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Nature & Parks

Maturity Ratings

Each Second Life destination has a maturity rating of General, Moderate, or Adult. You can choose to show or hide destinations based on their maturity rating.

Relax in one of the many beautiful garden and nature spots in Second Life. Explore flowing fountains and waterfalls, lush gardens and more.

StoryBrooke Gardens

Explore the romantic fairy-tale garden of StoryBrooke. Enjoy the peace and tranquility of this beautiful setting.

Snuggles Forest

There's lots to do in Snuggles Forest. Enjoy a beautiful stroll and explore the many beautiful areas. Walk along the beaches and hold your sweetheart close, cuddle, dance or just sit in one of many romantic spots. You can also ride a boat, propose, or even get married in the chapel.

Fantasy Forest

The fantasy forest is a peaceful place for both singles and couples in Second Life. The forest includes rivers, a waterfall, even a rain-kissed elven grove. There are many places to sit and read or explore in this beautiful venue. For more information, be sure to visit http://twomoonparadise. wordpress. com/.

This popular Armenelos returns to Second Life, reborn as a engaging woodland region in the vast Calas Galadhon Park estate. With all the pristine woodlands, coastal wildlife, and steep cliffs, one can't help but feel inspired to explore. Or visit the Dolphin Café with 24/7 live music and dancing.

Bellefleurs

The spectacular Bellefleurs has been the seat of the Duchesses of Ominum since the 1590s. Built in the High English Renaissance style, it offers a Salon Music series, opera, dances, En Garde, and other events. A history of the house and family are provided on the region.

Garden of Whimsy

The Garden of Whimsy has been created to offer all Second Life residents a place to wander, contemplate, take pictures or share a quiet moment with that special someone. Different garden areas include: Gypsy Travellers, Steampunk Lake, Dragons' Nest, Butterfly Meadow, Cottage Country, and the Dark Crystal Forest.

Runestone is a special place to relax and enjoy the sights and sounds of nature. Dance, meditate, or cuddle with a loved-one, visit the quaint cottages, or explore the garden with its waterfalls, rope-swings, and hidden pirate's cave.

Sheepville

Sheepville is a romantic little village near a lake surrounded by hills and mountains in Second Life. There are a lot of things to explore like the shops and pubs in the village, or the castle on the hill.

Swiss Park

Swiss Park is an area for relax and recreation. Newbies are welcome to explore and discover the many activities here, including rides via train, boat or balloon.

Woodland Park

Woodland Park features a wide variety of shopping experiences in a pretty, park-like setting. This is also home to the Relaxation Station, a peaceful, photogenic park area that is open to the public.

Amazon Web Services

Pros

Comprehensive selection of products and features with an expanding list of add-ons and integrations from third parties. Wide choice of Windows or Linux OS server options. Rock solid security. Extensive server support.

Cons

Vast selection of choices makes determining pricing very difficult.

Bottom Line

Amazon Web Services can run various services and support a range of operating systems. Its universal appeal is further strengthened by its intuitive setup process, management, and monitoring features earning it our Editor's Choice selection in IaaS solutions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) takes our Editors' Choice for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for its sheer dominance in a number of areas. AWS (whose cost can be determined by contacting the company) will be the best option for most applications and businesses. It is the largest IaaS offering and one with the most comprehensive set of tools as well as a burgeoning list of third-party integrations. Competing platforms may handle some tasks better, but AWS continues to maintain market leadership. A mature product and service offering, AWS ensure most things work well and setup and management are intuitive and familiar. It also has an impressive level of service which smaller players will find hard to match.

Similar Products

Google Cloud Platform

Rackspace Managed Cloud

DigitalOcean

AWS has not rested on its laurels, it's improved in almost every area and its basic service levels rival the best the competition has to offer, including Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud.

The vast array of services in AWS, which includes an even more vast collection of partners, lets you build exactly the cloud service you need. With its wide variety of other AWS cloud services—everything from cloud databases to e-commerce storefronts—you can build an end-to-end workload complete with management tools and custom-coded apps.

AWS is also a prime example of exactly how key IaaS is becoming, in not only enterprise networks but in small to midsize business (SMB) installations as well. The AWS Cloud operates 54 Availability Zones within 18 geographic Regions, and one Local Region. The company has plans to add 12 more Availability Zones and four more Regions around the world. Keep in mind that an Availability Zone is a cluster of up to six data centers, with more being brought online constantly. In short, if you want to commit to a cloud service that's going to be here not just next year but for the next decade, then AWS is your choice.

