Prokofy Neva

Oh, dear. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Try googling the term "stock market" and "pyramid scheme" and such with the term "Second Life" and you might broaden your horizons...

Good work on the detachables, Esbee. Now fix the chat chicklet clusterfrak.

That's awful. And no, you can't get it back, unless you have a lawyer and determination and the willingness to pursue what is a relatively small amount through small claims court, but most small claims courts wouldn't deal with $18 US in a virtual world. So you should put the name out on Twitter, blogs, inworld groups, etc. to warn others. I can offer you a free 4096 for 4 weeks if you like. IM me inworld. No purchases, just move in. I only rent land, I don't sell it, and I think that's really how it should be done. I also believe in refunds, and I find most landlords in Concierge dealing with islands will not give refunds.

Are you closing and/or selling Second Life by the end of the year or first quarter 2011? There's been a lot of speculation about that. You're putting in features that there was no mass demand for -- no one needed display names except ostensibly the business and education customers that have now left anyway (or so we're told, I still see some of them but the very vocal ones have left). Mesh is one of those exoticisms of the geek/designer FIC that was not any objective mass customer request, just an indulgence for a certain constituency. It strikes me that trying to institute an increase in group limits *and* an improvement in group chat is probably a recipe for ensuring neither of them work. I never complain about my land group issues because I figure I'm an exoticism like the mesh lobby. How many people have mainland land groups with nearly a million meters and 600-700 people like Ravenglass Rentals? Probably only a dozen. Private island land barons don't need to make such massive groups because their customers "buy" the parcels or homesteads or whatever with their *own* group and have no need of a landlord's group. I used to have more than 1,000 in this group, but I calved off some people to several other groups because it was unworkable. I'm still keeping the main group for 600 plus because they are on land that has my brand already on it and I simply don't want to change it. But the group is essentially a mechanism for setting prims only because I can't do the following: o can't search by name -- it never works o I have to sort by alphabet and hunt for a name that way -- but that's assuming the system will in fact sort by alphabet, and not stall o BTW, the reason I'm hunting for names is to add powers to people, i.e. I keep a "tenant" status for people to join the group without invitation immediately and set home and prims without waiting for a manager to invite them, then I click off resident powers in another group title they can switch to in order to ban or deed media. So I have to find them and click those powers. I then have to press APPLY and hope they stick. Sometimes they don't, lather rinse repeat. o I can't see my land in the group -- it won't load and leaves brackets like this: o therefore when some tier donor pulls out without telling me, I can't tell if I'm under tier. When I have to move tier around to other groups and make adjustments, I'm working in the dark, and have to keep coming back to the web page. o forget about chat o notices sometimes work; sometimes they don't. They lag terribly in any event so I can't tell if they work. Gwyn's idea of separating land and chat groups doesn't make sense. Land groups by and large only have one couple or family in them renting on islands. And then perhaps a few dozen big mainland rentals groups and then numerous mom and pop groups on the mainland where people group land with their alts to hold it. The use case is not there to warrant the separation, I suppose. Why even have land groups? Philip Linden once asked me this question. Answer: so that group powers, which were so hellishlly developed finally back in 2005, could enable people to have *businesses* instead of hippie communes (the old group tools circulated all income equally to every member, with no ability to adjust this by role, and enabled the group to vote tier-payers off their own land in "officers' recall" ensuring that "expropriation of the expropriator" occured on a regular basis). Inworld business would not have been possible without the group tool reforms of 2005. It enabled people to create clubs with officers who could bounce people, but not sell land; it enabled people to make land busiensses with real estate agents who could issue invitations or terraform but not sell land -- etc. It was a huge boon to the economy. Then the tools stagnated because Lindens have never been committed to inworld business, except for a few businesses they promote themselves. That can be seen in the stubborn refusal to fix what is indeed a group tool bug -- the ability of people who were not designated with this power in the group by the owner to return group-set prims when they are put in "share". The hippie mentality prevailed again here, too, and the bug is left to enable a few opensource communes to "share" but plague thousands of businesses that don't want one tenant returning another's TV or other object, often destroying it completely if it is on non-transfer. These simple basics of property rights essential to capitalism keep eluding the Lab, so I thought I'd mention it again. There are other things about the group which have been destroyed deliberately in the name of reducing lag: o voting -- this was really a wonderful tool for business, socializing, and various "cause" groups and should be restored. It really harmed inworld democracy when it was removed o group accounts -- the groups used to show a complete record of monthly transactions but don't any more

