother to change the place to store cache information, and doing so, they make their viewers use the same files SL viewer does. Blame the right people. Features in SL viewer are far better than 3rd part viewers and the only reason 3rd part viewer do what they do is that they dont have to answer for their problems. If your 3rd part viewer do anything wrong or damaging to your PC or to your SL account, they at most lose their listing, but nothing else. SL in other hand have to respond for their problems since theirs is the system beacon. So they cant just make some rubbish up to let people with bad computers be able to use SL when they shouldnt. After that, the display names complains are honestly, a JOKE. Scripters should know they dont need to rely on display names for their scripts to work, not even in names. Good Scripts dont even have to change their scripts due to display names. AH, I forgot, in SL anyone can call themselves builders, scripters, and so on, even if they dont have a clue about development. That is the wonder of SL, you can be what you dont know a bit about being. LL have their share on the blame for SL being worse than ever, but it is time to ppl face their own share on that too.

The only thing that holds SL at the top of grids list is the fact that user generated content in SL is tons more than other grids. If you have the opensim architeture, the opensim philosophy and its possibilities directly linked to the content SL gathered in its years of advantage, SL would be the worse grid in the run. But not all of this is SL to blame. SL was born to be used in a way, and users misuses SL everytime. You talk about price ? The problem of garbage and/or unfinished Sims isnt the price. There are stupid people with lots of money to throw away. Many of you may not have 2 or 3k dollars to play, but outside USA, there are places where this crisis isnt even a little hit, and people still having 2 or 3 k to spend and for them, 300 USD a month isnt even a sweat. Money isnt the issue for that. Nor is the sweat for SL being ended or not. Same way, there are places where people can afford spend couple hundreds weekly in virtual goods and services just to play. It is easy to notice, just take a look at Zinga numbers in facebook, where they are buying just credits for a game they cant even customize. The SL numbers doenst reflect all that stability you are talking about. It just reflect that now people are graduly spending less in SL and more in flash bogus games. And that is the main index that SL is going down. Despite they can be spending more in SL this year than previous years, you must take a look at competitors numbers and find out that while SL has going a little downwards, others are going upwards big time. SL numbers alone doesnt tell about SL situation facing competition, but only shows about SL within itself. To solve the problems of system stability and land usage, there must be a criteria of eligibility for builders and scripts much like the ones in RL, so only people with the necessary skills and knowledge can build or make scripts. That is the only way. Putting prohibitive prices doesnt raise quality, worse, decreases it, because the ones wanting to do a good job will look also for a place they can do it, at a grid where you dont need to pay to test and pay to experiment. Most of SL dropouts to opensim firstly gone there because of that, and stayed because of what they found there. And that is the way to SL downfall, the discovery of places where u can have more for less.

Yup, You cant focus on several things. Either you focus, or diversify. What LL does with SL is to try to diversify focus, lacking the further analisys needed to satisfy at least one of its markets. That is why there is flow of money, there is residents, but it is as unstable as it can be. There is a limit from where helping a newbie is taking them by hand preventing them to learn to choose. That is what is done for most people today. Talking to them we see that many choices are understood as rules, and therefore they dont know they can do other things. The lack of interest make them go away. But "leaving users" were once "joining users" which fuels statistics. Leaving users could have been "paying users" which fuels statistics. Not logging users still users in the database. "IM" only users still logging users, and so on. All this makes numbers look great. It is like RL crisis, altho you are selling houses, ppl are loaning money to pay them from other people loaning, and thus, you have nice selling statistics, nice "quarter" statistics. One day: Boom, the chain of charging lenders stop when one refuses to loan money to another one to pay their debts, and the chain is broken, every one attached to that falls. Same here. Why is that the TOS simply changed ? Be smart and think: You are being prepared to be the next "Orange". They are talking about apple, but you need to ask yourself "WHO IS TALKING ABOUT APPLE ?" and "WHO IS TALKING ABOUT SL ?". I am a IBM guy. Love PCs since we (me and them) coexist in this world. Neverthless I can see good features in Macs, it is just my preference about PCs. People who talk about apple and their problems is talking about passion, not about facts. They have their problemas, as IBM does, as Microsoft does, but at the end of the day, they dont just have big numbers, they have coherent numbers. Second Life in another hand, has big numbers but not coherent numbers. The numbers shows a ship loose at the tides just steering at a minimal to not sink. SL is going towards its doom, eventually. What matters now is if SL will end THIS STEP and turn into something, or just vanish. P.S.: Apple computers where once like this, a forgotten bad press company, which made SERIOUS changes in order to be what it is today. The reflexes of that time sure are the fuel for those idiots who talk non-sense today. As it will be to SL to turn into something remotely like it was once. Reborn from the ashes is needed.