Core Features of AWS

AWS offers the primary services you probably expect when you think of cloud service, including Compute, Storage & Content Delivery, Databases, and Networking. But that's just the beginning. In 2016 AWS launched 1,012 new features and in 2017 it launched 1,430 new features. In addition to the basic four services, AWS offers Mobile, Developers Tools, Management Tools, IoT, security and enterprise apps. At a high level, you can control all of these with extensive admin controls accessible via a secure web client. Tools available here include identity management, auditing, encryption key creation/control/storage, monitoring and logging, and more.

AWS has more options than anyone else in the cloud business. Need a database management system (DBMS)? Check out Amazon Aurora, a MySQL - and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database service. If you need to put terabytes (TB) or even a petabyte (PB) of data into the cloud, then AMS Snowball, a briefcase-size appliance, can do the job. But if you really have a lot of data, there's AWS Snowmobile, an exabyte (EB)-scale data appliance that arrives in a 45-foot, ruggedized custom shipping container delivered by a tractor trailer.

When you need to process all of that data, AWS offers Redshift, a data warehouse; and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), a Hadoop and Spark service. As you would expect when so much data is involved, there's machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) services you can use.

Once you have gotten your head around a tractor trailer full of data, you can go back to the tiny data sets. AWS has the Internet of Things (IoT) covered now as well. AWS also offers more conventional cloud services than its competition. As you'd expect, there are virtual servers, containers, file systems, and block and archival storage. In short, there's nothing you can't do on a cloud that can't be done on AWS. It offers, by far, the widest range of both in-house and third-party software options and choices. If you ever get to the point where AWS can't handle your most complicated jobs, then you have reached a place in which you need to set up your own private cloud.

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), AWS supports many Linux distributions as well as Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2012, and 2016 on top of the Xen hypervisor. Amazon's cloud also supports Docker containers. And with 54 Availability Zones—each with up to six data centers in 18 geographic regions around the world—AWS is also a no brainer for multinational companies.

Getting Set Up With AWS

Setup in AWS has been significantly improved since the last time we looked at this service. The sheer volume of available services and options means that you'll need to study your options carefully to get exactly what you need. But while Amazon has necessarily delivered one of the more complex IaaS solutions on the market, the setup process has been well thought out and was surprisingly clear. Setting up a basic Amazon cloud is easy, and the available features are well considered.

While the vastness of AWS provides a good market for consultants, unless you need something complex, you may be able to handle setup yourself. I had no trouble bringing up a Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and providing it with the required apps and security options. Some previous complexities within AWS, such as setting up Secure Shell (SSH) connections or using the Windows Remote Desktop have been automated to the point that there was never a problem. Setting up a Windows virtual server consists of specifying the parameters you need, including the number of processors, the amount of memory and the amount and type of storage. You can specify the network connections, your security settings and whether to include a database in the setup. Once you have clicked the right buttons or chosen the right choices from a drop-down menu, you fire it off and wait while it's built.

There are pre-made images available from AWS, including images provided by other users on the AWS marketplace. Some of the choices are free, and some are not.

Once you've set up your server and provisioned it, you can use Amazon's Remote Desktop to log in to it. Unlike some remote desktop utilities, the Amazon software provides a full-screen image that appears identical to one that might be on a local server.

Even thought the test machine was running a 4K monitor that can relegate some screen images to a tiny window stuck in a corner of the screen, the AWS desktop did not do this.

Perhaps even better, there was none of the strangeness that sometimes accompanies remote desktop use. Latency was not an issue. The house pointer acted normally. The Windows Server instance behaved exactly as if it were on a local machine—actually better since it also didn't have the weirdness created by the test facility's crappy kernel-based virtual macine (KVM).

If you have more than one server that you're using at AWS, then the company will let you create a Virtual Private Cloud, which is a logical grouping of your virtual servers. Keep in mind that it's not a private cloud like you'd have in your data center or a co-location site, but it's what most organizations need if they're not processing highly sensitive or classified data.

AWS has improved its documentation over the years, but the service has been made so intuitive that you may not need to refer to it much. Using the AWS Windows Server was essentially the same as administering a physical server in your own data center. While there are times when you'll need to use the command line or PowerShell, they're the same times that you'd use it whether the server was in the cloud or not.

AWS Performance

AWS performance was approximately on par with other cloud services I tested. For these tests, I used Geekbench 4 by Primate Labs, a cross-platform benchmarking app that's designed to treat all platforms the same, regardless of the operating system. This benchmark ran many integer, floating point, and memory tests. I ran the tests on a single vCPU and 2 gigabytes (GBs) of RAM running Microsoft Windows Server 2016. With this benchmark, the higher the score the better.

