Disqus - Latest Comments for Gwyneth Llewelyn

Re: Gwyn, you’re too smart | Baba Sucks

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 19:26:11 -0000

This is most embarassing. Eric, I'm your fan, not the other way round... Thanks in any case!

Re: Second Life: Web 2.0? | Baba Sucks

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 19:34:15 -0000

Baba, now you're going too far :) I'm blushing... "Who is Castronova?" For the ones that don't know, Castronova is the leading world expert on virtual world economics. Having written several papers on the subject, he is the reference on the way virtual world economies grow, expand, and become an embarassing aspect of the (real) world economy, since they show now huge figures (billions of dollars worth), and nobody really wants to listen to that... Castonova's only fault is not liking Second Life :) Somehow, in 2006, he's unable to ignore it, like he did before, shrugging it off as a "minor" MMOG (when it had less than 50,000 users). Now, as we slowly approach a million users, obviously he can't ignore us any more. It is interesting, though, how he now starts to understand what we SL residents have known for some years: that this is way more than just "another MMOG". Well, for me, it's important that he acknowledges it, and thinks about its meaning. So, yes, he is interesting, and I seriously encourage everybody to look him up and read what he has to say about virtual economies :) As for my rantings... I'm just a loudmouth. I can't even do my own accounting, much less understand how virtual economies work. Still, one can always aim to learn more :)

Re: I upgraded to WordPress 2.1

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 11:55:29 -0000

Wow, congratulations :) I have been (as always) reluctant to do another huge upgrade myself (again!), but it seems that I have to do it soon — I've been hit with huge amounts of spam lately, and apparently Wordpress 2.1 is able to reduce that more effectively. Also, I'm eager to see if the TinyMCE editor has solved the memory issues it has with Firefox 2.0+ (Firefox 1.5+ seems to work fine).

Nice work, Torley!

Re: I upgraded to WordPress 2.1

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 13:52:28 -0000

Taking the plunge and doing the upgrade myself right now... if I only understood why my site is soooooo slow...

Re: Diclonius days

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 22:31:18 -0000

Torley, tell us where you found that German town ;)

Re: Play YouTube Mobile videos directly in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:51:13 -0000

Fantastic tip, Torley, yay :) This is great! Of course, it means some tweaking to upload a video as a "mobile video", and I think that the quality will suffer a lot, but... it's for free :-D

Having lots of issues always to set quickly up a video streaming site for use in SL with enough bandwidth, I think this will be a rather great idea :)

Thanks for pointing this out to us :)

Re: The skies will return…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:02:15 -0000

Well, like starcomber said, if you're having serious WindLight withdrawals, after much pain and sweat, I managed to get a working compiled version of SL for the Intel Macs:

WindLight First Look Viewer for 1.17.0.12 (Mac OS X Intel only)

However, it's painfully slow, ie. about a fifth of the performance of the regular viewer. Avatars also don't get their eyes rendered, who knows why, lol — and the "fullbright" setting makes things "overglow". Still, it works, and is as stable as the regular SL viewer hehe (noooo I didn't fix any bugs, but very likely added a few ones by mistake when trying SL to compile :) ).

It's good enough to take a quick picture of a scene in all WindLight glory but not much else. Also, you'll have to be quick, since very likely, with the two upgrades promised for the week starting on the 25th, this version will very likely not work any more, and I'll have to see if I can compile everything again... hopefully with more luck this time and hitting the right setting to have it run faster :)

One truly appreciates the developers at LL that can so-very-quickly launch a new version if something goes wrong, sometimes even in the middle of a grid shutdown (this has been quite rare recently, but it used to happen) — I took almost 20 hours to figure out how to compile it :)

*waves to Gwygory* Good luck on fine-tuning MorphVOX for use in SL, I'm really glad that Screaming Bee allows you to "be around" in SL and give so many helpful tips to the overall community and also take feedback on what they'd like to have as new voice packs. Oh, well, I guess you're also "addicted" by now — LOL :) And let me know when you've got a Mac version available that turns my hoarse, smoker's voice with a Kyrgystan accent (or so they tell me!) into something recognisable as English :) haha

Re: Play YouTube Mobile videos directly in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 06:43:54 -0000

Aw, I just found out that you can't upload videos in the mobile format. What a pity! Specially because this is real streaming, not the crash-prone progressive download...

I can't seem to get blip.tv to work for me, so I guess I'm stuck with Google Video. Ah well. It's still far better than my own limited access to low-end and low-cost streaming servers :)

Re: Better Second Living through WindLight, glow, & sculpties!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 12:13:29 -0000

I don't know what's better, drooling over your ever-so-amazing pictures, or cry in frustration knowing that the next version of WindLight will never see the light of the day (pun intended!) before the end of summer...

Ah well, Torley, it's always nice to have something to look forward to :)

Re: I once was afraid of voice chat

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:11:01 -0000

I specially enjoyed reading about your "rite of passage", Torley, for two reasons obviously. One is purely philosophical, which actually comes from the ever-present discussion which obviously will never be settled by either side (we will still have people preferring to read books than watch TV in 2100!). The second reason, more dear to me, is that since we first met, you have certainly improved dramatically in your health and dealing with your hyperacusis.

So there is a "story within the story". One is the exoteric one — the visible one to everybody: from someone who was shy and in a sense "isolated" in an environment full of sound that you could not listen to (and I can't possible imagine how that can feel to somebody like you that made music your primary career and hobby), to someone that gradually, in little over three years, is fully able not only to deal with the hyperacusis, be the most social person in a huge environment (that is, ultimately, mostly about people, no matter how fun and entertaining the technology is!), and make it your secondary career (as the Most Optimistic And Positive Linden Employee Ever™ :) ) — while, at the same time, not neglecting your first passion (and interpreting and composing music again — a distant dream which you referred to on the first talks we had, soooo long ago) and acquiring a few new ones (becoming a successful teacher through your video production). I have no idea if any doctor is writing a doctorship's thesis about your incredible recovery (I know it's not complete!... but... what a difference!), but they should. A "miracle" happened along the way — obviously, by tapping your inner strength to allow the miracle to happen, but still, from an outsider watching you over the years — what a change!

This is something so encouraging to hear! Fortunately, you're not the only one, but very likely, the one that has been most open to discuss it freely to your vast audience.

This is, obviously, just marginally related to the discussion ;)

There is also an "inner" voyage, an even more deeper one, with an esoteric meaning. Somewhere in this ongoing process, "coming out" of your fears of using voice to become an enthusiastic voice adept, there was something experimented, that changed and transformed you. Voice chat was part of it.

I really don't know what to say about myself. I never liked voice chat on the Internet, or even on the phone (I might just be simply strange). I like presence — and SL is about presence — or, by contrast, imagination. Books and text have an appeal that voice doesn't. I never manage to follow podcasts, and hate to watch videocasts, when the focus is on the content and not the visuals. Obviously I like a good movie or a good TV show (even if I don't own a TV), but there has to be a perfect sync between the dialogue and the visuals to make it stimulating for me. It doesn't work one without the other. On the other hand, "dialogue without visuals" are more than enough — if they're written, since I can have my imagination fill in the gaps. Podcasts, voice conversations, simply don't work for me. Neither do audiobooks.

There is a third issue which most people don't realise. Video and audio production, to be successful, are made my professionals. If I listen to a radio show while driving, they know how to make it compelling, so that just the "right amount" of conversation goes through. Podcasts are too amateurish — people simply don't have the required skills to make voice compelling (unless they happen to be professional actors). They're too distracting with their "uh, huh, errr" and the confusing argumentation that circles around a subject which you never manage to understand what it is. That's why you have super communicators doing keynote speeches, but a poor teacher with little communication skills has to use a whiteboard or a slideshow presenter to get a message across to their boring students.

Text, however, allows your mind to drift and allows you to scroll back to see if things make sense. Text-based classes don't require 100% focus on what the teacher is conveying — if you get lost, you go back on the history and read it again. Granted, doing audiovisuals in a SL class also requires attention — you can't simply expect that what you're reading from half an hour ago still has any bearing with what you're watching on the screen (or being displayed with prims).

The experience I had with voice chat in SL is neither better, not worse, than what I had with all sorts of teleconferencing tools. Half the time is always wasted with people tweaking settings. When time counts, and you're not into SL "just for fun" and have an infinite amount of time to tweak things, voice is too disturbing. But even on the "just for fun and leisure" moments, voice is hard if you don't live isolated in a sound-proof cave. Try to have a romantic moment in SL with the trash truck passing on the street, the vacuum cleaner being turned on, children yelling, dogs barking, the neighbours screaming... it completely turns anyone off. Or when doing it during the night, when you have to whisper not to wake up your neighbours, if you're not lucky to live in your own villa somewhere remote, but are in a small flat late up at night where your neighbours expect you to be mostly silent. Even romantic moments on the plain old telephone should be savoured when you're alone, relaxed, on an environment where nobody's interrupting.

Or maybe I'm just being overly demanding — just because I live in a noisy envrionment by day, and a silent environment by night; just because I have used unsuccessfully three or four sets of headphones and microphones which always had problems; just because my computer seems always to be underpowered in the voice settings, always conflicting with other software, making my voice either sound thinny like Minnie Mouse or full of echoes and random noise to the point that nobody understands me through my thick accent — I don't know. I might just be extremely unlucky. But it always pains and bothers me to waste so much time with all that worthless technology when trying to communicate with other people — either professionally or in my scattered leisure time — and worry much more about why the technology is always failing on me, instead of focusing on the issues.

Ironically, some good friends of mine, with whom I managed to have fascinating and interesting text chat conversations, but who also have talked to me in chat, are absolutely boring that way :) which was a quite unpleasant surprise.

Being surrounded by bad experiences everywhere, I guess that I've been anything but convinced about the "usefullness" (or even "fun") of voice chat. I think that I remember just one good example — and we talk more over the phone than in SL — who is a specialist audio producer with access to US$5k worth of technology, to have the audio sound perfect. Well, I guess that if you're a sound engineer — or are friends with one, or have an audio studio at home, or at least access to it — voice chat can be a fulfilling, immersive experience, as deep as simple text is. For the unlucky types, I guess we're always going to sigh deeply and roll our eyes when the next person pops in and "insists" to use audio for whatever purpose they wish.

As an exercise, I once did a text transcript of a 40-minute audio conversation with a dozen participants (the conversation was not very intense). It took me two whole days (about 20 hours total), and I missed several words. Then, once having the whole transcript (originally in English), I translated it into Portuguese, for the benefit of some friends that have some difficulty in listening to English. Retyping the whole transcript took about an hour. I think it was then when I realised how different audio is from text, and I have my own theories (vaguely supported by neurological science) on how our brains work so differently when processing audio, compared to text. It's not surprising now to understand that we took 100,000 years to a million years to develop audio communication to an advanced stage, but just a few millenia to come up with written communication (in fact it appeared very shortly after we learned to live in societies depending on agriculture and started building the first cities). It really says something about our abilities and how different they are. It also explains why, although we have the technology for that, portable dictation tools to write letters automatically never really caught on (and the tools get better and better every day!), except on very specialised cases (people with some sort of inabilities).

But I digress! Essentially, I'm very happy to know that at least for you, Torley, "voice chat" was an "audio therapy" that enabled you to feel much better, deal even better with your health-related issues, and break free from a grey past and walk in the rainbow light of a bright new future where you can be much more yourself — happy, excited, optimistic, and enthusiastic about what will come next.

Just for that, I'm very thankful that voice chat was introduced in Second Life :)

Re: I once was afraid of voice chat

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:37:43 -0000

Dizzy's comments made me add another comment on my own. Yes, it also "confuses" me when the sound is not "in sync" with the image or the imagination. I keep unfocussing and going from one to the other. Watching a huge dragon talk in a small, squeaky, piping voice simply "confuses" me too much — unless I'm watching a Disney cartoon! — and I tend simply to turn the SL camera away. Good audio/video integration is hard to do well, and requires professional experience. It will sound (pun intended!) a bit like propaganda, but Dizzy Banjo — a professional and talented composer — managed to do a perfect integration of a "soundtrack composed for Second Life" on the Ruta Maya project (Mexico's presence in SL). I was very pleasantly surprised, but perhaps I should not be — Dizzy is, after all, a trained, skilled professional.

But he also has a point with the text-to-speech technology. No matter how good my "home studio" might be — with a sound-proof room and a lot of equipment — it will be very hard to get my avatar sound like a 30 year old Welsh woman with a distinctive pronounciation — and which is what people picture "Gwyn" to be in-world :) The technology is there — God knows that if you can get JayLo to sing, you can do anything with professional audio and sound engineers — but it's simply not accessible to the common user.

Text-to-speech, however, comes pretty close to that, even with the rudimentary tools we have today. By carefully selecting "voice sets" from companies like Acapela group or Cepstral you're starting to get pretty convincing results. Definitely not perfect, and still slightly "computer-sounding", but definitely becoming better and better. I admit that I have a license for one of those voices and use it routinely when building virtual world presences for a customer that "suddenly" needs a sound bite done in a hurry for some interactive device that we've just created, and we have no time to get a professional actor to record it for us. These text-to-speech engines are very useful for that!

Re: An illuminating tale of the history behind Second Life's facelights

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:53:06 -0000

Aha! An old dispute, and this one pitches three camps against each other: personal vanity ("we want to look beautiful, not like cartoons"), skin designers (who put hours of work on those marvellous skins and get Windlight to display them horribly), and builders (who experiment very carefully with lights positioned on scenes — which simply get ignored by 2-3 avatars wearing facelights in the same area).

It's not a peaceful issue. When the new lighting model came out, and even in spite of the limitations on just 6 lights on a scene, builders cleverly used lights to give proper "atmosphere" to the buildings. Before facelights became popular, I remember people like Scope Cleaver or Damien Fate showing me very detailed use of ambient lights. These builds looked gorgeous — as you walked across them, lights would subtly illuminate the scene realistically as you progressed through the several rooms. Some themed buildings even fared better: say, a hidden mountain cave where you're holding a light-enabled lantern, and would see eerie things as you progressed through tunnels with the day of light here and there showing through cracks on rocks, etc.

Then people started to wear facelights, and all the magic of these buildings disappeared. In fact, they became ugly, uninteresting, dull, and some clients even complained! In fact the only thing that happened was that a small group of 2-3 avatars wearing multiple facelights just stole all the lights in the scene. For them — and anyone else visiting those places — the scene became uninteresting, and they complained.

So what did builders do? Since they cannot control who's wearing facelights (or how many are wearing them), the choice is to use the "glow" attribute of prims, and 'bake' textures to look like they're being illuminated. Light and shadows become textures, and not dependent on the lighting model. Sure, it means that scenes don't look "dynamic", but they're just "scenario". You can still do some pretty effects that way, but it's far less realistic than using "real" ambient lights. But it's the only choice left!

It also raises the cost of creating complex environments — 'baking' textures to 'fake' lights and shadows require setting them up in something like Maya or 3DS and projecting lights and shadows, and then do cutting & pasting, bit by bit, into SL. Or, as an alternative, shadows and light elements become extra, useless prims, just to be able to give some slight 'illusion' of ambient illumination. We always had this choice in SL, of course.

It also means that "dark environments" will get less and less attention, since people wearing facelights will cause pools of light to spill over the scene. Yes, of course, there are better facelight designers than others, and it's not so awful in some cases. It still looks strange. Facelights work far better during the day, but people use them all the time.

It's a tricky issue, then. Lights were intended to be used by builders, not by avatars in their vanity. But the latter case has triumphed, because Windlight renders the avatar meshes in such a weird way. Vanity, in SL, tends to triumph always over building — people buy many more clothes than furniture in SL, for instance — so it's quite unlikely that this will change. OpenGL will not change the number of available lights (to, say, a 100!) in the near future due to the raw processing power needed to calculate ambient lighting, so there is just one option left:

Make avatar meshes render beautifully in Windlight :)

Re: News only matters if you want it to

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:55:16 -0000

I totally agree with you, Torley. "Free" information is not always "good" information; that's the major reason why I actually don't really subscribe to any RSS feeds. Instead, I rely on people — people I trust; friends, acquaintances, colleagues — who share similar interests with me to filter an astonishing amount of information that crosses their digital lives, and share with me what they found more interesting.

All these people are actually providing me a valuable service: I don't pay them (lol I hope they don't get any ideas from your post :) ) but they spend hours and hours wading through the news, and come up with just what might be interesting. Well, that's definitely a service worth selling. Right now, we rely on semi-automated tools (like, well, Google News) to sort out things for us, by profiling our interests and coming up with information that is a bit more useful than "raw data".

However, nothing beats human beings as pattern matchers. We're really so good at this. A typical example is someone saying "I have no interest in sex" and checking a box on an automated feed somewhere. But information fed by a human — as opposed to a 'bot — might read a sex-related article that might be interesting and feed it to me. I would have never found Regina Lynn's amazing articles (both at Wired and on her blog) if I hadn't some humans looking it up for me.

So, yes, paying for people to sort out information and present it in a way that interests me is a business opportunity. It used to be called "journalism" :) Who knows, it might become fashionable again... :)

Re: 2007/03/07/playstation-crushes-second-life-with-superior-platform/

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:53:23 -0000

So when exactly is this going to be launched?

Re: 2007/03/07/playstation-crushes-second-life-with-superior-platform/

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 11:40:42 -0000

AndrÃ©, embora estejamos Ã espera do Sony Home hÃ¡ dezoito meses, Ã© certo que serÃ¡ para PS3 apenas.

Re: 2008/08/02/sitemeter-down/

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:13:53 -0000

Thanks for the tip! I thought that IE (which I use seldom, since I'm a Mac user anyway) was infected by a virus, since my own blog and several others were failing for no apparent reason!

Congratulations for staying on top of this.

Re: New virtual world coming from Australia

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:11:13 -0000

I'm not holding my breath :) But competition is welcome. The key issue here, I believe, is duplicating people, not technology. Technology is easy to do — everybody has read four years of blogs, forums, and sites describing how "easy" a "group of script kiddies" are able to cook together something that could be the "next Second Life". Well, I tend to agree. The technology is the easy part. If you have a product to look at, and can grab an off-the-shelf set of libraries to do all the hard number-crunching work to put a 3D environment on your screen, well, it'll be no huge feat to design something from scratch that looks better.

Second Life suffers technologically too much for constantly reinventing the wheel in all places that are critical, while delegating to third-party tools the less important things (like in-world streaming or handling audio... or licensing the SpeedTree code but never actually deploying it). The only advantage to that is actually being able — at some stage — to open source almost all the code, which they've done so far with the client.

But... technology is just half the equation. Or perhaps 10% of it. Or, if we are really mean, the least important aspect of it. Whyville looks awful — like a "parody" of a MMOG — but it has 2 million users. Disney's own virtual world for kids is also as primitive, and probably has as many users, if not more. Habbo Hotel — needless to say, it's even more primitive, but way more successful. The examples of "primitive technology looking good enough" succeed because they focused on what would make them successful: the people.

So, we'll see what Outback can provide to the people. It certainly seems to have appealed to the technologists so far. But... to become mainstream, you need much more beyond technology :)

Oh, sadly, as part of the minority of 10% or so Mac users, this will be another MMOG I'll have to pass, and stick with SL for a few more years until Apple has, say, a 40% market share with their OS to make it worth development for it :)

Re: It’s time for a well-needed change…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 19:57:40 -0000

I know... there are still a few loose ends that need to be fixed on the interface... I'll be fixing them over the weekend, hopefully!

- Gwyn

Re: Lipsynching with Crazy Talk 4

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 17:33:22 -0000

Ack! Of course you're right, Torley — how silly of me! Apologies to moo Money for the typo.

Re: Lipsynching with Crazy Talk 4

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:36:13 -0000

Well, the Bedazzle group did get a special client that mapped media textures to avatar's faces, so we know it's *possible*. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to Ventrella's amazing physical avatars first, and we'll see what comes next. By 2010 I hope that LL will be able to implement avatars with hair growth groups and customisable meshes like under Poser 5 :) and morph targets for infinite variation on facial emotions — so you'd basically be able to express *anything*. They can do it easily — the issue is, of course, *performance*.

This would be the state-of-the-art of 2004 implemented in SL — so, yes, 2010 is a good date for that ;)

Re: Lipsynching with Crazy Talk 4

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 21:02:18 -0000

My apologies to everybody who did not manage to see the video. Seems that the built-in editor of WordPress is quite good at mangling the embedded objects so much, that they almost always become useless! From a working version that displayed correctly under all browsers, it refused to work on Firefox, to slowly degrade to not support any other browser but Safari (one of the least used browsers in the world, but I happen to be one of its regular users!).

After much tearing of hair (virtual hair, that is), I simply gave up. There is supposed to be a plug-in to make these things easier, but the ones that I've installed seemed to prefer to invent new and more creative ways of mangling embedded objects, so... you'll just get a plain, old-fashioned link that happens to work :)

Ah well. I'm always learning new things! Again, I'm sorry about that.

Re: Virtual worlds, yes, but real behaviour

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:31:45 -0000

What can I say more, Ordinal? I totally agree with you on *all* points!

In spite of what you said, A Tale of a Desert seems to be pretty popular. Eventually there are areas where you get better camera controls, who knows.

The social norms you allude to should really be more studied and researched. There is a good paper on that :)

Re: 300k

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 22:44:55 -0000

... and now we even have over 300,000 active users, with a bit over 700,000 total users, with more than 10,000 simultaneous ones... all that in just 2 months!

Re: The Big Controversies in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 13:39:19 -0000

Thanks, Boadi! I actually discourage anonymous comments for many reasons (I'm sorry about that), one of which is spamming, but with the increasing number of people using some sort of OpenID to sign on different blogs/wikis/forums, I thought I'd implement it as well (people can also sign up for just this blog, of course).

Ah, and the article is definitely far from "thorough", but at some point in time, I guess I can also get tired of writing :) There are many, many things that I've forgotten to mention, the most notable ones being:

- IP rights and how people have such a wrong idea about what they are or how they work
- Ethics, and community standards that change from community to community
- The approach towards commerce in SL (just barely mentioned on the "politics" paragraph)
- How much RL data should one reveal, or expect others to reveal (also just lightly brushed)
- Who does, indeed, make the rules in SL? (I have an unfinished article on that, sooooo...)

This just means I'll have some more work to do next week :)

Re: The Big Controversies in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 15:37:29 -0000

Thanks for your patience in reading it to the end, Torley :) (and BTW, nice Gravatar! :) :) ) Well, the new blog format is mostly a tweaked version of Lisa Sabin's Blossom Theme for WordPress, I guess that she is the one that has the merit of getting a rather presentable format for reading :)

As for publishing a book, ah well, I'd love to — it has been years since anything I've written has been put into "book" format — but I don't truly think there is an audience for that. Not yet! Let's see SL grow a bit more, perhaps to 10-15 million users, then grab some of the most interesting writers in SL and get Tim O'Reilly to publish it ;) Who knows, it might even sell more than 50 copies :)

Seriously now, I hardly have enough time to post articles here, much less to write a whole, serious book about SL... although... hmm... I might surprise you still with a different type of book ;)

I'm keeping it a secret for now, just to add some spice — watch this space in 2007 :)

Re: More SL magazines — and their struggle for an audience

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 15:50:59 -0000

Congratulations on "In The Grid"'s opening!

Re: The Big Controversies in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 18:55:55 -0000

Just to clarify, Prof. Beliveau, the 4 roles are suggested by Jon Seattle and not by Anshe Chung :)

The 4 roles are also *not* isolated boxes; most people will fall into several categories at the same time. The categories can be misleading. A "business owner" can be anything, from a teacher, to a freelance DJ, up to a lady of negotiable virtue :) — just because most people think of business owners as land barons or shop owners, this is not so easy like that. Similarly, a builder can be a community builder, and don't know a thing about gluing two prims together.

It's most likely that educators/teachers will fall in the category of either builders or business owners. Most educators/teachers either teach because they love to teach — in essence, their act of teaching is its own compensation, and thus, they would be classified using Jon Seattle's taxonomy as "builders". Other educators/teachers will teach because that's their job (and we certainly see that also happening quite a lot in SL!) — they would most certainly be classified as "business owners" in that taxonomy.

Now that you mention this aspect, I guess I'm not a "pure" Debater, as I thought I was, since indeed I like to teach in SL, for the mere sake of teaching. This is the hallmark of a Builder. So I guess I'm also a Builder, after all.

In any case, Jon's taxonomy is certainly open for discussion :)

On the community/business rhetoric issue, you might find Henrik's blog-cum-wiki at http://slcreativity.org interesting. Search for his immensely interesting articles on Immersion vs. Augmentation — which fall neatly into the community/business dichotomy, I think, just with a slightly different emphasis.

Re: The Big Controversies in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 07:19:14 -0000

Excellent way to take my words and place them upside down, Prokofy :)

Actually, this article is about *questions*, not answers. People should ask the questions themselves and have an opinion on what their answer is for them, personally. Sometimes, though, people don't even know what questions to ask!

So, yes, people should look at LL and ask themselves the following:

- is LL too deep into "gamer culture" to the point that they aren't able to change to corporate culture instead?
- what does "favouritism" mean, from the perspective of an immersionist (this is a country) and an augmentist (this is a platform for content creation), using Henrik's definitions?
- will a company made of 99 kids and one adult be able to survive beyond the year 2007? If yes, is that an emotional "yes", or one based on researched data?
- can a company and their closed software product be "dictated by their users" (in the sense that they participate in the decision processes, hopefully in some sort of democratic way), is "crowdsourcing" the only possible way of participation, or do other models exist? (open-source, for instance, and even that means different things for different people)
- how professional is a company that uses "The Tao of Linden" to control their development process? Is inventing a new business model, just for the sake of it, a good idea; or would a more conventional model bring better results? If so, why?
- does the LL culture influence the way SL works, to an extent that at some point, only the ones aligned with LL's ideologies will thrive, excluding the rest of the world? If so, what can we do to prevent that? Is that even possible?
- will Second Life be *one* Metaverse or a plethora of metaversettes, each with its own rules?
- is *Linden Lab* creating the Metaverse, or are *we* creating it using the tools that Linden Lab provides us?
- and finally, will Linden Lab still be around in a year or so?

I just ask the questions. People are expected to find the answers for themselves. You have your own; I have mine (which, on most of the above questions, are even overlapping, although not on all); I invite others to answer the questions for themselves. Providing all the answers would be presumptuous on my part; people have different expectations on Second Life, so it's unfair to tell people what they should think. Instead, I encourage people to think by themselves, to compare SL to other, successful models, and see the differences, and why they might affect the present and future of SL. But it's up to them to take their own conclusions.

And yes, I do "forgive" Linden Lab quite often :) I have a terrible shortcoming in my personality: I truly believe that people should learn from their mistakes first, and only from what other people tell them second. You might label me as subscribing to some sort of post-modernist education school. As a matter of fact, while I'm quite conservative in terms of teaching children under age, once you're an adult, you should be able to figure out things on your own, test them in the field, fail, make mikstakes, and learn from the mistakes you make. Ok, so, LL is "playing around" with a quarter of million people, and eventually they might fail because noboy told them what to do. It's true — I'm rather passive in that regard. All I try to do is to incite open-mindedness: "look, there are other ways of doing the same thing, why don't you give them a try?" If the answer is "no way, I'll do it stubbornly *my* way", it's their fault.

And this is ultimately what CAN happen to LL. They're stubbornly following "their" way. If it works out as they want, great. But it is not the *only* way. Learning to adapt to a plethora of opinions is not an easy task for whomever is at the helm of Linden Lab. All I try to do is to point out to them that there *are* alternatives, and they should look at them.

But if they don't... and if their model works out well, in spite of everything... well, I'd look silly :) So I don't "blame" them for not doing things like "I" would do, if I'd be walking in their shoes, I just provide input, ideas, concepts, models, and watch what they're doing with interest. Who knows, their way might even be best. After all, after 7 years, they're still around and have three quarter million users. That should tell us something. They can't be *totally* wrong.

Re: “Second Life is Web 2.0 more than anything else”, says Castronova

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 19:40:01 -0000

Hmm, an island for Terra Nova... that would be something! But didn't you also get the feeling that the people of Terra Nova are completely missing the point somehow?

I can't hardly blame the academics. When things change so much, it might mean for them to "move and adapt" — or be forgotten in the ruthless game of academic politics. So it's far easier to grab a floating log and abandon the sinking ship :)

Well, I can't hardly say that all MMORPGSs are a "sinking ship", of course, since every week or so, another 3 or 4 new MMORPGs get announced. Many even survive 3-4 months of being online. A few make it to a whole year. And giants like World of Warcraft will keep growing and growing — but perhaps not exponentially so. We'll see.

In the mean time, we'll watch them from our window set in Second Life :)

Re: Reuters in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:21:36 -0000

My apologies to the Sheep (meh!) for not mentioning their work with Reuters on this. Thanks to Satchmo Prototype for the correction.

Sorry guys, and excellent work :)

Re: One million of us!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 19:27:05 -0000

Pathfinder says on the Linden Blog that the mythical million was reached on October 18, 2006 at precisely 8:05:45 AM (Second Life Time).

:)

Re: Competition to Second Life®

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 15:13:11 -0000

Oooh I haven't re-read my own year-old article in such a long time!!

Did we really only have 60,000 users back then? :) Well, we DID fullfill the dream of having a million users before the end of 2006 ;)

What strikes me as very surprising is that the very same issues are still unresolved after a year of continuous development and growth EXCEPT for new group tools. This is very, very sad. It'll be interesting to analyse LL's development on SL in October 2007 and see what has improved since then.

And no, I'm not an MBA (sadly, I can't afford that), but well, I used to do dozens of SWOTs for small and middle organisations where I happened to work with at a management level... ;) The "MBA gobbledigook" tends to rub off. :)

And thanks very much for your comment!

Re: Lipsynching with Crazy Talk 4

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 08:26:35 -0000

Hmm it seems that I've managed to get the video link to Google Video working. Hooray for WordPress!

Re: Learning the lesson about copyrights

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 05:16:16 -0000

Excellent insightful comment, Extropia. Indeed, I had completely forgotten that. In some cases, it's the ones that rip off textures from web sites, inspire clothes on RL brands, copy skins from others and use Photoshop to do, uh, "derivative works", create their houses, furniture, vehicles or weapons to be reproductions of RL ones, as faithful as possible, who stream music copied from several sources, who are now suddenly in the limelight as "victims"...

