Relay Raiders Charity Dance Goes on Despite SL Troubles

At Haute Style & Co. in the Haute Couture sim, Nevar Lobo, Bcreative Wilde, and the Relay Raiders held a charity dance for Relay for Life. But events made it more than just a simple fundraiser.

Continue reading in the RFL section with Bixyl Section

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Changes.....

You may have noticed a little change with our layout (well i had to find something to do) one of the main changes is that instead of leads to our other sections you will now find the headlines on the right, these only show the top 2 stories in each section, so to read the whole section you will need to use the left navigation buttons as always.
We hope you find this easier, as now you can see what is new from the one page without hiding the articles on this main news page.
As always feel free to comment.
Dana

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The Beast Kicks A Patient.

The Beast Of Ghul, aka Jeb Nicholls, has sunk even lower ..For full story…click here

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How can organizations use virtual worlds?

One cannot say that he or she has figured out the way that large organizations will be able to use Second Life on a broad basis. Using it as a tool to reach ordinary people or simply do internal activities has yet to develop comprehensively.

A few examples such as Sun Microsystems and IBM have been widely cited in the media for having virtual offices or meetings. We sometimes hear that there are companies who recruit on the grid. But all of this is rather experimental. There isn't clear a "virtual world presence" model for everyone. Even for retail businesses, which may not have been fully using the potential of SL.

Without being an oracle, I have a bit of a vision on all of this.

Let's start with the retailers. I believe that in the long run, 3D worlds have all the potential to be a replacement for traditional Web sites. Today's Web sites have their limitations when you want to shop. Imagine going to your favorite electronics or housewares store's Web site. You do not get the same shopping experience than you get at the RL location.

Second Life can be an answer to this. With an island, sculpties and a bit of work, even a luxury shop from 5th Avenue in New York could recreate its unique in-store experience. Even for the curious such as me who don't go to NYC very often! You would go to virtual stores and look at the virtual replica of this LG television, Canon photo camera or GE fridge that you are thinking of buying. You could read about it from a notecard. You would get, on your screen, the environment that you would later see when visiting the RL location. Or order in-world if you want.

In such a model, the virtual world doesn't have to replace the real world... just replace the limited potential of the Web site.

As for large organizations that want to use virtual worlds, IBM's answer might prove to be right. They want organizations to use SL as they use the Internet. They would have a firewall that allows them to step outside as much as they want while protecting their internal islands. That would be a brilliant step towards a more secure environment.

But there's still a major problem, as The Economist points out wisely in its March 19 edition. You can't take something you created in Second Life and take it to another virtual world. The same goes with your avatar. They are wrong about moving information in, which is rather easy. But being unable to move it out easily is an issue. And they rightly point out that more open standards might do to SL just what they did to AOL's gated online services. Once we discover a universal, open virtual world, we may all abandon SL to avoid its limits.

Scary for the Lindens, eh? But it could be a long-term reality.

Related Link: Break down these walls (The Economist)

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Yes you can MAYBE log in, but why bother?

Unless you were lucky enough to log in amongst your friends you cannot get to them, TP is borked and I won't be trying to buy anything (The system is currently unable to process your request. The request timed out.). IMs work so at least you can talk (if your friends list loads that is) textures don't load, notecards ditto, oh and don't try to get dressed either because its a waste of time, I did eventually manage to get hair, but shoes? not there even after 15 minutes. It took 20 minutes to change pants and prims still havent appeared.
Walking? well if you call sliding across the ground with your hands on hips walking then that is at least possible
Uploading, don't even go there LOL
building seems to be possible and it even managed to delete the prims i rezzed which is a slight improvement from reports we have heard.

To give them their due (ROFL) LL are at least admitting they can't fix it and are keeping people informed:

[07:30AM 04/05/08] It seems the problem is even harder to nail down than we earlier supposed. We need to close logins again to go back to diagnostics. -Lotte

Hopefully we will all be back sometime this week with the new Havok4 working and transactions going through everytime, oh no thats just a dream I had once upon a time...........

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What is happening at Ancapex

We spoke to Intlibber Brautigan last night go to FINANCE for the full update

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Second life grid wide issues, a black week for residents

After another week of inworld issues the World of Second Life® has finally come to a complete halt with logins being disabled as from 10.22 last night.
Said this time to be a problem with the ISPs who provide bandwidth for Second Life this is just the last in a very long list of problems which many are saying make SL™ such an unstable platform for any business to consider.
This week has been plagued by problems which present themselves by: login failure, teleporting, timeouts on the web page, support lines down, map usage, search functionality, IM/chat, add to that the fact that most of the week transactions have been failing grid wide, businesses will be suffering as residents hold tight to their purse strings.
Through load tests, updates and the installation of Havok 4 Linden Labs have worked hard to try to fix the issues but to no avail, this week has been a black week for most residents and definitely for business owners.
I am sure that many will agree with me that the long awaited Havok4 rollout has been over shadowed by the inworld problems facing most residents.
I know many are asking if the two are related and maybe, just maybe the Havok4 is not all its cracked up to be. Now I am no expert but I have been told that they are not related and Havok4 is actually making a difference. But with no logins and troubles when you do, who is going to believe that (apart from the techies out there)?

Update:[3.30 AM] [RESOLVED] - The doors are open and we are back. It turned out there were multiple issues with our ISPs network which have been worked around for now. The network provider is working to resolve the issue permanently - Matthew
OOPs looks like i was too quick to hope:
[05:20 AM 04/05/08] Unfortunately, connected to the earlier described problems with our ISP, we are getting reports of failing inworld services again. We are working to get it fixed again, and will keep you updated here.
[9:38 PM] We are continuing to work with the service provider, we will keep you posted as the details come in.
[8:34 PM] We have investigated network issues and determined connectivity issues with one of our service providers. Contact has been made and they are working to resolve this.
[7:31 PM] We are experiencing various inworld issues at this time, such as region down, logins failure, transactions, teleporting, timeouts on the webpage etc. We are aware of this problem and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Please refrain from any transactions at this time, as possible.

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