Month: July 2014

The further return of the Premium Membership offer and gift

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Friday July 18th, the Lab launched the latest off of its Premium Membership discount offers, together with a new Premium Membership gift.

These seem to be run around July / August each year, and also in November. As usual, the offer is 50% off of membership for those upgrading, but only if they opt for the Quarterly billing plan, and the discount is applied only to the first quarter billing period. The offer runs from 08:00 SLT / PDT on Friday July 18th 2014 through until 08:00 SLT / PDT on Monday August 4th, 2014. The usual Premium Benefits are part-and-parcel of the offer.

The Premium Membership offer banner
The Premium Membership offer banner

I’m a Premium Member; I re-upped several years ago after having been basic, and I find it moderately useful – for I time I lived exclusively in my Linden Home and didn’t find it that bad; admittedly, I managed to land on my feet with the one I had, but I did spend a fair amount of time mulling things over and settled on the exact style I wanted ahead of time and then dallied until it came around on the booking page (not all variants of the various styles are available all of the time). I was then very lucky that the first one I saw was in a location I liked – however, moving between Linden Homes is relatively simple, providing you follow some simple rules. So if the first one you are assigned doesn’t fit the bill, location-wise, it’s easy to hop around.

Even so, I’m still (as always) irked by some of the stated benefits that come with Premium, and wish the Lab would clean-up some of the wording – “More Land and Privacy?”  – how, exactly? Basic members get to enjoy both of these as well; not as cheaply, perhaps, but they can have them. I’d also like to see more thought given to the benefits in general. some of the gifts are fun … but none of them are that inspirational.

The Premium Gift pirate airship includes a premium prim count / land impact
The Premium Gift pirate airship includes a premium prim count / land impact

Which brings me to the latest Premium gift itself. The gift on offer this time is a “new interactive pirate airship, the Linden Marauder.”

Pirate, eh? All I can say is avast … land impact goes into this vessel; 502 in fact (although the physics weight is admittedly only 18-ish), so it’s not something you’ve going to want to keep rezzed out somewhere. It’ll sit a number of people – Captain (owner) at the helm, who must board first, then the “First Mate” and then passengers (or “scurvy crew”, if you prefer and keeping to the piratical theme. Flight controls are the usual : PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN to ascend / descend, LEFT ARROW and RIGHT ARROW to turn. UP ARROW and DOWN ARROW to accelerate / slow down. A nice touch is SHIFT LEFT ARROW or SHIFT RIGHT ARROW to run-out the port or starboard cannon on the gun decks and fire a broadside.

Quite a few were trying the latest Premium Gift out for size, if only briefly
Quite a few were trying the latest Premium Gift out for size, if only briefly

Handling-wise the airship is OK, firing the guns at another passing airship can be a bit of a giggle – the first time. Other than that, I don’t have anything to say on it, other than when it comes to the idea of Premium gifts and offering something of value and which is likely to be of real benefit, this kind of offering leaves two words floating inside my head: “missed” and “opportunity”

A quick note on finding meeting transcripts in this blog

Posted on by Inara Pey

As regular readers may have noticed, I’ve produced a number of transcripts for meetings related to LL and which involve the Lab’s CEO or staff.

To make finding these transcripts easier, I’ve added a new tag to the blog, which will appear appended to the end of such posts. Clicking it should list all available transcripts so tagged.

More particularly, I’ve added a new menu category which should make finding them even easier. It’s called Meeting Transcripts, and can be found under News-Updates-Opinion > Linden Lab, thus:

The new transcripts option (News-Updates-Opinion > Linden Lab > Meeting Transcripts)
The new transcripts option (News-Updates-Opinion > Linden Lab > Meeting Transcripts)

Note the transcripts related to things like specific viewer meetings – such as Firestorm meetings – will remain under the relevant section of the Viewers menu (so Viewers > V3 Style > Firestorm > Firestorm Meetings for … well, Firestorm meetings!).

Hope this makes finding information in the blog a little easier.

Paradise Lost: second season announced

Posted on by Inara Pey
image via Canary Beck
image via Canary Beck

Paradise Lost: The story of Adam and Eve’s original sin, the stunning production by the Basilique Performing Arts company, which ran from April through June in its first season run will be returning in August for a second season, commencing August 2nd, 2014.