One very intelligent person told me recently that only the "mediocre creators" (or those lacking confidence in themselves) are truly worried. The good ones — like in real life — will not worry: their most important asset is their minds and their ability to *create*. And these cannot be reproduced :)

Re: Upgrading Second Life, and Why It Is So Hard To Do So

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 05:52:23 -0000

They might "outsource" time... they have recently announced that they're willing to get submissions for software development companies to work on specific aspects of their code.

Re: Upgrading Second Life, and Why It Is So Hard To Do So

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:59:59 -0000

SL never ceases to amaze us, doesn't it? :)

Some further thoughts on this

odysseus, take a look at the UUID algorithm. It's a quite complex one, and all the "bits" of the UUID are generated automatically — all of them. There is no "prefix" to identify "this is an UUID generated from Microsoft, this is one from Linden Lab". One could however imagine a model where the first, say, N letters in the UUID specify a server/subgrid/whatever, and the rest is a "restricted" UUID, randomly generated.

Sadly, this means inventing a new algorithm "on the spot", which very likely will not be random, neither guarantee uniqueness. Worse than that, how would LL deal with the existing keys — specifically, those that are hard-coded inside so many scripts? (mostly sound and textures, but sometimes avatar keys as well). Not to mention that this would also break all existing third-party websites which relies upon LL's UUIDs to be fully compliant with the OSF standard.

Of course, one could develop a two-step process — generating a new key and see if they "match" with any existing key. So all keys that are "unmatched" would belong to the "first grid" (if the algorithm generates an existing key, it'll be repeated until it generates one that does not exist yet); all new keys would have the first N bits "tagged" to mean something (like belonging to a specific subgrid). Assuming that LL can indeed develop their own derivative algorithm, and validate it mathematically to generate enough random and unique keys, this could be possible to do, although, strictly speaking, it would be a mess :)

Re: Upgrading Second Life, and Why It Is So Hard To Do So

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:22:21 -0000

haha Brace — you're most welcome to write as much as you wish, as always :)

I do agree with the issue of the "communication problem" of Linden Lab. They have the most amazing product that was ever invented for a computer, well, since DOS 1.0 came out for the PC :) But sometimes they haven't a clue how to "sell" it. Some of the Lindens tend to say "oh, we never do presentations of Second Life like the other companies do, we just show them machinimas". And that's mostly because it's hard to explain what SL is about. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie is worth a million :)

Re: Upgrading Second Life, and Why It Is So Hard To Do So

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 19:11:16 -0000

Andrew, thanks for coming here :) We're honoured by your presence!

Lex, last time a rumour was spread about the way the asset server was done in the past, it was a very, very easy system, which didn't even require a "database". But basically it was simply a collection of pointers to assets stored in a sim. Of course, the whole asset server got a major overhaul, as did the inventory servers, and it's not easy to understand how things might have changed.

Still, one thing is certain. Upload a texture to a sim, it'll load way faster there (even a very busy one). After uploading it, rez it anywhere else — even an empty sim! — and see the difference. With enough time and patience, and enough uploads, this seems quite consistent — textures (and sounds, and animations...) load for the first time much faster on the sim they were uploaded.

Now this can be due to two things:
1) The texture is immediately cached locally and then goes to a central server (possible)
2) The texture stays locally, and just a reference is made to it on the central asset server (more likely)

Of course, after the cacheing kicks in, in theory at least, you'll be able to rez things fast, no matter where you currently are. In the past, I tended to upload everything on the then-new Sandbox Island (as opposed to my residence at the time, which is on a painfully slow early sim), and it was quite a difference...

In essence, it's more reasonable to have the assets distributed among 5000 servers, each with its own database, and just have the pointers to the assets on the asset server, instead of storing everything there. With "hundreds of millions" of objects (I'm wildly quoting Philip from his last or before-last TH) I find it hard to imagine that LL has put all the assets on the same server – specially taking into account textures, which will take vast amounts of bandwidth to connect with all other servers...

Re: Secrets to Success in Second Life®

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 20:47:18 -0000

Look for the link above for a very nice translation of the key parts of the article in Spanish :)

El link arriba es una traducción en español de una parte del artigo.

Re: Second Life Client Becomes Open Source

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 11:18:31 -0000

Well, we'll have to wait to see what happens. It will take at least a few months until people are really able to look into the source code seriously and understand the way it works.

Re: Breath-taking improvements and how to implement them

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 15:26:48 -0000

BTW, in case you're wondering, to enable shiny reflections all you need to do is to go to the Client menu, select Rendering, and then Dynamical Reflections.

If you don't have a "Client" menu, you can enable it with the Ctrl-Alt-D key combination.

Re: Breath-taking improvements and how to implement them

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 14:06:42 -0000

Ah, but the issue here is having two different branches, Starcomber :) One is for the clueless newbie — install it, and it will work for you. If the performance is too bad, well, buy a faster computer — the usual answer for anything that works "out of the box".

The second branch, however, is different. That one is supposed to be the unstable and "not for casual users" branch: the ones willing to trade-off a 'flawless' installation by one which is feature-rich and requires a lot of tweaking and knowledge to have it run properly.

I also think that Linden Lab designs awful interfaces, but at least they make pretty reasonable renderers. They're also getting better and better on the way they handle "reasonable defaults". After I wrote this entry, a good friend of mine, an IT researcher, tried to use the First Look viewer, and found out that lots of things — like rippling water — weren't even checked. After some checking we managed to find out that he hadn't the latest and greatest graphics drivers for his card. We could only assume he was using the Windows defaults or an outdated driver.

Now... the amazing is that SL worked at all, in spite of LL's comments to the contrary ("SL does not work except with the latest drivers for your card"). Although the "latest drivers" will naturally allow people to have access to many more features and increased performance, SL apparently is even able to handle outdated/wrong drivers as well, and still do something about it. I find this outstanding work, and "the way things should be".

As for the overall interface... well... that deserves one way longer analysis on what is wrong with LL's design :) People can really appreciate things like Windows 98 after looking at the quirky, unprofessional, clumsy, and badly implemented interface of LL's. The way they handle the focus right now — differently from before, and differently from the "beta" Focus Viewer; a mix of the worse of both! — is really less than adequate. I totally agree with you on that, and it certainly the interface requires a lot of improvement, which we'll very likely never see from LL but perhaps from the open source community in a year or two...

Re: Attempting to update to WordPress 2.1

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:02:02 -0000

Ok, tag clouds are operational. Whew. That was hard! As a side-effect, by looking at the logs, I noticed something weird was going on with the Dreamhost server I use. After reporting the errors I saw — related to the Zend Optimiser — they fixed it in, what, 10 minutes? Half an hour? I have no idea, but it was very, very quickly done. And guess what? Performance on my site has increased 4-10x! WOW.

This makes me more confident that I picked a rather good provider :)

Re: Breath-taking improvements and how to implement them

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:13:53 -0000

BTW, there are now some changes on the way this feature gets enabled. You need to go to the Debug Settings (from the Client menu) and search for a property called RenderDynamicReflections and turn it from "FALSE" to "TRUE". LL said that they didn't wish that such an "unstable" option was so easy to add from the Client menu... although, depending on how you define "unstable", it works rather well, even if it consumes quite a lot of CPU on my poor old PowerBook G4 :)

Re: The “SL Killer”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:04:42 -0000

Hehe :) The trouble is, their would-be competitors are all headed by the Pointed-Hair Boss, even if they have developers as good as Dilbert...

On a side note, I completely left out the discussion on Raph Koster's upcoming Areae virtual world. It deserves perhaps more attention than the short paragraphs I wrote about it on SLOG.

Re: The Schism Around Voice: Multicasting vs. Broadcasting

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:28:15 -0000

There is indeed a big difference in stating "anyone can do anything" in Second Life and saying that "anyone has the chance (or opportunity) to do anything, if they have the required skills". Very good point. Speaking for myself again, I'm also completely useless as a builder, and a very lousy (and lazy!) programmer anyway.

For a discussion between augmentism vs. immersionism, see SL Creativity, which is, in my opinion, the best explanation so far of the two viewpoints on the issue. I'm just following the lead here :) Lys Muse, the author of SL Creativity, has explored the issue much further.

As for myself, Extropia, I'm going to be a bit more patient. I want to watch what is going to happen — you may call me a masochist perhaps, but I really do have a cat's curiosity in seeing a new thing unfold and see what it leads to. Slowly, I'm picking up groups of people that will live on the voice-impaired ghetto, and we'll see how many there are going to be, and how long we'll survive in this new world. I might start wearing a yellow star on my chest and use as title "Second Class Resident" and post some provocative thoughts on my Profile. "Voice-impaired people also have rights — stop the discrimination NOW", that sort of thing.

It'll be an interesting exercise to see how long that will last. I expect that at some point there will be strong peer pressure to let the matter drop, and well, after that, it might really be time to leave as well. But I'm obviously going to stay around as long as I'm allowed.

Re: The Schism Around Voice: Multicasting vs. Broadcasting

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:31:14 -0000

An interesting side-effect of the introduction of voice in SL is that it will be freely available on the mainland (I expect Linden Lab to upgrade their own servers!) but only available on private islands if people pay the extra cost of upgrading them to the latest hardware which can support voice. One can only wonder what that might mean for the overall land business: "Buy this voice-enabled plot!" will probably become a new marketing strategy...

Re: The Schism Around Voice: Multicasting vs. Broadcasting

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 21:24:40 -0000

Let me try to summarise both Ashcroft's and Ordinal's points (with apologies to both of you for being so brief :) ):

Ashcroft: "SMS is more important for mobile phone operators than voice" (fact, not wishful thinking)

Ordinal: "There are so many good reasons for text over voice, why will voice wipe out text?"

Ashcroft's fact is unarguable; SMS messages are, these days, the core stream of revenue of mobile phone operators, a fact I've once found out when my boss pointed out to me that all phone calls internal to our business subscription plan were basically "for free", but SMS wasn't, and I had a huge bill on my account because that simply didn't make any sense to me. SMS is one side-technology that was never meant to be used in 'mainstream' mobile phones, and its impact was totally underestimated by the designers of mobile communications.

It's true that SMS is indeed the core revenue of mobile operators. It is also used for asynchronous communications, like Ashcroft mentioned — calling someone up while they're on a meeting is rude, but sending an SMS is not (just like email vs. a regular phone call). So it's used by high school students during the classroom as well as for business managers for their work. Also, no sane mobile operator will ever think of "disabling" text on their phones — rather the contrary, they keep using it for more and more revenue. Germans pay their supermarket bills by using SMS. Others download ringtones and subscribe to information on sports events, weather, or stock exchange markets. SMS is here to stay.

However, typing on a phone keypad is cumbersome — way worse than on a keyboard. So, while SMS will definitely continue to be used (and more and more), as a means of "pleasant communication", it has only marginal success. Sure, young lovers will send romantic messages several times during the day; but are they engaging in cyber-romance, like they do in SL? Not really. There are no equivalents of "SMS Chat Rooms", although several have (even successfully) played with that concept — using, say, SMS to send messages to a videotext-enabled TV channel, for example. But the scope is limited as a means for "almost-real-time" communication.

If we compare SL with 'games', well, the focus is very different. There is no question that people socialise on WoW or on any other MMORPG; in fact, since the overall number of users of all MMORPGs outpace SL's own userbase, it's fair to say that more people socialise on MMORPGs than on SL — and many are obviously using voice. However, "games" have a limited advantage when using voice (although I assume that coordinating teams on a real-time battle are far easier using voice; my younger brother, a die-hard fan of America Online, does that all the time using voice. Strangely enough, I spend more time with him on MSN chat that on the phone :) ). For most non-socialising uses of MMORPGs, voice is not a huge advantage, and it might even become distracting when fighting that Ogre and having your sweetheart wishing to talk with you; it simply breaks your concentration too much.

However, when the focus is on socialising events, the reverse is true. A 15-minute event using voice becomes an hour if you just use text. Obviously, during that hour, the whole audience is doing 4 things at the same time (ie. chatting with friends — on text), so, in effect, you're not "wasting" time, but effectively multitasking. For the "speaker", though, the time required is much higher! They'll take four times as longer to write the whole thing. Nevermind that at the end everybody will have a text transcript — which might take you an hour to write and summarise afterwards. The "immediacy" of voice is unquestionably easier to use — specially when we look at the Y Generation, which has uncannily short attention spans, and they have no patience to type and type.

Similarly, although you can, in an hour, spend your time flirting with 4 different people in private IMs, you can only talk to one person in the same period — but what is the more fulfilling experience? Nevermind the difficulty of having "wrong" body language when talking to an avatar — we're used to flirt (or have phone sex) over the phone, and can cope very well.

I've been a few times over to the Voice Beta Grid, trying to see the changes in interaction that are already occuring. The Voice Beta Grid is, of course, an extreme example: people only go there to try out voice chat, so that's all they do. So, they stand around in a circle, often not even looking at each other, and they're just yelling "can you hear me?" or "hi, who are you?" and "that's me, you moron" :) There is no "avatar body language" at all.

Now contrast that to a regular chat in SL using text. People have emotes ("gestures") and use them all the time. You can look at someone and you know they're not paying attention — either because they're IMing others, or you can watch their head moving around, and know that they're activating menus on their screens. Picking up "avatar body language" is an art that all of us learn after a few months. People invite others to sit down, facing each other, because you can then look at what they're typing (and when they're typing). Eye-to-eye avatar contact is important — as a study has shown — which sounds quite weird when you think about it. But — we're humans, and we need to pick up clues. A smiling avatar shows that you're not angry when typing something blunt.

Bartle, however, is very blunt when he says that all this is irrelevant for newbies. They couldn't care less about that. With voice, you don't need body language. All you really need is a headset and talk. I agree that it's harder to setup for someone who never played with one, and is just used to phone calls with "perfect" sound and no problems (we've evolved phone technology for over 130 years :) — VoIP has little more than a decade!). But — harder compared to what? The SL interface is so clumsy, that if you have mastered it, figuring out how to use a headset is childish compared to SL :)

I still think that the issue here is to understand that things will not happen "overnight". I can imagine that good old friends who have shared something in SL for a year or three will stil use text chat for most of their interaction. And one day one of them, in the middle of an interesting discussion, will just say: "oh, let's forget about it, this is a fantastic discussion we're having, I'm tired of typing, let's use voice instead" and the other one will answer "sorry, I don't do voice". Why not? There might be a billion reasons, but at that moment a huge barrier has suddenly separated those two friends forever — just because for one, using voice is as natural as doing a phone call, but the other one is not willing to do the same. This will break their relationship — or, at least, change it. "If you're in SL, why don't you use voice?" The doubt will arise — are they hiding anything? Do they lisp? Do they have an ugly voice? Are they of the opposite gender or a different age? These questions will remain unanswered — but there will always remain that doubt: "this person doesn't really want to give me their RL identity — what are they hiding from?"

Voice breaks anonymity to a degree that it would be considered a ToS violation – or at least a violation of the community standards — but it'll become "normal" to invade other people's privacy and "forget" about the silly "anonymity" in SL. And this will happen over time. Not by June 2nd. But over time, gradually, and at an accelerated pace.

Think about the impact that Sony Home will have, when everybody who bought it (which, of course, is voice-enabled) will leave it, bored that they can't create anything, and try SL next. The "Sony Home Generation" will naturally use voice in SL. And they will come mentally prepared to do all their communications using voice; text chat will simply be an alien environment for them. The more successful Sony Home (and others...) become, the more easily people will use voice-enabled SL and forget about text chat — except, of course, when using it like they use SMS: "Hi, are you busy, or can we talk over voice?"

Ordinal, you and I are deviant aberrations of corporate culture :) I fought for about 2-3 years on a brand-new Internet company that I had founded to erradicate completely "voice" communications in the business. Voice is the worst nightmare in a small company — it only has disadvantages for business, and no advantages at all. When a customer calls you up, you need to give answers immediately — which you might not be prepared to give. You can just call one person at the time; I tended to tell the phone operator to send me a message via ICQ (it's all that existed at that time) to ask me first if I wasn't on the mobile phone before she transferred the call. Worse than that, phone communications are expensive — think about call centres, and what it costs to staff them. After these 2-3 years of "customer education" they've started to learn a few things: with a phone call, you don't get a transcript, so you never know if someone got your instructions right — so it was better to send an email. An email got an answer at odd hours during the night; a phone call would normally be useless (if you didn't have the answer ready — "I'll send you an email with the answers") during office hours, and unthinkable outside them. After a period of time, it was corporate policy to answer all emails (or ICQ IMs, or forum posts...) for free, but charge for phone support — because one operator could easily handle 10 or 12 users on ICQ, while just one on the phone, and — since you got a transcript — you only needed to explain things once. Most clients would forget what we'd told them, and they would call back later, again and again, to go through the same routine.

I have a huge amount of anedoctes on the use of the "voiceless" office. In 1994, I hired system analysts, programmers, technicians, and even secretaries using IRC — and a few emails. If they didn't use IRC or email, they would be worthless anyway — but at least they got some basic training on the "text-based" tools. I still hire some programmers that way; we have very close relationships on complex projects, and I have no idea on how they sound on the phone or how they look like, or if their picture on MSN is their RL picture. Who cares! I never did... I just needed them to work, not to smell their bodily odours :)

So, customers started to use ICQ because they would be "always in touch" with the company's representatives — while if they used phone calls, they had to fight at the incoming calls queue, and very likely never get through. At meetings, people were forbidden to pick up phone calls (that's both rude for the attendants, who will lose their time while they patiently waited for their colleague to hang up the phone). They could, however, bring their notebooks or laptops and answer emails and IMs on meetings. After a while it was pretty worthless to do the meetings anyway; a chatroom was enough; and to socialise, you would simply take a break, have lunch together, or something much more pleasant than "staying in a meeting".

There are many more silly cases like that. I've oriented a trainee for 6 months and we never met physically; all work was done on MSN and email. Prospective customers who insisted on physical meetings or phone calls would very likely never complete a purchase; they were far more likely to have the meeting as an excuse to leave their offices for a couple of hours :) Even with my soulmate, I often sent IMs to tell that I would soon be back home — each one of us would be at their respective offices, and if we couldn't get an IM through, we'd send SMS instead. I still keep in touch with former colleagues and friends — and even family! — after years and years, and chat with them every day, if they're on an IM system. For me, it's like they have never left my sphere of acquaintances — even if we haven't physically seen each other for a while. As said, I talk to my brother and cousin more over MSN or Gtalk than on the phone or physically; I think I haven't even seen my cousin in two or three years. Or was it four? But we talk every day!

So, every time I start a new company, the first thing to do is get rid of the nasty "voice" habit, and start putting productivity back on the priorities. Customers, for instance, are forbidden to phone me. When they complain, we tell them how much they have to pay for the "privilege". Instead, they have my email, MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo, whatever they prefer — as well as web-based forms to contact sales and obviously support. They grumble and complain a lot, but they quickly understand how so much more efficient the system is — instead of trying to call over hours and hours, or even days, and finally go through, they just send an informal SMS or email: "help, we need the proposal for tomorrow!!". And they'll have it in a few hours.

Sadly, this is anedoctal evidence. The vast majority of all companies in the world get "scared" if they only have a "virtual" contact with someone, specially if it's not even voice, but just text. It's a question of mentality. You "trust" people more if they wear nice, expensive dresses with quality fabrics and a known brand and have a formal hairdo (or a suit and a tie for the males, and having shaved in the morning). Old habits die hard, and we were educated — by tradition — that a "sloppy" person is "untrustful". In this age of nerds and geeks, however, the reverse is true — the more sloppy your geek, the more likely he's a genius that doesn't care about personal appearance. So, for people like me, all that is really moot — I don't need to know how people look like to trust them, but... how many of the 6 billion people in the planet think the same way?

Just a handful.

Of course, naturally enough, when I started to use SL, all this started to make a lot of sense to me. So people need to trust a nice visual image? Well, you just need a well-groomed avatar :) It's far cheaper! No need to use eye concealers or face scrubbers to look "fresh and clean" every day, and outfits in SL never get dirty or wrinkled, your office always has the latest style in furniture, and the view is always nice. Just like the first businesses on the Web tried to get the best-looking site to impress customers (if you care about your site, you care about your customers!), in SL you can do exactly the same. It's the same thing!

So, voice breaks all that. For friends, this means that I'll be yawning late at night (or too early in the morning) and I have an ugly voice, so they'll have a hard time to figure out what I'm saying; for business it's even worse, although when "in my best" I can be pretty convincing in my argumentation, I can't do that when I'm sleepy, groggy, distracted, or worried about something else. But in SL I'm "always in my best" — as on emails, IMs, SMS, or any other text-based medium. I can appear "untiring and nice" all the time — while definitely my tired or bored voice will immediately betray me :) In RL, at least I can "return a call" when I need to prepare myself — get some documents ready, finish a proposal, or do a short slideshow presentation. But it won't be the same in SL — this being part of the fast-paced Internet, people will demand the same in-world as well. I can say "sorry, I only saw your IM now" but I can't say "sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm busy". Why? People pick up the phone at all moments, don't they? That's why they have mobile phones , right?

As you see, this can go on and on, and worth a whole book on business practices. "How Phone Calls Destroy The Business Environment". It'll be a nice book to write on the subject!

Will anyone read it? Naaw. Nobody believes in the voiceless office.

But people would probably download the podcast...

Re: Home: No Place Like SL?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:19:24 -0000

Extropia, from the point of view of the consumer/entertainment market, I think you might be hitting the mark with your essay. After all, if people want pure entertainment, they turn on the TV, which has high-quality content targeted to the mass market. They don't hang around on YouTube and the amateur videos, which are boring to everybody except the ones doing them :)

Sony Home is, however, not being creative. They're just replicating what There.com or IMVU (among many others, like Kaneva) have been offering for ages (and with at least half a million users together): visually appealing content in 3D chatrooms. So will Sony Home be more successful than the rest? Very likely. Sony is Sony — we can't ever forget what's behind that, a huge megacorp with unlimited marketing resources. I can very well imagine that Sony Home, the ultimate 3D chatroom for the PS3, will grow to have dozens of millions of users very, very quickly.

The trick for success on virtual 3D chatrooms is actually simple:

1) Make it insanely easy to use;
2) Make content as high-quality as you can;
3) Allow people to "personalise" (not create!) their "virtual space" as much as possible;
4) Market it aggressively.

Sony can do all the above, far better than There.com, IMVU, or any of the tiny startups. The only big contender would be Google Virtual Worlds (which very likely be something similar) and the yet-inexisting-and-who-knows-if-it-ever-would-be -developed Microsoft Metaverse or Apple's iWorld; they would be the only ones to be able to "threaten" Sony, since they can also develop similar products. Microsoft and Apple, of course, since they control their own OSes, would have an advantage over Google; but we all know our history lessons, and Google, in spite of that apparent disadvantage, did manage incredibly well :) (iWorld, of course, would be much cooler!)

And then what? Second Life is not "only" a "virtual 3D chatroom". The huge step in understanding that the key building block of a "metaverse" – as opposed to a chatroom — is user-generated content. Yes, obviously, only 10% of the people will generate content for the remaining 90% — but that's the ratio you have for producers and consumers iRL anyway!

User-generated content is far more important in defining the metaverse than most people think. The Web would not exist if we wouldn't be able to create our own websites if we wished. We all know what happened to "controlled content" (ie. in the hands of a company that controls the environment): look at Microsoft Network (which survived for 6 months in 1995, and then clever Bill simply joined the Internet bandwagon). AOL took some more time to understand that, but eventually they went the same route — as did CompuServe.

All of these companies/services thought that they would reap more benefits if they could only use high-quality licensed content in a closed environment, tightly controlled with high licensing costs.

And all those business models ultimately failed. Who pays this day for a proprietary browser to Microsoft Encarta, if you can use the Wikipedia instead? Oh, well, the usual argument is that Encarta is a professional encyclopedia, and Wikipedia isn't — but is that really so? How many people still buy Encarta, anyway? On the other hand, in spite of internal troubles, Wikimedia did raise a million dollars from donations, in four weeks, by the end of last year.

In the battle of closed content versus user-created content, the lesson is called Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a nice buzzword, and perhaps nobody really knows how to profit from it (except through Google AdSense), but the truth is that it's dethroning every other "proprietary" and "closely controlled" models around. If you can't read it on subscription-paid Wall Street Journal, you can get the same information from a blog of a business analyst somewhere in New York, London or Tokyo.

User-created content goes even further. It's the basis of an open economy — good old market forces at play. We can watch it as we see content and services being sold by the millions in SL, every day (and these days, these millions are US$). Oh, I'm sure that Sony will get millions from Sony Home as well (if they didn't, why are they launching it anyway), by selling licensed, closely controlled content. But... who will set the prices? Sony will. By contrast, in SL, it's the market that dictates the prices. And these are tied to quality — and advertising, of course (advertising, in return, will provide a new service).

Think of the whole chain of value inside SL. If you wish to launch a new product, you need to hire someone who is knowledgeable in SL — ie. has the required skills and talent to develop your product. Then you need to promote it. Simply placing it on Search > Places is not enough; you need advertising. So, people started creating magazines, and living from the ads there (and not only Google AdSense). In return, they would need to hire people to write for them — virtual journalism was born! Those journalists, in return, need to interview people in-world. For that, they have to "look good" — and that means buying nice skins and clothes — and do some socialising to get good contacts for news leads. All this is an incredibly dynamic economy which is perpetually in motion and with lots of positive feedback loops: it grows and grows, and it grows faster than SL grows in users, because it grows in complexity.

That's why we have real media companies in SL (Reuters, Axel Springer Verlag) and real real estate businesses advising people on how to buy land in SL. They don't pay Linden Lab nothing, they don't need special tools, they don't need licenses, or agreements. All they need is an avatar, a few L$, and skills and talents to work in-world — or hire those skilled people.

Now imagine what happens with Sony Home. Sony is one of the largest content producers in the world (think about Sony BMG — which are already in SL — and their games division). They can produce high-quality content for Sony Home and don't need anyone to do it for them. At some point, however, they'll open up the licensing to create content for Sony Home — and charge huge fees or demand that all content gets pre-approved (like There.com or IMVU do). The small companies have no chance to compete with Sony, the giant content producer. Only the huge content producers — who already work with Sony anyway — will be able to afford to "be there" as well. But... how will they market their content? Using Sony, of course — that'll be another source of revenues for Sony Home, in-world advertising. Again, you just have one supplier, one monopoly — no market economy. You won't see e-zines and blogs popping up very quickly, and live from advertising there — since that would cut directly into Sony's revenue stream. More likely, Sony will pay Reuters (for example) to create a channel for Sony Home, too, and give them an exclusive license to write about Sony Home. And then they'll tell other content producers: "look, you can place ads at Reuters, since it's a Sony-approved news channel — if you place your ad anywhere else, we'll sue you".

Why should they react differently? Sony is huge, has a monopoly on Sony Home, controls the servers, the content, the application, and, ultimately, the users. They have invested on this technology and need to reap benefits out of it. They couldn't care less about "metaverses" – having a nice virtual economy going on doesn't help them to sell more games, which is what they care about. Also, they want people "locked" to Sony content — by viewing things in Sony Home, and staying there, they want that a message goes around their users: "look how cool our content is! Why do you need to try anything else? Look how things like Second Life are crude or plain ugly — at Sony, we only employ highly trained professionals for deploying the best content ever"

And their users won't care about low-quality content, either — they're used to Sony's quality, easy of use, and addictive entertainment. That's what Sony Home will provide, too — in the form of a chatroom.

So, while it's obvious that Sony Home will be a success in terms of number of users, I'm rather sceptical that it'll be "a competitor" in building the metaverse. They will fight for users, of course — who will come from people interested in the kind of content that Sony develops. I'm not claiming that they won't have millions, or even hundreds of millions users. They will have those very likely.

The difference here is just one. In a battle between a closed, "state-controlled" economy, and an open free market, who will ultimately win?

So the issue won't be "who has more users in 3 years, SL or Sony Home?" Because Sony might very well win that race — perhaps very easily, if they can stay abreast of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or perhaps Apple and Nintendo.

No, the question is: between the two models, which one will become the Metaverse?

Just take a look at all "closed content" sites on the Web these days and see how many users they have. You'll see they'll fall in two major categories: academic research papers, and sex. These are the only ones that people are willing to pay for.

I can safely bet that Sony isn't going to enter either of those markets.

But Second Life already does both — just like the Web :)

And at the end of the day, I can very well imagine a SL for the Sony PS3 (released at the same time for the Xbox and the Wii, of course), simply because the client is open source and you can naturally change it and distribute it to be installed on your PS3 — while Sony Home will remain forever stuck inside the PS3 (and successors). So while SL can move from the desktop (or laptop) into mobile phones and consoles (all brands), Sony Home can't move outside Sony.

A much more cleverer approach, of course, would have been to simply get SL's open source client, get a few thousands of servers, rewrite the client completely to give it a huge improvement in performance and usability, and log all Sony users into "Sony's Second Life", with Sony's beautifully created content — but inside SL. If Sony went that route, I could predict that they'd buy out Linden Lab in a few years :) Remember, people would buy PS3 just to log in to SL! (yay, no crashes, no lag, no crappy graphics, no cranky interface!)

But the "not invented here" syndrome will always be in the minds of the corporate structures that hold monopolies; even Microsoft Metaverse, if it were part of the plans for MS, would never be SL-compatible...

Re: The Schism Around Voice: Multicasting vs. Broadcasting

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 07:20:10 -0000

A more customer-oriented company than Linden Lab would probably have done a survey if residents would use voice in Second Life or not.

I've added a poll on my blog... let's see what the results would look like :)

Re: Home: No Place Like SL?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 07:25:19 -0000

Dandellion, I totally agree with you :) There is a huge world of difference between "art" and allowing "creative content". People will obviously pick high-quality content when they have the choice, as pure consumers they are; but, given the more broader choice of being creative on their own, they will prefer an alternative that does, indeed, allow them to be creative no matter what.

That is the lesson indeed of Web 2.0, and Sony Home is missing the point — because, well, they're a megacorp with their own view of what the universe should look like — they are content producers, the rest of the world are simply consumers...

