RockAndRoll Michigan

To further complicate matters is a proposal to change the UK's time zone to a European one. Moving the UK clocks two hours further ahead, permanently. Wasn't the whole idea of time zones predicated upon GMT, as in the main, centralized line determining all the time zones in the world runs though Greenwich, England? What would permanently moving England's clocks two hours forward do to the rest of the world? I smell global meltdown! And people thought Y2K was confusing!

Company..... Present..... TAILS!

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: We got "Display Names" as a compromise which is a simple UUID pointing thing that can pretty easily be done immediately without any manpower involved. That's exactly the point I was trying to make. A simple "UUID pointing thing" is how it should have been done in the first place. For example, if I create a group called Rock's Landholdings and it buys a plot of land, the land should not show up in the database as the property of Rock's Landholdings. It should belong to the group's UUID. So when the client comes to that property, and the asset servers need to display the land's owner as Rock's Landholdings, then the server should see the UUID, send a request to the database for the name of the group referred to by that entry, and display it. Rename the group? No sweat, piece of cake, update the database entry. Poof, everything that references it, be it land the group owns, a member's profile showing they are a member of that group, objects the group owns, or even objects associated with but not owned by the group, all are instantly updated because they never had the group name in the first place.

There used to be grid-wide announcements, both in-world and at login, of issues that will seriously impact your time in-world. Grid status page says not to rez no-copy items, or make financial transactions? That would be communicated in-world as well though a wonderful blue pop-up message, as well as posted very clearly on the initial login screen. Those messages were eliminated years ago. Why? It doesn't speak well of a company's confidence in their product if they expect their users to rely on web browsers and Twitter feeds in order to have access to the information that they need to see in-world. Sure somebody could check the grid status page before they log in, but that doesn't help anybody who's already logged in. Should we spend all our time logged in to SL refreshing the grid status page to make sure something bad hasn't happened? I think not. Linden Lab needs to start telling their users when the grid is unstable and it's not safe to buy that product you want. This is a very basic thing they've lost over the years.

LL themselves probably cannot provide security against this. But there is a very simple way not to visit phony URL's. Don't click them. It's Internet Security 101. If you're sent a link to a supposedly "official" site, such as your bank, Linden Lab, Paypal, eBay, Amazon.com, iTunes, etc., don't click on it. Open your browser and either type the known correct address manually, or use your existing shortcut. Using SL doesn't preclude this very basic precaution. Maybe ISP's need to include this information in their welcome packet to their customers when they sign up, and send it out to all their existing customers, if people still don't know about this easy security feature?

It *should* be a simple matter to change the group's name in the database. Other references to it such as land, people's profiles, etc., should merely point to the database entry by UUID. I don't think they've set it up in such a relational manner, though. I think they've forced the group's name to be included in any database entries that refer to it, such as land settings showing that it belongs to that group. That's the only rational explanation I can personally come up with as to why you can't change the name. Disclaimer here, I am not a Linden, and I have never seen the behind-the-scenes infrastructure related to database, this is just my best educated guess.

As a long-time SL DJ, I have to disagree. The best parties are the parties where people actually hold conversations. You do remember conversations right? I say something on my mind and other people respond to it. This is not possible with gestures. It's also a major block to conversation when you are in a club and you run into this (note that the names have been made up, to protect the guilty): Jimmy Resident: ~~~~~~~~******** HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! **********~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Jerry Garcia throws his head back and HOWWWWWWWWWWWLZ RockAndRoll Michigan: Hello, how are you guys doing? Jane Doe: This song vibrates my poonani! Jimmy Smits: ************************************************ Jimmy Smits: ************** THIS DJ ROCKS! ************** Jimmy Smits: ************************************************ Victoria Spivey: (30 lines of ascii art here, I'm not going to bother to try to type it all in) Jenny Smalls: (Another 15 lines of ascii art) Jane Doe: I'm having an extreme HOOOOOOOOOgasm here! New Guest: Hello? Jimmy Smits: (40 lines of ascii art) Victoria Spivey: (35 lines of ascii art) Jerry Garcia: (some random statement about Ben & Jerry's ice cream, complete with ascii art) Jenny Greenlow: (another 40-line ascii art gesture just got fired off) RockAndRoll Michigan: Any intelligent life here? BigJoe Noobie: Wow man, I just fired up a doobie, let's get wasted! Johnny NoGood: (48 lines of ascii art about marijuana) Jimmy Bozeman: HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Jenny Wortherington: I love this TUUUUUUNE! HOOOOOOOLALALALALALALALA!!!!!!! RockAndRoll Michigan: Beam me up Scotty, no intelligent life down here Jane Hostess: Thanks for coming Rock, come back often!

This one time, at bandcamp.com ..................

Somebody briefly touched on Ruth's origins already, but there is one other fact they didn't mention (unless it was in the video, I admit I didn't watch it) Ruth was a model for Daz 3D that LL had purchased, and used as the first avatar. The model name actually was Ruth, so they just kept the name for the avatar. I've heard that Linden World was also initially black-and-white only, color wasn't added until later. When color was implemented there still wasn't an option for streaming audio either, it was a very silent grid. I'm not sure when they added that but it was there in June of 2006 when I first signed up. There was also a school named Teazer University that is no longer present, where a lot of things related to Second Life building, scripting, texturing, creating gestures, using gestures, even how to put on clothing, were taught. I myself took many classes at Teazer U. As I recall it actually had some sort of official backing from Linden Lab themselves, but I could be mistaken on that point. I also heard that the green voting boxes (you can still find them in SL) were at one time actually used by LL as a measure of a location's importance. People still click them when they are around, but they have been relegated to pretty much a bit of nostalgia of no actual signifigance. Can be somewhat handy for the landowner to see who's interested in their property if used properly, but it doesn't impact search rankings like it once did.