The Geekbench 4 was 3021 for single core performance and 2862 for multi-core performance. These numbers were reasonably close to other virtual servers in this test with similar configurations. While Geekbench will test compute performance using GPUs, the instances we tested did not offer GPUs for these virtual servers.

Service-Level Agreements

While throughput is an important part of overall IaaS-provider performance, it's only one half of the equation if you're putting mission-critical infrastructure in the cloud. The other half is the cloud provider's service-level agreement (SLA). Amazon's current SLA is roughly equivalent to those of other cloud providers.

While AWS has a good track record if something does go badly wrong, don't expect to save your bacon with the SLA. AWS's default SLA, like all cloud SLAs, will not cover the cost to your business if the service goes down. It will just provide you with credit for use with AWS. What this means is that you will need to make arrangements for backup and recovery, and you'll probably need to have agreements for disaster recovery services when you need them.

Pricing and Contract

Pricing on cloud services in general is a source of extreme complication. It's not that the pricing is intentionally hard to follow, but rather, that there are so many options, each individually priced, that you'll need to configure what you want to find out the price. Amazon has pricing calculators to help you, but those are complicated, too. This is a situation in which you may want to ask for help from Amazon's sales staff. That's one reason why a popular service for AWS cloud consultants is simply calculating an accurate price for a proposed cloud solution.

While AWS has been aggressively lowering its prices recently, so have its competitors, including Google Cloud Platform and Rackspace. However, the way AWS is set up, it's difficult to determine in advance what your cloud configuration is going to cost. As a starting point, the VM I ran the simple benchmark app in would cost about $14 per month. AWS also has spot pricing and reserved instances that can lower the bill by up to 90 percent and up to 75 percent, respectively, from on-demand pricing for EC2 images and other services that leverage EC2 (for example, Amazon EMR).

The RightScale cloud calculator is no longer available, so we attempted to price an Amazon solution matching the previous standard configuration. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't offer anything closely resembling the standard configuration so, at our request, its staff priced out a configuration that was as close as possible. This included three on-demand micro instances: a web server, load balancer, and a hosting www site. These were supported by two on-demand micro web servers for peak demand and a small, reserved, one-year, light-utilization DR server.

The 300GB S3 Standard storage for the database backup and a 4GB S3 Standard storage for the web server are no longer available in that form. There's also no longer a data transfer allowance; you're simply charged for what you use. For tech support, I went with the included ticket system. This simple web app would cost approximately $2,500 per year according to the pricing provided by Amazon. This is a significant reduction from the original pricing, but it's not the best pricing for this app.

Amazon said that today's cloud technology has bypassed the type of setup we used previously and suggested another approach instead. For both a lower cost and higher resiliency, the company anticipates that customers will take advantage of EC2 Auto Scaling across multiple Availability Zones. EC2 Auto Scaling will bring both the ability to satisfy peak demand and to provide resiliency in the case of failure, according to Amazon.

Overall, if you manage to put AWS together the way you want it, then you'll likely have a reasonably low price and decent performance. Plus, you will also have the most options and the greatest flexibility. For most organizations, AWS is your best choice. This is why it receives our Editors' Choice award in this IaaS solutions review roundup.

Shopping in the Second Life Marketplace

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Finding items to buy

The Second Life Marketplace is the place to buy an amazing assortment of virtual items sold by fellow Residents.

The Marketplace fee and listing policies govern the types of items for sale, as well as advertising, fees, and other guidelines for using the Marketplace.

To start shopping in the Second Life Marketplace:

Go to Marketplace. secondlife. com. If you're not already logged into secondlife. com, click Sign In in the upper-right. Enter your Second Life name and password, and click Login.

You can look for items you wish to purchase in several ways:

By using the search box at the top of the page. By browsing the Categories and Communities on the left. By scrolling through the Featured Items.

To search for something specific:

Enter keywords in the search bar at the top of the page. You can use the boolean operatorsAND, OR, and NOT to refine your search. As you type, the search bar attempts to automatically complete your entry based on current marketplace listings. If desired, click the All categories dropdown to specify a category. Select your preferred option from the Show maturity levels dropdown. Press the Enter key or click Search. Items matching your search parameters are displayed on the right.

