Do you "SLim" yet...?

SLim is the name of the Second Life chat client.

It enables Second Life Residents to text or voice chat with SL Friends without having the SL viewer open. Residents using the SL viewer can use the usual viewer communication controls to text or voice chat with SLim users, and SLim users can communicate with SL viewer users.

SLim does not support group (conference) text or voice chat yet, though we hope to make this available in the near future.

You can get the SLim beta from the second life website.

-Wise

Openspace pricing part 2

In my last blog post I wrote about LL's announcement to increase openspace sim pricing by 60-67% in january 2009. As you can imagine this caused a little uproar in the second life community. As result LL & Jack Linden have posted another statement on the official LL blog:

As mentioned in the post, Openspaces were intended for space, empty areas of ocean or forest. Take a look at the Knowledgebase article description here. By that criteria, the large majority of Openspaces have more going on than was the original intent. We are not suggesting this is a bad thing, and of course we’re delighted that people have found them to be so useful. And we’re not saying that everyone is abusing resources. We are saying that the use has changed, and continues to do so as people find more creative ways to use them. So the revised pricing is about recognising that change of use and the additional costs and value associated with it.

This is quite interesting.
While Jack LInden said in his first blog post that OS sims create a massive load on the assets server and people over using them, LL now moves to saying "we calculated the value wrong and they are to cheap for what you get". LL realises now that landlords are making 25-50US$ profit from their OS sims and after they allowed the same landlords to order thousands of new OS sims to rent out... LL now turns around wanting a peace of the cake.

A jira has been created for SL residents to voice their opinion about the planned price increase. Amazing thing is.. I can't remember any jira that ever got so many votes from residents. Please visit this jira post and leave your comment on the issue & vote against the price increase. You can login to the SL jira with your SL user name and password.

-Wise

LL Openspace Pricing & Policy Change

Just when you thought you had it all....
...LL Openspace Pricing & Policy change:

Beginning 1st January 2009

We will increase the monthly maintenance fee from USD$75 to USD$125 per month. This price increase will apply to all owners of Openspaces on January 1st as well as new purchases after that date. There will be no grandfathering of Openspace maintenance pricing.

For anyone owning class 4 Openspaces on January 1st, they will be upgraded to class 5 by end of January, to further improve the experience people have on those regions.

At the same time, we will be increasing the upfront fee for brand new Openspaces from USD$250 to USD$375.

Link to the official blog entry.

-----------------

Uhmm let me think... this means 4 openspace sims will cost me more than 1 full prim sim in the future. Also means LL will really ask 2000L$ monthly rent for a quad core server with 16 openspace sims on them. At the same time it is said that the current sims are "over used" and they are creating a to "heavy load on the LL assets server".

Right, for one the assets server has been overloaded since it was created cause it is quite bugged. One reason transactions and deliveries keep failing as often as they do in SL. This was already a issue well before OS sims have been sold as stand-alones.

2nd. Rather than reducing the total number of OS sims on one sevrer from 16 to something like 12, which would reduce server load by 30%, LL turns around asking 125$ monthly rent for a OS sim with 3750 prims. This is a increase in monthly sim rental of 67%. This also means that now, after a lot of the large land barons purchased thousands of OS sims, LL turns around and let's this people hang in the air in a attempt to increase the land sale on LL's very own mainland again. 4 OS sims would than cost the owner 500US$ / month were a full simulator is only priced at 295US$.

LL also stated in their blog post, that one reason for the policy change would be... over usage of openspace sims. Funny how anybody would have thought, that after LL increased the total prim number of a OS sim to 3750, anybody would really use such a sim for "open water", sailing or other "low performance usage". Of course people use it to live there or run theri business of such a OS sim. Sorry LL but all your blog post (and IM logs with residents) show is that mainland sales are down, land barons making 25-50$ profit from each OS sim, and you LL.. you want your share of your cake...Poor job LL... but nothing new...

Fraud Alert (phising)

Attention!!

There is a phising site online that just looks like the LL website.
It is hosted @ http://www.win-lindes. tk/ (yes I added a space as not to give more exposure to the site).

Linden Lab seems to be aware of the situation but as usually the scammers have choosen the weekend to take this online. DO NOT enter any information on that site. In order to pursue a fast take down you can report the site to

abuse@altervista.it

The website to report is:
http://wapsecond.altervista.org/html/

.tk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand located in the South Pacific.

Tokelau provides any interested individuals .tk domain names free of charge, and you pick if you want advertising banners on all provided domains. These free domains are pointed to Tokelau nameservers, which redirect HTTP traffic via HTML frames to a specified web page. The domains also redirect 250 email addresses to external addresses. Because of this redirection, use of free .tk domains for other services (such as hosting servers for other protocols such as FTP and IRC or creating hostnames and subdomains within them) is not officially possible. Sites not visited at least 25 times in consecutive 90 day periods are automatically cancelled to avoid the domains being unavailable to more active websites.

Dot-TK recently provided .tk websites the option to join a network called TiKinet, a close-knit network that links sites to each other based on key words called TiKilinks. The network is expected to increase traffic to the websites, many of which are personal sites and blogs operated by individuals who otherwise would have no way to advertise their sites. [1]

To be able to use one's own nameservers, or get a "special" .tk domain name, for example, trademark domain names for most Fortune 500 companies, and to avoid advertisements, the user must buy it. Paid domain names start at $19.90 US for the first 2 years.

Potentially valuable names with less than 4 characters are unavailable for free registration, and must be purchased - usually at a premium price of over $1000 USD...

