Your2ndPlace

Today is a lovely spring day and I'll shortly be off to the pub to catch the second half of Man United v Liverpool, but before I do that a quick round up of some concerns.

Let's start with being careful what you buy. Over at SLUniverse they've been discussing the upcoming script limits and in an amazing exchange we see the perils of buying bridges. One user purchased what they though was a modifiable bridge, only to find out that it was modifiable only via a resizer script. The response, which can be read here, is very humourous:

"You got scammed?

Buying a bridge?"

Well it made me laugh! Anyway, more to the point, what is the deal with so many resizer scripts? I can sort of understand them when tiny prims are involved, but I don't see the point with buildings of any reasonable size, this is the sort of script usage that has taken us into script limit land. If the idea is to prevent copying the design then it's a very clunky way of doing things and probably doesn't achieve the desired goals.
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The first step towards script limits have been announced on the blog and can be read here, although these aren't really the first steps towards script limits because those steps have already been taken...don't get confused!

There are a couple of things about this, script limits are going to be a disappointment, people are getting way too excited. Script limits aren't going to stop lag, make everything work beautifully, provide perpetual sunshine and singing birds and we'll all live happily ever after. The impact of script limits is not the great saviour, there's a lot more to performance issues than script limits. However script limits can help, they just aren't going to be the be all and end all that some people seem to believe. My glass is half empty yes, but it's better to be realistic about what this will achieve then get excited and then wonder why things aren't running ten times better than they were previously.

However, as I said, script limits can help. I still have concerns over how they will be implemented and what they will mean for people on 512M parcels, after all 512M is the size of parcel that premium membership grants you tier free, people use 512M parcels. If the use of a 512M parcel is severely nerfed then we're in for a whole lot of pain, but that's a concern that can be reserved for later in the year.

The big concern for now is how the perception of mono scripts will be received, from the blog:

"What do the numbers mean?
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You know I was sitting there today pondering whether I should have a no moaning day once a week, like "No Moaning Monday" or "No freaking out Friday" or "No Whining Wednesday" and make this a regular feature, but then I figured there are only seven days in a week and I'll pick the day where LL announce something like the XStreet changes and I'll be tied to this no moaning day, so I decided to scrap that plan. Which leads me to today's post, which isn't a moaning one! Hurrah! Jack Linden's mysterious new role is the subject of the day.

Jack arrived an hour late for his office hour, which is rather traditional when the Americans have put their clocks forward and the UK has not, Jack's done this before. Anyway, there we were chattering away, you know, same old same old, microparcels, search, why don't they promote private estates on the website yadda yadda yadda, when Jack dropped the bombshell of telling us he's got a new role now and is repsonsible for consumer products. His official role seems to be "Executive Director of Consumer Products".

What does this mean I hear you ask? Well I'm not quite sure, we did ask Jack, which was only the polite thing to do and he mentioned e-commerce, XStreet, Land products but it seems not so much land management and customer relations. Someone else will be doing that. He did remind us that Harpo Cyn is the VP of customer relations and mentioned someone whose name began with R I think, I really should write these things down. Anyway there are new Lindens and old Lindens around.
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Awhile back, (I can't remember quite how long ago as time in SL gets very evasive, so I'll stick with 'awhile back")  I was visiting with a friend and was looking at her hair, being the compulsive hair shopper that I am.   When I inspected it and tried to view the creator's profile, to my astonishment THAT PERSON DIDN'T EXIST in Second Life.  As she was passing me a folder, my friend confided in me (much to my dismay) the hair was copybotted. I went kind of quiet and changed the subject... to avoid a discussion on morality and content theft.

Later that day in the Y2P office, while handing Ciaran a steaming cup of black Java, I mentioned this to him.  We talked for a bit and agreed the ORIGINAL Content creators should be notified.  Well I am a busy bee lately and hadn't gotten to that point yet.  A few days later, another friend passed me a folder full of  "Blond Hair", as she was a brunette most days I thought "WOW" isn't that sweet.  What I found was more of the same copybotted hair.  NEXT, I was cheer leading for my Virtual Hockey League team the "Sim Crashers" where we have to "prim down" to help with lag, so us cheer leaders use system hair (no prim), when one of the other cheerleaders gave me some low prim hairs.  YESSSSSSS, you got it .... it was part of the same FULL PERM FREEBIE BRAND NAME HAIR!

Now, there are 3 different people that do not know each other (that I am aware of) that all have this copybotted hair.  So today, in a forum group chat, of which both Ciaran and I are members of, the discussion, much to my surprise, is about  free hair at this NAME BRAND STORE...One that if I mentioned it, alot of you would know who I am talking about.  I get the LM to this store and get the FREE HAIR box.  GUESS WHAT!!!!I Now I have 4 copies of the stolen hair!  Why is this stolen hair so  blatantly spattered throughout Second Life with no consequences? 
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The shiny new forums are in danger of completely going off the rails and becoming a cesspit of despair. This is another case of Linden Lab ignoring resident feedback and taking a "Mother knows best" attitude, we've seen this before on the adult content policy and it pains me to have to point out the obvious, the forums are failing and "Mother doesn't know best".

Sometimes you just despair, in the greater scheme of things this isn't that important an issue, but the forums are already a pale shadow of what they once were and some felt they were on the road to nowhere. Throw into the equation Linden Lab's removal of the highly useful classified section of the forums and we have confusion, complaints about moderation, teens and adults freely mixing and a whole lot of angst, add in a sprinkling of the software not really being fit for purpose and it's whole fail pie slowly cooking.

Let's take the commerce forum, and with their current state, please take them. They were already a pale shadow of the old XStreet forum, there's your first danger sign of the not fit for purpose issue. However people persevered, there was some interesting discussion to be had, until the rest of the forums were "Upgraded". Then confusion reigned, people didn't know where to post full transfer sims, new products, new stores or general classifieds and assumed that the commerce forums were the place for these sort of posts. They're not, but there's no other obvious section, some people haven't realised that Linden Lab have removed those avenues of advertising.
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Thanks to the respondents on my previous blog post regarding Azure Islands being transferred to metaverse services limited I've been able to piece some parts of the puzzle together. For some people, this is going to be a painful experience but in the wider scheme of things, there's no need to man the lifeboats.

Now putting things together, Tyche Shepherd reliably informs me that Metaverse Services Limited are part of Anshe Chung's empire, this means the tenants will be in good hands. Anshe has has been around for a long time and if she's taking on an estate the size of Azure, it looks as if she plans to be around for quite a while longer. Tyche also has impressive stats:

"it comes at a time when about 85% of all Azure Island full regions were moved on to the new Class 7 Servers. These servers are currently running 8 mainland full regions each. As of yesterday the 141 Azure Island full regions hosted on Class 7s were still running 4 to a server.  Aside from the VWBPE regions and 20 or so other full regions, no other estate has been moved to Class 7s yet."

Tyche also commented in the SL Universe thread where this issue first came to my attention: "ACS leaps from 6.3% of private estates to 7.5% " Someone with those sort of holdings isn't go to look to take the money and run.

The Azure Islands website also has a notice up about the change:
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To all the Mothers out there, for working so hard, cooking Sunday lunch for your son after he comes home from the pub, putting up with Dad, looking after your daughter, looking after the grandchildren.

Happy Mother's Day to you all, Mothering Sunday marks the fourth Sunday in lent, so we're nearly at the stage where whatever we gave up for lent can be replenished.

Mothers of Second life, I salute you. My Mom isn't in Second Life, which is just as well as she'd seriously tell me to tidy my room!