Ceera Murakami

Well, they are doing rolling server restarts today to deploy a new server release. Maybe it's related to that? http://status.secondlifegrid.net/

If you want the option to sell an item in the future, then purchase only no-copy, transfer OK merchandise. Problem solved! Of course, you can only use one iteration of that item, and can't make a backup, but hey, you can sell it later, if you want to get back the dollar or two that you probably paid for it. When you buy copyable, no-transfer merchandise, you are trading off the ability to maybe sell the thing later for the convenience and security of being able to make backup copies to protect yourself against loss, and to make copies to use the same item in multiple places or with multiple outfits. For many people, that is worth many times more than the ability to maybe sell the thing in the future. Many merchants will offer either form of permissions if a polite request is made, and if suitable to the item. And if one merchant doesn't offer the permissions option you prefer, thousands of others probably offer very similar merchandise that does. If LL were toallow individuals to "remove the no transfer restriction" from items, even at the cost of making that item no-copy, what is to prevent you from first making thousands of copies, and then making each copy transferrable and sellable? That way lies ruin for almost all the merchants. You'd essentially be making their hard work into full-perms freebies, and profiting from their work at their expense.

Ishtara Rothschild wrote: PS: You can only exchange L$ for real world currency if you earned them inworld. L$ that have been bought on the LindeX can't be exchanged back into US$. You also can't pay your tier in L$, they need to be exchanged first. What ever gave you that idea, Ishtara? L$ are L$, and once in your account you can cash them out just fine. When cashing out L$ from your account and into US$, there's absolutely no distinction as to whether they were earned in-world or purchased on Lindex. I have bought L$ on Lindex and then decided I didn't need that much, and was able to cash the excess out without the least bit of hassle. Now I will grant that if you buy huge amounts of L$ on Lindex, and you immediately try to cash that back into US$ and then immediately try to cash it out via PayPal, that will probably trip the API Risk evaluation as possible money laundering. But if all you do is buy $300 USD or so of L$ and then transfer that to your USD balance so it will be there to cover next month's tier, there's absolutely no rules against that which I have ever seen.

The answer is, not really. Alpha layers (and I am pretty sure tattoo layers) only support one-bit transparency. The alpha layer is either all on (invisible) or all off (visible) for any given pixel in the layer. While technically you could do an alpha later that alternated pixels as 100% on and 100% off in a checkerboard pattern, I think the result is rather lacking. Try using alpha layers to hide the body, and then using Tattoo layers to apply a semi-transparent 'skin'. Maybe that could work.

Unfortunately, most of the basic assumptions for how things work in SL are locked to the idea that no one flies, and that all activity happens on the ground. So all parcel access is based on the ground, with no provision for vertical partitioning, and all access restrictions are effective only very close to the ground. Or look at Windlight, which looks great at ground level, but gets steadily less useful as you climb in altitude. It too is designed only with the thought that those using it will be firmly on the terrain surface. The fact that we can build as high as 4096 Meters and that many Residents use skyboxes and other floating platforms on a regular basis seems to have eluded the coders at the Lab, or else they are just too busy with their pet projects to go back into the reams of source code and change all the places where the ground-centric mindset locked in absurd restrictions.

Note also that parcel-based restrictions for land access, whether allowing a group or allowing a list of individuals, will ONLY affect the area within 50 M of the terrain surface. Ban lines and parcel access restrictions have no effect at all at altitudes greater than 50 M above the terrain surface, unless you ban an individual explicitly by name, in which case the ban is still only effective to 512 Meters above the surface. To protect against intrusion at higher altitudes, you need a scripted security device, commonly called a security orb, that can use the parcel's access list or its own list, and can ban and eject intruders after a brief warning and grace period. If you have an entire sim, and if it is not connected edge to edge with any other sims, you can turn off "Public Access" in the Estate controls, and add a group and/or individuals to an access list, and only those people will be able to access that sim. This can not be done on the mainland, since Mainland residents can't use the Estate tools, and since those sims touch edge to edge with other sims that you don't control access to.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Not quite what you asked, but this little routine, dropped in a prim and worn somewhere, will tell you which Mainland continent you're on at any given time: Continent Detector That's a really cool script! Thanks for providing that link.

Unfortunately, LL has given us absolutely no way to prevent teens from participating in Mature/Adult groups. No way to screen new or existing group members and require that they are not teens. No way to know a group member or someone who IM's us is a teen. As far as I know, Mature/Adult groups can still be located by various means by teens, and joined by teens, unless the group is invitation-only. The only safe way to operate a Mature/Adult group is to lock it down to invitation-only, and require that the person meet a group officer on Mature or Adult land, as appropriate, before being invited to join the group.

