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Kampu Oyen

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Everything posted by Kampu Oyen

  1. It would also keep you from sneaking to the opposite end of the listings for the cheap stuff. But more importantly, it would be a huge nuisance, thus possibly making in-world shopping less unattractive by comparison.
  2. Please post the record numbers if you can. Did these happen to be items you listed around 1 November 2010? How would I know that?
  3. Well they at least accomplished something ahead of schedule, I guess. SEE UPDATE Fri, April 13, 2012 - 6:22 PM http://tribes.tribe.net/secondlifemarketplaceproductsearch/thread/9354a5f2-05b0-4fbe-b898-5a8dea6fd770
  4. Cross-link http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/And-as-totally-predicted/td-p/1484381
  5. It's easy to understand if you accept that LL is trying to grow a new crop of users to replace the ones lost when they finally "give up" and shut down the Marketplace altogether, on top of those lost through all the previous bad marketing decisions. The seeds of that new crop are merchants already using the Marketplace who are eager to comply with any instruction from LL, given at any time (such as now, for example). The fertilizer for that crop will be Social Security money now finally being paid out to the beginnings of a 60 million strong distinct demographic cohort of US people known as the Baby Boomers. These are people who already sold their unborn great-grandchildren down the river for viagra and hair implants, so if they are offered a chance to feel young a 3rd time just as they find they have too much free time and not much left to do with the retirement money they're drawing out at 4 times the rate they paid in, more than a few of them will jump at it. But how long will they live to keep paying in? Probably another 20 years at this point, or more. How long is the current average length for avatar use? A lot of people are finding they have better things to do than pour money into SL. But maybe these people won't. In fact, as their bodies continue to deteriorate and their kids want less and less to do with them... well... you get the idea. It's not called "Other Life", it's called "Second Life". So I guess they figured out to whom that name makes any real sense.
  6. Cross-link and see if they both disappear by tomorrow. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Re-Marketing-Opportunity/td-p/1484387
  7. ... here comes the plan to revitalize in-world commerce... ... just as LL is getting ready to permanently shut down the Marketplace. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketing-Opportunity/td-p/1484001 Baby Boomer nostalgia? OK, now it's clear they've run out of ideas. Add "madstyle" and you'll probably be recruited for a select group of in-world marketers. Otherwise...(um).
  8. Dakota- What was the original suggested size of the shopping cart? Who suggested the original size and who decided the current size?
  9. This issue was fixed three weeks ago. It was fixed by re-migration. Since then, has the number of open JIRAs increased or decreased?
  10. >I think at the end of the day we all want to be on the same side and move on. Of course. What any reasonable person should want here is simply for LL to clean up its act and keep it clean henceforth. Maybe that's what they're doing. But every day you wait for them to demonstrate that conclusively, you lose. Patience in this matter could end up costing you a lot. Is it worth it?
  11. >Complaining in SL is sort of like an addiction. Sometimes fueled by the development of a recent problem or issue. Other times for the sake of.. the addiction. Are you saying that LL is in an enabling relationship with people who like to complain? If you're not saying that, how is what you are saying different from that? >But, if any of you take out a CD of any software you've purchased.. you'll read a disclaimer clause much the same as Linden Labs has.>What!!?? Oh No!! It can't be!! .. It is. Sure it is. They are not responsible for honest mistakes or anything unforeseeable. They ARE responsible for doing intentional harm or refusing to take simple, easy measures to prevent it when repeatedly alerted to them. LL has refused even to correct text giving people demonstrably incorrect instructions, even when the text change is spelled out for them, and even when there is no possible legitimate advantage to refusing to make the change. >But really, in the course of lets say a year, how much do the actual losses amount to? Ten bucks? A hundred? In most states anything under $2,500 lands you in small claims. Yes. If you take the above explanation to an attorney, he'll most likely tell you it's going to be a small claims case in your state (you might all be able to file in California, I'm not sure). But that doesn't mean he can't do anything to help you prepare. The last time I went to small claims was for $200. I didn't use an attorney. The other guy did. HE LOST. Why? Because the facts were in my favor and I showed that, much as merchants here will be able to do if they so choose. In Massachusetts, my filing fee was $30 and the guy was also ordered to pay that, and an additional amount for transportation costs for my proxy under Power of Attorney, who was not a lawyer, but just someone who agreed to submit my papers because I was out of the country. The process was not fast, but the final outcome was pretty inevitable as far as I could see. The defendant had a history of just gradually waiting for people to get sick of sticking up for themselves and giving up. So I just didn't give up. If nobody speaks up for their small losses, someone at LL will reap a fortune from the apathy and inaction. If everyone speaks up, that's going to be a lot of filing fees on top of whatever else LL is ordered to pay. The guy I took to small claims was eventually pursued by the County Sherriff for nonpament of less than $300 total, and they made a very hard and clear point of making him pay it when they finally caught up with him. >Where all the attorneys in the world won't do you a bit of