Your2ndPlace

If you've spoken casually with Sarah Nerd for more than two minutes, you're probably well aware that she's a devout (read: obsessed) fan of Nine Inch Nails(NIN) and the band's frontman, Trent Reznor. Sarah recently became a finalist in a local contest to meet NIN and Reznor. From a glimpse at the MySpace page Sarah has created for the contest, it's clear she's pulling out all the stops.

Recently, Sarah requested that SL users take inworld and/or RL photographs of themselves holding a sign promoting the contest.

Sarah's contributed a great deal to the SL Community. She's also become a dear friend. So I'd consider it nothing short of a personal favor if people would take a few minutes of their day to help make Sarah's dream a reality. That may sound melodramatic, but if you know Sarah, then you know I'm speaking in earnest.

The sign is available at SL Exchange and onrez . The contents of the photo beyond the sign are limited only to the user's imagination.

Open Grid Public Beta Begins Today yells the official Second Life blog and I hate to be a party pooper but what the hell is this all about?

Pass through authentication? To what end? This isn't about expanding Second Life, this is about Second Life technology and I think some of those doing a happy dance are in for a rude awakening when they realise the difference.

There is no point in this process if it means we're all going to be bound by Linden Lab's terms of service. PKR and such like are going to want a piece of this pie or it's not going to fly, that means gambling, legal authorised gambling this time. That of course will also lead to separate registration processes.

Who else is going to recognise the Linden dollar as currency? Are we going to have a bureau de change on the borders of independent sims? Are we even going to have a currency? Well yes I expect we will, but it won't be backed by Linden Lab in the long term.

This is a long long long term project, it's not really about being able to teleport from one world to a next, it's proving a point for a future that doesn't involve your Second Life inventory and people need to get used to this concept.

I'm sure some people are going to want to tag along to the main grid, after all that's where it's all at for the moment, but long term, the main grid is going to be a blot on the landscape. The whole issue of the Second Life world and the Second Life Grid becomes more and more apparent.

People need to think logically here, why would an independent grid want some of the content from the main grid on it? Why would they want to have to wait for Linden Lab to develop or release code to make everything compatible, and in the process break something else?

Users of The Sims Online(TSO) will be enjoying their last day today. The servers are set to go down tomorrow (August 1st). Though my knowledge of software technology is so basic that I should have a bumper sticker reading "Enduser 4 Life," I can't help but think The Sims was a stylistic influence of Second Life. As a viable online platform, I have no doubt that TSO was itself influential. In fact, several users of Second Life have told me that they were formerly TSO users.

I was among the first. I signed up for the beta test in November 2002 - one month before the game went live. Though I bought the released game and became a 'charter member,' within two weeks of sporadic use, I was gone again. TSO simply did not hold my attention. The single-player counterpart had that problem for me as well. To this day, I pull out my original "The Sims" game once every 2 years for 2-3 days and then return it to my collection. The user behind Konner McDonnell is very much the introvert. He likes his games single-player and his interaction with others to be constructive in a specifically 'real world' sense. I've always considered myself as being somewhat 'unusual' so I suspect my reasons for abandoning TSO are lost in the numbers of people who were simply "too bored, too fast." But that certainly can't be the extent of it.

While I'm sure people that use Second Life have a diverse history in the MMOG world -and many have no such history- the similarities beg the question of whether SL somehow took ideas like TSO and expanded beyond the limitations of that platform to create something with more realistic implications. In effect, 'sealing TSO's fate.'

After Konner posted on the halt of the Exchanges, Ciaran hit the nail on the head about the silence of Linden Lab on the topic. I've been following it with interest, trying to nail down exactly how the exploit occurred, when I found it in my email - I'm withholding the person's name at this point, but I can share that the information has been disseminated to the exchanges.

Basically, how the exploit worked was through fooling the simulator into allowing someone to rez something of the same Object ID - or key. Allegedly, this exploit affects Second Life Server 1.22.4.90499, and a rolling restart will solve it once the server software is updated. It appears that this has already begun. It should be noted that this exploit required a special tool from LibSecondLife, one that was kept quiet but which someone (obviously) leaked. For the more technical folks, a modification to SLProxy made this possible.

In all, Linden Lab probably should have said something but didn't - something that is par for the course when it comes to the virtual world of Second Life. It did not just affect ATMs, it also affected other objects as well. The good news is that even with the exploit, items received through the exploit got the same permissions as the owner dictated - thus, a no copy/no mod/no transfer item would remain a no copy/no mod/no transfer item, with only the person who used the exploit getting a copy.

As I mentioned here, Marillion is having a contest for the most viewed video on YouTube for their song, 'Whatever Is Wrong With You?'. Since I'm without enough bandwidth at present, I can't follow through in time to do a machinima for the contest - but maybe one of you readers can. I'd contacted Marillion in the past about doing something in Second Life, but it never got responded to... so maybe one of you folks could show them the power of virtual worlds combined with their lyrics.

I mean, if I can't compete for the £5,000, one of you could.

Consider these lyrics:

We need to talk..
about the way you've been behaving
We need to talk..
about the Christmas lights in your clothes
We need to talk..
about the stranger in the kitchen
We need to talk..
about the scissors and the silver foil
I thank God..
You're so fabulously..
Odd

If that isn't Second Life, I don't know what is. Toss in Sarah Nerd's prim baby for good measure. The scissors and the silver foil could even be seen as a reference to Prokofy Neva, though I'm not certain that the song was written about her...

Read enough? Good. Watch the clip below, head over to WhateverIsWrongWithYou.com, read the rules, get the MP3 after reading the terms, and go a little... machinima.

When 'Second Life Improves Real-life Social Skills' came up on my radar, I just had to ask myself what it was about. Since I had not written the article, I had no idea - so I went and read it. It seems that a PhD student has submitted a paper that has been interpreted as saying that Second Life assists real social skills.

She definitely hasn't been hanging out with my crowd. Or Pighed, for that matter. It isn't that I don't believe that Second Life has the capacity for positive social skill development - I just seem to have the soft and putrid underbelly of it in my face all too often.

From the article:

..."There are not many places we go in the world where we are guaranteed social contact, in real life it is harder and less likely that you will go up to a stranger and start a conversation," said Ms Grant...

But in Second Life, unless you create some sort of real world link with the owner(s) of the other avatar(s), everyone is a stranger. Some are stranger than most, and most are stranger than people outside of Second Life - sometimes in nice and interesting ways, but sometimes in disturbing and macabre ways. A balance is struck based on who you wish to be associated with... but when you're writing about Second Life, that balance has to be less utopian and more realistic.

Konner McDonnell was kind enough to email me a few links to look at regarding yesterday's news of the successful teleportation between Second Life and OpenSim. While, at a simple technical level, this is no big deal - logging an avatar onto a secondary grid - the architecture cooperation is noteworthy.

One can log in to multiple websites on the Internet with the same username; it stands to reason that the same should be true of virtual worlds. The difference, of course, is in the assets - something which was apparently not addressed in the teleportation... yet. Basically, IBM and Linden Lab had a handshake across their virtual worlds to verify that the systems could communicate. While the technical details require more digging to understand how this happened, the week old Linden Lab blog entry pretty much explains that this is only for logging in and teleportation. The real test will be the asset server.

And so, one's avatar will be hopping grids in the not too distant future. That sounds fun and interesting on the surface, but it also brings with it new problems that have to be looked into:

• Security: Soon, your password for your avatar will become that much more important as it leaves the Second Life sandbox and goes forth to brave new virtual worlds.
• Names: Naming limitations in one world may not exist in another. While this may not be a big deal for some, it can be a very big deal for others. Like Pighed.