This thread seems to have gone off the rails here and stopped being about how a U.S. default will impact our second lives. However, since it has gone that way, these are some of my thoughts regarding the situation: First off, we need to look to ourselves and our own borrowing habits, whether we are U.S. citizens or not. I see way too much of this behavior going way wrong here in the U.S. and I doubt this is the only country where this is happening. We're constant bombarded with all the things we "can have" if we just use this credit card to buy it. Well, sure, we can have them, but at what cost? We need to start thinking about that. I think it's time people start showing the backbone to refuse to accept that credit card. You go to a store and you want that twelve inch key lime cheesecake? Sure, you can have it. Oh, you want to pay for it with plastic? Not with this MasterCard you ain't, this one's a credit card. Give me your debit card my friend. Don't have the money to pay for it? Be off with you. You don't need this cheesecake. Credit is meant to be used for large purchases that you don't have a prayer of having the cash for, not for everyday items. Sure, get yourself a house on credit, or a car. Even buying a wedding ring or an engagement ring, I can see those things. But we need to start thinking about whether we can really afford to mortgage our future paying 12, 15, even 30 percent interest just to buy that toothbrush, Justin Beieber poster, cheesecake, or what have you on a credit card. My second point is about taxes, specifically tax breaks for corporations. There are a lot of huge corporations getting tax breaks here in the United States that love to send jobs overseas. Stop it. During the Bush administration, no matter who was at fault and who wasn't (that's an entirely different argument in and of itself), we saw a great deal of high-paying jobs, like in the $30 an hour range, being shipped right out of this country and sent overseas. Meanwhile we had Bush crowing about all the jobs that had been created in the U.S. under his watch. Maybe he was actually responsible for their creation, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. The problem is, when you send 500,000 $30 an hour range jobs overseas, taking that income out of this country permanently, and create 200,000 $10 an hour level jobs in the service sector ("Would you like fries with that?"), that still represents a loss of $13 million PER HOUR in U.S. spending power. Hardly something to be proud of. It's time to tell businesses receiving tax breaks, no matter how large or small, that they're going to lose those breaks forever if they continue to ship high paying jobs overseas. They don't deserve any assistance from Uncle Sam if they can not or will not hire Americans. Period. No flexibility or compromise on this issue, ever. Then maybe we won't have teenagers trying to get jobs saying "Would you like fries with that?" forced to compete with college graduates for those jobs. Tackling these two issues will go a long way towards putting an end to the problems that have left the United States in the position that it is in.

FJ, I feel cautiously optimistic about many of the changes addressed in this blog entry. It does sound like a positive step to fix things that have been broken for years. Kudos to the team on that fact, it's very encouraging. I would like to ask a direct question, though. You stated that the group increase to 40 will be rolled back to 25 if it causes too much lag. Has this been stress-tested very much? If it hasn't, people need to be cautioned not to count on those extra 15 groups sticking around, as this whole thing is the stress-test. I'm also concerned about the ability to stress-test this, if such testing is only going to happen when it goes live on the main grid. How many avatars will be increasing their group memberships to do this needed stress-testing, if they know they run a risk of it falling back to 25 again? The issue of stress-testing the group increases absolutely gives me some cause for concern there.

Now, you ask how this will benefit someone who uses "Blue Mars". Whatever makes you think Linden cares in the least about Blue Mars? It isn't a Linden product, so it isn't worth consideration unless it's a threat. You're right, Blue Mars is not a Linden Lab product. Neither is World of Warcraft. Or InWorldz. Or any of the other sites whose members Avatars United was created to embrace and serve. But, there is something every last one of the users of these other non-Linden Lab products, who also have accounts with Avatars United, have in common: Every last one of them is already one of Linden Lab's customers, by virtue of their purchase of Avatars United. They are not customers of Linden Lab to use Second Life. They are customers of Linden Lab to use Avatars United. This segment of their customer base is being told straight up that they don't matter because they're not using the right virtual world. Do you matter to Linden Lab because you use Avatars United? Clearly no. Therefore, do you matter to Linden Lab because you use Second Life? Obviously you, too, can be discard on a whim, because Linden Lab does not care about their customers. So should LInden Lab care about somebody who uses Blue Mars, when this person already is a Linden Lab customer? You bet they should. Simply because they have a responsibility to their CUSTOMER BASE.

I have a question, Jack. Avatars United was intended to be a site embracing ALL virtual worlds. It is not specific to Second Life, nor was it ever intended to be. Whether you use Second Life, Blue Mars, Inworldz, World of Warcraft even, or any other online virtual community, Avatars United was supposed to be for you. Now you're shutting down Avatars United and incorporating "some" of its technology into the Second Life platform? How is this supposed to benefit somebody who uses, say, Blue Mars? I think you at Linden Lab have completely missed the point on this one. Bad decision.

I'm afraid it's really no big secret how somebody without ban authority can do this. First off, because the land is group-owned, only the GROUP has the authority to run scripts which modify any of the parcel settings on the land. This is an extremely important distinction. So if I am a member of your group, and I have been given the ability to rez items on the group's land and then deed them to the group, I can deed anything I want to the group, and it will become the group's property. This also means that any scripts that are in it can change things about the settings on the group's land. Audio stream address, video stream address, allowed "whitelisted" avatars, BANNED AVATARS...... So all a group member had to do was to deed a scripted object to the group, tell it who to ban, and then take it back into their inventory again, and their chosen victim is banned from the group's land. It's very easy to do it even without ban powers.