Still, that doesn't mean that Sony Home won't have millions and millions of users. Of course they will! But the Metaverse will be built elsewhere, and not at Sony.

Re: The Schism Around Voice: Multicasting vs. Broadcasting

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 08:40:28 -0000

There are not enough readers here, Ashcroft :) Linden Lab would need to email all users and send them a link to SurveyMonkey or so...

Re: The Schism Around Voice: Multicasting vs. Broadcasting

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:11:21 -0000

Just a short comment to second all you've said, Ordinal :) Pity, however, that it's the "wrong" people who impose corporate policy in the business environment — but this is very unlikely to change soon!

Ashcroft, as I hope you understand, I'm on "your side" in the sense that your arguments are the ones that are rational, logical, and correct. Nevertheless, the European Union, Japan or Korea are plagued with more mobile phones than inhabitants — and I'm pretty sure that while the mobile operators' profits come from SMS, the use given to all those phones is still for voice calls. This is a mentality very hard to change — after all, after 130 years using telephones, we were all "brainwashed" that the best way to communicate is to do it face-to-face, and the second best one is by using a voice call. It'll be hard to prove, through rational arguments, that this is, in fact, simply not true. The ones making the decisions about voice will not listen (pun intended) by rational and logical argumentation. You don't find people in decision areas that will take those arguments and go "aaah, yes, you're so right, let's get rid of phones". Instead, the first thing a company does is to get a phone number; only afterwards they might get an email address, just because it is fashionable to do so.

At my home, I have a telephone just because recently I got an ADSL line (I used a cable connection before). Nobody knows the phone number except my parents; I have no use for the phone, and can't even remember the phone number. But then again, I'm an odd one, and don't register on the statistics :) Imagine my difficulty of opening a bank account a few years ago without giving a phone number. Managers were outraged and shocked; I sometimes gave my parent's phone number instead just to be able to open the account...

No, the notion that "voice is supreme" is too ingrained into our society, and "mass voice communications" is still in the minds of people as being an achievement of the 20th century. People would be surprised to find out that "voice traffic" over the world-wide networks these days pales in comparison to data communications in the 21st century. Of course, much of that traffic is already VoIP...

Re: Microsoft: Metaverse Reloaded

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 08:17:04 -0000

Thank you all for your wonderful comments, but you should never trust anything written on April Fool's Day :) No, Microsoft is not going to launch their own metaverse in July, and neither is Google launching their Toilet ISP :)

Re: Local Government Study Group meeting @ Sunbelt Software Island

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 07:35:29 -0000

For all who care, there is now a Wiki for the Local Government Study Group at http://lgsg.wetpaint.com/ and the transcripts of the meetings are both there as well as on the SL Homepage forums.

Re: Local Government Study Group meeting @ Sunbelt Software Island

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:24:41 -0000

Lem, think not of "government" in the RL sense of the word, but in "management", like an non-profit association or a company has.

Imagine that a group of residents create a non-profit co-op to manage their land collectively, and wish to implement a series of rules to enforce a common covenant, and delegate roles and functions to each member of the co-op. This works using the group tools if the co-op is not really a co-op, but an autocratic structure where the "manager" is the landowner and group owner and decides everything (including kicking out members that don't comply with their rules).

But now imagine that the co-op (like RL co-ops) needs to do enforcement based on a common agreement of the majority of members. Using the current group tools, you'll see that either the group owner agrees with "majority ruling", or nothing will come out of it — the group owner, estate owner, etc. will always have the ultimate word on what goes on with their land/group.

Ashcroft's ideas present suggestions for having groups of people where all members have collective ownership and management of a group; each one has effectively the power to decide (by voting or any other mechanism) what should be enforced in their common land/group — and what should not.

Obviously this does not dictate that all such organisations need to be "democratic". RL gives us two models: companies (autocratic — the boss is the one that controls everything) and associations (usually democratic, but sometimes the right to vote/decide can be limited to a group of members; the others are "users" of a service but not "voting members").

Now while your comment that "governments will not work because of the people who usually get involved in governing" might apply to true governments, but I'm pretty sure that people who claim those things will not claim that "companies will not work because of the people who usually get involved in running businesses" or "co-ops/associations/NGOs will not work because of people who usually get involved in running those organisations". In fact, the very same argument is usually extended to: "government is a bad idea, let people run their own businesses and organisations without government interference and all will be better".

While I don't necessarily subscribe to that view (ie. the usual "all politicians are corrupt" etc.), I definitely agree that companies and organisations iRL can work much more efficiently than most governments.

What Ashcroft is proposing is a series of mechanisms that would allow people to form companies or organisations and use those "governance tools" to set them up, independently of the role of the "founder" or "creator". A few of those organisations might call themselves "local governments" and go all the way to establish elections, parties, judicial systems, etc. Most will not — but most will certainly embrace the notion that a group of users could, indeed, co-own land and co-manage groups, without relying upon the "owner/founder" to give them "permission".

Notice that co-ownership also means a way to have, say, an island or an estate in the name of a group, and not a single person. Just like iRL, where companies and organisations own real estate in the name of the company, not in the name of the CEO/Director/President.

I hope that clarifies things. Calling the resulting organisation a "democratic government" is just one of the many possible uses of the "governance tools" that Ashcroft is proposing, and by far not the only possible one. I tend to believe it will actually be the least used. In any case, this will be an opt-in system — people still wanting the full enforcement of the current autocratic group structure with land ownership will obviously still get it.

Re: Hotspots: Second Life’s New Controversies

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 11 May 2007 09:43:36 -0000

Excellent analysis, Dandellion :) And here some more comments...

1) The issue about integrating voice and the old augmentism/immersionism paradox is a bit strange. You can have augmentism inside an immersionist world (people only need to reveal their RL data); you can't have the reverse (when everybody has "RL avatars", talks with their own voice, and have their faces plastered on your avatar's face, how can you do immersionism? It's you being there...). SL was designed (and you can see it on its ToS) as an immersionist utopia; after enough time passed, and this upcoming release will be the final blow, another utopia went the way all utopias go.

A good example was a conversation yesterday between two oldbies and a very friendly newbie. The oldbie: "Where do you live?" (he had a nearby plot on the sim we were) The newbie, without hesitation: "Cleveland" The oldbie laughed and explained he actually meant: "where do you live in Second Life?"

This is the difference between the "old school" that was educated and trained to think about Second Life as a "different country" (immersionism) and the new generation that just sees SL as glorified 3D MySpace with an economy.

I don't think that you can have two radically opposing views of a "metaverse" running inside the same environment — immersionists will have to go away, there is no more room for them in SL.

2) I agree that validation is a complex issue, really, and I'd personally prefer having multiple choices of validation services. For instance, what about a Verisign certificate? They ask pretty thoroughly about RL data — why doesn't LL trust Verisign, who have been around in the Internet for way longer? Still, I also agree that it's a pity we're subjects of "experimentation", but, like Google does, SL should be flagged as being in "perpetual Beta". The good thing is that we're slowly getting used to it :)

3) Finally, the "open letter". Well, you're not the only one that gets annoyed at my depiction of the anti-feature group as "Luddites". I have rather strong feelings against anyone that complains about how things don't work for them, and "demands" that they work, "because they're paying customers" (or: "because they're losing a lot of money") — and, as a result, demand that all innovation and research stop immediately to "fix what is broken".

And then, after submitting those complains, go back to the world of virus, spamming, blue-screen-of-deaths, of Microsoft Windows, and pretend they're suddenly different people.

Well. You can't have two measures if you're being honest about what you're fighting for (the Luddites, after all, went back home after a destruction spree, to sleep in their comfy, factory-produced beds...). If you're honest enough about only using "perfect, flawless" products, you'll be doing the same fork-pitching with Windows products, raising awareness in the media to fight spam once and for all, get the police to investigate virus software houses, and the like. "Partial activism", for me, smells of hypocrisy. You can't be "tolerant" with buggy, faulty software developed by a company, but be aggressive and prevent innovation and research on another.

I used to be more tolerant in the past with that attitude, in the sense that I feel it's important that people protest about things, get it out of their system, pat themselves on their collective backs, and then return nicely home for another session in SL :) LL would ignore the ranting (although claiming otherwise) and move on with their research path.

But things have been getting more and more intense. It's not an attempt to "molest" Philip, but a true attempt to stifle and control the rate of innovation. When "the wisdom of the crowd" starts to tell scientists how they should do research, innovation and research are stifled down — look, as an example, how far back the old USSR was, in terms of technological development, because their research efforts were curbed by government.

Or, if you wish, look how far we westerners are behind on developing a non-polluting car which doesn't work on petrol derivatives — while we have operating nanomachines. Surely an advanced civilisation like ours, that is able to create metaverses and computers, should be able to tackle things like "clean" automobiles, or cure the common stomach ulcer (not to mention AIDS or cancer)? We have the means to research that technology — but "interests" are stronger and disallow some kinds of research.

This would be worth a post on its own on a completely different subject, but, for the record, here goes my reasoning. At some point in time — hopefully distant in the future — Second Life, and Linden Lab, will be "curbed" in its development by the "powers that be". LL is already facing the first wall: Puritanism, which, as a consequence, will need validation. The next wall is dealing with money and taxes, and I'm not sure how that will be accomplished. But these will obviously demand that LL removes their developers on much more interesting things and dedicate to unplanned and unforeseen development as a consequence.

The major issue, however, is the "under-the-hood" development. As stated by Cory, 72% of the dev team are working on fixing bugs. That's impressive — but it means that there are not many left for doing the crucial changes: moving over to a different architecture that deals with multiple grids and independent, 3rd party server farms. All this is very nice, but so many resources have been pulled into fixing irrelevant issues — all of which would quickly disappear if the whole architecture would be replaced! — that there might not be many people left to focus on the next stage of the SL Grid. Also, years of development have gone to a standstill, as un-integrated code has been abandoned, and the developers assigned to bug fixing tasks: SpeedTree, the fifth attempt to upgrade the physical engine to Havok 4.5, Mono, Jabber instead of their homegrown variety of IMs, HTML-on-a-prim, physical avatars. There have been thousands and thousands of hours invested in all these projects — abandoned for now.

But all of them require deployment — and they will be unstable at first. They will break existing content (eg. think about animations/clothes and new avatars; think about Mono and all the LSL scripts that might break because they rely upon a different type of virtual machine). They will make another 5000 users very angry, unhappy, and frustrated.

But what is the alternative? A "freezing" of the codebase?

Well. In my mind, Linden Lab cannot "afford" not to be innovative. If the Open Letter is the kind of reaction people have when we're "only" 6.2 millions, what reaction will there be with 150 million users? It's obvious that the greatest technology hurdles have to be done now, when LL can afford losing a million users now (which they will quickly recover in one month or two), and not in 2010, with 150 million users and perhaps 100,000 companies using SL as their primary communications platform.

Software reaches maturity when it is used over a decade — that has always been an old rule. The success of things like, say, MySpace, rely upon a "stable" web architecture that has handled all issues pretty well for over a decade. There is no "innovative technology" under MySpace — just engineering feats, and nothing else.

Second Life, however, is all new. The technology is totally new; the engineering problems have not even been written down, and if they have, the ink has not dried yet. SL is, in effect, a complex interaction of several things that have been placed in the same package and having a nice wrapping around it. A lot of things are not "integrated" at all; they co-exist, because they were done in a hurry for a world tested with 300 users (of which less than a half had been online simultaneously), and there has been no time for planning and thinking on them properly.

It's a miracle it even works — and that it works perhaps 97% of the time. So many people cannot say the same about their Windows desktop — and still they use it every day without complaining.

So, I insist on my message. Second Life is not for the kind of people expecting perfection and stability — it's too new, it's changing too much — when we don't even have seen but the tip of the iceberg of the real value that SL provides. Being on the edge of the technological forefront means dealing with what it entails; the first automobile drivers had to be mechanics as well, and their early cars broke down all the time. It took us almost a century to develop a safe car that starts at a touch of a button (or turn of a key), works reliably 99.9999% of the time, and gives good performance with minimal performance.

We're not looking at the Matrix yet, where everything is photorealistic, without lag, and except for a few sporadic glitches ("déja vu"), everything runs smoothly :) No, Second Life is the Matrix, version 0.1, and needs at least one or two decades to be as reliable as that.

But first and foremost, it's a research project, and we're just the lab mice. The good thing about it is that we have a choice — if we don't like to be treated like lab mice, we can turn SL off and use something else instead. Like reading a book, say, Snowcrash. Or even watch TV, which works 100% of the time!

One cannot ask people to be patient and wait a decade, but certainly it's worth taking the trouble to explain why it's crucial for Linden Lab to deploy innovative solutions now (and not in the distant future!) instead of focusing on temporary bugs and glitches that will go away under the new architecture anyway.

Don't destroy the factories and research labs while you're consuming the product at the same time. In essence: don't be a Luddite.

Re: Hotspots: Second Life’s New Controversies

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 11 May 2007 09:51:27 -0000

Ash,

Luddites were manual workers in the 19th century who deliberately damaged people’s machines because the machines, which were far more efficient, put them out of work: in other words, they destroyed what belonged to other people and created efficiency for the sake of their own, short-term personal interests.

Precisely what these people are doing :) Well, the difference being that what they're destroying is virtual, and no humans are being harmed in the process...

What would you prefer: a highly luxurious and sophisticated car that breaks down every day or two, or a basic but sturdy and reliable car that keeps on going and always gets you where you need to go?

I thought the answer was obvious, or else what would I be doing in Second Life?... If I'd prefer the latter, I'd be much happier on There, ActiveWorlds, The Sims Online, IMVU, or even Kaneva...

All of these work quite well. Some have years and years of development and are pretty stable. They do what people want. Lovely :) But booooring :)

Fortunately, we're in Second Life ;)

Re: Hotspots: Second Life’s New Controversies

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 13 May 2007 18:31:56 -0000

@Dandellion: A new architecture, most definitely, since anyone can now write a SL-compatible browser, and an open-source simulator server software will soon be available. What is missing? The "glue" that connects both, which, at the moment, is in LL's hands.

This is actually what Cory's team is doing right now. But it means "replacing the whole warp drive with a radical new technology of SS Enterprise while dodging a fleet of angry Klingons, using a team of engineers who haven't got the slightest clue on quantum mechanics". So expect things to become much worse before they improve — the whole core infrastructure is going to be redesigned from scratch, and one can only begin to imagine what that entails...

I would say that over 90% of all "critical" bugs are related to the centralised database and nothing else. Sure, some texture flicker or bad alpha sorting is client-size, but anyone can change the code if they wish. Bad teleports, missing inventory, loss of L$, incomplete transactions, all sorts of issues with IMs and Group IMs — they're architecture problems, neither in the server nor in the client.

Effectively demanding LL to focus on "fixing bugs" means asking them to get rid of their architecture while they put a new one in place — all that without major disturbances in the grid. An almost impossible task. The good news is that Linden Lab is doing exactly that; the bad news, of course, is that SL will be much more unstable in the coming months before it finally scales well.

There is no question about where my support is :)

Re: The End of Anonymity, Part II

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 15 May 2007 05:46:19 -0000

It's indeed a bit hyperbolic to claim that "immersionism is dead", at least in the way Henrik Bennetsen describes it — he also believes that after enough time, immersionism will replace augmentism again.

It could be. I remember the first times I connected to things like ICQ and, of course, IRC. People tended to avoid the difficult question of asking for more personal data, because it meant most of the time that you wouldn't see that person ever again. Nowadays, at least for me, all random conversation I get, without an exception, from people I never saw before is:

"Hi"
"What's up?"
"asl"
"do u have cam?"

I used to make a lot of random friends in the past, many of which very clever and intelligent, who are still around; in fact, I even created companies with clever people I found "by chance" on messaging services :) This won't surprise much the average SLer, since it (still) happens every day.

But... since 2003 or so... everything changed. I can't even remember when I got a new acquaintance on ICQ/MSN/Gtalk that was not only interested in "asl" or "cam". More than a year ago, for sure; probably more. SL is certainly very different still. For every ten new residents that pop up at Help Island and go the "asl" route as their second question (the first being, of course, how they can make money), there is often one that just wants to have an intelligent or witty conversation. "Age/sex/location" is hardly mentioned by those — except, perhaps, much later. Fun, enjoyment of SL, and conversation, are still part of the goals of many new residents.

But I strongly suspect that the "orkutisation" of SL will push these to a small minority, just like it happened with everything else on the net really. After all, the success of MySpace and its many clones and derivative social spaces was the notion that you'd show yourself as deeply as possible. And MySpace has 150 million users, all very willing to reveal as much personal detail as possible (avoiding just giving a name and address, but revealing basically everything else). So, when SL gets as many accounts as MySpace, I fully expect it'll be crammed full of people who want to tell as much about themselves as possible. Sure, not all. There will be always a few millions around who will be either shy or have their reasons not to be so casual with the information they wish to reveal (these are in MySpace as well — they are just so few, a couple millions at best, that you're prone to miss them).

So, I don't know, Ordinal... my thoughts are mostly on what will be "mainstream SL" in 2010. In 2004, the mainstream was pretty much what you've described: people logging to Second Life mosty because they can be both creative and anonymous, and you'd be shunned if you were too pressing for RL details... they were irrelevant in SL-at-large, and it was bad taste to talk about them. Obviously you would exchange RL data with people you had talked to for a long time; many relationships started in SL, went over to Skype and Webcams, and then to real, physical presence — and I'm not talking about "anedoctal evidence", but tens or hundreds of thousands of cases. But in a world with millions, they were the exception, and one assumed them as exceptions.

I still think that the table will be turned. And in a handful of years, it'll be the Mentors that will ask the newbies: "asl?". If they get an answer: "sorry, I'm not interested", Mentors will quickly apologise, drop them a notecard and a landmark and say: "Ah, you must be one immersionist — read that notecard, there is a place where people like you tend to congregate, sorry about that, most people give away all their RL data, just like on MySpace, but it's ok to be an immersionist, there is still a lot of those around — have fun, enjoy your Second Life!"

Re: The End of Anonymity, Part II

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 15 May 2007 15:30:26 -0000

Society wants to protect itself from both anonymity and pseudonymity. [...] Pseudonymity is different type of problem.

I'd love to hear more about that different type of problem, Dandellion :) Can you elaborate?

I think you might just have hit gold... we always talk about how everybody is anonymous in SL, but they aren't really, are they? In fact, they are just pseudonymous — clearly identified all the time, without any doubts at whom we're talking to, but... we just don't have their ID card available :)

I'd be very interested in reading about the separation of anonymity and pseudonymity... what problems are common to both, and what are unique and different.

Re: Hotspots: Second Life’s New Controversies

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 27 May 2007 03:45:38 -0000

Well, I'll rephrase my "from now on" into "in the next 10 years", Extropia :)

Indeed, the moment we do direct interfaces to the cortex, the notion of "augmentism vs. immersionism" will fade away and be a moot point anyway. It'll be just immersionism, and there will be no way to know if someone in front of you looks (and sounds) like that iRL, but very likely the answer is no.

10 years? Well, we'll see. There are pretty advanced research on those areas, but it's still on the "research" phase and not on the "technology" phase, ie. there are no commercial mass-produced products yet. Once they become available, for, say, €100-200 or so (what a LCD panel costs these days) they'll become ubiquous. Well, perhaps not in 10 years; perhaps in 20. We'll see.

Re: Apples and Oranges

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 10:12:57 -0000

Thanks to all who reported some typos and misspelled words on the above text; I've managed to track a few of them down :)

Re: Apples and Oranges

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 05:34:17 -0000

I just found out that Satchmo Prototype from the Electric Sheep Company had also written an article discussing metrics for corporate virtual presences:

http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/chris/?p=235

Re: Surprising Research Results

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:29:07 -0000

Extropia, yes, I've heard IBM's argument before, and mostly shrugged it off because at that point I was not really convinced that business wouldn't be using voice all the time... After all, people call each other for doing business all the time, right?

Well, apparently, I was very wrong, but at least I wasn't the only one — I asked a few of my very friendly "competitors" in the metaverse development area if they would accept a contract for a US$25-30k build in SL without talking with them over the phone at least. They said "NO WAY", loud and clear, and I nodded to myself, believing that this time I got it right.

I was so wrong. Suddenly I realised that in half a year, over half the income from Beta Technologies came from "voiceless" business. And we would even have more "voiceless" business if we hadn't two partners that simply delight in talking over the phone (I'm so glad they take all the calls, lol). But on my other job as an IT consultant I tried to count on my fingers when was the last time I had talked to a customer on the phone, and how many customers I did actually meet in the flesh. You could count them all on the fingers of your hand, and some fingers would be left over. One particular case of a very nice customer I hadn't met for several years of a very good business relationship — and when we finally met "in the flesh", we spent most of the time talking about Second Life and not "other business"... since... well, we had email and MSN for "handling business".

All these things started to fit, as a very complex puzzle that suddenly makes sense, when I saw that Linden Lab was removing phone support and doing webchat support instead. I was revolted! In three years of SL, I never managed to get them on the phone (mostly to get one of my old alts back), and now that they are introducing tiered support, I was hoping I could finally get someone on the phone... when it suddenly went 'click'. If for so many years I never managed to call Linden Lab, why should I worry? They're giving us a better tool (webchat), not a painfully hard to use (voice!), so I should be happy, not frustrated?

Why do I tell all my customers that they can get 24/7 technical support if they do it by email, but only "a few hours" during business days when on the phone? (this has been on all contracts I've signed since uh... 1994 I believe).

The "moment of enlightenment" came to me, of course, when I attended the academic workshop and heard people talking about exactly this issue. All suddenly made sense. Well, being an avid book reader (and hating podcasts) as well as a (former) amateur writer, I was naturally eager to embrace the notion that the written text wasn't outdated yet — after being in widespread use for 6,000 years or so :)

Now I start to think that if business doesn't want voice, if educators think it's impossible to use for remote training, if roleplayers don't like it, and if people like me — with an ugly, heavily-accented voice — simply hate it (and have hated it for ages), I wondered who is left...

Well, the answer to that is quite simple, actually: everybody who uses the phone for entertainment. And these are certainly the majority of the users in Second Life :)

---

Kisa, you're right, my own article is a bit incomplete. A very good example of a virtual presence is using a RL building — specially if it's a lovely one! — but do the interiors completely adapted to SL needs. After all, this is not unheard of in RL buildings: people started building castles, then rebuilt their interiors for monasteries, later turned them into hospitals, briefly used them as army barracks, and now they become universities... in the mean time, their interiors were done over and over again to fit different purposes! So I agree that the same should happen in SL!

---

JJ, thanks for pointing out your comments on NWN which I ashamedly admit to have completely missed — they provided very refreshing reading. I'm still undecided about if a "SL that imitates RL" is better than a "SL that complements RL" (and it would be worth thinking about how it complements). I think it's rather soon to tell...

Re: WindLight First Look Viewer for 1.17.0.12 (Mac OS X Intel only)

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 10:33:21 -0000

I don't know to think if you're lucky or not, Pablo, but I'm definitely not telling anyone about your case :)

Ashcroft, people can indeed just copy the pre-compiled dynamically linked library and use it instead of OpenJPEG. What they can't do is distribute a compiled version of Second Life with it ;)

Ana, so do I, so do I... *sighs*

Re: Surprising Research Results

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 19:38:19 -0000

Thanks so much for the link, Cleo :)

Re: WindLight First Look Viewer for 1.17.0.12 (Mac OS X Intel only)

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:57:51 -0000

So that's it, Placard66, I was wondering about what version LL was using of GLH, since Nvidia's publicly available one is certainly different!... I've used LL's two header files and just used Nvidia's current version for the rest of the includes. Strangely enough, though, the libraries seem to be correct otherwise, it's just a few dozen of missing files.

Nobody else is commenting it on the Open Source portal — I've added a comment myself — so I guess either "everybody" has those libraries and header files correctly installed and never bothered to check, or something strange happened :) Still, my iMac has an ATI card, and that might explain why my compiled version of SL works well on it.

Re: From Welfare State To Laissez-Faire Capitalism

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:41:27 -0000

Hmm, dandellion, I'm pretty sure that real estate is not the only way to make money. An example: a few thousand sims are simply malls/huge shops or locations for live events. Believe me, all their owners are not only making enough money, but they're making a living out of it.

So content creation is a good business. What you might mean, however, is that content creation takes skill, talent, and time to create — and business skills to promote it everywhere to attract enough sales. Well, that's true. While land business is "easier" in the sense that you just require one skill: buy low, sell high :) (obviously, large real estate businesses will have to provide much more added value than that!)

The best type of business right now, however, seems to be "private condominiums". By these I mean buying a few dozen private islands, then terraforming them, hiring an urban planner, a few architects, create a lovely place to live in, add a few tech support reps, and then open up the plots for sale. Now this requires a lot of organisation to scrap a few L$ from users wishing to live in a safe and beautiful place. However, it pays off. Not so quickly perhaps — but it does. Whereas the "wholesale" real estate speculator is at the mercy of the market — and of their ability to drive people to "their" plots.

Now, since SL grows exponentially, there will always be people not knowing what to expect from the mainland, and in that sense, they will always be a market for "empty plots" on the mainland. But... if SL enters a plateau, where the rate of growth is not exponential any more, all these people have suddenly a problem.

Anshe Chung, the best possible example in business keenness, figured this out two years ago and only sells community-based plots exclusively... all the other huge real estate owners are obviously doing the same, and have been doing it for well over a year now. Only the wannabe landbarons are still dealing with rough empty land. But... their days are numbered. After all, there are very very few Premium users — around 0.1% or so. And literally hundreds of thousands of residents live on "private condominiums" :)

Re: The $20,000 Question: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 09:39:27 -0000

Extropia rocks... and she is in the UK :)

Re: From Welfare State To Laissez-Faire Capitalism

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:44:38 -0000

vampira, the common misconception that "in democracy there is only corruption" comes from a very important democratic principle: freedom of expression. We take it so much for granted that we forget that all the issues about "politicians being corrupt" (and getting sent to jail for it!) is because in democracies, investigative journalism can root out the corrupt politicians, make a fuss about it, and an independent judiciary can investigate the claims and arrest the corrupt politicians.

On any other non-democratic form of government you never know where the corruption is; and even if you find out by mistake, there is no way you can tell everybody about it. Much less talk to the judiciary (which will not be independent).

While this naturally applies to all autocratic forms of government (believe me, you'll never know what goes on in those), on anarchic/libertarian models things might even be messier. Having no entity to guarantee your own rights — except the ones you're willing to enforce on your own, in your community, by the force of arms — you can't trust a "free press" (there is no way to sue them for libel or defamation) and very likely any form of "judiciary" will be opt-in, so there is nobody you can complain to. What this means is that while under an anarchic/libertarian model of self-government you have no real protection from "corruption", "theft", "privacy", or "libel/defamation", unless you provide it on your own — by employing force.

Democracy, instead, makes the employment of force a monopoly of the State — which is democratically elected — and rooting out corruption is in the hands of the free press which is perfectly able to tell everybody about what they've found out — and, more to the point, tell it to the independent judiciary to investigate. It's not a perfect model. And it naturally gives the wrong impression that democratic governments are full of corrupt politicians, just because that's what you see on the news. These news sell, so they're popular.

Be glad that you live in a democratic country and are able to read the paper, watch the news on TV or on the Internet, and hear all those horrible stories about corrupt politicians. If you didn't live in a democracy, you had no way to know.

@Pablo: I'm sorry if I gave the wrong impression of SL being "independent" of RL's national and international laws. It is not, and never was, no matter how often some have claimed (or argued) to the contrary. My interest was in analysing how SL works from inside. In the real world, we have corporations being run autocratically (almost all, without exception) and foundations and non-profit organisations who have embraced a democratic model (by far a minority, when considering all entities in the world). Both can affect thousands or millions of users ("customers" of their services). And both, naturally, are subject to precisely the same RL laws, national or international.

When analysing SL as the "community of customers of Linden Lab's Second Life" we can, however, make comparisons, since this "community of customers" will interact in predictable, social ways, and will follow models and patterns of behaviour. This was the purpose of the essay; not to claim (or infer) that SL "has laws of its own", but that SL as a "community of users" can — and will — evolve/develop self-governing structures following a model, depending on the "hints" and "pushing" done by Linden Lab.

Re: From Welfare State To Laissez-Faire Capitalism

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:19:29 -0000

AntónioCostaAmaral: Concordo que o que cria a fraude e o vandalismo não é, de todo, o capitalismo laissez faire— de forma alguma. O capitalismo, antes de mais, necessita — talvez até mais do que outras formas!... — de normas de sociedade que regulem princípios como a honra, a palavra, a ética do trabalho, a honestidade, etc. — com as quais se pode, efectivamente, construir uma reputação. No entanto, embora estas efectivamente surjam de forma espontânea (por necessidade), necessitam dos tais "agentes" que as possam garantir e proteger. No Wild West americano, era pela força das armas; no Second Life, no entanto, não existe forma de impôr a força dessa maneira.

Há, no entanto, outros mecanismos para permitir um adequado controlo dessas normas de relacionamento. As comunidades libertárias tendem a apontar o ostracismo e a exclusão como o melhor método ("portas-te mal, não te deixamos entrar") e o mais simples de implementar, pois não requer nenhuma "estrutura" para além do mínimo. As estruturas democráticas necessitam da vontade popular em delegar a sua autoridade num grupo de representantes que organizam toda uma comunidade. Qualquer coisa que "comece do zero" e que adopte uma estrutura democrática (por exemplo, na vida real, uma associação sem fins lucrativos...) requer esta noção de opt-in. Fazê-lo à escala de todo o SL é uma tarefa inglória, extremamente morosa, e muito provavelmente mesmo impossível. Mas a escalas mais pequenas (um subconjunto de sims ou de pessoas) é possível.

Não penso que a questão tenha a ver com "concorrência" ao SL ou não.

Re: Lipsynching with Crazy Talk 4

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 05:44:56 -0000

Well, sadly, Michael, the only thing that I know that does lipsynching on a Mac is Poser 7, but it doesn't work like Crazy Talk at all...

