Land bots: still any good?

Early this year, as part of the 'bots' announcement blogs, Jack said that by the end of the year, land bots wouldn't be worthwhile running, or words to that effect. The end of the year is now fast appraoching. Has LL done anything to make landbots not worthwhile?

Land prices are extremely low, but that was happening before Jack made the statement. Could it be that LL is doing everything it can, such as Linden Homes, to keep prices low, and even lower them? Could that be what Jack meant?

I recall something about moving land sales to be handled through the web site rather than in-world and that that was what would make landbots rather ineffective.

"End of the year" is very relative too... I guess even "end of the decade" won't fit this year .

One could wonder with the current land prices and the amount of land for sale, if landbots indeed are useful at this moment. Trading mainland is not the best trade I would say

Now I would imagine that low land prices are in the interest of LL, as it might get people to buy more land and pay more tier. If someone can afford 125 US$ a month for example, that does not mean they want to form over US$ 500-600 for half a sim. Now prices are lower, they might be easier convinced to buy.

As for the bots, I think the plan was to move land sales to a web-based method. Maybe set something up to where clicking on the sale stuff links you to a website via a seperate web browser, rather than the normal interface? Whatever the plan was, it hasn't happened yet.

As for encouraging land ownership, the purchase price isn't the barrier. Take a look around. Land prices are rapidly approaching zero, and we don't see people swarming all over each other to snap it up, do we? The barrier is that the monthly tier prices are way too high, and that the penalty for tiering up to the next level is too steep to encourage slow, steady accquisition of land.

If they want to encourage a lot more people to become Premium and buy land, or to buy Private Island sims and/or support land ownership on private sims, they need to do an across the board slash on tier prices and on maintenance costs for owning a private island. The current prices are simply not justifyable in terms of what the land owner *percieves* they are getting for their money.

It would also be good if they would "smooth out the curve" on mainland tier increments. The idea that someone who owns half a sim worth of land and wants to add 16 M2 to their holdings has to double their tier to do so is for the birds.

Depends on if you count '00 as the first year of the decade or '01.

There's no choice is there? The end of 2000 was the end of the last century. The only reason that that start of 2000 was celebrated was because it's a nice number

The only thing they're useful for is buying land. What good is that?

I mean at this point, people snapping up land as some kind of investment are really competing to see who will be left holding the bag, aren't they?

But do you include 2020 with the teens or the twenties? You could easily say that 2000 was the start of the new century.

Twenties, because it doesn't end in "teen". After that - 30s from 30-39.

You could - but it wasn't. You could say that 100 is the start of the next hundred, but it's last of the first hundred. 1 to 100 was the first one hundred years. 1 - 99 wasn't. There was no year 0, so 1 to 100 = one hundred years. 1 to 2000 = two thousand years. 1 to 1999 = 1999 years which means that the second millenium wasn't completed when the year 1999 was completed.


Yes, I know that they didn't call it year 1 back then, but you know what I mean

So the teens decade is only 9 years long?

Yep But I've never heard of it refered to as a decade before. It wouldn't be that even if 20 was included - 11 and 12 are missing.

it's not even that... there are only seven "-teen" years.

I have wondered about that before. Do you have an authoritative source for this assertion? What is "the year dot"?

I thought that it went
- BC
- AO
- AD

Which is of course confusing as some people think that AO is the year that Zindra was created.

I don't, I'm afraid. The year numbers we have now weren't invented until into the second millenium and I've only come across there being no year 0 in documentaries about that. But we don't usually count anything starting from 0. The very first item of 4 for items, for instance, is always number 1. Computer languages often use 0 as the first number, but I don't know of any other examples.

There's a section in an article about the history of years here:-

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/year-history.html#anchor-born

It says that there was no year 0.

ETA:
Apparently the years we know now started in the first millenium, not the second one. I'm remembering a documentary about setting the date more accurately, which happened in the 2nd millenium. I remember the question that whoever set it correctly needed to know the answer to - "When was then?".

Even odder is that Christ's nativity is estimated to have occurred around 4-6BC (before Christ).