Looking at my own heavy usage of the Customer Service systems as a Concierge customer, i.e. once a day or at least several times a week, I would say the overwhelming majority of use cases for CS is reset of a mainland sim. We don't have the access to the tools on the mainland sims that we have on our private islands or homestead sims where we ourselves can reset our sims when there are malfunctions, i.e. teleports cease working, rezzing issues, inventory issues, low FPS and TD. So I would suggest figuring out how to automate the support queue for the mainland reset requests. To be sure, this is a bit complicated in the fact that not all mainland sims have a single owner obviously, that some of us are sharing mainland with multiple owners (and sometimes no-show owners with zero autoreturn which leaves them vulnerable to griefing attacks). If there were an automated CS option "reset my sim because of X or Y" then I'd put in a ticket rather than live accessing, if they were turned around in 8-12 hours. You should examine how many requests come in for sim resets and how this could be automated, even if we are not given the option to access the tools ourselves on mainland.

Could we get an honest figure for how many non-SL accounts were on AU? It was definitely not the place where WoW players went, they have other sites. So Im thinking this is all rather contrived. AU was pretty lame, and you couldn't block people. You couldn't do much with it except upload a picture and IM people. You can do that on AIM or Yahoo or a hundred other things, so it was pointless.

Um, nice try, House of Frye, but it's shorthand for paying the bills of Linden Lab, and providing it revenue, with our tier, which makes the world possible.

This is to notify you that I and a group of my comrades have occupied the ANWR prim factory to secure it from the destructive technocommunist mesh hordes. We have donned prims on our heads and we will fight to the last line-up-by-the-numbers. The undemocratic means by the Linden Entity have been exposed by the People. We aren't anonymous, and we're not everywhere. But we provide you REVENUE through OUR TIER.

Oh, no. I don't believe people are entitled to commercial success; that's silly, and socialist. I do believe that people are entitled to free *access* to the path to commercial success, and that's what was created with the prim-based economy. And the freedom to access is what is missing from the mesh concept, it's another supremly FIC concept. You would think after the 2.0 debacle that cost them 30 percent of their staff that the Lindens would be so self-preoccupied again such as to inflict another destructive program on the world. But the geeks they drink with in SF make them think they have to keep doing shiny stuff or die. The Lindens putting Draxtor's machinima in their SL YouTube channel, with the snotty DEAL WITH IT at the end is truly an outrage. Really tone deaf of those creators and supremely arrogant, and TRULY NASTY coming from the Lindens. I'm going to put a prim on my head in protest. Who's with me? I will wear my prim all the time.

Can't complain, as I had no use for Avatars United for the simple reason that a) first you wouldn't create verified names through inworld confirmation, which every site does, and that mean spoofing and griefing; b) second, you couldn't find a way to block and ban nuisances who friend you to stalk, as Woodbury does, and people who left unwanted comments and harassment. Any system you build MUST have tools to block and/or ban. No one should be forced to take a griefer and cyber-bully as a "friend". I'm puzzled by all this, though. You had the avatar profiles showing on the web now for a long time. They are already in Google, even. So...what's the reason for diverting from the obvious, making profiles on the website, and going off to AU? It seems like a side rail. Why? I think it goes without saying that many people will want the ability to TURN OFF their avatar profile from Google. You haven't done them that courtesy and you must. People HAVE TO be able to OPT IN, not OPT OUT. As for social media -- sigh, I can't wait for you to get over this infatuation.

nobody is shut out except those who will not make the effort to learn. You can't make a world out of only elite coders and designers using obsolete guilt tools to prevent access by other people. It fails. It grows stale and collapses. Eventually, these types of picky and arcane skills you pride yourself in having, and which you arrogantly demand others learn, or be blamed for lack of access, will grow extinct. Nobody needs complexity in creation. What we've seen with the Emerald debacle is how much morality and intelligence matter even more than skills.