Re: From Welfare State To Laissez-Faire Capitalism

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 05:48:46 -0000

MariaD, I think that your suggestion is akin to asking "will there be a world government on Earth soon?" (and a second question would then be: "and will it be democratic?"). I believe that we have an answer to that: "no" :)

So I tend to agree with you, there will be no grid-wide government, or, even more than that, no inter-grid-wide government (when that becomes possible!) ever. And the more SL grows, the less likely that is to happen.

Re: “I’m bored”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:07:17 -0000

The issue about the "chaotic mainland" and the unzoned sims is something that has recurringly bothered me. I know LL's official answer: "let residents zone themselves". The fact that a majority simply refuses to do so (and prefers to live in the chaotic mainland) tells us a lot about how people really think.

Recently someone even told me: "I live in the mainland, because I enjoy the drama there; SL is no fun without drama". So at least some people "fight" boredom by being deliberately provocative — with their builds and their attitudes.

It's a strange world.

Re: Welcome to the Real Life!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 15:54:57 -0000

Ashcroft, what I meant is that you can't have overlapping jurisdictions when both conflict with each other :) So, even if all casinos in SL would join forces together and create a "Second Life Bureau for Gambling Regulation" that would oversee all gambling machines in SL to see if they were fair, and make sure that none of its member casinos would take undue advantage of their customers, all that would be moot, since LL still has to operate under Californian and US Law, which forbids online gambling — and that LL had no choice, after some pressure, to enforce the removal of all casinos.

On the other hand, if LL did not enforce the decision to ban casinos and gambling, I very much agree with you that local self-regulation would, indeed, provide with several possible alternatives for regulating gambling in SL. In fact, on several communities, setting up casinos was indeed forbidden; on others, you could only have "official casinos" (the ones that the local community decided that casinos were allowable under restrictions, ie. mostly keeping them on areas not subject to lag, etc.); and on a few, setting up a casino was not regulated at all. All these varieties of local regulation (or lack of it!) popped up spontaneously and indeed they came mostly from residents' own decisions and collaborative work towards regulating their own communities.

Sadly, all these very interesting experiments were washed away from the board when the FBI knocked at LL's doors :)

Re: “I’m bored”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 18:05:10 -0000

Roisin, after being a month in SL, I asked the same... "when will the thrill wear out?"

After a year, I asked again: "surely there will be nothing here for me after a second year?"

Well, I'm in my third year, and things seem to become more fascinating, not less, so I can't say where it will stop!... if it ever does. :)

Re: Second Life Tutorials

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 06:41:34 -0000

Oops got the wrong URL!!! Thanks for pointing it out to me, Dobre :)

Re: Welcome to the Real Life!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 16:22:40 -0000

That's very intriguing, Gracie :) So would that mean that the article in Reuters is fake?...

Hmm. This is getting more and more conspirational every minute

Re: Welcome to the Real Life!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:40:18 -0000

After a very quick informal (and possible wrong) survey with a handful of residents, it seems that it's not very likely that "phoning up the FBI and asking them for cases under investigation" might actually lead to any answers. By default they will answer "no" to all requests for further information.

However, if there is any investigation going on, there might be a very tiny chance that one might talk directly to the agent in California that is assigned to this task, and they might answer truthfully.

In any case, it seems that the probability of the FBI not answering is much higher than answering "yes, we are investigating". So I guess that we'll really never know the truth!

Re: Open Source Second Life – The Geeks Strike Back

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 19:57:01 -0000

Good questions! After the recent tumult and chaos on SL's economy, it's more than clear that people need to trust whoever runs the currency :)

I'd imagine that the only solution to that is using a third-party micropayment system.

As for (2), the answer is simpler. When companies release their previously licensed software as fully open source, they make money from services instead. Here is a short list of what LL would very likely be providing:

1. Hosting services. After all, they will still be the entity on the planet with more experience in running a 12,000-sim grid. Most new customers will definitely be more willing to pay LL to host a server for them than to blindly trust a bunch of kids running servers behind their ADSL modems.

2. Interconnection fees. Here will be the largest "cash cow" for LL: you'd be able to run your own grid, but if you want to access the uncountless Terabytes of content on LL's grid, you'll have to pay for the privilege. And pay quite a lot. In fact, I can seriously expect that things like OS Grid would need to pay up to US$200 per month for each sim they wish to interconnect with LL's own grid...

A typical example on how this works are the roaming agreements between mobile phone operators, or the peering agreements for Internet service providers. In those cases, the amount of payment will depend on how huge your own network is. The larger you are, the less you'll pay — if you're the same size as LL, and have as many sims and registered users, it's likely that LL won't demand any payment — since half of their own user's content will be stored on your grid, not LL's. This is how these things work.

In effect, the huge "Metaverse Service Providers" will very likely agree to interconnect between themselves for free, while reselling interconnection for a huge fee to the smaller grid operators.

In the same manner, to guarantee that your sim name (or even avatar name) is unique across the grid, you'll be able to pay a monthly or annual fee for "name registration on the metaverse", to be provided by LL. LL will be much like Network Solutions — not an "exclusive" operator, but the one that ultimately runs the "root asset servers" for the World-Wide Metaverse.

3. Technical support. If you are running your own grid, but require support and training, LL will gladly provide it — for a price!

4. Features. Many will obviously contribute to the open source community and benefit from any new features that happen to be created that way. However, some companies have specific requirements and will require outsourcing that work to LL.

What all this means is that LL, as a company, will probably be happy to remain the same size and with the current running costs, but will suddenly have access to a large number of pure services at almost 100% profit margins with a way larger grid and user base... and believe me, having much higher margins on some selected services will make their venture capitalists very happy. Specially because some of them are very familiar with open source models :)

Re: Open Source Second Life – The Geeks Strike Back

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:56:38 -0000

I don't think that there will be an "OpenDollar" system (although I'm pretty sure many will try to do it!) since the issue is really about how to trust them... but there are a lot of micropayment systems available anyway. Amazon, for instance, has just launched one that seems tailor-made for Second Life (well, it shouldn't surprise us that the founder of Amazon is also a venture capitalist for LL...). But there are a lot of them around – all backed up by RL companies under jurisdictions that regulate their operations.

Note that it would be quite easy to create an OpenPayPal or something similar — but nobody did anything like that, for the same reason. Would you trust a kid running a payment gateway running from his home, using his own bank account? :) Well, most wouldn't, but then again, we trusted Ginko... :)

As for LL's change of business model... the answer is obviously "yes". First, although registering a top-level domain costs the registrars a few cents (US$0.15 I believe), we're talking about hundreds of millions of domain names. Even small national registrars for a national top-level domain, with a few hundred thousand domains (which cost way more than that) are able to pay their running costs. They don't need to sell licenses for BIND (the most popular DNS server) or hosting websites! Remember, ultimately, LL might only be a team of 10 system administrators and a handful of programmers running the "root asset servers" — if everybody else is running their own sims.

The other thing is medium-term vs. long-term plans. Imagine that tomorrow IBM launches their own grid with 12,000 OpenSim servers. Well, what would the running costs of that operation be? Why would IBM be cheaper than Linden Lab? LL is not really doing "speculative pricing" on their servers just to Make Money Fast™ — an illusion that comes from the fact that a low-end webserver just costs US$100/month or so to run and maintain, and so LL is making a huge profit. This is simply not true! To ensure the same level of commitment and development than LL, you have to add the salary costs on top of the service being provided, and remember, there are just a handful of people world-wide with the necessary know-how to handle a SL grid. Almost all work at Linden Lab :) So salary costs will definitely make an "alternative grid" more costly than people can imagine (in the olden days, people also tried to create an "alternative DNS system" to escape the costs of registering domains, but as the success of that grew, the running costs were too high, and the "established DNS system" was simply run more cost-effectively).

The image people have is of kids running their own sims at home and interconnecting them, and not requiring labour costs. That's all fine for "experiments", but most kids don't have 5 Mbps upstreaming bandwidth at home, which is what you need to get 50 or so avatars running from your server. Not even small companies have that much upstreaming bandwidth — ADSL/cable connections usually have between 128 Kbps to 1 Mbps, and that barely allows 1-10 avatars to connect to your home sim, on a good day.

So what will possibly happen is something like the suggested "Open Grid Foundation", which will get donations to host a large amount of sims on a co-location facility, and, since they'll be tax-free and use volunteer labour, they'll be able to run a "cheap" grid for quite a while. This, again, doesn't scale well — although you can start with a few hundred servers that way, at some point, the running costs will rise above the ability of the Foundation to draw donations to pay for the co-location costs. This will mean that they'll have to be selective in what projects they accept (like the FSF does), or use another revenue-earning model.

On the long-term, however, you might be right. Someone with unlimited starting funds might launch their own grid, and create a fantastic and unheard-of business model that allows them to offset the costs of running the grid, without charging the whole price to the end user. This will very likely be a combination of sponsoring and ads. And as we all know, the biggest investors on ads and sponsorship on the Web come from sites with mature content and casinos :) So the first mega-cheap grid will very likely not be used by corporations or universities that will dislike the idea of having cheap sims sponsored by your local sex shop.

The other possibility would be someone like IBM, Sun, Microsoft, or whoever comes next, to launch a mega-grid, not with 12,000 sims, but a million. Running a grid hundred times larger is not hundred times as expensive, but much less — and this would mean saving costs (quite a lot, in fact), and effectively being able to successfully compete with Linden Lab in the same business area.

The question is, who would invest now in a million-sim grid? It would require close to a billion accounts (not active ones, just registered ones) to be profitable. Again, I find it quite unlikely that anyone would really invest in such a business model just to be able to place sims in the market at a lower price...

The last way to effectively compete with Linden Lab would just to use more advanced hardware. Let's take an example. We have heard from LL that they use quad-CPU servers, and that they run four sims per server. Well, on the transcript above, you might have noticed that Gareth commented that you could run in theory around hundred sims on a single server. The only issue in this case is dealing with the massive networking and CPU load if all sims are full with eager avatars, all drawing an average of 100 Kbps. OpenSimulator does not even have a physics engine, and no assets to keep track of, so naturally it's much lighter.

Still, this is just part of the story. One could employ an IBM mainframe running a thousand virtual Linuxes, and a couple of Gigabit Ethernet cards on it. In fact, a single IBM mainframe with 64 CPUs could run the whole of LL's current grid, with the same performance. And it costs perhaps hundred times less that LL's whole grid! Sun has also equivalent hardware that could do about the same. So that is a reasonable alternative for someone to start up their own grid. It certainly has its own problems — I'm not underestimating them — and high running costs, but the simple truth is that, in terms of hardware, it's a far cheaper solution. That's why IBM and Sun and others are still manufacturing mainframes — for these kinds of environments, they still beat grids of interconnected PCs.

So, assuming that someone is seriously going to try to replace the multiple-PC-grid by more advanced hardware, there is a way to compete with LL on costs only. However, hardware is just part of the story — bandwidth costs are the same, for a ten-thousand-PC grid or a mainframe running ten thousand virtual servers.

Still, there are more alternatives. For instance, a single sysadmin is pretty much able to deal with a grid with up to a hundred servers or so — allowing 400 sims. So small "grid providers" would probably manage to survive thanks to very reduced overhead and salary costs. They don't even need offices. Imagine that Anshe, who runs around 600 sims, would now be able to buy her own hardware, get it on a Chinese data centre with Chinese funding, andhas just an engineer overseeing those servers. She might be able to offer sims at half the cost or less. However, as soon as more and more people buy more and more sims from the AnsheGrid, she'll run into the same issues as LL.

In fact, the big question here will very likely be: "do you want to connect to LL's main grid or not?" If the answer is "yes", LL will always have a way to charge interconnection fees (or allow only Premium users to "roam" across grids). If the answer is "who cares about LL's grid?" then there are other solutions: Multiverse, for instance, is quite more cost-effective for someone like Anshe that has her own team of content producers, 3D modellers, programmers, and engineers. She might simply just launch her own virtual world and forget about LL.

No, for me, the most important thing is to ensure that if LL is removed from the business arena (mostly because of lawsuits and Government pressure), there are ways to go on with a "Second Life" that doesn't require LL's presence. Cheaper costs are actually not so important for me; if IBM takes over where LL has left (they have far better lawyers to survive any "attack"), I want to be able to transfer all my assets and L$ to them — and it doesn't matter much to me how much I need to pay for the privilege :)

Re: Open Source Second Life – The Geeks Strike Back

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:59:11 -0000

Oops A.T.... my apologies. I'm trying to get it back!!

Re: Finally, the blog is back online…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 07:38:43 -0000

Aaah Lili, that comes from the previous CMS I used, before WordPress — it was way more fast and more flexible than WP, but had a major issue: it was too dated (not even RSS feeds were supported, much less things like trackbacks or pingbacks or a XML-RPC API...). So I made a decision, almost two years ago, to move to WP.

Sadly, though, there was the issue of keeping those three-year-links of the past available from the many sites (specially Google!) and not break them all. WordPress can deal with all types of links, so I made it to conform with the "old" URLs. Thanks to SignpostMarv Martin, I found a WP plugin that allows on-the-fly dynamic conversion of one style of URLs into another; so, at last, I managed to get "normal WP links" while still not breaking the URLs on gazillions of sites pointing here :)

Nothing destroys a site so much as broken links pointing to it!

Re: Open Source Second Life – The Geeks Strike Back

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:03:18 -0000

All true, Math :) The importance of the OS Grid should really not be underestimated. Just because it's nothing more than a toy right now, it allows research, investigation, testing out models, see what works and what doesn't — while not interfering with the LL-run grid at all. The good ideas will necessarily be "pushed" into SL-at-large sooner or later; as said, LL has people watching closely about what might come out of it.

Still, there is a fundamental flaw in the overall SL system, and the OS Grid will not address it immediately. SL simulators were designed to work similarly to a web server: they have an amount of finite space and allow a finite amount of users. Massive distribution exists on the Web because people can easily copy a whole site on a second server and balance the load among both. If you need to support more users, you just keep adding servers. The Web, being a stateless protocol, is very good at this sort of copy-content-and-paste-it-on-another-server-to-split-the-load.

SL, however, is far from stateless! Thus, a different architecture will have to emerge, and we're far from even imagining how that would work. Dynamic allocation of CPUs on a massively distributed system is way beyond what SL is able to do right now.

SETI@Home, and its successor, Boinc, work at parallel computing. Under this scenario, the data to be processed is simply split into "chunks", and each CPU (on a user's home computer) gets a chunk and processes a bit of the data, and then all gets assembled back again. A similar model is p2p networking for sharing files: you just split them up in chunks and download each chunk separately from different servers running on people's homes.

SL does not work well under this model. Or, if you wish, part of it is actually similar, but not the critical bits. For instance, currently, textures (well, all assets really) are spread across the 12,000 simulators. In theory, your computer could open 12,000 connections to each simulator and get the textures directly from each of them; this way, overall, the simulators would have less work, since the "empty" sims would be helping out spreading the huge load of streaming textures.

However, this doesn't scale well. With 50,000 people online simultaneously, the sheer number of open connections required for this model to work would exhaust a server's ability to handle them (connections are limited to a certain number; this can be tweaked, but it's not "infinite"; also, you can tweak them on the servers, but what about the clients running on a computer from their homes?). What Linden Lab devised instead is placing a proxy server for assets on each simulator, and making the client's computer just connect to the proxy server instead, while on the background, all textures required for a particular sim are funneled from all over the grid and stored locally. So while the assets are totally distributed over the grid, when connecting to a sim, a local copy of all the textures you need (around 100,000 for a regular sim; more, of course, when avatars with attachments start logging in) will be ready for download as soon as your teleport finishes.

If you look at your texture cache in your computer, you'll see that they are anywhere between 10k and 100k in size (some are way bigger). I didn't compute an average, but this basically means that a whole sim could very well take about 1-10 GBytes to download. You don't get all the textures in a sim, however — things like occlusion will prevent some faces to be displayed, and it's worthless to send textures that will never be seen. All this is rather cleverly done. But as you know, your local cache can be set only to 1 GByte, meaning that a single sim can simply exhaust the size of your own computer's cache. Walk across a dozen of sims, and it's the end of your computer's disk space :)

Now, how can this be solved? Right now, as you said, figuring an alternative solution will most definitely "win the jackpot". All we know is that things are way complex — more than the average programmer imagines — and that LL's solution, while certainly not perfect, was not so silly at all. I just think that they grossly underestimated user mobility (ie. people are hopping from sim to sim at all the times) and, of course, the amount of people that will gather on events.

I imagine that a first way to deal with this problem of massively distributing the grid would be to separate three aspects of a simulator's job: tracking users, streaming textures, handling physics. The reason why most MMORPGS can get far more users per CPU is because they don't need to stream textures, and to a degree, the physics engine is loaded on the client. So the servers only handle tracking data, which is the least demanding issue on the sim. The problem is that the "tracking engine" in SL is starved for CPU resources in a busy sim, full with textures of all avatars that are dropping by, and with the physics engine dealing with all the movements and bumping into walls and other avatars. If the solution is to separate the three things between different hardware — I don't know. I can imagine that "dynamically" tracking users — not unlike what OpenCroquet does — might help to make it more distributed. Assets can be offloaded into separate systems — in fact, weren't it for the costs, LL could simply put all textures on Amazon's S3 distributed infrastructure, and just handle tracking & physics. In fact, even with the current costs, it might pay out (I haven't made the calculations). The physics engine, of course, is a major culprit. Havok 1.0 simply cannot handle this. Havok 4.5 might help, as well as splitting the task of handling physics between the client and the server. However, this would mean that the client could not remain open source any more. Plan B, of course, is to use an open source physics engine running on the client — many exist — but that is definitely a major development for many years...

So, in the short term, I fail to see how things could be made "better", except for delegating the responsibility of the asset server and the other centralised servers. This will naturally help a lot — even allow parts of the grid to keep running when a "local" asset server dies — and the nice part of those changes is that they can be performed on a "live" grid, over time. And offloading the stress of streaming textures to a separate infrastructure would also help a lot. The rest, well, requires some genial breakthrough never attempted before — coming from the "bunch of kids" or LL :)

Re: Second Life Community Convention in Chicago, August 24-26

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:36:00 -0000

Sadly, the one for Europe was cancelled: http://www.slconvention.eu/

There are a few others at a local and regional scale, however.

Re: Please get your facts straight!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:50:48 -0000

If there is indeed an effort by the media to discredit Second Life, what is its purpose? Who would be willing to pay the hundreds of journalists worldwide to write articles giving Second Life bad press?

The only reason would be the launch of a multi-billion-dollar platform to eclipse Second Life by Christmas — but seriously, who is thinking that this might be not only possible, but a profitable venture?

Really, I just think that the media doesn't know what to write more about SL, and since several journalists are making a living out of it, this is the only thing they manage to get out of their brains.

I actually pity them — what will their personal credibility be in, say, 2009? What will they report next? "Although LL has developed the second version of SL — dubbed by its users as 'SL 2.0' — a version that has no more lag and is easy to use — we predict that, in spite of their 100 million registered users, no one is going to use it next year." Well, if I were an editor, I would never publish that :)

Re: I got twitted…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:52:35 -0000

I think this might be too time-consuming for me. Still, I like the idea of using Gtalk to send messages to Twitter...

Re: I got twitted…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 15:37:22 -0000

Aah silpol, you misunderstand the devious ways WordPress works :) You see, if you look at the classification of this particular article, it's filed under "Snippets". What appears on the home page is, well, filed under "Homepage" :-) This is deliberate — I don't really wish to put everything on the homepage, just the things that I find interesting ;) On the other hand, "Snippets" (and other categories) might have marginal interest to the subscribers of the RSS feed. Marginally, I say!

So while usually people have this concept of posting basically everything on their homepage, I don't. Remember, I come from an older generation, where 'blogs' had editors who critically looked at what they had for content, and picked what got published on the "front page" and what would be delegated to a different column. Well, I love the ability to do the same :)

Sorry if this is confusing for you. But, well, the homepage is really just for the items that are, well, filed under "homepage"; the rest remains on their respective categories, no matter how 'recent' they are.

Thanks for being watchful, though :) Yes, it's a feature and not a bug; no, I have no intention of "changing platforms" for change's sake. WordPress is still not perfect but is slowly nearing that "perfection", which is, from my point of view, the ability to replace any content/information site with a way easier admin interface for the "regular", clueless user. Most blogging software is way too limited; or, by contrast, it's so overly complex to understand how to make changes that only full-time programming professionals are ever able to develop it.

(And before you ask, yes, I've tried LiveJournal, Blogger, Movable Type, Nucleus, and many many "small-scale" blogging software, like the ones embedded on things like MySpace, MSN Live or Multiply; I've tried Drupal, Joomla, and all Mango derivatives, and I've settled on WordPress because it's way more powerful and flexible than the "typical blogging software" while being much easier to setup and configure than a typical full-blown CMS)

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 07:21:29 -0000

Eloise, thanks for pointing out that the impact due to the end of gambling was actually very minor and almost negligible; somewhere else I remember posting that the LindeX is back where we started before summer, which is always "slower" than usual. So we have to look at other causes for the stagnation of growth on simultaneously online users, active users, the reduction of Premium users, and, well, L$ transactions. Things are really not so bad since SL still gets 800,000 new registrations per month, sometimes more, and the number of new private islands also grows regularly by the usual amount, so it's easy to claim that "SL is still growing" (just slower than usual — but so is World of Warcraft!).

It's too early to know what the impact on the sales of mature content will be. My judgement is based on the following assumption: the hordes of basic users contribute comparatively little to the overall economy (although, obviously, this is a gross over-generalisation — a huge chunk of the active basic users buy L$ every week on the LindeX), and it's very likely that these will be the ones refusing to get verified. So, a segment of perhaps 200-300,000 users will certainly get verified, and what sadly we can't figure out (we have no market data!) is how much the economy depends on them. I'm willing to believe that 80% of all sales — specially regular sales – come from these 200-300,000 residents, so, the worst case scenario would be a drop of about 20-25% of all transactions due to the lack of available mature content as merchants panic, pack, and go.

However, as pointed out, this is just transitory. A few clever merchants will immediately verify themselves and block their shops to unverified avatars and wait until the competition goes away. They'll be the future content barons in the adult industry. As more and more new users come to SL and click the verification checkbox on their rezday, the adult content creators willing to wait a few months will reap the benefits of having less competition. The winning strategy, as always, is not to panic and keep that smug, knowing smile in your face even when you see customers running away to play WoW or LoTR, or, well, There.com. They'll be quickly replaced, after a few months, by people that will come to a safe SL where there is no liability attached to sell adult content, since Integrity will be around to make sure that LL is insured against any lawsuit. So, instead of "Disneyland", I believe that there will be an "adult content boom" in a few months. Not "right now", but perhaps in half a year, as the waves of panic have subsided.

Sophrosyne, you're actually very correct on your analysis of "the corporate avatar". Frustrated for getting some of my (snail) mail undelivered because it was addressed to "Gwyneth Llewelyn" — whom I claim to be! – I understood that the point here is that in my country I need legal proof of my claims. Well, I have started a long process, almost complete by now, where "Gwyneth Llewelyn" will become my business name, and like you write checks in the name of IBM or Dell, you'll be able to write them in the name of "Gwyneth Llewelyn" as well. Right now, it's a registered literary pseudonym (meaning I can sign contracts under it) and a fully registered trademark (meaning that nobody else can pick that name and do business under it), and there is only a final step missing: using that trademark as the business name of my (personal) consulting business, which at this point is not a completed process (yet).

So why all this fuss, if in reality companies have long since be, in effect, "corporate avatars"? You're so right in pointing it out. But the truth is that we're still on unchartered legal territory here, at least, in bureaucratic countries like mine. I remember rejecting several interviews because journalists were "complied to tell the public what their sources' real name is" (when, in fact, it's the other way round!). Those same journalists then proceed to write articles on "Apple just announced that they'll buy IBM", and nobody thinks twice about 'Apple' and 'IBM' being "corporate avatars" with legal existence! As if people forget that you can set up a business with just a single person, and use any name for doing business (which is not required to be your own).

You also remind me of a discussion I had with some jurist friends of mine in SL. They claimed that the avatar's identity should simply be a separate legal person (I might have some doubts about it), since, like a corporation is not "just individuals" but a different entity — with quite different liabilities — the same applies to avatars. Their reasoning comes from the following point which applies to several countries (specially under civil law systems): when doing business under your own name, you've got unlimited liability, ie. meaning that when things go wrong, in extremis, the Law can go after your personal assets. However, if you trade under the legal persona of a corporation, the risk is reduced, since you'll be able just to have limited liability — meaning that the Law can only go after the company's assets, not your personal ones. This has been established long ago in most countries to allow merchants to curb their risk. And even on one-person-companies, the same applies: your legal persona is different if you trade under a company's name as opposed to your own personal name.

So the question that begs asking is why we can't fit avatars in that model, too, since we know that avatars have their own assets (their inventory; their land; their L$ account) and they should legally be liable only for those as an independent legal entity. Alas, we're on the front row of an emerging new paradigm which will take quite some time to mature and settle until all this starts to make sense to every country's legislation...

In the mean time, what we certainly can do is simply register a RL business using our own avatar name...

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 14:34:35 -0000

Well, the "insurance" bit comes actually from Integrity's own site:

Insured. Integrity insures transactions against fines imposed on the merchant for underage sales.

For more on Integrity's business model, read this article. Quoting Integrity's CEO:

"We're the only ones who insure the merchant because we are confident enough in the technology we use. If a merchant uses our service and is prosecuted for allowing underage access, we pay the legal fee and we pay the fine. It has never happened."

Notice that they claim to be the only ones offering this service. No wonder that Linden Lab is not looking at alternatives...

I claim that Integrity really is a form of insurance against what LL most fears: getting a lawsuit for allowing minors to view "questionable adult content".

Sorry if it wasn't obvious. Notice that I'm just quoting from Integrity's own site and the public statements of its CEO; I have no way to get access to the actual contract that was signed between LL and Integrity, but I'm pretty sure that this is what caught LL's attention to strike a business with them.

Also notices that "transferring liability" is exactly what is happening in this case. In theory, of course, a court might find LL liable for allowing minors in; but LL is acting in good faith to do the best to shut minors out. The worst that can happen to LL, thus, is paying fines or getting a lawsuit. And they now have it covered through Integrity's service. It's very unlikely that Philip goes to jail because a minor was found roaming the grid and he (Philip) didn't do anything about it; however, it's quite likely that the minor's parents might sue Philip in court. Well, they can sue him at will — Integrity will pay it all, and LL will continue to do their business as usual.

Sure, I'm "speculating", but really, based on what is publicly available on the Web about how Integrity operates, as well as our knowledge that LL is scared about the kinds of lawsuits that can be brought to them, I'm really just adding two and two together...

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 20:55:46 -0000

Well, I still think that we always had that liability, although I'll ask one of my lawyer friends what they think about it. Put in other words, if an angry parent puts a resident in court for displaying mature content, the question remained, so far, if you could simply shrug it off and blame it all on LL who didn't provide an adequate protection against minors on the main grid.

I believe that with a pretty good (and expensive!) lawyer you might be able to argue today that you have trusted LL not to let minors in and convince a jury that you're a victim of bad protection by LL.

LL's move in this regard is not so "evil" like it sounds. They are putting safeguards in place. And as said, these safeguards can be extended to the common resident, if she or he is willing to click on a checkbox. I mean, LL will still prevent minors from entering the grid using the system they currently have in place: requiring the resident to enter their birth date, just like any other social Web 2.0 site requires. So one's clever and expensive lawyer might still be able to shift the blame on LL.

There are two differences with the new system, though. First, you can shift the blame on LL as much as you want: they're insured against it, and will be able to get Integrity to pay for everything and still keep in business. And, as a side effect, you'll be able to do the same by checking that box saying "no unverified avatars in my land". So the residents get additional protection.

What remains to be discussed is how legitimate or questionable Integrity's operation are. Here I'll keep an open mind, like I did with Ginko: unless there is proof to the contrary, Integrity is a "honest" company, so far as nobody proves in court otherwise. Is that enough? Well, it should be for anyone who entrusts LL with their data and their IP rights... and we all have followed the case of Bragg vs. Linden Lab, where an averagely-clever lawyer is trying very hard to prove that LL has been lying to us. But so far, until that gets proved in a court, we have to assume that LL acts in good faith, although we can — and should! — question everything.

What I'm not claiming is that this new situation is good for us. It's only good for Linden Lab. The "extra protection and insurance" for the few residents who will have no qualms in clicking on a checkbox is perhaps too much to bargain for when we consider the (possible) results — more fragmentation on the grid, more content creators disappearing, more chaos and drama for a few months until things stabilise again. Is it worth it?

Well, one has to wear Ginsu Linden's shoes and think about it. What is more important for Linden Lab as a business? Losing a fraction of their customer base due to drama, paranoia, and public accusations of bad faith — or be forced to be shutdown because, say, the German government or an international Puritan association puts LL on the bench of an international court accusing LL to be "promoting" paedophilia or whatever crimes they might come up with?

This move to a relationship with Integrity sounds like a desperate move by someone evaluating what the alternatives are, and not finding any way out — not even a hard way out.

Are there alternatives to Integrity that will protect LL in the same way? If there are, where are day? (Put into other words, is Integrity's CEO lying when they claim they're the only verification entity that puts their money on their claims?)

If there are, then LL should explain why they picked Integrity and not any other company. They were very vague by saying that Integrity offered the best value for their money out of several possible options. If they were talking about insurance against lawsuits, I can very well believe they weren't exaggerating at all.

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 21:22:58 -0000

Indeed, Becky, the process is being tested by a "select group of people", namely, private island owners — they're the only ones that are allowed access to the system for now. Since there are perhaps around 10,000 or so private island owners, this is a group large enough to help LL fix any problems the system might have.

I wish I were one of them, I'm pretty good at making software crash :))

Re: Sculptie morphing magic!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 21:39:09 -0000

Oh, I just noticed that the artist himself has a far better video!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3yrZl01bJOU

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 07:58:57 -0000

Well, in an ideal platform, everybody would get validated and would only have access to a Mature SL, end of story...

In practice, this is asking way too much from the poor residents. After all, so much in SL is PG anyway, so it doesn't make sense to "force" the residents to get verified for watching perfectly appropriate material.

Yes, I agree that a "better safe than sorry" will be the option for the most worried and paranoid types, flagging basically everything they see around themselves as being Mature. And I agree that this makes little sense, but it might become the usual procedure for the ones staying around on the "verified adult grid"...

