AnnMarie Otoole

I heard a rumor that there will be no mainland, that would be a sad omission. Any confirmation?

Yes you can, depending on your computer, communication, graphics etc. I often run up to 4 live avatars plus 2 bots simultaneously.

Its the "Be popular and get rich quick" business that budding entrepreneurs can start with minimal skills, not realizing that to be successful requires a dedicated team working 24/7 and lots of L$ to support it for a year or two until they establish a reputation and hope to break even on advertising and donations. The big get rich business is supplying the equipment they think is necessary.

My main SL account was hacked and nearly $2,000 extracted from my credit card. I am the only person in RL or SL who knew the password so it had to be hacked by someone with data file access internally in LL. LL were very cooperative and prompt in restoring my accounts but never gave any feedback on how it happened. I would hope the had sufficient internal logging to figure out who did it. It is not impossible that hacking software could be built into the viewer but with extensive testing on all releases it would be a monumental task to hide embedded hacking programs.

My account was hacked about 9 months ago. I'm the only person in the RL and SL that knew my password so I believe it has to be an employee in Linden Labs who did it or gave the password to someone else to do it. It was not a password you would find accidentally. Linden Labs were very cooperative and thorough in restoring my financial status.

The best way is an off-world database using http access. You can automate the process with an off-world database that recoreds all the owner UUIDs and object model numbers then use an in-world script to distribute the latest version to all customers with expired version numbers. Scripts in the object can access the database periodically to get your latest advertising information. Doing it entirely in-world is not so easy.

I've made good money in SL by doing scrpting. BUT if your aim is to make money instead of having fun, SL becomes a chore you would be better off distributing newspaers in RL and buying L$ with the proceeds. Some years ago I calculated the US$ income I was making per hour of scripting time and figured I was earning less than 10 cents per hour.

Its the "Gold Rush" mentality that explains the population graph. I was a monitor in the early days when there were 30,000 people a DAY joining SL, the two main questions hatchlings asked were Where do I go for Sex and How do I make Money in SL. There were news stories back then of residents making enough money to quit their day job and get rich in SL Although very few made that kind of money it triggered the gold rush. Despite the LL puritanical objection to the sex business it is probably the biggest remaining attraction.

I've been using off-world database systems extensively for over 7 years. They can allow very powerful marketing tools like allowing COPY and TRANSFER on a L$1,000+ object so existing customers can give free trials to other people. New customers can try them free for a month and pay a fee if they want to license it to their avatar. You can also put them on sale in Marketplace for L$25 (to discourage nuisance downloads) and avoid LL commissions on the final sale. The database costs me nothing, it is using a small portion of capability in a commercial website. Many of my products would be impossible to do without the external data base. I guess the best security is to check the age of the vendor and take the risk if the product is effective.

I've made good money in SL by doing scrpting. BUT if your aim is to make money instead of having fun, SL becomes a chore you would be better off distributing newspaers in RL and buying L$ with the proceeds. Some years ago I calculated the US$ income I was making per hour of scripting time and figured I was earning less than 10 cents per hour.

Not sure if this is the right place for progress reports? My vehicles and some customer purchased items are 95% shut down by BUG-5530, now MAINT-3897. Is there any way to check progress on this and perhaps ETA for fix?

In the past, the viewer would maintain the last direction and velocity of avatars or objects exiting a sim until the receiving sim took posession and project them into the destination sim using the local client surrounding data. This creates the familiar "rubberbanding" effect where the object would jump back to its correct location when the receiver took posession, which would be minimal for a fast transfer but quite dramatic on a delayed hand-off. Recently I noticed a change. On a percentage of sim crossings my avatar would hit an invisible brick wall at the sim crossing and bounce back about 5m. Flying or walking across the boundary was impossible but eventually it succeeded. It "appears" as though crossing is being prevented in the client until the new server is ready to accept the avatar or object. Does anyone know if this is an upcomimg change or in beta testing? It is causing me some serious related problems. EDIT. It appears my suspicions were correct, I notice a notification message popping up "Unable to create pending connection".

