Remember, It’s only a Server

Last week the Lindens announced that they were going to be introducing a new land store system which promises almost instant delivery of sims. With this a price drop was announced for the purchasing of Estate simulators.

When the new Land Store launches, setup fees will be:

* Normal Islands: USD$1000 setup
* Normal Openspaces: USD$250 setup
* Educational Islands: USD$700 setup
* Educational Openspaces: USD$175 setup

For some reason people started to interperet this as being a move against the OpenSim project or that the Lindens are having poor sales.

But if you take a logical approach to it. You will realise that it really isn’t the case. The fact is that technology gets cheaper and cheaper. Take an iPod for example. As more features and storage is added, the prices drops. This is the way that the tech industry moves and it obviously ripples into Second Life.

But wait, what about OpenSim?

Well… I am pretty sure that just last week, it was announced that OpenSim and Linden Lab are working together to integrate OpenSim servers into Second Life.

How is that going to work?

I think that they will probably have a message that pops up every time you enter the area of an OpenSim based server like, “This is a third-party server and Linden Lab is not responsible for what may happen”.

Personally I am excited about the prospect of having third-party servers in Second Life as this will lead to even cheaper server options for people. Of course all the backing up is down to the third-party or you instead of Second Life, hence the cheaper aspect. After all part of the cost for sims is that you need to pay the maintainence fees, backup charges, bandwidth etc.

As stability slowly comes to Second Life…so does some really exciting stuff that I just love the idea of.

Sport Relief in SL

Every two years, the UK holds an event called Sport Relief. This is a telethon charity aimed at bringing an end to poverty. Now it seems like it has entered Second Life. One thing that I enjoyed about the sims were that you could camp on some treadmills and for every 10 minutes L$100 would be donated to charity. This is far better than the standard L$1 every 60 minute rate that you get in boring lag-filled places. I’m not sure how long these sims will exist but if you go in to your world map and search WeAreHere (all one word) you will make it to one of the four sims.

The New Search Engine

The new Google - Powered search has now been implemented into the official Second Life viewer. I have to admit I’m starting to like this search engine implementation. One thing that may be cool is that at the bottom of each page is a URL which can be viewed in a browser, this can be great for showing locations and items in Second Life and give details on sims. Useful for those who could be listening to a podcast and want to find out more about a place.

CSI : Nonsense

I am currently in the process of stealing the latest episode of CSI:NY (since it has yet to air in the UK as far as i can tell). I just want to see what all this fuss is about….Like those sims, you know the 4 times 103 = 400-something to accommodate all these newbies who must be jumping up and down like a jack russell terrier just to play around in a virtual world…

Maybe it’s just the fact that i am not truly a CSI fan which is why I’m not too excited but more worried about the lag…

My Teen Grid Theory…

I have speculated about this idea before in IM’s and general conversation and after hearing about the Adult Verification scheme mentioned once again at SLCC I had the theory pop into my head.

I consider Mature content to be accessible to people who are 16 years old or more. Where as content that is Adult to be 18 years old or more. Therefore PG which does stand for Parental Guidance to be all content that can be deemed appropriate to anybody under 18 as long as a parent approves of it.

How does this relate to teens coming onto the grid? Well as we all know the main grid has currently got two types of sims. Mature and PG. PG seems to be maintained as a clean area where no swearing / sex / mature and adult acts happen. But in a world that is mature in nature and requires the user to be older than 18 (although we all know that can be easily bypassed) seems to be a little farfetched to me.

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Woodstock Day #1 - Aftermath

So the first day of Second Life Woodstock has come and gone. From what I could tell looking at the map we had about 100 avatars at one time all together on the three sims, Edloe also had 50 avatars on the sim. So personally i think that it was successful, there was seemingly no griefer incidents, the Sims stayed alive and everyone did their best to prevent anything going wrong.

But, personally I was shattered after all the music was finished with. I went to sleep at 6 am, and only got out of bed at about 3 PM. But still I am willing to do this again tonight because in my humble opinion, This is one of the greatest events I have been to yet in my Second Life which i have been experiencing since May 2006. So it is saying alot for the event, also I have only really missed about 30 days of Second Life. There are 2 days of Woodstock left…It has only just begun, This is going to be great

And So begins the Blogothon!

Get ready for the Marathon Blogothon

Well it is the day of reckoning for the sims. Woodstock Day is here and i can bet that i am going to have to do more blog entries than normal. This is certainly going to be a busy day. I have just woke up and finished the Podmafia Design booth where i will be selling some shirts and donating at least half to charity…no matter what.

Also so far in the queue of blog entries is about 5 different entries and a lot of pictures….yay…Stay Tuned or subscribed or whatever!

Crapped out Landbridge

For a while now there has been a lot of intrest in merging the continent sims with a bridge and other sorts of crazy ideas. But one of the biggest and coolest ideas is to get one singular 4-sim event. This is obviously a cool idea. However the issue was that floating prims would cause a bump and sink down to the sea below…now the simple solution was to anchor prims to the land. Crap was devising this earlier yesterday.

The “PodContinent”

This is an entire (as far as this graphics card will rez things) screen capture of the sims of Edloe, Woodbridge, Los Arboles, Nowhereville and Pitt Island.

The State of Podcasting Sims in Second Life…revisited

Since I last drew up a map of podcasting sims within Second Life there have been changes to the structure…so it is time to revisit the state of the sims. Also, the idea of unification of the podcasting sims as one total pile is bleak i believe there will be two main sectors of this. The Podshow + Pickle / Soho connection and the Podcontient (because of the size right now I dub it the Podcontinent).

Version 2.0 ^^ (click more for the original idea)

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