The news came via an announcement on Canary Beck’s blog on Tuesday July 15th, together with a link to the box office on the SL Marketplace.

Paradise Lost is a stunning production, which sets John Milton’s epic blank verse poem Paradise Lost to dance and the music of the Süssmayr completion of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. All performances will commence at 13:30 SLT on the following alternate Saturdays and Sundays  through August to October:

  • August: Saturday 2nd, 16th and 30th; Sunday 10th and 24th
  • September: Saturday 21st; Sunday 7th
  • October: Saturday October 11th and 25th; Sunday October 5th and 19th.

I was privileged, along with a number of other bloggers,  to be able to preview the production  ahead of the first season run. I also had the opportunity to join the creative team behind the production, Canary Beck and Harvey Crabsticks, in conversation about the production’s genesis and technical aspects. So I can say hand-on-heart that my description of the production as “an outstanding masterpiece of performance art in SL” is no exaggeration; Paradise Lost is truly an extraordinary piece, one not to be missed.

So, if you didn’t manage to see the production during its inaugural season, I strongly encourage you to set aside one of the dates listed above and get your ticket(s) now, particularly as, if the original run is anything to go by, they are liable to sell out fast.

Satan prepares to tempt Eve as Adam rests, Paradise lost
Satan prepares to tempt Eve as Adam rests, Paradise lost

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Lab updates on forthcoming improvements to SL

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Thursday July 17th, the Lab issued a blog post outlining further improvements being made to the Second Life platform.

Following a short introduction, the post reiterates the arrival of Experience Keys, and the new demonstration game for this capability – The Cornfield. For those interested, I have a review of the game available, and an overview of both Experience Keys and the Experience Keys project viewer, which can be downloaded from the Lab’s Alternate Viewers wiki page.

The Cornfield, the Experience Keys demonstrator game, gets a further mention in the blog post (note the game play area iuses a much darker and more atmospheric windlight)
The Cornfield, the Experience Keys demonstrator game, gets a further mention in the blog post (note the game play area uses a much darker and more atmospheric windlight)

The post then goes on to highlight three aspects of the platform which are currently being enhanced (note this is not an exhaustive list of all work that is being carried out – it’s just three of the projects thought to be of particular interest to SL users):

Improving Group Chat Performance

Today, group chat messages can sometimes take a long time to be delivered, and in some cases delivery fails entirely. This is an issue that impacts lots of Second Life users, and it’s something we’re actively working to improve. Anyone should be able to reliably hold a conversation using group chat in Second Life without delivery delays or other problems.

We’re carefully monitoring the effects of the changes we make to improve group chat performance, and so far, the results of efforts like upgrading the servers that host chat have been positive. We anticipate that the work to improve group chat performance will continue for some time as we identify the underlying causes of the issues, experiment with different fixes, and analyze results, and as we move forward, we’ll use this blog to share our progress.

Implementing the Chrome Embedded Framework

We’re working to upgrade the component of the Viewer that’s responsible for rendering web content, including the Viewer splash screen (displayed before login), the content of a number of floaters, and inworld media-on-a-prim. This is important because it will fix a number of bugs (especially related to streaming media) that currently affect many Second Life users, and it will also make available many modern web features that aren’t possible with the Viewer today.

We’re making good progress on this initiative already, and expect to have an experimental Project Viewer ready for testing soon.

More Texture and Mesh Loading Improvements

Building upon the performance enhancements we made with Project Shining, we are continuing to make improvements to how the Viewer retrieves texture and mesh data from our servers.

The next round of improvements will reduce the number of connections the Viewer needs to get this data (making it easier on your router and network), while also using each connection to retrieve more data more quickly (for the technically inclined, this means that among other things we will add support for HTTP pipelining).

These improvements will mean that as you explore Second Life, objects will appear more quickly and reliably, especially for users who have longer latency connections (higher “ping times”), such as those who live outside the US.