Using boolean search operators

Boolean operators are simple words such as AND, OR, and NOT that can be used to either combine or exclude specific words in a search, which can help to achieve more accurate search results. Here is a short guide on how and when to use each available operator:

AND - Narrows your search by requiring both words to be included in each search result. For example, a search of "red AND green" returns only results containing both the words "red" and "green". OR - Broadens your search by only requiring one of the words to appear in each result. For example, a search of "boats OR planes" returns results containing: only the word "boats", only the word "planes", or both the words "boats" and "planes" NOT - Narrows your search by excluding results that contain the words after the NOT operator. For example, "summer NOT winter" returns results that contain the word "summer" but does not show any results containing the word "winter".

Boolean search operators must always be written in CAPITAL LETTERS in order to be recognized by the Second Life Marketplace search.

Determining usage requirements

Some purchases may require certain conditions for use. For example, a prefabricated building requires that you own land upon which to place it. Some purchases may also come inside boxes, which require a specific un-boxing procedure as described in Opening boxes.

Usage requirements can be found on the right side of all item listings in the Second Life Marketplace:

Use It Now: This item will be delivered directly to you or a friend in Second Life, unpacked and ready to use. No land or sandbox required. Unpacking Required: This item requires you to find a place in Second Life (such as a sandbox) to unpack and use it. See Opening boxes for additional information. Land Required: This item requires that you have access to land in Second Life in order to unpack and use it.

In addition to these usage requirements, you may also see a message stating, "This item contains wearable items for your avatar," indicating that the product contains one or more attachments or clothing items.

Determining whether an item contains mesh content

Second Life Viewer 3.0 or higher is required in order to view mesh content. Furthermore, any object that is partially or fully composed of mesh content has a land impact based on prim equivalents, which are determined by calculating the actual impact of the object on computing resources, rather than by simply counting the number of prims in an object.

You can determine whether an object on the Marketplace contains Mesh by checking the right side of the listing, underneath Permissions. If the object contains mesh, there is an indicator stating either Mesh: Partial Mesh or Mesh: 100% Mesh. If the object does not contain mesh, this indicator does not appear.

Adding items to your cart and giving gifts

To add an item to your cart:

Click the item you would like to buy to see the item's detailed description. Click Add to Cart or Buy Now.

Add to Cart saves your purchase to your cart for later payment and delivery. You can keep shopping for more items.

Add to Cart as Gift saves your purchase to your cart as a gift for another Resident. The item must cost L$1 or more for this button to appear. See Giving gifts below for more information about giving gifts.

Buy Now takes you directly to the checkout screen but does not affect or purchase the other items already in your cart.

Giving gifts

If you want to send an item to another Resident as a gift:

Follow the steps above to find the right gift. Click on the item and select Add to Cart As Gift. Enter the recipient's Second Life first name and last name and click Find Res >Important: If the recipient has Only a username, not a first name and last name, enter the username. The system will show the name as "username Resident."

Editing your cart and paying

When you've finished adding the items you want to buy to your cart, click the Cart button in the upper-right.

For each item, you can choose to:

Remove it from your cart by clicking the Remove From Cart link below the item name. Buy more or fewer of the same item by changing the number in the Qty box and clicking Update quantities. You can also update the quantity of individual items by clicking the update link next to that line item. Change the gift message (if it's a gift).

Once your cart is edited to your satisfaction:

Click the Check out button. Review your invoice, then click Buy now to purchase the items using your Linden dollar (L$) balance. .

After you buy

Items delivered to the Received items folder

After purchasing an item, log into Second Life. You will see a Received items section at the bottom of your Inventory window. Click it to expand the Received items pane and see items and folders you have recently received:

You may drag received items and folders from the Received items pane to one of your existing inventory folders.

If you are using a third-party viewer, the Received items pane appears as an inventory folder named Received items.

If your purchase was packaged in a box for delivery, you need to open the box before you can use the item. Learn about opening boxes.

If you bought clothing or other items to attach to your avatar, see Avatar attachments to learn how to use them.

Viewing your order history

You can see what you've purchased in your order history:

Log into the Marketplace. Click My Marketplace >My Account. On the left, select Order history. You can also check other account-specific information here.

Unreceived and accidentally discarded items

Has it been more than 24 hours since you ordered? If so, contact the merchant, explain what happened, and politely request redelivery of the item. If it has been less than 24 hours, please be patient and check again later. If the merchant doesn't respond, you can submit a support case requesting redelivery. Make sure to include the order number and the exact name of the undelivered item(s).

If you accidentally discard an item, contact the merchant, explain what happened, and politely request redelivery of the item. Often the merchant will understand and redeliver, especially if the item in question isn't "no-copy." Unfortunately, Marketplace deliveries, unlike items sent manually from another avatar, are completely discarded and can't be retrieved from the Trash.