Amazing how some people are so narrow minded. How can someone honestly think that there are a crisis where the "value" (money is value, but value isnt only money) simply vanishes ? If the MICROcosmos of your "neighbourhood" is losing money, be sure that in some part of the World someone is earning money. Which brings us to the figures in this post: SL has lost it long ago when they oriented their efforts towards the wrong public. They tried to satisfy a middle class between money and tech and lost one and another. People who really like to make content, scripts, help develop, goes to another grids where u can really make something. Instead of paying 1000 US$ for a sale where the thing you buy isnt yours and anytime can be took from you, and invest about a 3rd of that value in something that is yours and if you dont like the grid, you take YOUR SIM to another grid. With that on mind, as a developer, SL isnt much worth. For those who want to make os spend serious cash, the freaking Farmville seems more attractive than SL, as many people log in SL as it was a simple "messenger" and spend the time playing farmville or similars. To make money ? This is my favorite: You can earn money in whatever it is you do, provided that you do it as it must be done. You can earn money in SL, in another grid, whatever, and the worse problem in SL right now is that SL itself isnt doing much to accomodate business, and business in SL arent doing much to be successful. Like the saying: "To be successful in business you have to have money, or be creative.". Most business in SL started throwing money and buying their presence. Today many have lost the money, and dont know how to be creative, LL included. WHAT IS NEW IN SL ? WHAT ELSE MAKES SL AMAZING ? We have no news, we have no changes that makes SL better. We just have problems solved (not even half of them) and we have LL limiting more and more the trust value for SL. Nothing else. As the RL crisis, the SL crisis is comming and will precisely like the RL one, none believe it will happen until it happens. But like the RL crisis, some will profit from it, and profit much, but in RL there arent another planets or another universes, in case of SL, probably the other grids will be the "MERCOSUL" of their crisis. And finally, a phrase for someone to think about (I love this...lol): "When the ship is sinking, the rats are the first to get out of it."

It is really funny how many people complain about features they are actually able to change. I think that people arent really into "having choices" but instead they would prefeer that the viewer were just a window with SL world and all things made by huds you would need to buy. Seriously, there are no complain about a feature you cant change or disable. All you need to do about all problems listed is READ, LEARN and TRY. I like the official SL viewer because it is the only one I can really control what I see. If I wanted just a window with the view inworld and nothing else, I could have, which I couldnt using any other viewer. Not even using the hidden menus in these other viewers. Plus the reliability. With official viewer I have better graphics, faster motion and it is much less prone to crashes and freezes. But this last issue I know where the problem is: "Lesser viewers" have "lesser code" and can be used in computers not really configured to run SL properly. And I am not talking about only hardware configuration, I am talking about drivers and rubish software installed in your PC which trashes SL resources. Really, if you want to be heard by serious developers, you need to have a complaint that really deals with development issues. It is like to complain about your car because you think that it should move sideways otherwise it is impossible to park, not bothering to learn how to park a car that doesnt move sideways. I like when SL gets more features and possibilities and turn into a less a mindless plataform. Hope one day SL gets too versatile and too complicated that people not wanting to READ, LEARN and TRY just leave it.

You like to go after what LL does but you forget a critical and plain fact: SL is a business, LL is a company and it isnt a non-profit one. We all would love if good intentions and honorable actions could pay bills, but they dont. If this is being done, it is for a reason. One thing I can see is that if there are indeed reasons for that cost "per sim", perhaps we should consider that offering 50% discount for X of the costumers wont be paid off by less than 10X paying in full assuming only 7,5% profit over the full price, and only if the price was adjusted to cover ALL sim related costs proportionally, which I dubt because I know about my own servers and I know that offering dedicated servers full maintenance without leaving any task to the customer costs more than that. If there arent enough full payers to back up the 50%, it cant be done. It is business, and business need money. Then, we also need to consider that if these projects are really that impactant, they can raise money from other sources, or cut budget in SL by using rented lands or getting less prims. After all, if it is purely educational, it wont hurt cut the prim usage. Plus, taking in consideration the ammount of resources and usage anyone have in SL, isnt that hard to understand why a company that HAS COSTS must do things like this. Honestly, it is sad that everything blogged here are taken as SL was a public domain which LL have the obligation to provide. News for some of you, SL is a service, and as such, it needs maintenance from paid workers in paid equipments which compose paid infra-structure consuming paid resources. It is not a magical place that appears when you run and log your viewer.