good. Your on your own there. No legal representation involved. You can bet Lindens will have a quite skilled representitive in place. Their a company, it works that way. No number of attorneys can rewrite basic laws of probability, or the basic facts of this series of incidents. The guy I took to court didn't understand that, either. Now he does. >You could also gather a collection of merchants together and file a class action suit for all those hundred or so bucks a year in losses. No need in most cases. Small claims. Easy. >Even combined, whos going to pay for the attorney? Maybe a merchant or someone else who is sympathetic to them who is also an attorney would do it pro bono. How many people do you think are upset about what has happened. Do you honestly think none of them would also be attorneys? >If you can get it out of small claims court and get a class action suit accepted by the judicial system ( Stroker Serpentine managed to but we saw how well that was going. And he had a good copyright infraction case! He was lucky it went down the way it did at the end) .. once again.. whos going to pay all those legal fees? In small claims, which is what most of these cases would be, LL would pay the fees. And they would probably be less than $50 per user anyway. >And if you lose? Your responsible for all of the legal expense the Lab incurred. Even divided among the class action participants, that'd be a hefty chunk. Not to mention your own atty fees. Not in small claims. In small claims, if you lose, you'll most likely lose only what you've already lost, some small bills, and a bit of time. So it's practically nothing to lose unless the judge decides it's frivolous and decides you're contemptuous or something. Just keep your nose clean from the beginning of the process to the end, and you should be fine. >Doing business always comes with its hidden expenses. If your a grocer or even WalMart, you have theft and shrink. You have the person who slips and falls and the world as you know it is comikng to an end. So you carry insurance for just such cases. Irrelevant... almost. Except that if LL does get sued, I don't think lawsuit insurance will necessarily cover lawsuits which they actively invited by repeated refusal to take any action to protect themselves. The hidden costs for not resolving this matter some other way are probably not smaller, but a lot larger than the Lindens have so far imagined. They could become effectively uninsurable for lawsuits, and then all it would take to put them all out of a job would be one long, tedious suit by one especially dissatisfied person of means. >What I never seem to see mentioned is what Linden Labs does give you. They give what we agree to pay for, or less. The less is the problem. >A tool and environment in which you can create your pretties and market them. All bundled into one package. Xstreet provided the same things unbundled, but not less effectively for their own part.. But rather than simply try to compete by providing something better, LL decided to shut them down and provide something not as good. I don't know if antitrust legislation would apply, but the principle behind it certainly does. >Someone mentioned their creating the wheel and its true. They are. The ride is going to be bumpy, and smooth, and bumpy and at times very bumpy. A bumpy wheel should be replaced by a less bumpy wheel, not a more bumpy wheel. >Being in business in SL not only is risky, it also carries those unexpected expenses and has hurdles to overcome, just as being in business in much of anything. I astound myself by finding occasion to quote Donald Rumseld in a favorable light: "There are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns." LL should be acting to reduce the number of unknown unknowns. Instead, they have been acting to increase it. >The difference is SL has forums to vent into. Filled each day with venting When you disagree, it's venting. But what it is when you agree?
  12. If WalMart spent 6 months refusing to do anything about an employee using shopping carts to break thousands of car widows and extracting things bought at WalMart in order to sneak them back onto the racks and shelves, WalMart wouldn't be blameless. Service agreements protect companies from having to pay for losses due to honest mistakes and unforeseeable technical failures. Service agreements do not protect companies from having to pay for losses due to gross wilful negligence or intentionally harmful acts. LL's service agreement would protect them from having to pay for accidents. LL's service agreement does not protect them from pretending to have accidents or pretending that technical failures are unforeseeable. So let's consider how accidental and unforeseeable the current collection of problems can possibly be. 1) It's possible that it's an accident that LL chose to secretly deploy "bugged" code on the day of the year on which it would potentiate the maximum damage to merchant confidence, 13 September. Given that 16 September represents the peak day for birthdays, the maximum yield for a birthday-item-related listing enhancement of 7 days would be applied on 13 September. Thus, as a same-day bork (optimum for gift disruption), 13 September maximally destroys merchant utility for such an enhancement, and likely also affects the maximum number of merchants who buy enhancements for birthday items. But birthdays are just the tip of the iceberg. Borking Halloween in December is obviously less effective than borking Christmas in October. But the build-up of merchant activity for 4th quarter sales promotions begins earlier. Items must be listed before they can be promoted, so, in addition to any other 4th-quarter items also being listed or promoted early, Halloween items will tend to start to be listed before the first 30-day enhancement period, which puts the early vulnerability date into September. 