I reported a parcel with 2 griefing objects. I discovered the problem when my computer started to freeze, including the clock and mouse. I turned on the temperature reporting on the graphics card and sure enough, the closer I got to the objects the faster the temperature rose until the computer would freeze. Having burned out 2 previous graphics cards on SL (running 3840 x 1080 resolution with 70+ fps) I got the hell out of there and reported it to the Lindens. They responded rapidly and removed the objects and the resident account. By studying the object a bit at a time from a distance I analyzed its construction. There was nothing magical about it, it had no scripts and nothing in the anti-griefing controlos that would prevent it being re-created however I'm not about to reveal its construction. The responding Linden was apparently able to analyze it safely by de-rendering, or somehting equivalent, so the graphics card was not struggling to resolve it. I have no doubt that a gaphics card with marginal cooling problems could be physically damaged by this object.

If you "can't" use PayPal and a wire transfer is not practical I'm sure I've seen advertisements for in-world brokers who will accept your Lindens and convert them to some form of cash, check, or direct deposit. Obviously this is going to cost you some percentage and fees and you run serious risks regarding their integrity and your security.

Caleb, can you give an update on BUG-5530, now MAINT-3897, objects disappearing after sim crossings. I heard you were going to discuss it at a meeting last week? I have a big project on hold and some broken projects with paying customers (who don't yet realize it is broken). Another resident has similar problems, added as a comment in BUG-5530. Thanks, AnnMarie Otoole

Sayrah, it is no longer an "obscure bug". It is now readily (but not 100%) reproducible and filed as BUG-5530. It has been around for many years. Caleb Linden has observed it and I believe will be investigating further.

Since you asked, here are the statistics, as of this moment, 104,138 unique individuals have taken a total of 307,631 rides on the vehicles. That is about 3 rides per person on average and with about 50% taking only one ride that equates to the rest taking 4 rides and more on average. I have Names and keys with 8 people over 1,000 rides, 45 over 100 rides (44 not counting myself). No one is forced to tip, it is purely voluntary and only available after riding for 3 minutes. If the ride was so distressful how come tips pay for half my tier costs? What is VERY STRANGE about your post is that if Daria Linette is your SL avatar name you have the second highest number of rides with 9,239 rides and the last one today (Tuesday 9/24/13) at 20:58 GMT. Would you care to explain your addiction and why you have taken so many rides if they are so terrible?

The sites that still rez a bus have a minimum of 2000 prims available and are at least 1000 sqm. That would allow 61 additional vehicles to be rezzed on the site before it ran out of prims and room for at least 15 physical vehicles although it would be amusing to see them all take off together. The remaining two sites are experimental ones that DO NOT USE self replication so they will not be killed by the update. They do not bypass the auto return feature, they rely on it.

Male Bovine Excrement. Only 5 of the 750 possible rez sites rezzed a bus on a timer. They were all large parking areas where vehicles would not block traffic. Get your facts straight before making broad fanciful accusations. 2 are still operating successfully.

Part of the problem is over supply of land. In the days when I first joined they were getting 30,000 new members per DAY. My first sim cost me over $5,000 US DOLLARS. Then they started to look at the fortune they were making on tier costs and decided that instead of a one time profit from selling the land, make the land cheaper so more people would pay tier fees. Early investors lost millions of RL dollars. So they started building new continents and dropping the purchase price to get more landowners, based on an expansion rate that was just a bubble. The days when we were just about hitting peaks of 100,000 people on board are long gone, we are lucky to reach 50,000 now days. Some new marketing structure is needed to put some life back in SL mainland. I would suggest considering the following ideas. 1. With apologies to those in the Real Estate business, new (or abandoned) (main) land should be only L$1 per sqm to get newbies addicted to the creative opportunities of land ownership. This is somewhat true already. 2. No membership required for first 1024 sqm to get newbies involved (but land cannot be sold without paid membership to discourage alt accounts from squatting). 3. LOWER tier costs based on actual land owned, scrap the tier levels. For someone who is at the tier borderline they currently avoid expanding due to the massive jump in cost. If it was $$ / sqm / month and prices dropping with volume that would be an incentive to add a few sqm to get into a lower price bracket rather than avoiding expansion. Once in the next price range, adding a little land would be just incremental cost. 5. Ban that scourge of automated vehicles on the roads that have caused the mass exodus to private islands and precipitated the downfall of mainland SL.