Thanks to Eloise for clarifying the issue about who was allowed to participate in the beta testing.

Re: Sculptie morphing magic!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 08:08:12 -0000

It's impressive, isn't it??

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:59:34 -0000

Ciaran — my point exactly ;)

"Integrity" should just be renamed "Verification Insurance Co." :)

Although I'm not part of the "beta" project to test the way the system works, I looked up my country on Aristotle's map, and they seem to ask very very little... I feel very tempted to do a fake test with one of the alts that I couldn't care less if it gets blocked or permabanned, etc, and just use some fake data.

As you pointed out correctly, the data you give to LL does not need to correlate to the data you give to Integrity. This is, at least, amusing. At worst, it's quite dangerous.

However, LL has a solid contract with Integrity — and I'm pretty sure that, whatever comes out of a lawsuit, LL won't really care about anything but where to send the bill :)

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:59:50 -0000

Fabio, although that's technologically possible, and thus feasible as part of someone's wish list, I don't think that LL will go for it.

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:45:17 -0000

Well, basically, the issue is how this is implemented now: no information gets sent to Integrity and no information is returned from Integrity back to Linden Lab except for an "acknowledgement" that the user was validated. This is the simplest form of validation:

Linden Lab: Redirects user to Integrity's site; they locally store just the avatar's name for this particular validation session
User: Types their own data on Integrity's site. Integrity only knows there is a session associated with the dat, but has no clue what the avatar name is.
Integrity: Returns a token to Linden Lab saying: "user validated in our database" or "not validated". Linden Lab knows now that the avatar for this specific session has provided enough data to Integrity to get validated. But Linden Lab has no way of knowing what data was provided.

So, in essence, as a resident, you provide avatar data to LL and RL data to Integrity. Neither exchange information. Although from a visual point of view, it all happens on the same browser for the resident, they are actually sending different data to different providers, and there is no link between both.

As said, this is the "best" model, since it doesn't require LL to store any RL data (beyond already-stored billing data, which might be completely different anyway), and it doesn't require Integrity to send back any data whatsoever. So, if LL's databases are broken into, the cracker still doesn't know what data was used for validation. Your identity is not compromised. (Granted, in many cases, your billing data might be the same data as what you've provided to Integrity; however, things like ID card numbers will never be stored by LL, and they won't get anything from Integrity either). On Integrity's site, there will be no additional data for their database: either they already have you on the database, or they don't — so you're not telling Integrity anything they don't already know about yourself! More important, Integrity will not know your avatar's name at all.

Changing all the above requires, of course, way more development, as well as local storage of additional data by LL. It is thus unlikely — but technogically possible — that LL will ever go that way, since for what they require — insurance against lawsuits — they don't need any more information from Integrity. Additionally, in order to store more data beyond the necessary billing data, and being able to display that information to other users (ie. "this is the avatar's age; this is their sex; etc.") might require Linden Lab to register their own databases with several different agencies and regulatory bodies that control the amount of private data they can legally hold on their residents.

That's why I don't think this will come soon.

As for the fee, Robin implied that this fee would be paid with L$, not US$:

- age verification will have a one time fee associated with it. For those with premium accounts Linden dollar fee will be nominal. Basic accounts will pay a higher, but still relatively small Linden dollar fee. These fees haven’t been set yet.

This means that if you're a Basic user and don't trust LL with your billing data, you can still validate your avatar for age.

Re: Open Second Life — The Roadmap?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:42:52 -0000

Ah, Bromo, there are definitely very good examples of so-called "guided" Open Source projects. The better-known ones are things like MySQL, Mozilla, Apache, but even things like WordPress are "guided". They have a company or organisation behind them to establish roadmaps, deadlines, and all the usual bits associated with "corporate", close-source projects. They use project management and bug tracking tools. They have project managers and team leaders. Open Source development can, in fact, be much less anarchic than it is usually perceived in the media — the issue is just that this point is little emphasised...

Second Life will just be another one of those "guided" open-source projects.

Re: Commemorating three years of democratic self-government in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:34:13 -0000

Oh, just to spite you, Prokofy, if you mean that there are covenants to obey, that's indeed true, ie. you cannot put up self-replicating, rotating cubes, spewing particles and filling the air with noise. So, what you do in your property is indeed controlled by covenants — more strict in a few areas, less strict in others. However, it's not tougher than in RL :)

As for membership, it's obviously open to all who are willing to abide by the Constitution and the Code of Laws. There is indeed a social pact between you, the citizen, and the remaining members of the society you're willing to join (unlike RL, where you usually are "born" to a certain society and have to abide by its rules and laws, and the only way out is to emigrate). The Confederation of Democratic Simulators is inclusive to everybody willing to join and abide by its social pact; furthermore, it allows the citizens to define the nature of that same social pact (through legislation, voted at the universally elected Representative Assembly).

There is no "selection" of citizens at all, rather the contrary — it's hard to see in Second Life such a rare crowd of opposing views all fighting each other rather aggressively on the public forums and defending adamantly and stubbornly "their" side of things.

Re: The multi-cultural Second Life® and penetration rates

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 06:06:18 -0000

As of August, Japan is now #2 on the list, and definitely growing :)

Re: Hell freezes over!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 18:04:01 -0000

Anony Mouse, well, you could download the Beta... and create physical objects like crazy :) Unlike what you might expect, the sims will not crash, and it's at least true that the behaviour on the Beta Grid is, indeed, quite different from the one on the Main Grid, so something was changed there!

Hell's definitely cooler if not actually frozen :)

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:52:40 -0000

Hmm I'm not so sure about LL's "good intentions", just that they're not really concerned about paedophilia in SL, or protecting minors, or doing the parent's job of keeping SL safe for children — but only about one major issue: avoiding lawsuits, and making sure they can be around and provide access to SL even in the face of a major class-action lawsuit against them.

Huge megacorps can basically deal with anything that's thrown against them and survive. Small corporations, well, buy insurance! :) And that's what I believe that Linden Lab is doing.

Re: Hell freezes over!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:53:38 -0000

Wow, thanks for that video... it starts to look like SL is really coming close to what the competing graphic engines were able to do 3-4 years ago :)

Re: Ten Millions of Us

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 22:05:42 -0000

Well, not at the current rate, Frans :) At most we can expect a doubling of the number of users.

However, we'll see what impact CSI:NY's episode featuring Second Life will make when that hits the screen of half a billion viewers worldwide...

Re: Figuring out your online status, revisited

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:20:15 -0000

Oops. You're so right! Thanks for spotting the bug!

Re: Don’t miss the CSI:NY “Down the Rabbit Hole” featuring Second Life!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:28:05 -0000

Hehe well, Eloise, my source is not reliable... a former student of genetics engineering, and he might have been referring to the DNA of a bacteria :-P

What he did tell me is that it was quite unlikely that a result would be presented in less than a week, after several checks and counter-checks in several tests.

Alas, I stand corrected! Thanks :)

Re: Crowdsourcing in Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:50:37 -0000

I'm glad it helped you, Savi :)

Re: Linden Lab’s Cool New Search Engine!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:36:24 -0000

Oh, but this is not all. If you're wondering about the link to the webpage, there is quite a lot more goodies from Linden Lab.

For instance, if you know your avatar's UUID (avatar key), you can watch your profile on the Web. Looks nice! And it works for groups too.

But wait! There is more! If you right-click on any texture or picture on your inventory (without any alphas in it), you can now view it on the Web too! For instance, here goes my very first picture taken in SL. Ugggh what an ugly face! Notice that you can change the last digit on that URL to give you three different sizes.

SignpostMarv Martin is a wizard with these things. Look how you can click on pictures and groups, and get information on them inside Second Life :)

Way to go, Linden Lab!

Re: The Most Re-Sold Media Story About Second Life®

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:35:57 -0000

Oh, and apparently the Internet is dying, too ;)

Re: Why are we special?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:30:59 -0000

Thanks for SignpostMarv Martin for pointing out some incorrect descriptions about WoW ;)

Re: Linden Lab’s Cool New Search Engine!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:26:26 -0000

Diva, sim, sou portuguesa :)

As for SLBrowser, I'm glad you're still in the business of searching & indexing SL content!

Ciaran, it's very easy to turn it off. Just log in with the Release Candidate, and uncheck the box "Publish on the Web". And there you go — your Profile will vanish from Search! Now isn't that wonderfully simple? I wish that the billion sites on the Web would work that way...

Just an interesting statistic: on the day I post a new article, half of the hits on my blog are from search engines (mostly Google and Yahoo, but also many others). When I don't post any article at all, it's about 90-95% of traffic generated just by 'bots crawling the web pages. It's scary. The Web's traffic these days is only made by machines, not humans...

Re: The Most Re-Sold Media Story About Second Life®

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 17:43:13 -0000

@Lem, you're definitely right. As I pointed out, I was in a bad mood :) One of my favourite passages on the New Testament is when even Jesus Christ loses His temper and turns over the stalls set up in the Temple of Jerusalem. There are limits to what one can endure from the hordes of opportunists, and sometimes "evangelisation" is not enough :)

@Extropia, I like the image of "Second Life as Potential" but not yet a mainstream, massified product. Why are some new products born "almost perfect" (say, an iPhone :) ) while others "gradually work towards being usable"? Your car example is a rather good one of something that took decades until become "perfect"; the Internet was much faster but still took a few decades. TV or radio were "almost perfect" from Day One.

The strange thing is that both types of products tend to become massified. I mean, nobody in 1990 would believe that Microsoft could get away with such a crappy product for long enough, when "almost perfect" alternatives existed; but they did, and they're still around — and most of their problems have disappeared. It's funny that there seems to be no advantage at all of launching an "almost perfect" product in the market — all you need to do is to gather enough critical mass in the number of users, for enough time...

Re: The Most Re-Sold Media Story About Second Life®

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:40:05 -0000

Rui, I wonder why the journalists are being "pressured" to write bad press about Second Life! What is the point? Instead of negatively criticising SL — and wasting good paper — wouldn't it be better to ignore it completely? Even "bad press" is, well, news — and bad news are better than no news at all!

But I still find the concept intriguing, that it's not the journalists themselves that are interested in giving SL a bad name, but the editors that wish to do so! What a strange world!...

I also think that most of the "other" virtual worlds will try to target Second Life as their "main competitor". Or, rather... I thought so. Except perhaps for HiPiHi, which is really the closest we have to a "SL clone", the truth is, most of the VWs out there are trying to distance themselves from SL. And why? I think that the major reason is that they wish to avoid being compared with SL. If they say something like "better than SL!" all users will log in and expect to see something just like SL — but better. The fact is, none of those VWs are "better" on all aspects! They might have better graphics, or they might have better performance. But they are light-years away from offering simple, user-created content, for instance. As you mentioned, they are also company-controlled in all aspects: from content to the economy; even limiting your self-expression to a limit of what is "admittable" as defined by the company owners. This, of course, allows them to promote themselves as a "safe" environment... but that's really all that they offer in return of a limitation of what you can actually do with these VWs.

Still, a lot of SL residents are always complaining about the lack of performance, the instability of the whole infrastructure, and the utter chaos and anarchy that allows people to get cheated or being griefed, without LL doing anything about it. These residents leave SL once they're disappointed: they expect the virtual world owners to coordinate and regulate all aspects of their in-world presence. So SL might not be the right tool for them; they should stick to other VWs instead, and I guess that this niche — users that don't care about content creation and just want better performance and a strict enforcement of moral and ethical rules — is what all these VWs are aiming at. Many, for instance, get teenagers together with adults, and this means PG content throughout the whole VW...

Re: Heel sounds on your shoes

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 08:05:53 -0000

My apologies if I was inaccurate on my post. Freesound samples are not low quality; my post-processing with crude, amateur tools is!

You see, the sound bites at Freesound that include heels also include a lot of background sounds, giving the whole clip an "atmosphere". My job was to isolate just the bit I needed. This, unfortunately, takes a lot of time, patience, good tools, and skills. I have none!

If I'd had started with just the clicking heel sounds (without any fancy "background atmosphere sounds") I'm pretty sure I could get better sounds. Freesound is not to blame — as you pointed out so well, their sound clips are amazingly good!

Thanks for the tip on Nyoko's, too! I've missed that completely in my (short) searches. I guess I should take a look at those freebie heel sounds, too, and send a note of thanks to the creator :)

Re: A tool to aid designing clothes

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:45:23 -0000

You're so right... I do that all the time ;)

Sometimes, however, the Beta Grid is down for a long time (it happened this year for over a month!) and there is no "free uploading"...

Re: “I am who I am”

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:03:16 -0000

Update: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/12/05/age-verif...

The first impressions are the following: US residents get validated no matter how many typos (or deliberately faked data) they type; Europeans can't get validated, no matter how often they try!

Exceptions exist on each side, of course, but I haven't found many yet!

Re: Sitting down with flexiskirts [UPDATED]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:00:29 -0000

patou, of course, feel free to translate it, I'd be very glad of it!

@4 Yes, in theory, it assumes that all flex settings are the same. In most cases, that's what the designers usually do. On others, not only the flex settings are different, but some elements (like buttons or a belt) are not set as flexible, so this script will fail.

Re: Real Life Fashion For Second Life Avatars

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 23:29:33 -0000

Wow, Ciaran! Carnal Lingerie deserve all possible good press for doing a great job! I'll be certainly checking them out, this is exactly what RL brands should be doing with SL!

Re: Instructions for the Franimation Overrider v1.7

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:24:51 -0000

SLguy, contact me in-world and I'll give you a copy :)

Re: Heel sounds on your shoes

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 17:37:45 -0000

Odette, contact me in-world, I'll give you a copy that doesn't give a syntax error...

Re: A Tale of Two Companies

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:36:54 -0000

Oh, I was mostly thinking of "OpenSim" as a very wide and far-reaching 'word' that encompasses a lot of different and separate technologies... which would indeed allow different teams to work on each of those in parallel.

Re: No More Banking!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:04:57 -0000

@Rui, according to Linden Lab's blog post, "not a single one of these entities had a valid charter". This means: 100% of them are illegal.

While it's worth discussing if "15 days" are enough or not — and I agree that a longer period would be much finer! — there are complex legal issues around. When someone does something illegal, in most cases, you don't even get a warning — you just get fined/arrested. Being given notice and a fair warning is actually very nice.

The issue worth discussing — and I'm with you on that — is if LL's own operation is "legal" by itself or not. On their ToS, they claim "the Linden dollar is not worth anything, it's just play money, and by signing the ToS we accept that it's not worth anything". That's ok. But the very same company that signs this agreement with every user of their service also provides a "currency exchange" where people are allowed to exchange L$ for US$ — and they charge a commission on it!! So, what gives? Is the L$ "worthless"? Then why is LL charging comissions on people willing to buy L$? :)

This is definitely walking on very thin ice. Either the L$ is worthless — and Linden Lab should not be running a currency exchange — or it's worth something (like casino chips, that are just pieces of plastic, but certainly worth money!!), and LL might need to be chartered itself to operate a microcurrency. I have no idea, from a legal point of view, how this works.

@Rheta: Yes, you're right, legal banking was not "outlawed" (in fact, I believe that LL could not ban legal banking in "their" virtual world even if they wished; a bank chartered to do banking cannot be prevented to do so, if they want!) However, as you pointed out, there are no legally chartered entities offering banking services in SL... for now. And LL possibly hopes that none will enter. Or, perhaps, it's exactly the reverse: they might be aware of a dozen legally chartered banks wishing to enter SL, and these might have complained that the whole market was crammed full of scammers operating without a license... and kindly demanded that LL shut them down before they started their operations. It could be possible, since I'm definitively aware of a few financial institutions that are studying the idea :)

Re: No More Banking!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:26:25 -0000

Oh, as for the OpenID plugin not working, I do apologise :( I don't know why it isn't working for some people...

Re: No More Banking!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:53:17 -0000

Excellent comment, Ashcroft. Yes, between those three scenarios (protecting residents from fraud, legal compliance with some laws, or increasing LL's profit), the "protecting residents from fraud" seems to be the more plausible of all.

As for:

Indeed, the very fact that SecondLife banks are almost all investment and almost no loan itself is a cause for some suspicion: what are the bankers doing with the money, if not lending it, such that it can earn interest of 130% per annum (as is offered by BCX Bank, for instance)?

the answer is simple...

They're buying Google shares :)

Re: Prokofy Neva’s Predictions for 2008

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:05:31 -0000

@6, naturally, that prediction of yours will utterly fail :)

As anyone knows, I don't ostracise anyone and I fully believe in freedom of expression. As long as it doesn't descend into personal offenses and open insulting. The rest is just rhetorics, and anyone is welcome to present arguments using the most irreverent rhetorics to press their point further; it's up to anyone to read them or simply ignore them.

Prokofy also apparently delights in getting banned from everywhere he writes, and makes a point of posting that publicly. Well, I'm thwarting his plans by blatantly refusing to ban him from this blog ;) In fact, I'm a semi-regular reader of his writings, and very often there are pearls of wisdom hidden in his articles — if people are just willing to read them, strip them down to the essential message, and think about them.

I intend to continue to do that during the whole of 2008.

Re: No More Banking!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:38:03 -0000

Note to Rheta: I believe that your gravatar had not been correctly loaded; the plug-in I use has a rather long timeout on the cache. It seems to be working now :)

As for the OpenID plug-in, it is a known limitation of the plug-in I've got that it doesn't deal with delegates properly. I have the same issue myself. Development has stopped in late 2006 or so, so I might try a different one instead. Sadly, my blog has gone through a lot of changes over the years, and keeping it up-to-date with the latest plug-ins is becoming more and more difficult, mostly because the theme I use is way out of date, requiring a lot of manual patching to add any further plug-ins...

Re: Heel sounds on your shoes

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:55:33 -0000

Justus, I don't know what you mean by "the original walking sound"... if you mean the sound made by the prims as they hit another surface, that's why there is a line with llCollisionSound(oneClickHeel, 0.5); . I actually forgot to say that you should place that line on both shoes (or the other one will theoretically still make some sound).

In practice, I didn't hear a difference...

Now for the synchronisation. That's indeed the problem. Before we get "physical avatars" (a feature that might or not come out in 2008... the preview of those was done on June 2006 to a very select group of people...), animations are not really "synchronisable". You see, they run on the SL client, but the server has no clue of knowing when the animations started or what they are doing. There is no way to retrieve, say, the position of a foot and know when to play the appropriate sound. That notion doesn't exist. For the servers and the physical engine, an avatar is just a "blob" changing overall position, but the servers don't really have a clue what you're doing with your hands and feet.

So one has to work from assumptions. This means measuring how many paces an avatar does per second, using a few more popular animations and a standard avatar height. Give a little margin for the LSL script to run (which also consumes a tiny amount of time), and all you can come up with is an approximation. If someone is claiming to give you one for L$4000, well, what they're probably including is a default shape and a walking animation, to make sure that the sounds are sync'ed as closely as possible with the movement. Still, sounds take a bit to load properly, as well as the animations, so the first time you teleport to a sim, they might still be out of sync for a while.

Re: To Boldly Go To Where No Avatar Has Gone Before

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:25:46 -0000

Ah well. Except for the ever-watchful Prokofy Neva, it seems that most of the satire was missed... which was what prompted me to write a story, instead of just posting some pictures of Privateer Space and leave it at that.

So the fun thing is when you know all these characters in real life, I mean, in Second Life, uh... hmm... ok, I hope you got what I meant!

I apologise in advance to all my friends if you didn't appreciate the irony :) Well, after you read the explanations, you'll might be even more furious with me, of course...

'Commander' Hamlet Au, of New World Notes fame, is our former-Linden-turned-editor. He's criticised for never getting his own ideas for writing about them. Instead, he assigns 'friends' some 'assignments', which they gladly will do, and then posts these on NWN. In this story, he sends Gwyn around to "find about the news on the mines" — he never bothers to go there himself. And obviously, forget about "background". That's for them to find out ;)

We then meet Prokofy Neva as Stargate-keeper. Well, he's always furious because the FIC — specially the friends of Hammie, of course — always want to be at the forefront of everything, even if really there are more really important things than what the FIC want or not (that's why the trade ship goes through the stargate first — commerce and economics, in SL, exist in spite of the FIC, and are far more important than them). We all know about that, of course, but Prok's always prone to lecture us ad nauseam. This is what he does here. Also note that here, at least, he is in charge. ;) Worth thinking about what that means — or why he actually just makes the FIC wait, but at the end of the day, they'll let them through.

Tateru Nino's character was particularly naughty. Tat's a wonderful friend whom I've met when she was drawing a lot of attention as a community leader among the many helpers and volunteers in SL. In fact, one might argue that she was the community leader, at least of the helpers in SL. In this story, she's a manager of a whole mining complex — that is full of robots ("[...]almost everything is remotely controlled. Humans only come here for maintenance mostly.[...]").

So she's down a few notches, isn't poor Tateru? ;) Now she just orders robots robots around to do exactly what she wants. But... they're breaking down... and require human maintenance teams to get them working again ;)

There is a hint at the statistics and metrics, something very dear to Tateru indeed, as probably SL's oldest statistician. Frans Charming has recently joined the group of stats-and-graphs providers, so I thought to mention him too (he's certainly FIC enough!).\

On the secondary roles, Mera Pixel is mentioned, but just "to fix things up". Mera and Tateru used to be very close (sadly, not any more), but Mera behaved as she were only Tat's sidekick. And, well, since BanLink opened, Mera's shown her talent at putting incredibly powerful and complex projects out, so it's naturally with irony that she is barely mentioned here — in real life, I mean, in the real Second Life, Mera's probably done quite more for SL than most people I know. She just never gets the credit for it.

You'd have to know how SignpostMarv Martin codes to appreciate the irony here. Let's just say that if you want to have something simple, easy-to-understand and remember how it works, user-friendly, and, well, working, you should not look at his projects. On the other hand, that's how SL looks under the hood — and that's probably why he's campaigning to get hired by LL.

Morgaine Dinova (a strong critic of LL's grid architecture and a leading member of the Architecture Working Group) and Extropia DaSilva (who is an extropian — now, how did I know that before I met her? ;) and a fellow Thinker) make a short apparition here. I'm sure that both would delight in getting those dumps from the robot brains. Extropia, for instance, managed to host a meeting today just about warbots. So, yes, I knew she would have fun tinkering with robots' memory dumps...

And of course, there is the star role. I'm amazed that no one commented on that; perhaps you guys are too used to my own persona and were too polite to comment.

I think it pretty much resumes how I truly am:

- I tend to run errands for anybody that asks gently, even if I have no clue of what's all about
- I underestimate the complexity of problems
- Any job that gets me to talk a lot, has to be fun!
- I do things way beyond my level of knowledge and never ask how to do them, or try to learn how they work (beyond, well, reading on Wikipedia). See, I'm sure that if someone gave me a spaceship I'd behave exactly like that — "oh, I'll figure it out somehow".
- I disregard people's snarky comments
- Fashion/design/looking cool is often more important than function. Yes, I like pretty graphics and nice outfits — why do cool things have to be ugly? Look at the Mac! It's just plain old FreeBSD beneath, and hardly anything to get excited about, but looks so cool!
- Note that in the conversation with Tateru I have absolutely no clue of what she's telling me. But she says that to figure things out, I should talk to people and robots. That's cool! I can do that!
- Still, I'm lazy. Maybe there are better ways of doing things? Like hmm, don't starships do scans of everything while in orbit? Why do I have to go down the mines? Arrrgh... well, ultimately, procrastinating leads to nothing, but I usually realise that too late.
- Thus people never trust me with anything important (aye, that's why Hamlet Au has a Space Patroller... who goes around unarmed. Who knows what would happen otherwise??)
- I delegate everything. Talking to robots is not fun, so, well, I just dump their memories into a stick and get the experts to look upon it. Did I fix anything? No, but I was great at pushing work to others. Specially boring work. Who wants to have philosophical discussions with robots, anyway??
- The most obvious answers always elude me. I was never good at "Keep It Simple, Stupid".
- And most important of everything: I never finish my tasks. Either there is someone else to finish them for me, or everything will, ultimately, fail. Unless it's open-ended.

So there is actually not going to be a "sequel" :) since the fun part of the ending is that the main character never "ends" anything ;)

Re: Hitler Explains Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:13:15 -0000

Credit where credit's due... Hiro Pendragon told me about this movie :)

Re: Heel sounds on your shoes

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:43:19 -0000

BTW, for all people who are clueless about the "mysterious syntax error" on the above script, all you need to do is to replace

&

with an ampersand (&). Sadly, I can't get rid of it here on the blog.

Re: Anatomy of a Griefer

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:11:47 -0000

The Wired article goes to explore the whole issue a bit further than looking at the "lone griefer". I guess that the "lone griefer" is just bored, immature, and has difficulties in accepting social elements. And is so closely connected to the "script kiddie" culture that it's not worth studying as a social phenomenum.

Now the "Organised Griefing" that the article mentions is much more interesting. We're seeing gang-like behaviour. We're seeing a social structure which works systematically to destroy other people's work, enjoyment, or business, at an expense of a few laughs. There is not even a "political" or "artistic" message (both used in the past to justify obnoxious acts; in that regard, the politically incorrect buildings done by the W-Hat could vaguely be classified as both "political" and "art"). There is, however, a philosophy beyond their action: We, the griefers, are willing to spend time to coordinate our efforts to show you how you are wasting your time in attaching any seriousness to your work.

It's almost nihilistic in nature. And, as something worthy to be studied, very interesting.

Then we have the whole consequences of their acts. Why should we "tolerate" a small group of people to spoil our work, our fun, and our business? Are they simply enacting their freedom of expression — using violent means? Where do we draw a line of what's acceptable or not? What is more important — the ideology and the message of a group of 150 people, or the hard work of 12 million? Why would actions that would be (at least) classified as minor demeanours in RL are "shrugged off" and "accepted" in Second Life? What kind of society do we plan to create using virtual worlds, if we allow and tolerate such disruptive behaviour?

And then, going further, my question remains. Is this kind of behaviour even acceptable? Is it normal (where "normal" obviously means: fitting into the average, expected behaviour of a society where every human being is but a part) or simply deviant? Deviant behaviour can be either corrected, or tolerated. Under which circumstances should we apply the former, and when should we allow the latter?

In my personal morals, any kind of behaviour that prevents others of their freedom, their leisure, and their means of work (all of them unalienable human rights...) is deviant behaviour and not tolerated, and is to be corrected.

Re: Anatomy of a Griefer

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:58:08 -0000

I have to side with Laetizia on this issue, Lem. What kind of protest are griefers making? The message is (according to Wired): "let me have a laugh at your seriousness and ridicularise it".

Now it's obvious that the above is a message (a concept, a political statement, even an artistic ideal), but I wouldn't classify it as a protest. What exactly are they protesting against? That we are too serious? So a griefer is someone that prevents others of socialising/having fun/making business because, from the perspective of the griefer, all the rest of the world is "too serious"?

Re: SL/HTML - Merging the Old 2D World with the New 3D World

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:32:03 -0000

We're still waiting for HTML-on-a-prim, which would be the real first step towards a closer integration. There has not been a lot of reports on how far that effort is.

Linden Lab is continuing their brave move towards a model where almost every part of the SL protocol is Web-based and fully documented. This will facilitate the integration of Web-based applications and Second Life. It's also an on-going effort; two years apparently were not enough...

Re: Linden Lab Becomes A Content Provider Again?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:58:47 -0000

Well, this is crowdsourcing but with a twist: work is for free. If it weren't, people would follow it up with drama on the SLogosphere ("why was AvatarName hired? They can't build at all, I'm much better, this should have been a public bid!" etc.). So they go for the "free work" — in that case, LL can always defend themselves and say "these were the only people who volunteered".

I obviously wonder what those builders will get out of it except for fame and glory, and possibly an opportunity to get hired by an MDC later on.

Lem, curious that you suggest the idea of "Building a whole sim", since that was one model strongly encouraged by LL back in 2003-2005. They dropped the model in March or April 2005 (I don't remember exactly when) as the majority of the community complained that "only friends of the Lindens got a chance to win a bid for building public structures". I wonder if they're going to introduce it again. It would certainly be a 180º turn in their policies...

Re: Sitting down with flexiskirts [UPDATED]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:20:23 -0000

Aaah yes, Pompo :) There is only one way out: unlink the small sphere, delete it, and readjust the skirt. The small sphere is only there for "convenience", ie. it's far easier to adjust the flexiskirt if you have a "reference" to align it properly.

Re: Sex, Lies, and Reality

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:44:18 -0000

Hehe Ana... that's because you only read the SL-friendly press! :)

Believe me, it's a lawless jungle out there... on the mainstream media :) They're positively trying, at all costs, to crush and destroy virtual world (like they did with the the Web in the 1990s and mobile phones and PCs in the 1980s).

Ultimately, in another ten years, the media will turn to other scapegoats to continue to sell their rubbish, but in the mean time, 50 million users (and the companies supporting them) have to suffer from a "Dark Ages" mentality that sadly continues to sell newspapers. We fear the novelty of the unknown, and pointing out the horrors of the unknown is just selling bad news, which always was more profitable than good news...

Re: Sex, Lies, and Reality

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:59:47 -0000

Digado, for case studies, consistent analysis, recommendations, marketing plans and strategy, and similar reports, you can turn to Kzero, who have been consistently doing the reference work about virtual worlds.

Although most of their reports are being sold, their blog is particularly good in offering snippets of analysis that concern the successful deployment of brands in several virtual worlds. They're the Gartner Group of Virtual Worlds :) and an invaluable reference.

Re: Lag Myths Dispelled

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 06:18:00 -0000

@Prokofy, you're very right on the perception of lag — but this "perception" comes, indeed, from myths, legends, rumours, and misinformation. That's the reason why prim shoes rarely get "attacked" by the "attachment nazis" (so long as they don't have bling...) — they came into existence later in the history of Second Life. The same, of course, applies to skins — nobody ever asked me to remove a skin when entering a laggy sim. So the "perception" of what causes lag and what doesn't widely varies, and only in some cases it is related to actual technical issues.