We have begun doing small-scale testing with a selected group of users, and the early results have been great from a performance point of view. Unfortunately, we’ve also encountered a bug that we need to tackle before we can move on to releasing a project Viewer. We’re eager to move ahead as quickly as we can, and will use this blog to announce that project Viewer as soon as it’s available.

Above: Whirly Fizzle produced a video showing the comparative texture loading between the (then) current SL release viewer (June 27th, 2014) and the HTTP updates experimental viewer

As always, I’ll be doing my best to report on the work outlined above through my weekly SL project updates as and when there is news to impart.

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Education in SL: A Q&A session with Ebbe Altberg and Peter Gray

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeOn Monday July 7th, Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg and the Lab’s Director of Global Communications, Peter Gray, met with members of the education community to answer questions on the future of education in Second Life.

The meeting was organised by Lori Bell of the The San José State University School of Library and Information Science, moderated by Aldo Stern and recorded by Marie Vans.

The video is embedded below, and the transcript is time stamped against it for reference. When reading / listening, please remember:

  • This is not a word-for-word transcript of the entire meeting. While all quotes given are as they are spoken in the recording and the audio files, to assist in readability and maintain the flow of conversation, not all asides, jokes, interruptions, etc., have been included in the text presented here
  • If there are any sizeable gaps in comments from a speaker which resulted from asides, repetition, or where a speaker started to make a comment and then re-phrased what they were saying, etc, these are indicated by the use of “…”
  • The transcript picks-up with the first question asked.

0:04:42 Aldo Stern (AS): Will the educational discount be stable over time, so that education organisations can take [it] into account for their budget cycles? So I think that reflects right off of the top one of the things that people will have a concern about.

0:05:00 Ebbe Altberg (EA). Yes. Well, it’s very unfortunate that back in the day … that the discount was taken away. I thought it was very fortunate that it was re-instituted before I showed-up here, and I can tell you we have absolutely no intent whatsoever to make the pricing worse for you guys. none whatsoever.

And over time, as some of you have heard about, we’re starting work on a next generation platform, I think that ultimately an extremely large and vibrant and successful virtual world, prices have to come down all the time.

Today, we’re constrained by a number of factors: technology, business models, what have you, and user experience, that sort-of limits the size of the market for a product like this. for example, if we were to cut prices in half, we would have to get at least twice the number of users – or more, actually – to end up with the same revenue. Right now, I’m not convinced we have a product that could attract two extra users at half the price.

But I’d be happy to lower prices to get more users and make it up in volume, once we know we have a product that can achieve that. I think it’ll be an interesting conversation at that time, especially with the educational sector. would an even lower price … let’s say we take the current discount that you have, which I think is about a hundred and fifty bucks for a region; if we cut that in half again and say it’s seventy-five bucks, would we have twice as many of you buying simulators? If that’s the case, then it might be worthwhile for us to do; but if it only increases by 5% the number, then it’s just hurting us and our ability to invest in the future.

But I feel very confident in stating that we’re not going to mess with the current pricing you have in a negative way for you.

0:07:55 AS: I think that’s very encouraging to us, and I wanted to ask if anybody had any further comment before the next question?

0:08:08 Comment: Well, it is encouraging to hear that; but I think there are a number of related issues that make the current platform problematical for educators, and a number of questions we’ve identified I think will get at that, if you want to move down the list.

Ebbe Linden (Ebbe altberg) and Pete Linden (Peter Gray) at the meeting with representatives from the education community
Ebbe Linden (Ebbe Altberg) and Pete Linden (Peter Gray) at the meeting with representatives from the education and non-profits community

0:08:26 Comment: I did want to say something about the pricing real quick. If you did lower the price for educators you might not see the number of buyers go up right away, because I’m not sure if you understand how the education funding cycle works, and probably everyone in the room here can explain that much better than I can. But that is the issue: getting into the funding cycle ahead of time to make sure that you have funds available for your projects. So if you implemented that today, cutting it in half again, you have to give the education community time to get that in their budget and make that happen.

0:09:27 EA: Absolutely, and there’s way to solve that. I could say, it’s a hundred and fifty bucks now and it’s 75 bucks starting next quarter, so you can put it in your plans. how much advanced notice do you need to be able to get it into your budget cycle?