13 September would have borked a larger part of the 4th quarter had the rest of DD been deployed on that date (which it somewhat did in any case, as seen from the fact that the quarterly report has been withheld, and can't be any better than the bad one before it). Specifically borking the 13th optimizes the additional destruction of birthday enhancements by producing unannounced same-day inteference with gift item processing during a 7-day peak period, corresponding to the length of the shortest enhancement, best fit to this annual peak. Thus, 13 September is the most dangerous day of the year to risk borking the market. The probability that it was chosen merely coincidentally approaches 1 in 365. 2) It's possible that it's an accident that LL chose the 2nd most destructive day to re-deploy the 13 September borks and to continue with the borking from there, (as if) in spite of the fact that they were seeing an effective repeat of the previous incident right from the start (which even they acknowledged by offering a comissions holiday later). After an incomplete, but numerically effective bork of the whole 4th quarter, LL waited until 14 February to apply the next secret bugged deployment. Not the 13th. Not the 15th. As with the birthday peak, 14 February is a major date for gift processing. And, as with the birthday peak bork, the deployment was unannunced, in a repeat violation of Brooke's earlier statement that DD code would not be deployed unannunced. This incident borked St Patrick's day much as 13 September borked Halloween, and set the stage for the more extended borking of Easter on 21 March, just as merchants were done counting their combined losses for 14 February and 17 March, much as the additional bork not provided in the 4th quarter would have done to various 4th-quarter holidays. In fact, the borking of the 14xxxxx cluster, a cluster of items listed essentially a year before the 13 September bork was clearly to have been deployed earlier, had the 13 September deployments been allowed to continue; thus "coincidentally" borking 4th-quarter items from both 2010 and 2011 at essentially the same time. And this, oddly, just at the same time of year when borking them would have done the most damage to merchant confidence. Even without the borking of the 14xxxxx cluster, 14 February is the 2nd most dangerous day to deploy "bugged" marketplace code. Look at any other day of the calendar and consider what I describe, and it becomes clear that 14 February is second only to 13 September in terms of these dangers. The probability that it was chosen merely coincidentally approaches 1 in 364. The combined probability of these dates being chosen by coincidence is 1 in 365x364. That is, it approaches: 1 in 132860. To put it another way: this is a set of two bad date selection decisions we should expect such a company to make about once in every 132,860 calendar years, given no criteria at all. Or, to put it another way: if LL had 66,429 employees and they were EACH asked to come up with one pair of 2 possible deployment dates for new marketplace code, probably NONE of them would come up with a more dangerous pair of dates. So you can probably just print this and take it to your lawyer right now. But why not consider the rest of the coincidences? A) Transaction errors uniformly favor LL, not merchants or customers. B) The specific timing of the listing of the 14xxxxx cluster, and the time at which the bork would have occurred, had it been allowed to proceed. C) A mascot for DD which, based on height, color, species, markings, and behavior is a violation of the Care Bears trademark for Oopsy Bear. Why a bear? Why green? Why such a precise height? Etc. D) "Other". There's plenty of "other". Make your own list. And not unforeseen. It was largeley foreseen and stated as foreseen on this very forum. Just take a look. Most of all, that against which the service agreement does not protect LL is accountability for obvious fraud, expecially in terms fo fraudulently inducing people to participate in throwing their money away, regardless of where it goes or why. (Summary...) The Motive: get merchants to rent more land, increasing total LL revenues otherwise "lost" to marketing and sales not in-world. The Means: destroy merchant confidence in sales not in-world, and possibly shut down all other options by pretending to fail at improving them. The Opportunity: whoever suggested the dates 13 September and 14 February had the opportunity.
  13. > they would then tally the answers and do exactly the opposite. Imagine you've been told to somehow force merchants to stop using Xstreet anf go back to renting land in-world in order to conduct business, thus mitigating loss of land revenues due to loss in-world commerce to Xstreet. What would you do with any kind of merchant concensus?
  14. If even 1% of the merchants affected should happen to file small claims in SF, I don't see any way that LL could fight them all, no matter what they would like the court to believe the service agreement says. And it CAN be done by merchant proxy, under Power of Attorney. I have done it, in fact.
  15. No civil contract is a one-sided license to take additional money arbitrarily and offer nothing in return. OTOH, you should all be ashamed of yourselves. Conspiracy talk is always counterproductive.
  16. And what's funny is that I just checked on the alt situation. Someone apparently flagged the alt's item (by mistake?) instead of Josh Susanto's item. AND my alt's punishment for his/her behavior on SLM (which has so far been nothing but 100% BAD) shows in the included screen shot, here...
  17. A small group of people is developing an exploding car that will be available FULL PERMS for CHEAP (free to you, if you provide part of the final project). The car, itself, will be ONE PRIM, but will be carefully textured. We already have enough dismembered body parts, and most of what else we'll need, including functional scripting, and making wheels that look like part of the one-prim car is no problem. What's left on the list is mostly seats, steering wheel, and engine parts; things you'll see only after the explosion. If you have a realistic SL version of the book "The Angry Clam" by Eric Quisling, or something similarly explanatory, that would also be great. Please send me what you have. Thanks.
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