As for OpenID authentication, my apologies — I was using an older version of one of several OpenID plugins for WordPress. I'm trying a new one that has almost "official" status (it's being supported by the WordPress team directly) and hopefully it works better. Except for Yahoo OpenID, it seems to work fine for most OpenID servers, although it doesn't display the Gravatar properly (I'm working on that, too!).

@Eloise, the skin calculations I've got are from two sources I've got: Linden skins and (old) Second Skins (the PSD for version 1.0 Second Skins were available as a FTP download for L$6000 back in 2005). Both types are, of course, 512x512 pixels. The TGA files, on my disk, occupy 23 KBytes (Linden skin) and 1 MB (Second Skin) respectively. Why the huge difference? Linden skins have far less detail, so they can effectively be more compressed during transmission. How bad is the difference in compression when downloading it from the grid? I don't know, but certainly there is a huge reason why two files with the same pixel dimensions have such a huge difference when locally stored!

Obviously an avatar with absolutely no attachments (and no Linden hair and no Linden skirts) will create less lag than someone wearing, say, a ring. Still, the difference is not perceptible to the end-user — aggressive culling will get rid of almost all polygons on that ring, even from a short distance (and, again, when zooming in on the ring, you'll basically be shutting everything else down, so that doesn't change the polygon count dramatically). Granted, if the ring has 500 prims, each with 3-4 faces, and each face with one 1024x1024 texture, it would be a "monster lag generator" just because of the textures that had to be downloaded — but, fortunately, most jewelry designers don't work like that.

As for anything that rotates animations, yes, granted, that will cause some lag, for two reasons. Each new animation requires about 160 KBytes of downloads (a few might be larger than that). But setting a new animation also demands a "full update" of both the avatar and the chair it's sitting on. Full updates are a big, bad, no-no thing — sadly, for some things, LL was too lazy and simply forced them. Most things in SL don't require full updates (you can check this out from the Client menu, it has an option to show you what objects are sending full updates and what are happy with partial updates). So, yes, granted, a hundred avatars, all with AOs, all furiously forcing full updates, will lag the sim (and lag less the viewer, since once all the anims are loaded, they're stored locally — and unlike textures, they don't "compete" for precious graphics card memory).

Also, granted, vehicles lag the sim more than attachments (due to interactions with the physical engine), and some objects are scripted as vehicles (a few brands of animation overriders do that in order to capture keys in a different way), or sometimes people just appear on motorcycles, wheelchairs, or similar vehicles. These will obviously lag the sim more than if you walk to the event.

And obviously if we turned off all animations whatsoever, the sim would lag even less :) It would also be interesting to see what lags the sim less: all avatars sitting down or all standing up. I tend to believe that sitting down will lag the sim more, even if the only animation you're using is the "typing-in-the-air" animation...

Re: Lag Myths Dispelled

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:47:01 -0000

@Miriel, in fact, there are three issues at stake here.

The first one is technical — "hard facts", so to speak. It's undeniable that, for instance, Linden hair has usually less polyons than prim hair with twisted torii. I've done a rough count of polygons, and apparently Linden hair has about 500. A single twisted torus in my 100-prim-hair has about 100 polygons — so, if the SL client renderer would treat them in the same way, we would be talking about (at least) 20 times as many polygons!

But as I tried to patiently explain, that's not how the SL renderer works these days. Culling is very aggressive; from about a distance of 6 m (or the camera distance!) the polygon count for such small detail decreases at least about a factor of ten for the small torii, and only the visible ones are even calculated (which is about half of the total). So my insanely-laggy 100-prim-hair, viewed at "third person camera", has about as many polygons to render as Linden hair.

Naturally enough, when zooming in on prim hair, SL has to display all those polygons (well, at least the half that is visible to the camera). So, yes, prim hair viewed on high levels of zoom will, without a shadow of doubt, have at least 10 times the number of polygons to render!

But there's a catch. When zooming in at that level of detail, the insanely-laggy-prim-hair will also occlude everything "behind" it. So in fact it'll be preventing all those polygons from all the detail behind it (other avatars and their attachments, ground, buildings, etc.) to be rendered. So zooming in effectively lowers the polygon count for other agents in the scene.

Obviously this doesn't mean that rendering 10,000 polygons close up is "better" than 500 polygons close up. Not at all! However, rest assured, your graphics card, even if it's an old one, will easily render a few million polygons every 1/30th of a second, so it doesn't matter that much.

Now this is the technical reason why prim hair is not that bad.

The second reason is educating the resident to learn how to work with the SL preferences. I also agree that we can't expect everybody to be an "expert" in knowing how to tweak the application (in RL, people pay me to tweak servers to give better performance, lol — so, yes, knowing about expert configurations is a skill to be learned, and quite a valuable one!). SL is simply too complex to deal with "reasonable defaults". Even the experts can get stumped! I humbly admit that I don't know (yet) how to tweak WindLight properly; after several hours at giving it a try I managed to get almost all settings at their maximum level with just a 33% hit on performance (from an average of 30 FPS down to 20 FPS). When I install WindLight from scratch, it insists to go to the lowest possible settings — at a 25% hit on performance compared with the regular viewer. So it's not worth staying at such low settings — but getting them right (with reasonable performance and as high as possible) took a few hours!

Yes, I fully understand that most people don't care or don't even know how to start doing that kind of patient trial-and-error configuration (even if it pays off hugely). The same applies to the simple tricks like focusing on the show and not on the audience... some people have no willingness to learn how to do that, and there is little one can do about that.

So, thirdly, we have the social issue. When you go iRL to a fancy show on a fancy place, there is a dress code. If the place is very fancy, the dress code might even be enforced in the sense that they don't let you in. Naturally, it's fine to apply the same set of social norms (or a different set, like, "wear a Ruth avatar") to Second Life as well. Prokofy is right on his comment: the perception of lag is important, too.

I have no problem with "social norms"; in fact, I enjoy them very much, since those are the ones that bind us together as a community, in RL but in SL as well. Still, in SL, most of these norms are usually based on an incorrect perception of the technical issues, and the technical issues are given as a pretext for imposing a dress code.

But that's not necessary! When I visit Caledon, I adapt to their dress code naturally — I have enough Victorian outfits ready for that. I'm not forced to go to Caledon — but once I'm there, everybody assumes I know about the dress code there, and it would be rude and impolite to ignore it (and, ultimately, Desmond might ban me :) ). If I disagree with their dress code, I simply don't go there. But nobody at Caledon argues that there are tecnical reasons for their dress code. It's just a dress code. It's adopted because everybody wants it. Nothing else; no "excuses" are needed.

Thus, it would be fine for me to jump to a fashion show and see a large sign saying: "Dress code for today: Ruth avatar. We love Ruth! Make sure you wear one of those, or else, the bouncer won't get you in." And it would be my choice to accept the dress code or leave. But, well, I don't go for the paternalising and condescending comment of: "We know you don't know how to tweak your settings properly, and that you're clueless about lag issues, so, well, wear your Ruth avatar and enjoy the show." It's insulting to everybody's intelligence in the extreme, and, marginally, to LL's programmers as well.

Using "technical excuses" to impose social norms is something that I really disagree with, specially, of course, if they're ungrounded on facts, but only on "perceptions", superstition, myths, and legends. As said, play it straight and honest: impose a social norm because you can do it if you wish, without using a pathetical "technical" excuse...

Re: Lag Myths Dispelled

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:15:13 -0000

No, Miriel, actually you are right. And I think you've summarised it quite well:

My experience has been that little things add up.

That's certainly true!

Re: Sex, Lies, and Reality

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:21:31 -0000

With due respect, Big A, wait until CityPixel has 12 million registered users and enough companies working with its platform, and you'll see exactly the same things happening there, too ;)

Nobody worried about Second Life when it just had 20,000 registered users...

Re: Lag Myths Dispelled

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:02:50 -0000

Actually, Sylvia, quoting myself on the conclusion:

Server-side lag is caused (mostly) by textures that need to be uploaded;

The keyword here is mostly. Obviously that the more avatars there are on a place, the more things the server has to track down — positioning; collisions (as you mentioned); chat; and all sort of client<->server communications. Back in 2005 or so, Philip & Cory had written some things about the technology explaining that each SL client opens up 13 connections to the grid simultaneously, for several reasons, but mostly to track position information for all objects and avatars on a region and the surrounding regions. This is exponential, of course, and everything that scales exponentially is a Bad Thing — namely, for each of the hundred avatars, a connection needs to be open to tell the server where that particular avatar is (or where it is moving); but then the server has to tell the other 99 avatars in the sim all about that avatar's move. This means 10,000 notifications of movement, which have to happen "several times per second" — ideally, 45 times per second (servers endeavour to work to display 45 frames per second), for all avatars to get informed. Movement prediction algorithms can effectively limit the number of updates, of course; interpolation techniques (which are used at the client) allow the client to need fewer "checkpoints" to correctly display an avatar move between two points; and obviously, if nothing changed (the avatar is sitting down and doing nothing), there is no point in sending any notification about it. Still, it's quite obvious that, the more avatars the system has to track down, the less CPU time it'll have to track other things down — like, well, chat or sending assets to the clients.

Of course, if the sim server also needs to be constantly uploading textures, well there is little time (and bandwidth!) left to send them positioning information. The sim time dilation steps in — updates are getting delayed and slowed down as the server tries to catch up with everything.

We know that tecnologically it's possible to have a server track down about 20-25,000 avatars simultaneously with little or zero lag. All virtual worlds and MMOGs are quite able to do that pretty neatly. If you look them up, you'll see that most "shards" on MMOGs claim to be able to track down that amount of users — it's a number I found rather consistent among the many MMOGs (and it also dispels another "myth", which is that some MMOGs have as many active users as registered users...). Actually that number is also pretty accurate for the number of simultaneous users of a web site server (I have seen claims of being able to support more users per server, but, well, I don't know how accurate those claims are). So, we know that at least in theory, and assuming that Linden Lab programmers are neither better nor worse than the average programmer, they could have sims just with tracking information (and sending no assets) and allow quite more avatars per sim! And the difference is about two orders of magnitude!

Granted, on SL we wouldn't have 20,000 users on a single sim, even if all assets were downloaded from elsewhere, because, unlike MMOGs and other virtual worlds, content is created on demand. This means that you can't simply say: "this scene is static, these are the agents (avatars, vehicles, moving bits) that I have to track down, and I only need to send information for the moving bits". In SL, everything is ultimately a "moving bit", and not only that, everything can be on a state of constant update (as people build objects interactively, rez them and tweak them, or, well, these objects have moving parts, auto-rez new objects as part of their details, and so on). SL is incredibly dynamic — and this means tracking down a lot of data. And a lot of data several times per second!

So, yes, a lot of server-side lag comes from just that — tracking down a fully dynamic environment, 45 times a second, and sending all the information about the environment to the client.

While, at the same time, uploading 30 GBytes of textures.

One might ask why LL doesn't simply offload the textures on a separate set of servers, and let the sim servers just deal with the data tracking. There are two reasons, one being mostly philosophical: in theory, a "simulator" is a self-contained entity, that can "survive" all by itself — it contains all assets, a small (replica) of an asset server, a physics engine, and tools to track down data (this is, in fact, what allows OpenSimulator servers be runnable at your home PC — you just need the sim server software to basically run everything you need. To integrate your own sim with another person's sim in order to exchange information between both, you'll need an external asset server). If this is a good strategy or not, well, it remains to be seen.

The other issue is pragmatical. The Lindens publicly claim that they store about half a Exabyte of asset data. That's about half a billion Gigabytes. Simply put, there is no technology yet — except, well, a distributed grid — to give you that amount of storage from a single array of managed disks. Currently, these are measured in the Petabyte range (a million GBytes), but LL would need a thousand or so of these. It is way more practical to store textures and other assets on the distributed grid and let each sim server deal with a fraction of the data. Also, it means that if a sim server breaks down completely (without backup), only a tiny part of the assets are lost.

If LL actually has so many assets as they claim, I have no idea (my own previous calculations estimated a much lower number, around 2 or 3 Petabytes only). One thing is for sure — content (in the form of assets) outnumbers tracking down avatars by far. Even taking into account that avatars (and objects) in SL will need way more complex information to be properly tracked down, compared to regular MMOGs (like, way, WoW...), still, "content is king" and His Majesty The User-Generated Content demands a lot of attention of the poor stressed-out simulator servers...

Re: Lag Myths Dispelled

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:15:14 -0000

Aaah Nobody, so well put! Yes, that's precisely it. There is no need to "tweak settings" on a fixed phone: just dial the number, and it works. All the time! Magic!

Yes, we're light-years and eons away from that in Second Life.

On the other hand, there is obscurantism: because of an improper knowledge of the technology, myths are born, which have little or no correspondence to reality. If they are harmless, they're ok (like the silent prayer to get your car started in a cold morning; so long as you don't really believe you're placating any demons inside the combustion engine, that's fine).

My only issue is when these dictate social norm.

Re: Sex, Lies, and Reality

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:04:51 -0000

@trinnysoul, what's the magazine's name?

I wonder if it is SL'ang Life?

Re: Simple slideshow projector

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:06:46 -0000

You're welcome to use these scripts, if you think they might be useful! I've just posted them here mostly because of the formatting — I needed them colour-coded to copy & paste them for the lessons I did :)

Re: Three Years Late… But HTML-On-A-Prim is Here!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:06:43 -0000

Haha @dandellion — yes, yes, you're right ;)

I wonder, though, what happened to Philip's announced "no features in 2008" policy. The upgrade to Havok 4 and to WindLight are actually viewed as "patching"/"debugging" to improve SL's reliability (server-side on one case, client-side on the other). So although they're new technologies, they're not "just eye-candy" but necessary upgrades (the old code was too hard to maintain and to include new features).

HTML-on-a-prim is by all means something new... I wonder how Philip justifies that internally!

Re: Three Years Late… But HTML-On-A-Prim is Here!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:11:27 -0000

Hello @3,

Unfortunately, I don't know your name, just your OpenID URL, so I'll have to reply here instead of in-world.

Your code has two slight bugs...

1) llParcelMediaCommandList is missing the initial L on line 36 (thus the "name is not defined within scope" error).

2) site is an integer, but at the very end you're assigning it a floating point value; use site = 1; instead.

I hope that helps!

Re: Immersionism and Augmentationism Revisited

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:26:31 -0000

Argent, I'm glad to see that a few are still eager to resist the change ;)

I'm personally quite disappointed myself. It has been a long fight, and I'm not sure if it was worth fighting it at all. It's like trying to stop a whole dam from breaking apart with just your finger... and, worse than that, everybody insisting that you remove it!

For the record, I think I'm the first person in my country that managed to give a class in a RL university giving my avatar name to their internal Moodle... a few students never even learned my real name. Which was sort of weird, but — it seems to be possible if you try hard enough.

The final chime of hope is the one I added about IBM. IBM is what I call an "immersionist company". They're in SL as IBM, of course, but they're "fitting" in the overall scheme of things. They are believers in virtuality. They seem to understand that, like setting up a company on another country, they need to adapt to the "special rules" in SL. And these few rules that we have — ToS, Community Standards, Netiquette — have come from the old Immersionists.

So there is a sliver of hope here. Who knows what the future might bring. The worst case scenario is the one you've described: we're all going to be herded into some sort of ghetto. Even if we paint it in bright colours and declare it's not a ghetto at all — but OurSpace™.

Re: Immersionism and Augmentationism Revisited

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:11:29 -0000

Thanks to everybody for your incredibly insightful comments; some day I might start by asking you all about your opinions first, and only write about issues after reading your answers!

For A.T.'s sake — the presentation was in Portuguese, and since most people registered for the workshop with their avatar names, they really didn't 'react' much. Ironically, I was teaching them how to do programming in Second Life — while in real life, a company I work with rejected me as programmer because I'm "too slow" and "too unexperienced", thus validating the old rule: "if you don't know something, teach it" :)

For Digado's sake... yes, I've signed some NDAs as Gwyneth Llewelyn, but, then again, that's also my (locally registered) pseudonym and a trademark I own; and I've certainly accepted NDAs signed by pseudonyms, too. In that we're not different as, say, Marilyn Monroe signing a contract under her artistic name (minus the glamour, of course :) ). The whole issue of "reputation" is based on good faith and trust. If you don't have good faith in signing a contract, it's irrelevant if you do sign it with blood, a dozen witnesses, inside a church/template, and with a hand over a holy book of your preference. Reputation is not really tied to "external signs" and fancy ceremonies...

Re: Heel sounds on your shoes

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:49:17 -0000

Joshua,

How things improve in just four months :)

Re: Lag Myths Dispelled

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:13:57 -0000

For another opposing view, see Laynie's article on reducing lag.

Thanks to Ana Lutetia for the link!

Re: Second Life® Bloggers Require Clarification

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:11:16 -0000

A short follow-up... I'd welcome you to attend Robin Linden's office hours (see the SL® Wiki for this) and raise this issue with her. Namely, if you think your current blog name might be a problem, bring it up to her. During her last office hours the issue was not raised at all, in spite of her pushing the subject.

Still, one thing seems to be clear. One of the major reasons for going through all this trouble is that when you're a holder of a trademark, you need to enforce it, or it reverts back to the public domain — and Linden Lab® certainly wishes to keep Second Life® as a valuable asset of their company!

The second issue is that a lot of their competitors are placing ads with things like "Start your Second Life on There.com" or something similar. You might even see things like "Clothes for your Second Life" on Google Ads and be redirected to... IMVU. This is what LL needs to prevent.

And thirdly, there is currently a lot of scam sites, like, well, http://www.second-life.com/ — not to mention places like "The Official Second Life Site for [Insert Country Here]" which is anything but official. So all these cases are very clear violations/abuse of LL's trademarks.

Still, this will mean that things like http://slprofiles.com, or http://slexchange.com, or even http://secondlifeherald.com will have to go — and that is something quite sad to see.

Re: Second Life® Bloggers Require Clarification

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:30:26 -0000

Yes, definitely, Laetizia — publish it on your blog too if you wish :)

Re: Second Life® Bloggers Require Clarification

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:41:55 -0000

Ciaran, I'm pretty sure the usage of ® and ™ is really minor and nobody at the 'Lab will worry about it...

The real issue here is clarifying in which cases Linden Lab is willing to "grandfather" some existing projects, which have high visibility not only inside the community — but on Google PageRank too! — and which, thanks to them, a lot of people have joined Second Life®. "The Virtual World Shakespearan Company" or "The Virtual World Ballet Troupe" will definitely not attract anyone to join SL® if people happen upon either of these names somewhere on the 'net...

Re: Three Years Late… But HTML-On-A-Prim is Here!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:06:43 -0000

Arria, you'e using the Release Candidate 4, aren't you? :)

Re: Three Years Late… But HTML-On-A-Prim is Here!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:08:07 -0000

A.T. they shouldn't be "per sim" since RC2 came out (it was a bug in RC0, not corrected in RC1, but RC2 should work fine). With LL's mandatory upgrade to RC4 yesterday, all these should work correctly "per avatar" again. But... try it out for yourself :)

Re: Blog Warning: UPGRADE IN PROGRESS

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:17:53 -0000

All right... this works... but it seems that I have to give up on the WP Super Cache, sadly. It simply gets totally confused about what to cache with this so dynamic site :)

My friends tell me that WP 2.5 does a far better job at caching things, so we'll have to live with a slower-responding site for a while until I can get a more permanent fix!

Re: Immersionism and Augmentationism Revisited

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:43:08 -0000

*hugs* Torley :) Yes, you've definitely been a "switcher" (borrowing the expression from Apple :) ).

Yay, it seems that WordPress now allows Yahoo OpenIDs — thanks for testing! Now to make sure that these will also correctly retrieve the name and the Gravatar, that will be something I'll spend some time with on the next weekend...

Re: Linden Lab® Becomes Virtual (Real?) Bank

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 05:11:12 -0000

Obviosly, dear Hamlet and Chez, that link gives you a "Page not found" error, because... it never existed :)

Thanks for the lovely comments anyway!

The fun bit, of course, is that this might have been possible ;)

Re: Petition to Linden Lab on the Policy of Trademark Enforcement

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:34:35 -0000

A text is just a text. I'm proposing a bit more of actively campaigning for the petition to get further clarification.

Traditionally, protests and rallys are made in front of the Governor's Mansion in Clementina. T-shirts are available through PalUP Ling (ask for the "Rshirt" with the bomb logo!).

Ideally, people would gather in different spots on the grid, organised by communities, and then slowly walk towards Clementina. Clementina doesn't handle more than 40 avatars, though. But... it's traditional. Bring your tomato shooting guns (or watermelon guns too). This will be a complex weekend and I need to ask when/if the Governor's Mansion can be used for the rally. Date to be announced — but more likely the weekend after this one.

SignpostMarv Martin and CodeBastard Redgrave suggest a more clever way of protest instead of a "shutdown". WordPress users can install a plugin tweaked by him that allows an immediate (and temporary!) change of Linden Lab's trademarked names to things like "Virtual World That Is Not To Be Named" (Second Life) or "Acronym of Unnameable Virtual World" (SL) and "Company That Cannot Be Named" (LL). The plugin is called Ubernym and Marv's patched version is available here.

We also need someone to handle the press. The purpose of this open petition is to escape the SLogosphere (a name which, sadly, I won't be able to use any more) and attract the RL media's attention. Quoting Rheta Shan,

As we all know, it's not about being right alone, it's about being right and being heard :)

What we also need (besides PalUP Ling's T-shirt) is a few signs and some mottos. We don't want to make LL's lawyers angry and get a "banfest", so I suggest the following (edited by Marv and Rheta)

Have a list of "mottos" that are positive but make a point:

The "dos":

"We want to continue to promote Second Life!"

"Don't shut down the fansites!"

"Marketing crowdsourcing — from 10,000 to 13 million in 4 years"

"We love SL — and wish to continue to say that!"

"We love to live here — let us say so!" (variant of the above)

"We love our Second Lives" (bit elliptic, granted, but openly defying the guidelines while conveying a positive message)

The "don'ts":

"You have no right to take back the use of SL from your residents!"
"Your World, Our Imagination, Your Trademark"
"No censorship in SL" (though censorship or the potential for censorship is one of the topics at hand, the term seems too contentious)

Please add your comments and suggestions below. More places for rallys and gatherings are welcome. The Dreams Community Fair, held by The Sojourner, is starting soon — it might be the place for another event.

Re: Petition to Linden Lab on the Policy of Trademark Enforcement

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 06:28:55 -0000

Indeed, IYan, there has to be a certain degree of realism on our expectations. How many avatars need LL to ban to stop people from continuing to complain? Probably around ten or twelve thousand?

Well, that's less than the number of new registrations per day. So life will go on.

They might also file a few hundreds of lawsuits against the owners of these avatars, just to make a point that they are, indeed, pursuing their claims on the trademark.

This will naturally be forgotten in a few weeks :)

Nevertheless, the Lindens sometimes come to their senses, think a bit about what they're doing, evaluate their options, and work on a compromise.

Re: Petition to Linden Lab on the Policy of Trademark Enforcement

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 10:34:25 -0000

I'm thinking on doing something like a pre-protest. Basically gathering people in-world for a "meeting", during Sunday, and throw in some ideas.

Re: Petition to Linden Lab on the Policy of Trademark Enforcement

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:18:00 -0000

Please, Rheta — it was not my work only! If it weren't for your deeply insightful comments, suggestions, and rewriting, I would have missed one of the most fundamental points... that LL can effectively curb the freedom of expression if it "hurts" them.

Thanks for your incredible support!

Now let's meet in-world sometime tomorrow :)

Re: Petition to Linden Lab on the Policy of Trademark Enforcement

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:23:03 -0000

A small comment to explain where I found out those numbers. My idea was to estimate how many blogs and websites are directly affected by the new rules. This is quite hard to do, since they are not "registered" anywhere (ie. there is no "list of official sites for Second Life"), and even if they were, Linden Lab would probably go after the unregistered ones first.

Everybody knows how to search for "links" on Google, and these are pretty straightforward, of course. The problem is that Google is not good at providing "aggregate statistics" — they just provide you with the raw data — and might even count several links more than once. In fact, Google will only retrieve and display the first 1000 relevant links (try it out!), so it's hard to do some serious data analysis. 24 million links can show how widespread Second Life is in Google (Facebook gets 190 million; MySpace and YouTube, 420 million; "World of Warcraft", 65 million) but not much more.

So to get at the more precise number of sites that link back to http://www.secondlife.com/ I just typed in "link:www.secondlife.com". You get 14,000 results. This, however, will also show media sites that have just posted stories about Second Life, and which are not really "Second Life Fan Sites".

There was also an article on NWN discussing the number of active SL blogs. I claimed, by extrapolation on some data, that the number would be around 3000-4000. But this is just a fraction of other services that might also be related to Second Life.

So, what is the alternative to count those sites? Well, knowing that the websites with domain names including "SL" or "Second Life" will be the primary targets of LL's "banfest", the trick is to search for those domain names. You can do the search on your own using http://domain-search.domaintools.com/. With a little patience you can find out that about 4000 active domain names have "Second Life" in them; 14,500 start with "sl-" and 100,000 with "sl". Obviously the last number is huge — but things like "sleeptight.com" or "slovenianhomes.com" will naturally pop up in those searches (and will be the majority). Quite a lot of these are also parked domains or redirections to porn sites.

Then there is a large number of sites that have no trademarks in the domain name, but might have things like "Second Life Blog" somewhere inside their titles or metadata. These are probably the majority, and they will be very hard to find.

Anyway, my estimates of "the number of Second Life fansites" based on the above numbers are as good as any others :)

Re: Petition to Linden Lab on the Policy of Trademark Enforcement

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 06:52:33 -0000

Excellent point made on the "dilution" problem, Jessica. What I have heard so far from LL was mostly worrying about "genericide", but I think that dilution is as bad as that, even if not worse. In fact, I can imagine that nobody will understand the difference if "Second Life Grid" is a Linden Lab product, while "Second Life Open Grid" is not. You're very correct on that. It should be part of the revised text.

Prokofy Neva also pointed out another problem. The terms of use of their trademark allow people to create something called "SL Developer Connection", and use it in-world, as long as you don't use that as a trademark, a company name, doing business as, or (even worse) use that to provide services to the competition. This should also be addressed at some point.

Re: Economics 101 for Technology Investors

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:25:56 -0000

No need to be "sorry", Ciaran! Your opinion is more than welcome.

To make it perfectly clear, I'm not against "land barons" who buy wholesale and split parcels to sell them to newcomers and call that a service. I was in that business once, too — only in 2D, not in 3D! So, obviously the business is valid, important, and necessary. Not everybody is able to buy their own servers and can only pay to have a tiny bit of it.

There are, however, as I pointed out, two different types of services here. One is the pure slice & dice land speculator — the person who buys wholesale and reaps a profit by selling slices of a simulator. They're not different from people who just buy a server in a rack and provide access to it to several users, possibly through some cool-and-easy-to-use web tool. Of course they're "service providers" too.

And then there is a different class of business — the ones that don't simply give you access to a slice, but add services to it. On the web, they might, for instance, give you access to applications (example: Flickr, MySpace, YouTube...). You're still getting the same thing: access to disk space, bandwidth, and shared servers. But you're paying for the service, not for the disk space.

Is that clear?

When I say that lowering the prices can lead to higher margins is that successful business owners on online services will try to lower the costs of their infrastructure as much as possible but keep the price of their services as high as they can. If the service is good, people will pay for it what it's worth — and not what your costs actually are.

Naturally competition will tend to make prices fall down. The more people are providing the same service, the less likely you are to be able to charge your customers the same thing, specially if they perceive that your costs are going down — and if your competition drops prices accordingly. You can, however, refuse to accept the price war. Instead, offer more (or better) services for the same prices. Some customers are more sensitive to price changes; other to what services they can get for the same amount of money. Juggling between the service-vs.-price issue is where a business manager will be making their qualified decisions.

Now, I see you're shaking your head and saying: "but Second Life is not the Web, everything is so different here, we're a community of users, we are LL resellers, and we're being undercut with our wholesale provider!" I'll maintain my claim. This only happens because you wish so. In fact, if you're providing a service that is not seen as "valuable", since you're stating that when LL drops prices dramatically, landlords have no choice but to do the same.

Why?

The answer can only be one: because tenants don't value your service at all — they only value price :)

Now I agree that this is naturally one way of making business as a landlady — basically, adding little value to the service, because "every other landlord is doing the same". But that's a choice. It's not "ignoring in-world economics" (which are, btw, the same as any kind of economics — just with less variables to play with). It's claiming that just "because everybody else does the same I have to do it too, or lose money". Not at all! Innovative services will be able to fill in the gap nicely.

I can give just one example of many possible. Let's assume you refuse to drop the prices on your sim. Tenants will complain, since they know that sims are cheaper, and that everybody else is dropping their prices. What will you answer them? "You'll have to face griefing, ugly builders, no urban planning, no events, and no technical support from the other landlords. I provide all those additional services for you — for a price. The choice is yours." Sure, a few will always go away and search for cheaper land. But the ones that stay will be the ones interested in buying a better service and pay premium for that.

You might also claim that this is simply not how it works! In fact, I know that high rotativity is good for landlords that charge an upfront fee — the more quickly people leave their lands for others to buy, the more you gain. I've seen some landlords offering plots for below-average pricing, thus attracting new customers quickly, then actually ignoring griefers deliberately (or, who knows, hiring them) to quickly buy the land back (or even reclaim it when the resident simply quits SL in disgust) and sell it again as fast as possible. It's not nice, but it's also an alternative way of running a business.

And then again, I know of communities where the price of land remained stable over three years, no matter what the actual price of the original islands was. They're profitable. They even offer things like plots at twice the prims. They get their tenants in, paying the same values, above what others are doing — just because they're better at providing services that their competitors. They're not happy; they're jubilant that they can grow their offerings at almost twice the rate as before!

They are, of course, very few. If I could hazard a guess, based only on the comments I've heard, it's about one in hundred. Then again, these landlords do not usually vent their opinions publicly. They're silent and plod on, gathering more and more customers — slowly.

If the one in hundred ratio is correct (and I hope it's not!) this is actually a very bad sign. It's impossible that these few service-oriented landlords are able to absorb all the tenants vacated by the people that are complaining now and will very likely cut their costs and leave SL — dumping their sims in the process. And this, of course, is worrying.