Actually the forum population is not representative of the general population. The compliments I get by IM outnumber complaints 10 to 1 and really make my day. But positive impressions don't motivate active forum participation to the extent that antagonistic impressions do so you get a biased view here that is not representative. Bottom line is I do not irritate the average resident and nothing I do violates the TOS intentionally. A large percentage of the forum contributors come looking for something to **bleep** about so if I can provide subject matter that feeds their appetite I'm happy to oblige.

Why does one of your vehicles have a URL on it that leads to a for-profit website? HUH? I'm not aware of any URLs but I have a bunch of vehicles so I may have missed something. Do you remember which vehicle? Where was it on the vehicle? Why are there so many of the vehicles? I'm trying to provide good service with a vehicle about once every 10 minutes on average at any one road location. Why are they there? Many reasons. They provide life and realism to the empty roads, they provide tourism and entertainment, they satisfy my addiction to scripting, they provide an excellent subject for forums, they earn me about L$1,000 a week, they provide targets for attack, and they supply an excellent subject for venting aggression while doing no harm. Why hasn't their appearance changed since SL early days? Again many reasons. There are numerous new models with sculpt and mesh, the old Arcadia vehicles are historic classics, there is no requirement in the TOS to change or update appearance, I'm a scripter, not a builder so I use whatever I can get free or cheap. Why hasn't your avatar been charged with vehicular homicide? Not a single person has been killed except for occasional sim crossings but that is not my fault and they do get resurrected. Why does the dryer only eat one sock at a time? Because if it eats both, you don't have evidence that one is missing. A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. - Lao-Tzu Oh my kind of passenger, the vehicles wander totally at random with no timetable or destination. EDIT, LMAO I did find the URLs of which you speak on the Ice Cream Truck, the artwork was stolen from real life vehicles. In fact if you look carefully you will see that the sides of the vehicle are from different companies promoting opposing businesses. When finding artwork for it you usually only get a picture from one side so it took two different ice cream trucks to make just one in SL. If someone files an AR I will have to edit the art work. EDIT. OMG and the front of the vehicle is a third unrelated company to the two sides and although the rear is a 4th company the only way you can tell is the license plate is different front and back .

Czari Zenovka wrote: AnnMarie Otoole wrote: HOWEVER, I don't need to justify their existence just as the thousands of empty shopping malls, empty dance clubs, empty renal houses, empty billboards don't need to justify their existence. I would continue to brighten up the empty SL roads even if they didn't accept passengers. Here's what I don't get: empty shopping malls, dance clubs, I think you meant "rental houses" (I'm shuddering over what a "renal house" would be), billboards, etc. all have to be on land where someone is paying tier or LL would take the land back. I don't understand how your vehicles have open access to Governor Linden owned land. If I step over the boundary in my water sim from the parcel I rent to Linden ocean I can't rez a boat; one step back on my land and I can. I'm one of the people who have been in SL for 6+ years and have never seen one of your vehicles, much less rode on one, in case you want to figure that into your stats. LMAO, yes I did mean rental. EVERYONE and everyone's objects have access to public lands, its no special endowment just for me. If you have not encountered public roads then you would not have encountered my vehicles that bring life and realism to the roads. Most Linden oceans are accessible so if you can't sail your boat there, you are probably unfortunate to have land at the edge of the continent, or the adjacent ocean is privately owned. Also private islands are isolated in an inaccessible sea. Although it appears that open space is all ocean it is not accessible unless it exists on a sim. If ever I start counting those who have not ridden on my vehicles, your name will be at the top of the list.

OMG what a brilliant and well constructed response. It is enlightening to see there is some intelligence in these debates.

You've got to admit I'm good at stirring up activity in forums .