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Another step has been taken along the road for the dispute between Richard Minsky (registered owner of the SLART trademark), and Linden Lab (applicant for the SL trademark). The United States Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO) has dealt something of a blow to Linden Lab's background effort to convincing the USPTO that Minsky committed fraud in registering the SLART trademark and that the SLART trademark should be cancelled.

In short, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) has suspended cancellation proceedings for now, so the Lab won't make any further progress on that front for the time being. Minsky asked the TTAB for the suspension of proceedings, and the Lab argued against it -- but the Lab's argument apparently didn't hold up on basic reasoning.

We realize that the suspension of a cancellation proceeding generates a little confusion. Just bear with us, okay? One part is the cancellation process by which the USPTO determines if the SLART trademark should be cancelled. Whatever happens, there's no guarantee that it will be cancelled, even if the process resumes. The process itself has been suspended however, based on the TTAB agreeing with Minsky's reasoning that the cancellation process should not proceed at this time. Suspension. Cancellation Process. Got it? Right, on with the show ...

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From Chiba, Japan, AP reports on Sony and Microsoft's upcoming avatar-based offerings at the annual Tokyo Game Show. Associated Press goes to great lengths to avoid spooking what they seem to feel are a parochial and hidebound audience with gems like, 'In the so-called "metaverse" in cyberspace, players manipulate digital images called "avatars" that represent themselves, engaging in relationships, social gatherings and businesses.'

Of course, the notion of graphical avatars as a part of a wide variety of Internet services has persisted for most of the last two decades, but even the sense of this is backwards.To the casual and uninformed observer it might appear that the user manipulates this (ahem) 'digital image' to perform actions, but this is substantively not the case. The user moves or takes action through the virtual environment in relation to spaces and to other users, and the avatar represents the action to others.

It's just that sort of long-arm punditry that seems to make AP compare Sony's Home and Microsoft's Avatar service with Linden Lab's Second Life, despite Sony and Microsoft's respective services having about as much in common with Second Life, as they have with Mortal Kombat. 'The real-time interactive computer-graphic worlds are similar to Linden Lab's "Second Life,"' writes the AP correspondent, in a wondrously surreal moment.

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Linden Lab recently attempted to evaluate the efficacy of its user-volunteer corps as a part of the new user experience (NUE) in Second Life. Two NUE areas were selected (Hanja and Korea), and baseline results established. Then testing was conducted in two phases using one area as a testing ground and the other as a control. The first incorporated themed tours by volunteer greeters, and the second involved general mentoring in conjunction with the original style of Orientation Island tutorials.

Phase one seemed to draw some very successful results, while phase two only showed a slight improvement. The phase two results look to be well within the margins of error, and essentially statistically insignificant. The sort of mentoring you might find at Help Island Public would, based on these results, seem to be broadly ineffective.

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As expected, Linden Lab has begun testing 64-bit builds of Second Life server software, deploying a 64-bit version of the software intended for the new Class 6 servers onto an internal test grid. The software appears to be a straight 64-bit build of 1.24.9(98659), which should be able to function as a 64-bit binary, pending any oddnesses.

Those 'oddnesses' would include implicit or explicit assumptions about the size of storage types, as well as the possibility of sending unrepresentably large values to other systems that only support 32-bit storage types. Additionally there are potentially increased disk, file and memory storage requirements.

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Well, at last we know what all the fuss was about with all the sudden software updates over the last week for the Second Life servers that caused so much disruption during the last few days. It appears we were on the money with security fixes, and exploitable vulnerabilities have received urgent attention.

As a result a new Second Life viewer is available for download now -- that's 1.20.17(98669) -- and you can expect a new Release Candidate viewer (RC5) very very soon. Both are likely to be mandatory updates.

So, what's all the fuss about?

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During the week, SLS-1.24.7 was applied to the Second Life servers, containing one bug-fix and three unspecified security fixes. This ran over the usual three-stage deployment process.

On Friday, SLS-1.24.8 was applied as an emergency deployment with no advance notice, over a five hour period. Apparently there is still more work to finalize the operation of 1.24.8, but there are no published release notes or hints as to what modifications it contains, why the rushed deployment or what additional work remains to complete it.

Already, we're seeing signs of 1.24.9 being run through testing -- and it wouldn't surprise us to see it start to roll out by Tuesday. Something's definitely wrong, but it is hard to say what. Judging by the predominance of security fixes in 1.24.7, the rushed deployment of 1.24.8 and the preparation of 1.24.9, we'd have to guess that it is either an exploitable (or already exploited) security problem, or a considerably embarrassing bug.

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3Di, a Tokyo-based member of the NGI group who maintain a fairly solid Second Life presence, have announced the launch of an enterprise virtual worlds product based on the BSD-licensed Opensim, Second Life simulator workalike.