Finally, a last comment on the content creators. First, they are far many than the landbarons — their major investment is mostly in labour, not money, although at some point they'll also need to figure out the costs of paying for their shops' rent, licensing costs for the software they use, and promotion. Still, granted, it's a lower cost of investment.

Content creators have short memories? Oh sure, they have. You'll see that the biggest complainers are the oldest creators, who are still stuck with the "glory of the past", where competition was small and they could set the prices they wish — and get a moderate income from 3 or 4 year old designs, thanks to the influx of newbies. These were naturally the ones worried when prices started to drop — since they had no patience (or time) to continue to produce a steady stream of new, fresh content, and relied on "established sales" on existing content. Again, we're talking about a type of business that relied on building up a reputation when SL was young and get a regular income from that past effort.

Those were the content creators that were scared off the "competition". New, talented designers have an incredible energy in producing content weekly — and all of it is very high quality. These don't worry about Anshe's announcements — they know they can produce more, better, and probably even faster than Anshe. If you're good in what you do — and have a solid model based on constantly exceeding your customers' expectations — you don't need to "fear" competition from the cheap copycats.

Speaking of which, there I see a major problem — pirated content. It's more a question of principle than an issue of losing sales. Your established customer base knows who you are and where your legitimate shops are. However, the pirates can hurt your reputation — they might illegitimately claim they're your agents (which they aren't). They can sell lower-quality products — and the customers will complain to the original creator, not to the pirate. They can dump and flood the market in certain areas, pushing your content as "freebies" or at very low prices — transforming an otherwise high-quality product into one that has no value. And this definitely hurts reputation — and through it, it hurts sales. Worse than that, there is no "technological" solution for the problem, only a social one — either LL forbids piracy through a rigid enforcement of the ToS, or you, as a content producer, need to file lawsuits against the pirates. A complex, morose procedure, that will hardly have a successful outcome, wasting your time and money, and dragging your issues into the public sphere.

In conclusion (this is a long comment!), I'm really not convinced by your arguments, except in one major point:

Linden Lab is not good at communication.

And they haven't learned to get better at it.

I think this is the root cause of all evil, and I hope to address it on a new post...

Re: Economics 101 for Technology Investors

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:29:59 -0000

@2 Doyle, because I reserve 160-character comments for Twitter, and 5000-word essays for my blog ;) Different technologies, different audiences, different attention spans, different purposes.

Oh, and Prokofy's article (which predates mine) is here.

Re: Economics 101 for Technology Investors

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:13:12 -0000

Ciaran, you're so right on bad communications being the major problem that I decided to dedicate a whole essay on it.

That is, indeed, the major issue.

As for viewing servers as an asset, well, there's a lot to be said about it. You really don't "buy" a server, you pay a setup cost — a practice that is slowly fading out of fashion on web hosting.

Perhaps Linden Lab is planning to reduce setup costs to zero and just have people pay leasing costs ("tier"), and this is one of the first of many steps to do that. How can we tell? They're so bad at communicating what they intend to do — we can only speculate.

In any case, I view "buying an island" as exactly the same thing as "buying a car". The moment I drive it out of the stand, its value has gone down by 30% immediately. But it's worse: a new car might come out the next week, with more features for a lower price, and people will not be interested in my second-hand car, unless I sell it for even less. Sure, private islands are not cars, since newer private islands don't have "more features" but exactly the same features they had 6 or 36 months ago.

But I agree with you. Poor communication from LL, badly addressing customer's needs and ignoring complaints, will be bad for everyone — in the short term and the long term. And there's where the crux of the matter lies. Price cuts are just another of several badly announced things lately.

Re: Going on strike…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:42:51 -0000

@10 Max, feel free to strike for 1 or 2 months if you wish ;)

Re: Secrets to Success in Second Life®

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:05:26 -0000

Thanks, Pedant :) It just shows that technology is not perfect — spell checkers can fail, too!

Re: Splitting Hairs Over Trademarks

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:25:49 -0000

Oh, actually, I don't agree with Linden Lab. In fact, I totally disagree with the way they're treating us.

However, there is quite a difference in "disagreeing" and "doing something about it". In this case, it means a legal fight: getting hold of a good lawyer in California that works pro bono and file a lawsuit against Linden Lab, very carefully stating that they have no further claim on the trademark in the manner they've stated, ie. that essentially they cannot trademark the "name for a community of people".

Now, this obviously means a much stronger fight — not one of raising awareness (which LL can suppress easily), but one of going to court. As we saw on Bragg vs. Linden Lab, when forced against the wall, LL prefers to settle on an agreement than endless pursuing their case (which is damaging against their interests). So my feeling is that by going to court, LL will negotiate much friendlier terms.

Now that is my personal point of view :) I think we did what we could to stay away from the courts, and we saw what came out of it. The fight now needs more powerful weapons :)

However, in my case, I'm not willing to sponsor a lawsuit against LL, nor encourage anyone to do that. It'll get nasty. Bragg, for instance, got his avatar, his land, and his money back — but his reputation was hopelessly ruined in SL and RL. Nobody will ever make a deal with him, even if, technically, he "won" the case (or, rather, forced LL to settle on an agreement).

And, who knows, perhaps Bragg's lawyer is reading these lines and thinking "hey, what a cool idea, why don't I sue LL for this...".

Re: Splitting Hairs Over Trademarks

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:29:36 -0000

For the sake of the argument, Cat, writing on your blog saying "I hate LL because it's my personal opinion" is not disparaging ;)

Writing "I hate LL because they're crooks and are cheating us out of our money and SL is just a pyramid scheme, so stay away from it" is!

There's a lot of difference in the content of those statements, even if the form is similar.

Re: Splitting Hairs Over Trademarks

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:55:47 -0000

Rui, take into account that the Portuguese laws on freedom of speech are quite different from the US laws. The biggest difference in our tiny little country is that our freedom of speech is protected against everything (and so is the right to fight back in court against defamation and libel).

This means that if you send an email to a colleague at work saying "my boss is an utter idiot", and that message is intercepted by your boss, three things happen:

1) Your boss has committed a crime by reading your email. Even at work, the right to privacy to your mailbox is guaranteed, even if the mailboxes are property of the company you work for.
2) You cannot get fired arbitrarily without due disciplinary process. So your boss would have to file an internal disciplinary process to prove you've been actively disrupting the work environment to justify firing you. And he can't use your email as proof.
3) Finally, nobody can be fired for emitting their opinion. In fact, that's an universal right that is guaranteed to all Portuguese citizens: you cannot commit crimes when expressing an opinion, and this holds true in all circumstances. (An "opinion" is "ideology", and you cannot be arrested for defending an ideology, no matter how crazy it might sound)

Now contrast that to the situation in the United States. What the US Constitution protects is the right to express your opinion against the Government. That means that the Government cannot pass laws that prevent you from speaking against them — no matter in which form. They can't also press charges against you if you emit a contrary opinion against your Government (that's why I have such a difficulty to understand how the Patriot Act was approved by the Houses...). More interestingly, they have an extension towards "public figures" (ie. not necessarily Government officials — but people like actors, popular speakers, etc.) which basically state the same thing.

Where US law is fundamentally different is that it doesn't cover the freedom of speech rights inside a corporation. Basically, in private, you're able to do what you wish, set the rules you want, impose what you like, and nobody — not even the Government — can interfere. The right to privacy is not guaranteed on the US Constitution, although I think that all States, on their own constitutions (yes, each State has one), do respect privacy. However, corporations are absolutely free to restrict "freedom of speech" exercised against themselves by their employees, clients, partners, etc. They have the right to do business to whomever they wish — and are not compelled to provide service to whom they dislike. They can also fire whomever they wish.

The fundamental point here is that Linden Lab is not required to provide service to a customer (a resident) that aggressively attacks them in public — specially if that resident comes from a different culture where freedom of speech is universal and not restricted to "special cases" (eg. only against the Government). They are fully entitled — legally — to prevent access to service to whomever they wish. That's also constitutionally guaranteed, and embodied in a lot of laws — namely, the ability to sign with your clients any type of contract you wish (so long as they don't violate any existing laws). This is very typical of common law systems, where basically "everything is allowed which is not explicitly forbidden".

Except for the British, we Europeans are more used to civil law systems, which operate on the exact opposite terms: "everything is forbidden, except those things that we have a framework of laws to explicitly allow it." Thus, corporations in Portugal cannot prevent their customers to exercise their freedom of speech — and cannot deny them service — and furthermore they cannot sign "any type" of contract with their clients, but have to work within a specific framework.

In fact, the LL ToS is almost completely void in any European country, since it doesn't "fit" in any of the frameworks. The most notable case is the one about LL seizing your money and your assets if you are banned — this would be a crime in Europe, but in the US (and, to a degree, on most common law systems, of which there are just a handful in the world), it's just a clause in the contract — which you either sign, or don't. But if you sign them, all are valid.

So this issue is not really a legal one, but a moral one, coming from a different culture. It revolts us Europeans that corporations have the right to deny service based on our opinions. But, the plain and simple fact is... we've signed a ToS under the Californian jurisdiction, and we can't avoid it.

Morally, of course, I'm revolted — but that comes from my education, my social background, the context I live in. Legally, LL is right — they have the right to do as they please. And we have the right, of course, not to sign the ToS if we dislike it.

But once we sign it, we forfeit the right to discuss it under our jurisdiction's legislation, but have to abide by Californian law — even if we dislike it.

Re: Splitting Hairs Over Trademarks

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:31:31 -0000

Oh, I don't think that all is well, Rheta. All is not well. I might point out Tateru's article on Massively, where she clearly states the fundamental aspect of this clarification by LL: that from now on, LL will, in extreme cases, refuse to provide service if we disagree with them. This is a novelty in LL's official position. So far, to the best of everybody's memories, they never made such a strong statement.

The other thing is — what did we "win"? Well, awareness was raised. A new procedure — also unique — was established where residents are allowed to reply to bans due to trademark infringements, and even a form of appeal. Of course, ultimately, LL might ignore that all — but if they did, they would be really going over the top by publicly claiming something and behaving otherwise.

The two other issues were much more trickier to "win". What LL basically did was simple: say "no" to the rest of our requests.

Where do we stand now?

We have three choices:

1) Continue the protest, but making it louder (or make it more creative).
2) Fight in court.
3) Accept a compromise.

Re: Splitting Hairs Over Trademarks

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:29:58 -0000

Rheta, I'm obviously available to discuss other strategies for protest, that goes without saying. The call for clarification was what motivated the 3-day strike. LL just posted their clarification on the last day of the strike. That was the first step.

LL made their move with that. Yes, they provided clarification. No, they're not willing to concede in any point, except the one of "banning without fair warning" — that was the only thing that was really clarified.

They made their position more clear. Instead of "legalese", they answered our questions — and questions that so many asked — in plain English. For me, their answers were quite clear:

1. Section 4.4 was not removed, not changed, and LL reinforced that they would use it — within reasonable limits, but definitely use it — to refuse service to avatars whose owners don't comply with their trademark policy.

2. There is not going to be any grandfathering of domain names.

3. Old content written in the past 4 years will not be subject to LL's analysis, but new one certainly will.

4. Dubious and doubtful cases will be settled with LL individually, one by one, at their will.

So, the protest was to get clarification, and clarification we got.

Now the issue is — the clarification didn't make things better. Quoting myself again: no, all is not well. There is a compromise by LL to restate more clearly what they intend — and I think it's reasonable to assume that they made an effort to be clear — but the compromise doesn't go as far as compromising on the issues (except for, well, minor issues).

So it's clear to me that LL is not going to change their position (like they didn't change so many other things), and they're pretty stubborn at that.

So what should the next step be? I'm repeating myself, I know. Protesting for protest's sake will not make LL change — we know that now. There are no "openings" in their argumentation where we might breach their wall. In my mind, this means that the fight now has to be targeted directly to fight against their trademark claims. As said, that's a nasty business, and it means that people have to be aware of what it means: suing LL in court.

Now, many, including Cat Magellan, have asked for legal advice by Californian lawyers. There is a pretty good chance of fighting LL in court and winning the issue. It will, of course, be a nasty battle — one where all parts involved will invariably lose something (namely, reputation) — but there are reasonably strong arguments for winning.

So again I ask you: between the three choices — protest louder, suing LL in court, or accepting compromise — what do you wish to do?

Personally I'm against "protesting for protest's sake". We can't say that LL didn't "address our concerns" — they did exactly what was asked, making their position clearer, and refusing to go beyond that. So to continue to insist, it needs to be a different protest.

The only suggestion I can make is to meet again in-world and throw some suggestions around, write a new document, get a few friendly IP lawyer to assist in the discussion, and see what we can come up with as a next step on the protest. Very likely it will have to involve a "threat of a lawsuit" to catch LL's attention.

I actually like Vint Falken's Trademark Parody Contest as a way of protest. Parody is very well established as a legitimate way to both use trademarks and make fun of them as a means to criticize a company's position. It might be an idea...

Re: My presentations on SlideShare

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 06:36:28 -0000

Thanks, Peter, I actually used the whole range of Google's online applications quite a bit. They're better for "collaboration" (ie. having several people working on them at the same time), while SlideShare seems to be a bit better for "publishing", at least in my opinion.

I think that Google's obsession with "search, not organise" makes their pack of applications a bit too unorganised for my personal tastes — I'm sure that at some point they'll allow people to share folders and tags and not only documents, one by one.

Re: The InterGrid and the Second Life Foundation

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:02:18 -0000

Prokofy, I stand corrected :) I didn't remember to re-read your article on that but in fact I was thinking more about your more recent "Cultural Revolution" article.

However, the "meme" of LL starting/joining a Foundation has been around the SLogosphere for quite some time. The oldest article I wrote about it was on November, 2005 (http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2005/11/16/sl-evangelisation-or-how-to-extend-linden-labs-marketing-efforts/), and although it talks about "crowdsourcing marketing", it mentions Mitch Kapor as a possibility to point LL into a "foundation" as part of LL's efforts.

More recently, a week before that "math article" came out on the Herald, I took some time to write about the Open Source Grid (Open Source Second Life — The Geeks Strike Back) and their creators' wish to establish a foundation for it. The difference perhaps was that it would be a non-LL-founded foundation (sorry about the pleonasm), but I'm sure that if Gareth Ellison goes ahead and turns his not-for-profit into a foundation, this would very likely get LL's sponsorship as well.

jcm, I'd be pleased to run your survey if you wish, but please ask permission from either the CSI:NY team or from the Electric Sheep Company first. My email address is gwyneth.llewelyn@gwynethllewelyn.net.

Re: A Special Thanks to Gwen Carillon

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:24:39 -0000

Thanks to all for your kind words! I'm actually feeling much better today :)

Re: The InterGrid and the Second Life Foundation

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:04:46 -0000

Ina, I'm pretty sure I didn't intend to imply that people would need to "log off" to enter a different (but interconnected) grid. Take a look at Ugotrade's article, where an example of how a distributed grid — with separate asset servers — can work (now, not in the future!) without the requirement of logging out of one grid and entering the next.

As a matter of fact, the realXtend project is something like a mix of Gravatar + OpenID for the 2D Web: use any entry point to log in, bring your avatar and your inventory with you, no matter which grid you're connecting to.

Re: Shadowy details! [UPDATED AGAIN]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:51:07 -0000

Really, Opensource? That's bad news. Do you have a link to it? I understand that 2008/9 were mostly "stability development years" (and that's why we don't get any dramatic new features quickly enough), but was the whole project dropped when the developer went away?...

Re: Shadowy details! [UPDATED AGAIN]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:52:20 -0000

Smiley, that's fantastic news!!!! I stand corrected, and give a big hug to Katherine from me when you see her in-world :D

Re: The SL5B Drama: Crowdsourcing Fiasco Or Devious Plan?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:18:52 -0000

Actually, Prok, you should be happy: "the same old people" (the FIC) are being dumped by Linden Lab, trampled over, and pushed outside Second Life, or at least outside Second Life's promotion...

Thus rejoice! The land of mindless zombies has no place for the FIC any more — Linden Lab dixit.

Re: The SL5B Drama: Crowdsourcing Fiasco Or Devious Plan?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:01:09 -0000

Qie, you're so very right: SL5B was just "another example" of communication going all wrong, and of LL putting themselves in a limelight they should never bother to put. We can extrapolate to everything else, and not restrict it to this single example: it was just the most recent in a series.

Stand by for the trademark issue (the expiry date for the "grace period" is nearing!) and the age validation (looming over our heads and we don't know when it'll hit us with full force). Oh, and there are a few other nasty surprises up LL's sleeves which unfortunately I can't reveal... and there was no date for their official, public announcement. I'm sure, however, that it will coincide in a week where a lot of new features (Mono and Shadows at least) will be released to minimise the bad publicity...

Re: How Journalism Works

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:54:14 -0000

Well, as for the promotion of the conference, I don't know, it was well attended: about 1% of the current active Portuguese resident population, which is quite good, frankly. Conferences in other countries have far less than 0.1% :)

It was also extensively promoted over a period of four months, with an in-world "promotional session" that was held every two weeks inside of the very scattered Portuguese communities — always on a different spot, and each community also promoted it using their internal groups. Short notices appeared on the major Portuguese SL-related blogs, some of which are written by professional journalists (although most aren't :) ). Sure, it didn't attract the regular media's attention as much as last year, but it still managed to reach most people. The auditorium was 2/3 full, well within the expected number (more than last year, and most sessions were, on average, more attended than in 2007).

I would really like to dispell the notion that "most Portuguese researchers are working alone". It's totally the opposite: about a hundred are actively working in Second Life, and they all know each other and are in permanent contact between themselves. It's a closely knitted group, bonding beyond work and towards real-world friendship, and there is no single day when at least a few of them don't get together because of some common project, ongoing or planned.

If you mean that the Portuguese researchers work in isolation from the community, that is not even true! Even when compared with other research communities on other countries, on average, they tend to stick together within the Portuguese communities. Some are very active members and community leaders (and many don't have a clue of what they do outside SL); UTAD is placed right in the middle of the largest Portuguese community; one of the professors of the University of Aveiro is a major fashion designer for the whole of SL; one is a major machinima director; and the list goes endlessly on. No, they're anything but isolated.

So why don't they get mentioned in the traditional media? I'd point out to what I've learned: as a lobby, they aren't pushing strongly enough :) But they should!

Re: Google launches IMVU clone?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:56:16 -0000

Rivers Run Red is taking it pretty seriously, according to Business Wire.

Re: Google launches IMVU clone?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:58:32 -0000

I guess Raph Koster is fuming... Google stole Metaplace's show :)

Re: Google launches IMVU clone?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:08:22 -0000

... and so does Millions of Us. And I wonder if the Sheep's announcement that they would be "just doing Flash games on the Web" meant they would just develop for Google's Lively. Hmm.

Re: Not So Lively: Chronicles of Day One on Google’s Virtual World

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:03:29 -0000

Meez is actually more interesting than Lively and works on any browser... but, well, they're not Google.

Lively is Deadly indeed, Eloise. In fact, the most fun so far seems to be hanging around with fellow SLers and discuss whatever we discuss in SL. With the crappy interface (tiny window, chat history covering half of it and silly messages popping all over the place so that you're not seeing anything anyway), there is really nothing else to do. It's sort of a super-heavy IRC channel with cartoons and stupid animations. And that is a strange comment coming from me, I'm a famous collector of silly animations in SL...

Re: The Mighty Linden Dollar

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:55:42 -0000

Dale, if I interpret Prokofy's words correctly (and I'm often accused of being a bad "interpreter"), the crisis comes mostly from land prices having dropped dramatically due to an excess of supply for a lack of demand — making land barons (also known as "wholesale buyers of land", since LL relies upon them to buy whole sims and parcel them out accordingly) suffer from the lack of sales and the tier payments they have to sustain until the demand grows again. Remember that all these people are mostly short-term profit-makers, they cannot hold unto land for months and months until the crisis is over. They need to buy quick and sell quick, or they'll lose money every month due to tier. Linden Lab is quoted to be the major agent in the crisis by oversupplying land for a slow growth in the user base — namely, in the number of residents that are, indeed, interested in "buying land".

Laetizia, I'm sorry, but your argument is really old and outdated. Sure it's not "real" nor tangible; and exactly as you mention, we "buy" intangible goods all the time, and assign value to them although they're just bits and bytes: imagine domain names under .com, for instance. It's amazing how people make a profit by hoarding names that they invent or look up on dictionaries. So I agree that it takes some time to mentalities to change and understand that a bunch of pixels on the screen has some value (because mostly someone is maintaining the servers that allow it to be there, 24h a day).

I've always been a supporter of value-added services. If "land" in SL is just land, without any concept of value added on top of it, no wonder that too much land is a bad idea, since the only variable in the equation will be how cheap you can get it. I've been often accused of "not understanding anythin about the land business" when claiming that the problem with most small-scale land barons is that they just wish to make a quick profit without effort: buying wholesale, parcelling it, announcing it for sale, getting rid of it as quickly as possible, buying some more. You're simply too dependent on the market changes for that. Sure, it means that sometimes the high risk yields high profits (that's true for everything in an open market economy...), but it also means that it's as risky as gambling on the stock market.

Planned communities, adding services (like protection from griefers; zoning rules; dealing with abuse), providing events and entertainment, all these are factors that make land be more important, and attract potential customers because of the value-added service. It also means that the land prices can fluctuate, but your price will mostly depend on the services you provide on top of the price. That's why in real life you can get a virtual host with 300 GB from Dreamhost for 6 USD per month, but Verio charges for what apparently is the same service about US$1000/month. The range of services provided by Verio is on a completely different category than Dreamhost's (and I'm a DH fangirl, too!) and that's why they can charge 160 times as more! The value of "bandwidth" or "hardware" is pretty irrelevant in that case...

Then again, the argument that technology-related prices drop all the time is my favourite one :) But tell that to anyone in the land business and they'll crucify you for being a heretic. See one of my early articles, specially the comments. Let me quote Ciaran Laval:

Gwyn I’m sorry but you’re wrong on so many levels on this issue.

Re: The Mighty Linden Dollar

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:24:46 -0000

Indeed, Max, I believe that Scarp is *totally* right. The reason why we have providers like, say, Dreamhost, giving you access to a full virtual server for, well, US$10 per month, is that they can fit a thousand users per physical server, which will cost them little more than US$1000/month (in leasing costs and high-speed bandwidth from ), and possibly as much in (human) maintenance. Large-scale providers cn thus make a huge profit that way.

The very same economics completely fail for grid service, where one single physical server can only have 4 virtual sims running on it. In fact, I'm actually surprised how LL charges so little per sim! I would say that they contract way too little bandwidth per server, thus having a lower price-per-server... which would explain things like the hard-coded limits on the number of avatars.

Re: The Mighty Linden Dollar

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:54:48 -0000

I see your point, Max :) Now, one question: why do you value a whole island — all 65,536 m2 of it and the 15,000 prims so low?

Understanding the reasons for it might also help LL target their product better. For instance, those numbers above are actually a bit "arbitrary". A sim could theoretically be 1024x1024 in size; or it could be 64x64 but have 15,000 prims! Or, like LL does with the OpenSpace sims, you can get one much cheaper, with the same 256x256, but far less prims. I can imagine sims being offered with 512 prims, 256x256 in size, but only for as low as L$20 — running, of course, 128 sims on the same server, and allowing as little as 3-4 simultaneous avatars per sim...

While there is a theoretical limit on the combinations, I think that LL could effectively tailor one combination that allows them to get an extra-low price, trading off on the features.

And there is a HUGE market for having 256x256 islands with 60,000 prims and allowing 400 avatars, for US$1200/month. It's such a pity that Linden Lab does not wish to offer that service, because it would simply be *awesome* — imagine what you could do joining four of those super-sims side by side, and get events attended by 1600 avatars simultaneously!

Re: Blog upgrade under progress!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:42:29 -0000

Aww and no comments on the two things that took me more time to do: the video of me digging (I had to build an object! and upload an animation for digging!...), and the insanely complex conversion of the winking Gwyn into an animated GIF. It seems that Photoshop CS3 now does that with just with one click; but under CS1 it takes about 2 hours to do it... *sighs*.

Ah well. Now suddenly I found out that I have far less widgets than I thought! That's the problem in starting with a hand-tweaked Wordpress theme that had no widgets: I have to start everything from scratch... this time, however, using widgets, which should be easier to update to later Wordpress versions...

The major reason for the change was (besides widgets!) a way to have the central section fluidly and dynamically adapt to the browser's width. That fixed width was slowly getting on my nerves!!

Re: Blog upgrade under progress!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:05:28 -0000

Hmm, after all, it seems that the comment preview plugin works after all...

Re: Immersion or Isolation?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:15:03 -0000

Ah, thanks for the YouTube link, 1angelcares... in fact, on page 3 (yes, the posts now have pages!!), I did place a link to YouTube for realXtend, but it's not the same as yours. Indeed, I do agree: avatars are important, and not all of us like cartoons/anime characters...

And yes, Ashcroft, it was our chat that definitely inspired me!... as well as one with Tara5 Oh from Ugotrade. We were both cursing and lamenting how the industry is basically moving away from immersive, contiguous virtual worlds to go to closed-room envirnoments..

Re: The Mighty Linden Dollar

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:10:21 -0000

Well, Tabliopa (@30), my only fear is if that would turn SL, the "contiguous virtual world" into one of "separate rooms" (islands!)... :)

Re: A Touching Event

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:31:19 -0000

BTW, good news. At the latest Volunteer Meeting, Periapse Linden has announced that Mono and llDetectedTouch() would be rolled out this Monday as SL server 1.24 is going to be deployed on the grid!

Re: A Touching Event

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:35:27 -0000

Aww you deserve way more praise than I can possibly write, Qarl — and my "payment" is that we all get a wonderful, totally unexpected fantastic feature in SL thanks to you!

Re: Sitting down with flexiskirts [UPDATED]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:10:53 -0000

Thanks, Krimson, I've added your explanation to the main article :)

Re: The Atomic and The Digital World

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:06:29 -0000

Susan, I'm flattered that you considered my article worth reading... thanks for the kind words!

Soph, if we did learn something from recent history, is that human experiences (extending to society and politics) are contagious. In the currently wired world — covering around a third of this planet's overall population, which is amazing to say the least — ideas and concepts spread like wildfire and they are almost impossible to contain (even China is dropping their firewalls!).

Although I understand your point between "colonialism" and "settlement", I think that we're past an age where the concept still applies. The digital era makes everything smoothly uniform, as concepts spill over all barriers — distance, culture, national borders. It's unavoidable, like so many autocratic RL governments have found out. The more connected a population is, the more it is exposed to all different kinds of ideas. If you wish, you can call it a "cultural colonialism" of a sorts, in the sense that everyone who is online gets affected by it.

We can still artificially raise barriers, like the RIAA still tries, but ultimately these will all fail. Thus, as time goes by, the clear division of what "colonialism" and "settlement" is will definitely blend and merge — and specially so on virtual worlds, which are inhabited by human beings who are used to live in the digital age.

Just look at what the major influences were on Second Life when it started: it absorbed the leftist culture of the young Internet, used by the early adopters — the "share everything" and "information ought to be free" attitude, and the "I wish recognition, not payment" reward methodology. Not many years afterwards, Second Life was immediately "infected" by the second wave of Internet adopters (the mainstream pragmatists): rampant capitalism. Both were attitudes developed outside virtual worlds, but quickly adopted and implemented in Second Life; of course, having a far larger number of people, the second wave was predominant. But we're certainly living in a Second Life which is the result of a "colonised" environment that adopted the prevalent attitudes in the digital era. They were even little changed; things like spam and scams became commonplace in SL as they are on the Internet. Not surprisingly, "mature content" also has a similar degree of adoption in SL (about a fifth of all content is mature) as it has on the Internet.

I would be very surprised that we will consistently encounter "a synthetic culture taking into account local circumstances, consciously choosing the best among available alternatives, tried and untried, and creating a new place apart from the parent society". In fact, what is happening is rather the contrary: the "parent society" (our planet, Earth) influences directly what the culture looks like, with just a few exceptions here and there (which obviously also exist in the physical world: we still have pockets of counter-culture on Earth, and these will not disappear). I'm hardly shocked: after all, the people are the same. We don't leave our brains out of the door when we log in to SL. Well, at least most of us don't :)

However, that doesn't mean that the emerging culture in SL is an exact copy of the one in the "parent society". Just like democracy in Europe changed subtly when it was "adopted" in the US — but both kinds are still democracies! — several things will be slightly changed inside virtual worlds. A good example is something as simple as the basis of enforcement: in the physical world, we can die violently, so governments enact a monopoly on violence (this basically means that acting violently on your own is illegal). But avatars don't die. Instead, they own land. Thus, enforcement in SL is done not by violence, but by withholding the rights to land. Nevertheless, a democracy based on land will be fundamentally similar than one based on the monopoly of violence. Both will allow people ("citizens") to self-rule themselves through electing members of government via a popular vote, and apply laws that affect their common lives. Just the method of enforcement will be different.

This naturally will extend to almost all areas of human culture and society inside a synthetic, digital world. We have SL-specific art inside SL, too, but that does not mean we have gotten rid of art critics: they do exist and fullfill the same role as in the atomic world. We learn and teach SL-related skills just like in the atomic world we learn about acountancy or computer software or common law. We gravitate towards personalities; we lobby for things we deem important; we assert our intellectual property rights, but instead of filing our creations with a Trademark Office or the RIAA, we just click on checkboxes to disallow transfer. And we even pay taxes! (it's just called "tier" ;) )

I'm afraid I have to side with Aliasi on this. We can, indeed, isolate ourselves from the "mainstream SL culture" and create our own pocket of utopia, and refuse to be "contaminated" by either our parent society or even by the mainstream SL culture. This happens all the time, and there are quite a lot of examples of those (proportionally speaking, far more than in the atomic world). But ultimately these will be tiny exceptions in the vast ocean of what virtual worlds are going to be.