0:09:48: About a year.

0:09:49 EA: My lord! (Chuckles).

0:09:53: And that’s why, when the funding was cut, it was so devastating, when the discount was cut, because no-one had enough notice to get their funding back up to what they needed, and so it was very frustrating for a lot of educational folks.

0:10:14 EA: I understand. I can’t even begin to understanding the reasoning behind why that whole thing happened. I’m just very glad it was reversed before I came here, otherwise I would have done that myself. So you can at least be confident that we’re not going to make that mistake again.

Continue reading “Education in SL: A Q&A session with Ebbe Altberg and Peter Gray” →

Lab updates section 2.3 of their Terms of Service – will it calm doubts?

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update, July 20th: My personal opinion on this update.

Update: For a legal view on this update, you might want to chack Vaki’s (also known as Agenda Faromet) blog post on these changes.

On Wednesday July 16th, Linden Lab updated section 2.3 of their Terms of Service and issued a blog post on the matter, indicating the update is an attempt to clarify the Lab’s intent with regards to user content in Second Life.

The changes to Section 2.3 come in the 5th paragraph, commencing “Except as otherwise described”. For ease of reference, I’ve reproduced the paragraph as it read in August 2013 and how it now reads in July 2014, with the updated text highlighted.

August 2013:

Except as otherwise described in any Additional Terms (such as a contest’s official rules) which will govern the submission of your User Content, you hereby grant to Linden Lab, and you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, re-sell, sublicense (through multiple levels), modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafter developed, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed, and to advertise, market, and promote the same. You agree that the license includes the right to copy, analyze and use any of your Content as Linden Lab may deem necessary or desirable for purposes of debugging, testing, or providing support or development services in connection with the Service and future improvements to the Service. The license granted in this Section 2.3 is referred to as the “Service Content License.”

July 2014*

Except as otherwise described in any Additional Terms (such as a contest’s official rules) which will govern the submission of your User Content, you hereby grant to Linden Lab, and you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and sell, re-sell or sublicense (through multiple levels)(with respect to Second Life, Inworld or otherwise on the Service as permitted by you through your interactions with the Service), and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafter developed, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed, and to advertise, market, and promote the same. You agree that the license includes the right to copy, analyze and use any of your Content as Linden Lab may deem necessary or desirable for purposes of debugging, testing, or providing support or development services in connection with the Service and future improvements to the Service. The license granted in this Section 2.3 is referred to as the “Service Content License.” 

(* Note that when initially issued the clause “sell, re-sell, sublicense (through multiple levels)” was accidentally repeated in the July 2014 version of the paragraph, a point I alerted the Lab to on reading the updated ToS, and which they subsequently fixed. The paragraph quoted above is the corrected one, with the repetition removed. So if you had to accept the ToS twice, that’s the reason.)

While this may be an attempt to clarify the meaning and intent of the ToS, I cannot help but question it’s overall effectiveness – although I do so with the clear statement that I am not a lawyer, so this is simply unqualified opinion.

Yes, the revised wording does apparently set out limitations, but the context in which this is achieved seems to be confusing.

Agenda Faromet explained during the Legal Panel discussion on the matter in October 2013 as to why terms such as “sell / resell” aren’t perhaps the issue in a legal context (see her comments here), but the lack of limitations on any assigned right are. Yet, within the revised ToS, the way in which the limitations are presented parenthetically might be taken to mean they only apply to the matter of “sell, resell or sublicense (through multiple levels)”.

Moreover, the limits as stated, would appear to stand in contradiction with a further clause in the ToS which was introduced with the August 2013 changes, and remain unaltered with this update. To wit: that LL can “otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever”. Hence, to the untutored eye, it is actually hard to discern what the Lab is in fact saying with this update, or what they are actually addressing.

Whether this apparent contradiction, if it is a contradiction, affects how the update might be legally interpreted, I leave for minds wiser and better qualified than mine. But given the wording “for any purpose whatsoever” with regards to how SL content might be used did give rise to considerable angst when it first appeared in the August 2013 ToS, I do wonder if its continued presence will remain a cause for concern among content creators.

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