3Di Opensim (the base 3Di technology) is a reworked and extended version of Opensim, and as an enterprise solution is packaged with additional tools and support under the name 3Di Opensim Standard. 3Di maintain a separate project developing further extensions and enhancements for 3Di Opensim.

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As you may already know from the buzz back in April when the project kicked off (just prior to Kingdon's hiring as freshly minted CEO of Linden Lab), the global interactive design firm Vectorform was contracted by Linden Lab to undertake the Landmarks and Navigation project, essentially completely reworking the way landmarks (a kind of virtual-environment version of Web bookmarks/favorites) are handled in Second Life.

The project adds a new user-interface element to the screen that applies Web-style browsing semantics (forward/back/location) to virtual environment positions. Vectorform say that they recently submitted a beta of the modification to Linden Lab and are awaiting QA (Quality Assurance) feedback.

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New Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon is still making irregular postings to the official Second Life blog. It's all heady and exciting stuff, to be sure. Growth, focus on improvement of the new user experience, simplified registration, and so on.

Yet something seems to be missing. What's missing is anything that excites you if you're already a Second Life user. There's plenty here to entice those who aren't already users, but if you're already one, there doesn't seem to be anything much in them for you to get excited about. Put together with some other pieces, however, it certainly creates an interesting picture about future direction for Second Life.

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Eric Krangel, whom most Second Life users will more readily recognize as the personable and approachable Eric Reuters and primary representative of the Thomson Reuters news service in Second Life for so long, is finally moving on.

Krangel will be taking up a writing position with Silicon Alley Insider, ending his long stint that saw him replace Adam Pasick (aka Adam Reuters) as the front-man for Thomson Reuters in Linden Lab's virtual environment.

In many ways it seems like the end of an era.

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Tom Hale, formerly Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Knowledge Worker Business Unit at Adobe Systems has been hired to fill what is apparently a new role at Linden Lab: Chief Product Officer. Hale, as CPO will be reporting to new Lab CEO, Mark Kingdon.

Hale isn't the actually first to be poached away from Adobe Systems to the Lab recently. Clare Rees, a Senior Group Manager there was recently hired as the Lab's new European Marketing Director. Marketing what and marketing to whom -- this is not yet clear.

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One of the most misunderstood concepts in any online medium is lag. Lag essentially refers to a delay. Most commonly we're referring to the delay between when you expect something to happen and when it actually does happen.

What makes lag difficult to understand is that it is a syndrome. There are multiple possible causes for lag, some under your control, and some not -- all of which contribute to that molasses-like feeling, and occasionally crashes or disconnections.

To help you make the most of your Second Life experience, we'll look over how to easily and simply identify what kind of lag you're getting, and what (if anything) you can do to reduce it.

Jump to a section:

• Your computer
• The servers
• The network
• Final thoughts

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Phatland (aka Phat Cat's Jazz club) was originally founded by Dilbert Dilweg and Charity Colville, two people who met in Second Life, worked together, fell in love, and forged a successful and lasting relationship in the physical world -- not an uncommon story. Indeed, it seemed like Phatland and its club grew with their romance, up until mid 2007 or so Phatland was one of the single most popular places in Second Life by any reasonable reckoning.

When the couple moved to be with each-other in the physical world, they needed to make some changes in their lives, as one might expect. And that included the sale of Phatland. The sale went through, but not everything went smoothly with Phatland after that, and Dilbert and Charity were banned from the site. Phatland's traffic started to fall significantly. Where there had once been 90 or more users at all hours of the day, soon the site seemed to be a mere shadow of its former success.

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Linden Lab apparently is in the planning stages for an upcoming rollout of new, "Class 6" hardware for Second Life, representing a step up from existing Class 5 server systems. Little is actually known about the roll-out, but they appear to be part of another project to migrate the server systems from 32-bit to 64-bit. How far along in that planning they may be is uncertain.

With SLS-1.24 server code still in the process of being stabilized, we wouldn't even begin to venture predictions as to when 64-bit server software or Class 6 servers will make it into testing, let alone into actual production. We assume it will be some time yet before the hardware is even purchased.

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A new Second Life viewer is available. Not a release candidate, but an update to the 1.20 series -- what's generally referred to as an 'official' or production viewer. The version number for this release is 1.20.16 (97603), and only contains one listed change over 1.20.15.

The lone change appears to be security-related. The text of the change (not yet available in Wiki release notes) is "Discard messages sent over UDP that should not be trusted."

It isn't clear exactly which messages those are, precisely, and whether they might be sent from servers or spoofed from other hosts (or if they should simply be being carried on another transport protocol) -- however if it was important enough to release a fresh production viewer with just this one change, it is likely to be an important upgrade for users.

The new viewer is available for download now for Linux, Windows, or Mac (universal binary). We assume that if you've had problems running the 1.20.15 viewer, 1.20.16 will not work any better for you.

Linden Lab has not yet announced this release on any of its blogs.

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