Still no way to reply to individual posts in a Blog, unfortunately. In the Blogs, we can reply only to the original Blog, and have no way to reference a specific post in the comments.

Unfortunately, every version of 2.x wipes out the settings for any other version of the LL viewer when you uninstall it. They also interfere with some other settings just by being installed. Residents have complained since version 2.0.0 came out, and LL has done nothing to fix the problem. You can at least prevent the wipeout by locating the Secondlife folder on vory computer, and changing its name before doing the uninstall. On a Windows XP system, that folder is at C:\Documents and Settings\LoginAccount\Application Data\SecondLife , where LoginAccount is the account you log onto the computer with. If you rename that folder before installing a 2.x Viewer, for example naming it "SecondLife-old", the install of 2.x will create a new SecondLife folder. When you want to switch back, rename that new folder as "SecondLife-mesh", and rename the backou from "SecondLife-old" back to just ""SecondLife".

Have the base send a message to the wheel on a non-zero channel, whenever the base is moved, and include the vector that the base was moved by, as well as any rotational changes. Then the wheel could act to move itself the same distance and rotation change. It remains as two linksets, so the wheel could still rotate on its axis. Likewise, the wheel could communicate with hanging cars on the wheel, each their own linkset, that would, as the wheel rotates, follow the rotation while remaining upright. During the SL Kids 5th anniversary celebration, they had a ferris wheel in that sim that rotated, and that had cars that you could ride in that remained upright. Check with Marianne Mccann to find out who added that ferris wheel to the Kids5B sim displays. Those sims have been repurposed since then, but she can probably lead you to the person who built it.

Zoya, I wouldn't consider it duplicity, so much as a good idea done incompletely and with no real corporate support. Properly executed and advertised, the program could have been a boon for both the developers and the corporate clients. And you didn't even need to be a big business to benefit from it. Smaller service providers and smaller customers could both have made good use of the program as a way to connect content providers with a proven track record with any potential customers. Someone looking for a builder capable of making a custom mansion and landscaped grounds could just as easily use that directory to find suitable providers as a big corporation could, and could use the references provided in the listing to go and see samples of that person's work, before contacting them about doing a project. Unfortunately, like many good ideas that Linden Lab has started (Windlight comes to mind), they got the ball rolling and then seem to have forgotten to maintain the process or promote it. If someone within the Lab were to actively champion the Solution Providers program again, and advertise it so potential new customers knew it existed, it could still be a very beneficial program. Unfortunately, I suspect that the staffers that used to champion this project were among the many that LL laid off a while back, and no one new has stepped forward to make this program a priority again.

The listing service still exists. I've been a member of it since at least Jan 2008. But I wouldn't call it very 'active'. The only real 'benefit' I have received myself, in several years as a listed member of the Solution Providers, was when they rolled out the NDA-sealed preview of the "SL Enterprise" corporate server solution. I was invited to participate in that preview and get an early look at that product. (That was the now-shelved offering where a corp with deep pockets could have their own SL-supported mini-grid, running real SL server software and independent of the main grid, for up to 16 sims that could exist behind their firewall and accessible only by their own corporate accounts.) I never got any 'referrals' where they directed potential customers my way, and as far as I can tell, they did very little to make any potential customers aware that the Solution Providers program even existed. Maybe the "Gold level" Solution Providers, the ones who pay hundreds of dollars to LL for premium level support in that program, get more back from it. I never saw the cost of that as being justifiable in terms of what they offered in return for that paid membership.

As Peewee said, your only hope is that the person you accidentally paid is still active in SL, and is an honest and decent person who will give the L$ back to you. Linden Lab will not get involved. There are many ways that a person can accidentally pay the wrong individual. Your case was one of those. You IM'ed someone with a very similar name, and paid them without talking to them first, and it turned out to be the wrong person. Another common problem is trying to pay someone while in a busy area, like a club, and when you click on what you think is your friend, you accidentally click on an invisible body part of someone between you, like a hidden set of wings, and pay them. The best bet is to talk to the person before you pay them, so you're certain you got the right recipient. Be glad it was only L$500 (About $2.00 US), and not L$500,000 that you lost that way, and consider it a lesson learned.