Writing a review

To write a review for an item you bought:

Open your order history. Click Review Product in the order description for the item. Select the number of stars you want to give to that item, give your review a title, and write your review. Click Post your review.

Tips for writing relevant and helpful reviews can be found at Writing Item Reviews on the Marketplace.

Flagging an item on the Marketplace

If you find merchandise on the Marketplace that you think is in violation of the Marketplace listing policies, please flag it for review by customer support. To flag an item:

View the listing. Click Flag this item on the right. In the Reason for Flag dropdown, select your reason for flagging the item. In the Detailed Reason dropdown, select a more detailed reason. Click Flag to flag the item.

Email notification settings

You can change the types of email notifications you receive from the Second Life Marketplace:

Visit http://marketplace. secondlife. com. If you are not already signed in, click Sign in in the top right corner of the page. Click My Marketplace at the top of the page, then select My account from the dropdown menu. Click Email settings on the left side of the My account page. On the Email settings page, under Shopping Notifications, click On or Off next to each type of email notification to set your notification preference.

As a shopper on the Second Life Marketplace, you may receive the following types of email notifications:

Order confirmation Gift notification Redelivery notification Revenue distribution notification Revenue distribution addition/removal notification

Edited 4 hours ago by Jeremy Linden

Fixed typo

InstantWatcher is a better way to search for Amazon Prime and Netflix videos

The site helps you find what you want to watch

Find Ratings

Amazon Prime Instant Video and Netflix both provide a wide variety of movies and television shows on their video streaming services. But finding the show you want to watch can be frustrating. Why? Both services suffer from inept TV-screen interfaces that make it hard to search their video catalogs. And for both you must use your streaming video player's remote to hunt and peck each letter of the movie that you want to watch. If the title you want isn't available, you have to start all that hunting and pecking again. Amazon Prime and Netflix also let you search through a home page of movie icons representing each video, but that process is just as user-unfriendly.

Fortunately, there's a better way to sift through the thousands of titles they offer. InstantWatcher is plugged directly into the databases of both Amazon Prime and Netflix and offers a much more efficient, easy, and comprehensive video title search engine.

How do Amazon Prime and Netflix differ? Check the results of our video streaming face-off.

Easier filtering

InstantWatcher gives you the power to search in many different ways. For Amazon Prime, you can filter your options by specific title, 29 film genres, actor, popularity or new on streaming, maturity rating, standard or high definition video quality, or all titles arranged alphabetically. The system also makes recommendations.

The search engine for Netflix offers all that plus deeper search capability by 388 genres and subgenres, critic and audience ratings, popularity in the last 24 hours, and super HD and ultra HD video quality.

Greater transparency

While searching is better, InstantWatcher's service is more clear about the variety of shows that are available. For example, as recently as last February, Amazon was advertising "over 40,000 choices." After we published an article with InstantWatcher data in June, Amazon took the number out and instead told consumers it offered "thousands" of videos. The reason for the change? We pointed out to readers that according to InstantWatcher, Amazon actually offered far fewer movies than it claimed. Part of the reason for the discrepancy had to do with the fact that Amazon counted every individual episode of its TV series as separate titles, while InstantWatcher counts each TV series as only one title, which we think is more reasonable.

You can get the latest tally by clicking "all" on the menu bars. The last time we looked, Amazon Prime had 17,948 titles, while Netflix had 7,984 titles.

The wealth of data available through InstantWatcher can also help you assess quality. For example, only 20 percent of Netflix' catalog received user ratings of 4 or better, vs. 43 percent of Amazon Prime's catalog. In terms of video resolution quality, however, only 21 percent of Amazon Prime's selections were in high definition, while 80 percent of Netflix' offerings were in HD, superHD, or ultraHD.

One feature we liked, which is now missing from InstantWatcher, was access to the entire Amazon instant video catalog, which included 55,000 more non-Prime titles that required additional payment to buy or rent. We found that useful for efficiently shopping the pay streaming marketplace. But the full Amazon streaming video search capability will be back later this summer, according to Hoony Youn, a partner at Kaja Software, the Cambridge, Mass., company that created the site.

If you're streaming via your desktop or laptop, InstantWatcher lets you click through directly to Amazon or Netflix to play the video. Since you can't do that on your TV, we recommend that you use InstantWatcher on your laptop or a tablet to search for what you want to watch. Then, after you've made a decision, you'll still have to type the title into that still-awkward search tool on your video streaming player to watch it on your television.