Second Life – Page 3 – The Kind Healer

Fun with Brandz (In Second Life(R) )

[Or how a writing project gets derailed before I even type the first character.]

I’m a bit late posting about this, mostly because 1) I don’t spend my time on this site talking much about SL since there are better places to do that, and 2) I contribute to those sites via commenting instead.

Anyway, Linden Research (owner of SL) effectively declared this week that they are aggressively pursuing infringement of their trademarks, and two days later changed the SL TOS to reflect that. I would normally be OK with that, except that its a near-reversal of their old policy, and appears to be preparing to take down external websites that include those marks (which were created in accordance with their OLD rules!).

Rather than get into my own tedious posting, I’m just going to drop the links of other sites which are covering this much better (some of which I’ve commented on):

-> Though not the original opening salvo from the community, Gwyneth’s explanation appears the clearest and includes an ultimatum that several other prominent sites are considering joining. I tried to post comments there, but her site will not allow access to comments from my home IP.

-> Reporter James ‘Hamlet’ Au has had multiple posts here, here, and here as the debate developed. I’ve participated in the first two, as they include discussions from people who I’ve come to know in RL or in extended discussion with SL and consider friends. The latest (comments disabled) actually summarizes from comments on the second, where two RL lawyers discuss the issue in detail; One of them has a full-time discussion of virtual law on his site, and will probably end up on my links list under the SL section.

-> For the terminally curious, I’ve added a link to the one lawyer’s site here, as his explanation and discussion helps greatly.

-> Linden Research’s PR is probably going to have a followup response on Monday, thanks to Hamlet’s badgering them (and rightly so, since he’s affected).

Anyway, the last link, above, has enough info that it does not totally derail the writing project, but while this calms down I’m taking notes on There.com instead. *shrug* It’s safer right now.

/salute
–TSK

Three Years in Second Life

The evening of this past friday (6/29) marked exactly three years since I registered the ‘Alan Kiesler’ account in Second Life. Though officially I left the Orientation island today (7/2) due to a bad crash and RL stuff, I logged in that night to hop around my old haunts.

Upon reaching the ‘Myst Online’ island sim (the GameTap sponsored replacement for Telador, btw), I found a group of folks playing ‘Heek (sort of – no less buggy there than it is in MO:UL ;) ). It was really cool to be able to walk in for the first time in a LONG while and just talk about Uru – especially while in SL, since that kind of ‘bridging’ is what I like to do best.

Imagine my surprise then, when I find out one of the folks at the table is Brad’li from the UO forum. He’s not been able to login to GameTap or MO:UL since it left the new beta, so I find it slightly ironic to learn that it was my own pics that got him over to SL as an alternative; My main calling in SL was (and still is) promoting Uru.

I ended up spending the next half-hour or so helping with the expected gaps in detailed documentation that SL is well-known for, as well as a small amount of L$ to start out with (which brings up the economy questions Gwyn brought up recently, but that’s a different rant).

I’m always happy to run across cool life coincidences like this, so it was particularly fitting to have one in SL at the 3-year mark.

–TSK

Update on the Site

I’ve been perusing my site logs to see who’s been hitting the place lately, and why. Brought up some interesting subjects, which I’ll begin to address now:

“Does Second Life work on an ATI Radeon Xpress?” – Last I checked with the notebook, yes, but slow. There is a ‘first look‘ version of their client that you may want to participate running a live beta from – but be warned, you’re connecting to their live/production grid with this, so anything really bad happens you may need to rebuild/rescript/etc. I’ve not tested it, not worth my little time online to possibly make it even worse for wear. :)

Status on my Debian Linux box, aka the NSLU2 ‘slug’ – It’s been shutdown for almost two months now; I’ve not had the time to maintain it for awhile, and once the DST hell is over with I’ll possibly poke at it again.

Numbakulla – I’ve had no recent time to visit there in SL, nor anywhere else. :( One query was looking for a walk through; There was some brief discussion about creating a ‘for sale’ item that would allow this (to generate revenue for the island), dunno if that’s been done.

—–=====—–

In other news, DST has come and passed, and we appear relatively unscathed (and after 8 hard weeks, it damn well should have!). There are still things to check, but so far, so good…

–TSK

Certain Blogs Hate Me…

I’ve been trying to comment on Chucker’s blog (regarding JPEG-2000) for the last four days, and it just won’t let me. I give up…

Anyway, what I’ve been trying to say is that Second Life uses JPEG-2000 as its image storage medium in the backend. IIRC its because of both the streaming and image compression benefits (they use the kakadu libraries).

I’m not sure how it’s being done for their new FOSS client source, since I’ve not looked at it (though trying to create a Solaris/SPARC compile would be amusing – if the equipment were available).

–TSK

Decisions, Decisions…

Well, it was not two days after I post a listing of thanks to my SL friends that they end up finding a way to bring Telador back – after a fashion…

It’s now called ‘Myst Online Uru’ island (I guess it hit the 20 character limit). Last notice I got from group D’ni was that it will open in a couple days – Almost in sync with the Grand Opening in the real MOUL. I need to check and send a note along to Hamlet if needed. :)

As I speculated (via Alan) in the IC Journal, this may be a way for Turner/GameTap to allow access to more international players (in particular, those that can’t have access to Uru at all since UU was shutdown last week – for whatever reason).

I obviously am placing my feet firmly back into Second Life due to this, though I will not back out of marching for the Parade next month.

I’m asking myself now – what can come of having an island in SL?

1) The Age Building groups have the possibility – via libsecondlife – to create ‘rough 3d sketches’ using the primitives system in SL and import them to Blender for finishing. I’m following the possibility to export an entire sim’s worth of data for conversion into a near-finished Age.

2) In SL tradition, we’ll have one of the more interesting SL cross-world events to occur. Normally that’s between SL and RL. In this case it could be between SL and D’ni.

3) I once again have a reason to be a walking, free promotion of Uru within SL. :)

We will have to see…

–TSK