There is no way with any sort of account currently available from Linden Lab for you to pay a one-time fee for land, and then never pay anything at all, ever again, to retain ownership. If you are a Premium Member, one of the perks of membership is that you can indeed purchase a 512 M2 parcel of land, and retain it without paying a monthly fee for that parcel. BUT, you still have to pay the monthly (or quarterly or annual, depending on how you set it up) membership fees for your Premium Membership dues. So that "Free Land" is free in the same sense that if you pay for an annual membership in a golf country club, you can play a certain number of games of golf that year for free. You're still paying an annual fee, it's just part of your dues. Stop paying the dues, and they will reclaim your 'free' land. If you are a Basic member, you can purchase, or more accurately lease, land from a private sim owner. They pay Linden Lab a one-time fee to own a whole sim, and pay Linden Lab monthly fees to retain ownership of their sim. You, as their tenant, pay them a one-time fee to get the land (some times a very small fee or even zero up front), plus a monthly payment that covers your share of the monthly cost of keeping that sim alive, plus a small profit for your landlord. Any resident can directly purchase a private sim of their own from Linden Lab. You don't have to be a Premium member to become a private sim owner. You pay Linden Lab a one-time fee to own a whole sim, and pay Linden Lab monthly fees to retain ownership of your sim. Maybe, if you set things up well and run your sim well, you can become a landlord yourself, and sub-lease parts of your sim to others as your tenants, and if you are very lucky and do well as a landlord, that may even make enough profit to cover all your expenses, so that effectively you don't pay any monthly fee yourself, because your tenants pay it for you, while leaving a modest parcel for you to use yourself, 'rent free'. In practice, this rarely works out profitably on a small scale like owning only one or two sims. Large landlords have several advantages, including discounted rates to obtain the sims, discounted rates to pay for monthly maintenance, and the flexibility that if their tenant level fluctuates, they can drop a few sims or pick up a few extra sims to compensate for that, without losing everything. Regardless of how you own land in Second Life, what you're really doing is renting server space. Linden Lab has to purchase, provide maintenance for, provide power for, and provide administrative staffing for that server. They have monthly cost that they pay, in real money, for keeping it on-line. So you have a monthly fee to pay for your share of the resources that you are asking to have access to. Even if you go to one of the alternative grids that are similar to SL, and that will allow you to download free server software and install it on a computer that you own, and then connect your computer to their grid so others can visit your home-served sim, you still have to pay the power bill for keeping that computer on-line 24x7, and any maintenance costs to keep it running. Very few things in life are free, other than the air that you breathe. You can't expect to get something of value for nothing. A long time ago, when LL was first starting out and had very few members, they did offer a "Lifetime Membership", which gave the buyer, for a one time fee, a permanent membership in SL, and a certain amount of land, tier free. Those memberships were very expensive, and so you still effectively were paying up front for what you would use over the next several years.

I would welcome a larger proportion of smaller, more realistically scaled avatars. As well as less spam.

So, you took the original of the house into inventory, but then couldn't find it? Try filtering your recent items list and look for the period of time when you took it. For example, if you took it at Noon yesterday, and it's 3 PM now, look for recent items in the last 30 hours or so. That may show it to you if it somehow got put in the wrong folder. You may also find a coallesced object from about that time that has just "object" as its name, or that has as its name one of the component parts that you selected. Try rezzing any unidentified objects. If you selected the house plus a single unlinked and un-named prim, and the prim was selected last, it may not show the name in inventory that you expect. As for the copy your fiance took, it sounds like you didn't have the parts set to full perms before she took it. There's no way to fix the permissions, but you can use it as a model to guide your efforts when you try building a new one. And you can probably use the eyedropper tool to select textures from it to re-apply to the new copy, since presumably you already have the textures that you used in your inventory. For future reference, always do a bulk permissions set and make sure the build is full-perms before giving it to a person who is working on it with you. If you fail to set the object full perms, they get the restricted permissions, and so will you if they give or sell that copy back to you. Even if you created it, giving it back won't restore the permissions you once had on that copy.

Part of the SL Main website was down for a while this evening. About the same time you had your trouble, I tried accessing the Friends Online page and also got directed to the Grid Status page. That is the normal redirect when the SLK website goes down, since hopefully it will have posts on why things are down, and it is on a different web server. Try again now, as things seem back to normal now.

I think this is an excellent idea. Here's my 'Showcase' build: The "Old Queens" campus for Rutgers University. The sim is RUCE 2, and it is open to the public, rated PG. This is just one of eight sims that I built for that university client. It's a full-sim project, where I made everything except for the purchased prim trees and some Linden plants and shrubs. All told, it comes to about 11,000 prims. The best part is the Kirkpatrick Chapel, which is the largest building on the right in this picture. It has an extremely detailed interior, with accurate representations of the actual stained glass windows that are in the real chapel, and even the actual portraits that hang on the walls inside. Here is a link to go there: http://slurl.com/secondlife/RUCE%202/203/17/27