I've never seen so many whiney babies afraid that someone more talented or competitive than them might come along and ruin their game of fake talent and monopoly. I'll tell you who the fearful and snivelling ones are, those who can't conceive of a world of freedom where everyone is free to create at different levels with accessible tools, and instead, has to preserve a medieval bastion of guild craftsmen who hoard the remaining, dwindling supply of specialized knowledge to themselves on the cusp of the next tool revolution when the knowledge will become obsolete. THAT's what fear looks like. The real challenge is designing a world that doesn't merely replicate the past stages of the real world but creates something different. Evolution? Hardly. Refusal to adapt? I'll tell you where the "refusal to adapt" is -- in the creator-class that zealously clings to its privileges and crumbling exotic knowledge that is soon to be no more... Nobody has to stand outside cranking a shaft on their car engine anymore; they just turn the ignition key : ) The stubbornness and laziness is all in the precious simulated divas, clinging to their lost world...

Against, you forgot the most important thing: o Lindens may want to examine how editable and modifiable mesh is by second parties.

Translation: "I'm superior to you all and I'm going to make sure you all know it by posting a faux meta comment and engaging in faux self deprecation."

What's more important than the 1000 or so that might make an actual RL living from SL are the tens of thousands who make at least *something* -- maybe merely enough to pay for tier on a homestead or a 4096 m rental; maybe just some extra gas money. If mesh makes it impossible for those people to earn *at least something* they will leave.

How are those "building widget sales" coming along in Blue Mars, Daniel? Again, I'm raising the principle of the matter. It's silly to imagine that I'd oppose lower-prim houses made of mesh because...I want to rent more land with more prims. In fact, Philip is doubling the ante by increasing prim counts on sims, or so he said. And any land lord in fact wants lower prim houses to enable tenants to be able to decorate more. On most of my land, the tenants put out their own house. The idea that people only make criticisms based on some sordid self-interest is big in SL, and I guess you speak from experience. What's in it for you? Prims in Blue Mars are like...a fish needs a bicycle lol. I've yet to hear a simple answer to a simple question in the miles of hundreds of answers and repartees and barbed snarks here: can you or can you not edit and change another person's mesh? End of story.

Open source doesn't mean decency and solidarity. Au contraire. Blender is wonky and infuriating, and forces you to buy the manual. See above. Again, why aren't you learning Chinese or Russian in this global economy? Don't you worry about getting left behind?!

Change is what *you're* afraid of, Danball. Change that means people other than you and the others in your "skilled class" aren't the only ones in charge of the world. Yes, I realize that's a scary thought.

Look, that sort of snotty remark is exactly what I anticipate in my original answer to Jack below. Of course those *in* the class of coders and designers to benefit from this new technology are going to claim, as they always do, that their class doesn't even exist, or that it doesn't benefit -- that's always the gambit here. But of course there will be a widening gulf of haves and have-nots in SL and we all see that if we aren't in SL-dev or licking our chops to make a buck off this as others are. And duh, we all get that avatars are meshes. But hey, when was the last time you saw a t-shirt or dress for sale made in appearance mode? Except in my store, as a joke. The supplying of people with elaborate avatar attachments and skins and enhancement is a huge business and one rocked by a very small elite at the top who commandeer the viewable space on classifieds and Xstreet. THAT has been the result of "having mesh for a decade" duh. Such elitimism will be even more the case when entire sectors of prefabs and furniture and knick-knacks will be now not prim, and hey, not even sculpty, which was last season's Next Big Thing, but mesh. Let's not pretend this isn't what it is. It's like Daniel RavensNest (note correction!) constantly going on and on about how "you can so create" in Blue Mars because...he himself is selling some widget that lets you have some placebo of creation nothing like SL, and because he won't admit that in fact you have to a pro to work there, and quite the finicky pro at that. Let's at least see you guys argue this one out on the merits of the truth about it, that it is indeed a Linden windfall to a select class of people and it will CHANGE OUR WORLD COMPLETELY. No more amateurs, hobbyists, ordinary people able to set and manipulate and modify simple builds or others' creations and serve as co-creators.