The lack of year 0 and the above discrepancy are both due to the use of roman numerals when first determining the date. A monk named Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Short) about 5 centuries later set up the "Anno Domini" calendar. You try doing a chain calculation with quill and parchment using roman numerals without making a mistake .

@Phil - the *calendar* was a 6th century invention, use of "Arabic" numbers (actually from India via Persia) is around 1200-1400 AD or so in Europe. Those are the modern number system we mostly use now, aside from a few odd holdovers like copyright dates in films.

Yes, I corrected it in the post above yours.

My L$ balance started at zero.

Troubles begins with zero.





as in


O Shit

and

O F**k

But that was when L$ in your account didn't exist. The months that make up the first year in the count did exist

When we track time that tends to starts at 0 though.

When you're born you're 0 years old.
It's been 0 days since this thread got started.
Etc...

It reads wrong to put it like that, but it's still how we count that so would mean that on January 1st 2010, 2010 whole years have passed since the start of the calendar which makes it the start of a new decade in my view .

When we track time, we start at 0 time. The moment time passes (the tiniest fraction of a second) then the count is no longer 0. It's only 0 as long as the count hasn't started - when there is no count.

When you're born, your age is counted in seconds, then minutes, then ....., then month's, and then years. Before you reach 1 year old, your age is measured in a different unit - seconds, weeks, months, and such. After you've been born, your age is never 0. Or to put it another way, when you're born, you are in your first year. You are in year 1 - not year 0.

Without checking when this thread started, it hasn't been 0 time since it started. It was never 0 time since it started.

All those 0s of yours are incorrect. They only apply to before the count/measurement started.

On the 1st january 2010, 2009 whole years will have elapsed and the 2010th one will starting. 2010 years won't have elapsed until the very end of 2010. That's when a new decade starts.

The first ten apples taken from a barrel isn't complete until the 10th one has been taken out. There is a time when the apples count is 0, but only before one has been taken out (completed).

On the other hand, with computer languages, 0 is an actual number that is often the equivalent of out 1. 0-based arrays, for instance, where the 0 element exists and contains data, just like the 1 element. In that case, there is no difference between 0 and any other numbers.

Nice try, but no cookie .

If you wanted to age this thread you'd say "less than one day" which is the same as saying "zero days" although we generally don't phrase it like that. Although even there we have terms like "zero day exploits".

Same way if you want to count the passage of 10 minutes: you don't start the count right away but you pause and don't say anything the first minute and you stop at the *start* of the 10th minute and *not* the end of it.

You've been born for ten full years the very second you reach 10 so you're a decade on the day of your 10th birthday, not at the day before your 11th.

Hence why I pointed out that if you go by the same way we all count age then on January 1st 2010 00:00:00 a full 2010 years will have passed, marking the end of a decade.

That doesn't mean it's the only right way, but if the "official" end of a decade is the end of 2010 then it's contrary to how we track other time related things.

There is still no day zero. If you want to only measure in days, then that day is day 1. And when it's complete, the thread is 1 day old AND into day 2. Similarly, there was no year 0, and the *end* of 2010 marks the end of the decade.

You are still wrong. Going by the way we all count age, the *end* of 2010 is the end of the decade and the start of 2011 is the start of the next one. You only need to go through the first 10 years (the first decade) to realise it. During year 1, the decade is 0 whole years old. During year 2, it is 1 whole year old ..... during year 9, it is 8 whole years old, and during year 10, it is 9 whole years old. At the *end* of year 10, it will be 10 whole years old - a whole decade old.

There is nothing contrary to how we count other things about it. The only reason why people get confused is because the last year of a decade, centrury or millenium uses a very different number. E.g. 1991, 1992, 1993 ..... 1998, 1999, 2000. That last number looks a lot different - hence the confusion.

It's not even a case of different ways of looking at it. The integers just keep going up, one by one, until it reaches 10 or 100 or 2000. When the 2000th year has been completed, then the second millenium has been completed. I think you'd notice it quite well if you were promised $10 and the person started counting at $0 and ended after $9 - that's 10 steps, but it sure isn't $10.