...There are reports that .tk domains have been used for phishing scams and spam.[2]

Moreover, the Dot.tk 'free forwarding service' is also widely used by spammers and scammers on free advertising services such as Gumtree.[citation needed] Despite numerous attempts to contact the 'dot.tk' abuse team, the service is still permitting unscrupulous users to set up forwarding addresses which enable them to mask their real domain name / url and redirect innocent victims to sometimes illegal / fraudulent web

Share this with your friends please,

-Wise

Texture War in SL and TRU...

Hi all,
in the last months there has been a lot of discussions in SL about Textures R' Us and their owners. TRU is one of the largest texture outlets in SL and people always thought it would be a good resource when shopping fo rtextures. I must admit until about 6 months ago I bought a lot of their packs as well. Why not, since TRU has "copyright by TRU" and all sorts of disclaimers all over the place, they must be legit or not?

Basically... they are not.
Established in 2004 LillyBeth Filth, one of the TRU owners, has been selling copyrighted material or google images slapping her copyright on them. A good sample would be the windows aquarium screensaver available at TRU with their (c) on it.

Earyl this year it was discovered that TRU was also selling textures from GFX CD's, from companies like ambient light, Marlin Studios ect. Since LillyBeth Filth is a small little woman she was quick to deal with the original copyright holder, now being somewhat licensed to sell their textures in SL. Though Marlin Studios has opened their own presence in SL a while ago.

Here is a link to a forum post on Xstreet SL to a ongoing discussion. I think it is a shame, once again, to see how people get away with content theft, IP violations and fraud in SL and Linden Lab's inability to act on such things. Reminds me of the Wolrd Stock Exchange in SL and Luke Connell making 10's of thousands of $ from it and still operating.

There is many great texture designers in SL, some of them selling their work at TRU, not knowing about the backround stories. One reason I post this, don't support this people. If you can, make your own textures. If you can't than take your time looking for the smaller stores around the grid. You be amazed by the quality of textures you can find from smaller designers... but at least it is their own work in many cases.

-Wise Capra

[SLCI] Google Group created!

Hey all,
we have now created a google group for [SLCI]. We believe a web based group for our customers, resellers and dev's is much beeter than the SL in-world groups. If you're in the in-world group we suggest you stay there anyway for product fixes, updates and quick release infos. The Google group allows better discussions, feedback and bug tracking compared to the SL groups. You can view the group here ->> [SLCI] Google Group. In order to post you would have to register but you can view it without.

Still playing with linking all the google tools with the blog. So tt you can navigate from here to the docs, group etc. Have to see how that goes.

-Wise

[SLCI] Affiliate Package v1.2 released!

We released our new version of the [SLCI] reseller pack today. The pack has under gone a lot of changes and now contains 37 vendor's with our best selling products. We also changed the vendor's to run with the apez i-vend 2.3 now. This means they vendor's will automatically register with the apez server when you rez them and load the collection and/or product we have configured.

With this release we also raised the commission paid to each reseller. You now get 50% of every [SLCI] product you sell. Compared to the going 30-35% in SL we believe it is a fair deal. Since you have to pay your land rentals, tiers etc. This is why we decided to give every reseller 50% from all sales now.

The new vendor's allow you (the reseller) to track your sales, commissions, best sellers etc. on the apez.biz web site and keep track of your sales. It also allows us easy updating by triggering deliveries from the apez server to all affiliates through the web. In order to track your sales you might want to register a account with apez.biz. You can do this by touching the Apez.ATM on the [SLCI] Island.

If you have any questions or find a bug in this pack, please report them to slci Planer with a note card or via IM inSL.

Enjoy,
-Wiseguy Capra

[SLCI] Demon House Control System Released!

Wohoo we did it again!!

Today we released our brand now and latest creation. The [SLCI] Demon House Control System.

With the release of this system we have created a new [SLCI] product line called "House Demon". The system is coded in a easy to use plug & play way to allow you (the builder) easy adding to your creations, boxing and selling. The Demon Line will be extended in the future with add-ons like a home security system and other devices. Feedback from House Demon owners is very welcome and we'll try to implement any features & options you guys feel needed for your designs.

Most current devices can be linked to the build. You can control them individually or from the central server (keypad / remote). We have already several add-ons in development that will either be sold as plug-ins or be included in future updates. The release version has already been optimized to run on Second Life's new script engine MONO.

It is also fully compatible with the “[SLCI] Builders Rez System” sold separate at the [SLCI] Island & Main Store. The Rez System allows you to link your builds expanding the SL link limit, box it for resale and your customer can rez it in one peace, move it around from the rez box.

You can view the documentation of the Demon House System online by clicking here. It is rather long and we decided to keep the documentation online for version changes and updates.

The [SLCI] Builders "House Demon" Control System is available here:
[SLCI] Main Store | Xstreet SL (new SLX) | onrez | apez.biz

We also added a new menu on the right side ==>
At the moment it only displays a link to the House Demon docs but it will link to more docs soon.

Enjoy the new system...

- Wiseguy Capra

SL Exchange is now called XStreet SL

Since yesterday the largest SL online store has changed it's name to Xstreetsl.com. The name change is a victim of LL newish policy to enforce their trademark, eye in hand logo and Second Life<sup>®.

After Linden Lab had motivated it's residents to use the name SL, their logo's etc for the last few years Linden Lab recently changed their policy about trademark usage in connection with Second Life. Due to this slexchange.com had to change their name as well, and it is now called xstreetsl.com . According to the SLX owners or now Xstreet owners all residents are asked to update their classifieds, profile tab, about land info, blog links etc etc. from SLX to Xstreet.

More information about the usage of the inSL logo's, the term SL etc. can be found at the Linden Lab Brand Center.

-Wiseguy Capra</sup>