Uh, no, there aren't three camps, one of which is "the smart people" the other two which are caricatures and "the dumb people" or "the hysterical people". Let's point out how the rest of the Internet lives, shall we? How the *rest of* technology out of the little Second Life bubble, where wannabees can project fantastic images of themselves as "professionals"? The Rest of the Internet and Social Media Technology: Big computers that take up a room A little smaller computer that take up part of a room Regular people can now start filling out punch cards Desktops Desktops with light pens Desktops with a mouse Laptops Weblogs of tekkies Blogs Twitter Netbooks Blackberries My-lo i-Phones i-Pad Now, look at our favourite virtual world: Prim building Teleport via telehubs Teleport by having to pinpoint location on the map Windlight Sculpties Shared Media/Viewer 2 Mesh See what I mean? The rest of technology is getting simpler and simpler to use, with more and more people able to use it, with simpler and more intuitive interface, taking up less and less space. Meanwhile, Second Life rolls back to the Middle Ages, to the era of medieval guilds, before the Iron Age, before the printing press, before the Enlightenment, becoming more and more complex, less and less available to people.

Thanks for confirming with such detail that you got a leg up over others in the market.

Oh, sheesh, Autodesk! And telling people who disagree to "hush up"! This Mesh gang may not be along for along with this sort of attitude. People may boycott their wares. Worse, they may laugh at them.

Keep talking, as the more people can see the nature of this New Class, the less long it will stay in power. You don't want to hear the basic points from me? Hear them from Maelstrom or Vivienne or Morgaine right in this thread, all people I never heard of until this thread and whom I don't know. It's not about uravnilovka, Soviet levelling of everybody and dumbing down. It's about access. ACCESS. FREEDOM. I have a healthy respect for a wide range of talents and abilities. I respect the newbie weekender making a box and texturing it with a wood texture and giving it to his lady love. I have respect for the people I've paid hundreds of real dollars to who build amazingly talented and beautiful builds. But here's the thing...I can access those builds. When they get prim drift, I fix them. When they are too primmy for a changing scene, I can de-fat the prims. When the texture might need a change, I can change it. I can put it in and out of inventory. I can even add to it and link to it. And so on. And none of that sounds possible with mesh items. Again, it's not about me, and your obsessiveness in making some wacky caricature of me to satisfy your own malicious spleen only discredits you. Nobody is telling talented people not to use new technology, nor is there a call to smash new technology. What is called for is access to tools; diversity of tools for abilities that differ; and some attentiveness to the economy by the people who control this artificial economy.

Yes, that's another angle, SL as third-rate environment by contrast with those with "real jobs". in fact, the reason you see such utter ferocity here in this thread, and such extreme social Darwinism with regard to inflicting pain on other people is because of the *insecurity* of those whose who are big-deal creators *only in this contest* with Mesh as a viagra for them *only in this context*. There's nobody more savage about capitalist extremism than people new to business and insecure and looking over their shoulder at what they imagine to be role models. And yes, you have to wonder, why didn't these magical Lindens put these tools *inworld*?

Communism, of the Zuma third-world type, is awful, but what opposes it at the other end can be awfully unattractive, too. what you mean to say isn't that the future is "now"; you mean to say the future is "me". Do nude people on nudist beaches even need mesh?