I really can't say one way or another about Facebook, since I avoid that data mining pit like the plague. But within SL, if a friend asks me to come meet another friend of theirs, and they make a positive first impression, I usually will offer friendship to that person, at least to get their calling card and to make a note in their profile that I know them because they are a friend of so-and-so, and when/how I met them. If my friend likes them, perhaps I may like them too, and I'll give them a chance. If they continue to interact with me in a positive manner, both when they are also with that first friend, and on their own, they remain on my Friends list. At that point they really are becoming my friend, and not just a 'friend-of-a-friend. If I rarely if ever interact with them after that first meeting, or if I simply don't get along with them, I un-friend them eventually. But I keep the calling card, so I know I met them before. If I un-friended them for a reason, like the other person always argued with me or did things I found revolting, then I might note that in their profile via the calling card, so if I encounter them later I can be reminded of that past history.

In my experience as a merchant (active for 5 years or so), what is normal is for a rented space in a mall or other shared retail area to be owned by a group created for that mall's merchants, run/owned by the person who owns the the land itself, and with member roles cleanly set so that the mall owner retains their property rights, but the merchants have the abilities they need for rezzing prims and preventing auto-return of their prims. Then the merchants SET, not DEED their vendors and merchant area prims, like signs, to the merchant's group. This allows auto-return to be on for the mall, so discarded opened packages and boxes go away, but merchant-owned prims don't. It also allows the mall to eject/ban troublemakers mall-wide. It should absolutely NOT be required for the merchants to DEED their vendor prims to the merchant group. Doing that would make the money earned by the vendor get paid to the Group members! The only real benefit to a merchant from actually 'owning' the parcel that they rent in a shared merchant area is that they can ban/eject problem people from their own store. I would never set a mall up that way. Honestly, it's better to leave that to the mall's administrators. If they are trouble in your store, they should probably be banned mall-wide. And if the mall owners retain the ability to ban/eject, they can take care of griefers when you're not around.

It is nice to see a club owner honestly concerned about the impact their club has on their neighbors. Well done for you, to express that concern! The best solution in your case would be to move the club way up in the sky, so you're at least 100M (preferably at least 250 M) away from anyone else's inhabited buildings, skyboxes, or terrain surface. This benefits your club and your patrons, because lag will be less for you and your patrons, and you'll have fewer complaints from neighbors. This benefits your neighbors, because they won't hear your patrons text chat, whispers, say or shout, or their gestures, or their voice chat. They will also benefit from reduced lag, because your club and its scripts and patrons won't be close enough to affect them. The one disadvantage of moving an established club into the sky is that people following an outdated landmark to the ground location may think the club no longer exists. The solution there is to put a simple, low-prim 'Lobby' at the old landmark site, with a teleporter to take them to the new sky location.

Thank you, Charolotte. I suppose there's some use for a separate Friends list just for the Community, but it eludes me at the moment. I never would have even noticed that, if you hadn't shown me where it was hidden.

Which Friends list are you referring to? On secondlife.com, if you look at the dashboard page after you log in, your complete list of Friends is in the left column, with those who are on-line at the top. Clicking "Manage" only shows you the on-line ones. Is there another Friends list specific to these new community pages? I haven't seen one.

The terraforming of the land is something you can't switch back and forth with any easy method at the parcel level. If you can come up with a single terraforming plan that works for multiple layouts of the buildings, trees, and other features, there are ways to "switch back and forth" between versions. The easiest method would be to limit yourself primarily to copy/mod OK items and prim plants. Then you could pack layout A in a one-prim rezzer box, and pack layout B in a second 1-prim rezzer box, and switch between them by using rezzer A to 'clean' the area and remove the prims it rezzed, then use rezzer B to "Build" and set out the items for layout B. "Builder's Buddy" is a free rezzer system that can do this for you. It's available here: http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/15/ff/96777/1.html Go to the last post in the thread for the latest version. The limiting factor here is that a rezzer system needs to have you add a 'component' script to each linkset that you want it to produce, which means you can't use it with Linden 1-prim plants or no-mod items that you can't add scripts to. You also need to have copy permissions to be able to have the rezzer set the items out more than once. So for example, you could have something like this: Layout A: 12 prim trees and a 'pup tent' and a campfire, for a "camping in the woods" layout. The layout also includes a flat area of prim grass that covers a hole in the terraforming that the other layout uses for its swimming pool. Layout B: 4 different prim trees, a modern house (2 linksets), and a patio with a hole for for a swimming pool. The pool itself is no-copy, so after rezzing layout B, you would rez the pool from your inventory and position it as needed. To switch back to layout A, take the pool back into inventory, then use the rezzers to clean up layout B's prims and set up Layout A's prims. Stuff that the rezzers can't deal with, like a no-copy scripted bed, can be manually placed from inventory when the layout calls for it.