What I also believe is that there will be "cross-contamination". Things done well in SL (or any other digital, synthetic world) will influence the atomic world in a slight degree. I take an example which is dear to Linden Lab: education/training and in-world meetings (including seminars, workshops, presentations...). SL residents, in both cases, have successfully demonstrated that things like "physical presence" (e.g. face-to-face discussion in the physical world) are of little importance — even less in SL than, say, on the Web (and eBay and Amazon certainly are the best examples on how the lack of a physical presence does not affect commerce in any way!). Just right now we're experimenting with new tools and methods that allow marketeers to do consumer profiling in ways that are simply not possible in the physical world (inside SL, you don't only know how many people visited your location — you know their names, too!). Good or bad, virtual worlds will allow a certain degree of experimentation which will also transform the atomic world — whether right now people accept that or not. But in 1900 nobody would imagine that City Halls would be regulating car traffic in the future or force architecture to take into account the need to park cars on streets and garages. Or that homes would be redesigned to allow some space for the family to watch TV together.

I'm quite sceptical myself that virtual worlds will really show us that "alternative" ways of building societies are possible. These will be swallowed up, as always, by the mainstream, which is ruthless and unforgiving. The best I can hope for is that a few good ideas escape back to the physical world, and, through these few good examples, fullfill Linden Lab's mission of "improving human condition through virtual worlds".

It's a bold aim, but I gather that the impact will be larger than we all might think. After all, nobody predicted how quick the change was once 2 billion human beings had access to computers, and 3 billions have mobile phones in their purses (or pockets). There was a change. We just absorbed it into our mainstream culture and never thought twice about it any more.

Unless we change the way humans think and react to other humans, exploring virtual worlds will just be like exploring anything else where humans have gone: after settlement will come contamination by the mainstream. I cannot think that virtual worlds are "safe" from that contamination, although I certainly think that new ideas that will shape our society — blending the virtual and the physical so that there is no real difference between both — will definitely pop up and grow more than we currently believe.

Re: SHADES OF GREY: An essay by Extropia DaSilva

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 07:01:51 -0000

The trend that human technology does not really change our society by "leaps and bounds" (although when reading history books it looks like that), but strangely mimics evolution ("continuous flowing of forms transition one into another") is quite dear to me — since I always hated the "black"/"white" concepts that just bipolarise a discussion without reflecting reality.

Yes, one of the things I was always critical about transhumanist teachings was the issue that in "the distant future" (or perhaps... tommorrow) the Singularity would emerge and demand that all humans bow to it in worship.

Clearly that doesn't reflect — at all — how we humans shaped our society. Yes, lasers were created in the 1960s and they were highly advanced precision instruments, and people thought they would change society (probably by being used as the "ray guns" seen on bad sci-fi movies). They certainly did. They now cost about US$1.5 or so and are found inside billions of CD players everywhere in the world. It's so commonplace that people have no idea that they carry around a coherent light emission device in their Sony Walkmans — something deemed "impossible" in the days of Maxwell, and "highly unlikely" (or "the product of a very advanced civilisation") in the 1960s. The same could be said about personal computers, mobile phones, or the Internet.

But it was all gradual change. Nobody in 1969 thought that people would be using the Internet on their iPhones just a generation and a half later. The concept would be completely insane; you'd be locked up in padded cells, all your sci-fi books taken away from you, and sedatives given to you to make you sleep in peace and don't talk nonsense any more.

I remember Bill Gates "Information at your fingertips" motto of the 1990s with a smile. I thought that, well, having encyclopaedias in CDs would be nice, but even projecting ahead in time, it would be hardly possible to have, say, the Library of Congress inside a laptop. I couldn't be more wrong — only a few years afterwards, we got both the Wikipedia and Google insanely collecting "information at my fingertips" from a staggering amount of data spread across the whole planet. But these days we just take it for granted. There is no more "wow" sense. People log in to Google and see better results from profiling (which Google will do; try to search while you're logged in and logged off and see the difference). They are getting used to Google's "hints" saying: "do you wish to search for XXX instead?" In some years, Google will even be more clever, and figure out things better and better, and we'll take it for granted. One day we'll talk to our eleventh-generation iPhones and talk to them asking to search for the closest available Gap shop and see if they have anything on sale. This will be just commonplace; people will not even understand when we'll point out that in 2008 that kind of technology was a dream but certainly possible.

Oh yes, I have no idea if Google is 'sentient' :) or when it will be. What I'm pretty sure is that once Google becomes 'sentient' (or once we're aware of its sentience), we'll not lose nights of sleep over it. It'll be common. By that time — not that far ahead, a few decades at most — we'll be used to e-butlers squeaking into our ear implants things like "You've got an incoming call from your mother-in-law, do you wish to take it or should I just tell her that you're busy reading Extropia's essays?". We can only smile at these ideas today, but in 2030 or so, kids will just ask us "mommy, when you were a teen, how did you know where your friends were, if you didn't have GPS on your mobile phones showing green dots for them?" Or when exactly will we tell them that there was a pre-Internet and a post-Internet date? Certainly 1969 launched the Internet as a technology; and certainly it was completely mainstream by 2000. But when exactly can we say that the Internet became a fundamental part of our society? (Computer science historians like to say that it was the day Bill Gates realise that they couldn't fight against the Internet any more — placing the date in September 1995, when Microsoft embraced the idea that they would also become "the Internet company" and not aggressively fight against it any more. But that date is as artificial as anything else; millions of people already used the Internet before Sep. 1995, and billions just started to use it ten years later)

The concept of "the approaching Singularity" does not really convince me. On the other hand, just going through it without realising we've done so, is quite appealing. In fact, and quoting you again, human technology innovation mimics closely the evolution of the species on Planet Earth: we go from form to form, shape to shape, with all steps in between, but there is no real way to place your finger on a specific moment in time and say: "that's a wolf; that's a dog".

There are really only shades of grey, and thinking otherwise is just fooling yourself.

Then again... our brains are insanely good pattern-matchers, and almost as good at labelling and classifying things. It's so uncanny to see how we're almost bipolar in those two conflicting trends. We experience black and white and label it accordingly; but when we actually measure both extremes we see the shades of grey in-between. Our brains deal with both and mix the approaches — and I guess that's why we're keep pretending that black and white do exist.

Re: Shadowy details! [UPDATED AGAIN]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:21:53 -0000

Wow, AMAZING, Vint, thanks so much for sharing!!

Re: No More Limits!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:22:00 -0000

Thanks for the very insightful comment, Clubside!

Re: Shadowy details! [UPDATED AGAIN]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:23:02 -0000

... and to get the full link to Vint's blog: http://www.vintfalken.com/kirstens-viewer-sl-shadows-for-the-masses-with-good-enough-pcs/

Re: The Hard Facts About the Second Life® Economy

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:07:06 -0000

@Nacon, I think you just read the first page of the article... there are eight others ;) Actually, pirated content (which is, indeed, a blight in SL — but so it is everywhere else) is not the major reason why shops are not selling as they used to. The major reason is that the market is not infinitely elastic, or, in other words, the number of people willing to spend money remains the same, while the number of content creators and new products and services continues to increase. At some point — which I argue further ahead in the essay — everybody in the market starts to hit the competition and fight for the same number of potential consumers. Needless to say, this will mean less sales for everybody, as more and more content gets produced, but the number of people willing to buy it is constant.

Content creators just shrug the issue away and blame LL, CopyBot, people leaving, etc. As the essay reminds, all these problems do, in fact, exist. However they're just minor issues — the real issue is that the market is saturated. There is too much supply, and not enough demand for all those products. Once content creators (and land managers!) understand this basic aspect of economy, they will have three choices:

1. Leave SL because they cannot afford to compete any more (the easy way out: shift the blame elsewhere and go away) by investing in aggressive sales strategies, promotion, and similar sale-boosting techniques;
2. Drop prices (which typically is the result of demand being way below supply), and, incidentally, ruin your business model and go away;
3. Invest aggressively in brand awareness — and by "aggressively" I really mean it, it's not half-hearted attempts of putting some camping chairs to get a little higher score in traffic, hoping for a slightly higher rank on Search — and push the competition out of business.

Oh yes, that's tough, I know, and so many service providers in SL are reluctant to play "the bad, ugly capitalist", when for years it was so easy to sell peacefully coexisting with your competition. Now, I claim, there is simply too much content for too few consumers — the competition either becomes far more aggressive (ie. RL-style aggressive) or they have no choice but to experience a huge drop in sales.

And trust me — somemerchants have a strong business sense and have no qualms of becoming aggressive enough to scare the competition out of SL. They will become the leading product suppliers in SL. The only alternative, of course, is if the market expands again. I however claim that it won't happen — and if it does, it definitely won't be at an exponential rate!

Your analysis, I'm sorry to say, is far too simplistic to be correct :)

@Prokofy, I agree with a lot of things you say. First and foremost, the number. 100,000 is actually just a magic number. The only hint that they should not be much more nor much less is really the sum of Premium Accounts plus private islands. The rest is wild speculation, based totally in indirect observation. For example, how many people do indeed read all the possible blogs, forums, e-zines, and websites about SL? About a year ago, a fellow from "my" community did send out requests to the major sites at the time to ask for advertising space, and asked them about how many people read each of their sites. The number, added up together, was around 150 thousand or so. Since he did not ask all the sites (of course; it's impossible to say how many there are), and there is always overlap (people already reading one site will very likely read more than one!), I would say that the overall number might be, perhaps, 250 thousand or so. Nevertheless, I continue to claim that the important thing is to realise that the consumer market — the number of residents willing to spend money to buy content/services in SL — is not growing significantly, and did not do so for at least one year and a half. But in that same amount of time, the landmass grew three times and the population doubled (and so did the number of simultaneously in-world residents).

So the argument is not that the economy has stagnated, but that it is saturated, which is quite a different thing, and requires a different mindset to deal with. Mostly the whole purpose of the article is to understand a simple fact of economics: markets can be elastic (they grow as more products are released) or not. Understanding what kind of market SL has was not easy. Let's assume, for the sake of the argument, that back in early 2007 everybody willing to spend money in SL would, on average, be willing to spend US$10/month (I could do the precise maths if I had the patience to look up the old statistics for early 2007). Since the market was not saturated at that time, it would mean that most of the people willing to spend US$10 didn't, in fact, spend them all — because there were not enough supply of quality products and services for them to spend that much. They barely managed to spend, say, US$7/month on average, but would spend more if they could.

As time passed and 2007 progressed towards 2008, more and more products were released, more and more land was added, more and more services were launched. The ones willing to spend money started to spend more and more, in about the same proportion as SL's overall growth. However, at some point, they hit their spending limit. Some might even have crossed that limit (I have seen quite a lot of them absorbing plots from neighbours which they never intended to do just because they felt sorry to get the land go to waste; my own recent experience showed me that surprisingly I'm spending more than I thought in SL buying outfits and gadgets, so that my own "limit" is often reached before the end of the month, and I run out of L$) — this is actually good news, since it means that the consumers are even stretching themselves thin and spending even more than what they're comfortable with. But that "stretching" is not infinitely elastic, ie. the group of consumers — those mystical 100,000 — will not continue to spend more and more in SL all the time. They will reach their personal limits and not spend any more. Even if they do — or if those 100,000 become, say, 110,000 — that growth is not exponential but rather follows normal, RL patterns: say, 2-5% per year.

Now SL's population and land mass has grown more than that. Way far more, in fact, in 2007! The consumers willing to spend are thus unable to cope with sustaining an economy that grows exponentially, even if it's a much lower exponential curve than in 2006. And this is what market saturation means in this context: dumping more and more content and services and land in SL does not mean that people will continue to consume it at the same rate it is released. Supply by far grows more than demand, and naturally, service providers will feel that in their pockets. It's not "people aren't buying anything any more"; it's "the same people that have always bought anything in SL are not growing and have reached their spending limits; they will not be able to absorb even more content/services at the rate the offerings continue to increase".

Notice that this has nothing to do with the steady increase of simultaneous logins or in-world hours or even minutes of voice traffic or the constant adding of 10,000 new registered users per day. All these show just one thing, that SL is nowhere near "stagnation" as people continue to use it, and new people come in and also use it, even more than before. The problem is that, on average, almost none of these people are consumers of paid content/services. So the market for selling products and services is not expanding. This is the hard lesson that service providers need to understand: more residents does not mean more consumers.

(And, like you, I truly believe that the green dot effect is far less campers/bots than people would like us to think. Yes, people are really there having fun, and yes, there are lots and lots of clusters of people enjoying themselves in SL. However, they're not there to consume but only to enjoy free content, be it land, outfits, or services).

The complaints about excess of freebies and copybotted content are just a minor issue because that's what they see happening: the new users, the vast majority being unwilling to spend money in SL, turn to free content instead. "Free" as in "freebie" but also as in "pirated content". This is sadly not an exaggeration or badmouthing SL, but I agree it's real fact. I've truly seen whole sims dedicated to gangs of content pirates, full of bots to raise traffic, and all "shops" only have freebies and pirated content — there is not a single original item in sight. These are not really "real communities of pirates", but they certainly attract a lot of the people from the group that is unwilling to spend any money in SL and are happy to just get the free/pirated content instead.

What content creators have to understand is that if by some act of magic all these people would disappear (say, because LL started to aggressively put them out of SL), their sales would not go up. The people unwilling to pay for content would not suddenly turn to paid content just because pirated content is unavailable. No, they would still refuse to spend any money — and, after all, they would continue to enjoy freebies listed on, say, the Fabulously Free website. The lesson here is that these people remain outside SL's economy by choice and they will not "come back" just because of aggressive enforcement of removal of pirated content. (I should add that I'm all for strong enforcement, either LL-sponsored or community-driven, mostly on moral grounds, and because I'm all for ethical business in SL, which will only benefit us by giving a clear idea that SL is a good and honest place to do business. However, I have no illusion that removing pirated content will hardly increase sales for content creators.)

And no, I'm not suggesting that LL removes all items marked L$0 (ie. getting rid of the freebies), although I'm sure it would make a huge impact in the economy! After all, even if LL did that (ie. overnight all items marked L$0 would be marked L$1 instead, and the servers refused to accept setting the price of an item to L$0), it wouldn't work: avatars can freely transfer content between themselves, and soon we'd see "freebiebots" giving content away and popping up everywhere. The issue about free (legitimate) content in SL is cultural and won't go away by "coding" the platform to limit free content to be distributed. In fact, if there is a potential collapse of the economy ahead, it could be just due to the freebies, but I'm rather unsure on "how" and "when" that might eventually happen.

Instead, the focus of, say, LL should be not on how to get new residents — that's working rather well, or they would not get 10,000 new users per day; these have to come from somewhere after all! — or even on how to improve the initial experience (which certainly would mean that more residents would remain in SL), but how to turn "freebie tourists" into content consumers. Put into other words, how to increase the Hundred Thousand. However, I think that LL is the wrong organisation to ask on how to do that. If they knew the answer, they would have an increased income from more Premium Accounts and specially even more private islands. So they're clueless on how to turn a free account into a paying customer, and they're perhaps not the best people to ask for advice.

I definitely don't have any idea on how that's done either. In my professional business life, I always ran away from markets where suddenly people said it would be a good idea to give things away for free just to attract paying customers. One of the companies I founded went almost broke with that attitude — which is not surprising, IMHO. I simply don't believe in that. The Clever Zebra guys did, and see where they are now. So I have no answer. The only "advice", if we can call it that, that I can give to current service providers in SL is just the following:

<cite>Don't expect the market to grow elastically. Assume it's saturated, and that the number of people willing to spend money on your services/products is limited and fixed. Assume that all your competition is starting to become more aggressive as they understand that paying customers are a limited resource in SL and all want a share of that. Assume that more aggressivity is needed to push your services — don't assume that the market will become "exponential" again, because it didn't in the past 18 months (or more) and it's highly unlikely it will grow exponentially again. Start using aggressive promotion and sales techniques to put out our products and shut down your competition, by throwing them out of business. The days of easy sales are over; welcome to a small market that grows very very slowly over the years — but is nevertheless an interesting market to explore! — but which has far too much supply than demand.</cite>

Most service providers won't care about that advice and will simply prefer to rant and vent their frustration at LL, at the world economy, at pirated content, or whatever excuse/scapegoat comes around. Everything is a better explanation than having to admit that to be able to provide services in SL in a saturated market (and not a stagnated one!) requires one to be ruthless. And most service providers do not wish to go that route — specially, of course, because it requires an increased investment in marketing, promotion, and handling sales.

Re: The Hard Facts About the Second Life® Economy

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:26:17 -0000

IYan, you're totally right, LL is selling ink. I made a serious mistake: at some point while writing the article, I got the figures from the completely wrong year! Unforgivable! In fact, there was a period of time where LL did, indeed, rely only upon exponential sales, but those days are long gone. In fact, they would be far better off these days selling private islands for US$0 and just get tier. :)

(Now such a statement will make the land speculators tremble with fear!)

I really should correct that bit of the article. My fault; my apologies.

Paisley, what you describe worries me a lot — because it will discourage new live musicians to enter SL (or, perhaps even more worrying: it will prevent even better and more talented artists to remain in SL, when they see they cannot really make a profit). Now, live music has been one of the major reasons attracting people to SL, and for a year or so, it has been one of the most fantastically growing areas — in all senses — and the one providing quality entertainment beyond what SL had offered so far (sorry, but Tringo doesn't cut it any more — and gambling is forbidden, so...). But, alas, I guess nobody would believe that the market could get saturated so quickly. It seemed just the other day when people roamed the grid in search of decent music, and often in vain!

Excellent analysis, Ashcroft. You spotted exactly the issue. Second Life is a "substitution product", ie. it replaces spending money on other entertainment/social forms, from TV, DVDs, games, to going out to a RL club or watching a movie. I totally agree that this will definitely limit the number of active participants in the economy. And your point is even better made: it definitely explains that it's far more difficult to convince someone to spend, say, L$400 on an outfit than US$1.50 on a cup of coffee, because the latter is viewed as having some value to most people, while the former doesn't.

You're also quite correct in assuming that few people (although definitely millions of them!) are easily persuaded to spend money on buying virtual products on a Web site (say, a new set of icons for your Windows computer, or a new template for WordPress). So the same difficulties of those business models will definitely be found in SL. Nevertheless I also agree that just because it's difficult, it doesn't mean it's impossible.

My point was slightly different. Although I totally agree that it's way harder to sell outfits than to sell coffee, SL managed to attract some 100,000 people who are willing to buy virtual goods — but that market is not growing. It's always the same people. Dumping more products will not change the number of consumers, just switch them over to new products, while leaving some content creators out of business.

So... the big question, which I did not attempt to answer... how can you turn residents into economically active participants? LL failed to address the issue on how to convert Basic Accounts into Premium Accounts, and is toying with the idea of dropping Premium Accounts altogether. So we can't turn to LL for help, can we? I agree that innovation — "extending the core functionality" — will probably switch some people over, but how soon can that innovation be converted into an expanding market?

Perhaps M Linden should worry far less about making the "first hour in SL" more easy (because at this stage this will only mean more and more people — at a larger cost of sustaining them with servers and bandwidth — but not more paying customers) and focus instead on deliver good reasons for people to spend money in SL.

Individually, at the resident level, of course, this question is easier to answer: to make sure your products and services attract customers (and not your competition!), you have to be far more aggressive. In a sense, Paisley pointed out what is already happening: the prices of classifieds are rising to absolutely insane levels, because there is a limited number of ways that people know how to attract customers. Once again, the laws of supply and demand are ruthless: if the number of ways to attract people is limited, and the demand to attract people increases (since the number of people remains constant), the prices for advertising increase. All predictable!

So what do I believe that will happen? In the next few months, we'll see lots of content and service providers to disappear. They will (not unlike Ashcroft's reasoning) expend too much in SL to get too little in return, business-wise, and move elsewhere (or remain a consumer but not a producer). This will ease the pressure on the ones remaining. So what this means is that a new balance will be met: there will be less live musicians — just the right number that are able to make a profit from it. There will be less land for sale, and less land speculators — just the ones that are able to still make sales and keep consumers happy. There will be less outfit brands — only the best will survive, and the ones that managed their brand well in the past.

Surprisingly, while this is all happening, there is one thing we will not see in SL: a decline on L$ transactions. They will remain constant over the period, even though there will be less things for sale. In fact, there are so many interesting metrics and statistics that I'd like to see — like, for instance, how many items are for sale today, and how many will still be for sale in 6 months. I predict that this number will dramatically decrease — but the number of L$ in circulation will continue to be the same. Right now, these are just products being offered without customers willing to buy them.

And a side-effect is that the surviving entrepreneurs will be the ones having just the right mix of quality/promotion and awareness/aggressive pricing. This does not mean that "only the best" will survive, but probably only the most business-like will. The era of selling snake oil might be over soon. What worries me at this stage is that during this shift, the content pirates will enjoy a temporary boom (since they can afford not to promote their services and have zero costs in labour; as legitimate content producers fail to attract more sales — mostly because they're unwilling to turn themselves into aggressive businesspersons, they're really mostly creative people — and abandon SL, their content will continue to be for sale through the pirate networks). Ultimately, they will disappear (or be so insignificant as to be worthless) as the only businesses surviving in SL will be the ones able to raise a strong brand awareness around a community of faithful clients — and pirates simply cannot afford to do that (they have to avoid exposure).

But on that subject I have a few ideas for Linden Lab to implement, which I'll address on a further article (which will be smaller, I promise!).

Re: Plugging the Analogue Hole

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:35:23 -0000

Jacek, obviously the viewer "string" is not enough :) We all agree with that... that was the whole point of not relying on it at all, but use LL-signed digital certificates which are tied to a specific build of a client. The checksum would be part of the certificate, or, to be more precise, it would be encoded as part of the certificate — like website certificates these days simply use the website's URL as part of the encoded data.

But my text was not very clear, I admit that I had Symbian Signed in mind: submit the client to LL's website, which will embed the signature in the compiled executable, and return a version with the signature embedded into it. I agree that's a bit tough to do and by far the largest drawback of this solution — it's something like 50 MBytes each time, after all, for the regular SL client. Granted, you would need to do this only once per released version.

To be more precise, even that could be forged — say, authenticating with one trusted client, and then using another one to receive the incoming packets. Switching sessions in SL happens naturally when changing regions via teleport, so this might work). So I agree this might not be so easy to implement ;) But... see below.

Packet sniffers work wonderfully well (and the libopenmv package even comes with a pre-compiled "proxy" to aid in decoding streams of data between the server and the client — you connect your SL client to the proxy, the proxy connects to SL, but logs all traffic exchanged between both. It's insanely easy to use.), but — the answer, of course, is encrypting the data streams. Positioning information, which is more sensitive, could continue to go through the usual, unencrypted UDP channels as normal. A few suggestions by the Architecture Working Group has been to continue to keep positioning information in UDP packets, but move streaming data transfer to HTTP instead. Move it to HTTPS, and the packet sniffing will be pretty useless :) (and you can do two-way certificate handshaking, since both LL's grid and your client will have certificates for the SSL connection at both ends).

It's obviously impossible to prevent the copy of textures (that's why avoided to put the focus on them). Although there are far better solutions to deal with the cache without making it so childishly simple to copy, nothing can prevent GL Interceptor or any memory-reading application to get at the textures (and very likely sounds as well). It would only be harder. And believe me, while everybody is able to figure out what a skin or a piece of clothing looks like merely by looking at it (those would continue to be prime targets for memory interception techniques), patiently wading through cryptic images for sculpties and their UV maps, and figure out where it goes on a complex object (when you don't have the prim relations anyway), is far from an easy task.

Quoting myself, Nothing in the world is 100% safe. The idea is to make content theft very hard instead of insanely simple like it is today. I hardly understand how that stifles legitimate use and open source development; every day I use digital certificates to log in to VPNs and that certainly doesn't "stifle" my use of remote services or my ability to do development (an encrypted remote call with libCURL just adds an extra line of code... provided you've got a legitimate certificate in your disk first, which was my whole point). It just makes it way more harder for potential crackers to enter my network.

Re: The Hard Facts About the Second Life® Economy

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 10:59:53 -0000

@Peter, just by the mere fact that you spend "hundreds of thousands of L$" means that you're not a "drag on the grid"; but rather, one of it's most active participants! In fact, according to my own calculations, I might not even have spent L$ 100,000 in my own time in SL (four years); and, at most, L$200k. It's pretty much irrelevant where that money comes from, if from stipends, camping chairs, the LindeX, or simply by offering products and services for sale. Immersionist fundamentalists would gladly say that only the latter is truly important; while I'm not a fundamentalist, I also think that the best way for a healthy SL economy is for people to offer products and services there, earn their L$ that way, and... spend them in SL's economy :) But simply be willing to spend L$ (no matter where the source is) is obviously the key to being an "active participant".

@Ashcroft, IYan's point mostly means that it is not in LL's best interest to flood the grid with shiny new islands, but making sure that the land owners continue to happily pay tier. So, yes, that changes LL's stance on this, and tends to increase the importance they should give to existing clients (ie. paying residents), and the push to drive Basic Accounts into paying customers. I totally minimised LL's "interest" in that and I was very wrong!

Your corollary is that a saturated market will make active participants to leave, since many residents providing services will drop out (it's too hard for them!), thus less products and services are around, thus the number of transactions will diminish. You can project that long-term and see the signs of a "failing economy", and, indeed, you might be right. I'm personally an optimist, because I see a very aggressive streak among some content producers. The way I look at it, I'd bet that the aggressive types will quickly take over and push the rest out of business — and with that process the number of transactions will not diminish, unless there is a tipping point where there is not enough variety (ie. supply diminishes way below demand). It's hard to figure out if that will happen or not, we need more time to watch and see...

@Paisley, you're definitely hitting the mark with your comments! Yes, the situation looks bleak, and I believe you're right, expanding to non-American markets is not an alternative, even if it's twice as big as the American one. I can only give anedoctal, parochial evidence: in the Portuguese communities, nobody ever would consider tipping a live musician. In those communities, it's always the venue owner who pays for the live musicians, since the tip expectancy is zero. But the venue owner needs to cover their costs somehow — expecting increased product sales, or rentals to fill up with tenants. When that doesn't happen (and, as said, this is getting harder and harder), venue owners will simply not pay to live musicians, and just stream from a public, free radio instead :(

@Clubside, you're the pessimist at the far side :) (eg. claiming that business & education will never work in SL). They certainly work — and work quite well, and more and better all the time — but at a completely different way that marketeers thought it would happen in 2006/7. On the other hand, it's certainly correct to assume that most (ie. a vast majority) of those uses of SL will do nothing for the SL economy overall, except in a very limited way (avatars will still need clothes!).

I'm curious about games in SL. The gambling ban shut down some of the most popular games in SL (ie. the ones where you could earn L$!) and nothing really has replaced these — at least not to a degree that they would make a serious difference in SL. MMORPGs and MMOGs done/created in SL — specially complex ones — would be a possibility. The issue right now is: who would develop them, and what would be the costs? A thousand-sim-MMOG would take two or three years of development and cost millions of US$. Why should a development house pick SL for their development, if they could, for the same cost, run it on their own platforms instead? (and have way better performance) Once that question is answered, I'm sure we'll see some real examples happening, and it might be... interesting.

@Faerie, yes, to be more precise I should be saying that the number of 100,000 is not "permanently fixed", but grows at a rate far below the "new registrations" rate. So this means that the proportion of residents actively participating in the economy is decreasing dramatically as new residents come in which aren't willing to do so. Over time, the percentage of residents actively participating in the economy just falls and falls; but the absolute number might be growing slightly. Also, the number of people actually willing to spend more than they used to is also increasing — very very slightly. So perhaps by the end next year we'll be talking about "The 110,000" (a 10% increase), while in the mean time SL has grown to 20 million registered users (ie. 25% more).

And yes, you are right :) I didn't address that, and — it did surprise me! After all, it was back in 2006/7 that all media talked about "Make Money Fast" in SL. Why are people in 2008 still believing that? It baffles me, but the plain truth is, that's how people perceive SL to be, and I guess that's the reason why they still insist in dumping more and more products and services, while it's clear now that there is no market for them — unless, of course, if you do it very aggressively and push the competition out of business.

Re: Stepping back from the analogue hole…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:12:00 -0000

Indeed, Zwagoth, I believe you're right: those ideas of yours to limit texture theft is pretty much what I had in mind as a viable alternative, and... I've even briefly talked to Blue Linden about it.

Re: The Hard Facts About the Second Life® Economy

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:50:20 -0000

Ashcroft, that's a very interesting observation, and one that I believe to be quite correct. So SL would become saturated with content as it grew to a certain amount of residents, no matter how "explosive" its growth would be. Very intriguing, but the current data certainly supports that argument!

And you're also right that the quantity of "absolute innovations" in SL occurs at a regular rate, not an exponential one. Put into other words: I'm prepared to believe that something extraordinarily new comes out every week or so. But that has always been the case: with 1000 or 100,000 content producers! Granted, these days, we might not even be aware of those "extraordinarily unique" products launched in the market (it's too big and there is no mass media!), but that also is relevant: on an insanely huge place like SL, new and unique items are only be "made aware" at an increasing cost of promotion. Gone are the days of the forums which were read by half the population and a post on a thread would be enough to advertise to almost everybody!

And MK, SL never was a game :) I don't know what gave you that idea...

Granted, at some point in SL's history, LL thought that SL might become a platform to develop games, but we all know how quickly they dispelled that illusion :)

Re: The Hard Facts About the Second Life® Economy

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:31:42 -0000

TheLoneWulf, I actually left the question unanswered, because I have no easy answer!

A few years ago, when there was apparently a higher level of "willingness to spend" (but this might just be an illusion caused by a very small number of residents with generally similar mindsets...), the "trick" used to be: pay for things that few other people have, so the idea was that "unique content" was valuable. Say, the first skin; or the first prim hair or prim shoes; or the first AOs. Or even going to the first live music concerts!

As time passed, products lowered their prices to a minimum, below which the producers simply gave them away as freebies. The notable exception has been land: it does cost tier to maintain it, and as long as tier costs are fixed by LL, they will never drop below that.

So... "uniqueness of content" (or access to special areas) was an incentive for people to upgrade to Premium, get some stipend, and get access to that content. In fact, this is pretty much one of the (many) reasons why things like WoW keep players happily paying their monthly fees: new awesome content is released regularly, so even when you've explored it all, new areas are opened and made available...

I can imagine a few "arficial changes" that might be interesting (although very likely impossible to implement; these are just "thought experiments"). Imagine that you could get a 15,000-polygon avatar if you were Premium, but Basic accounts would only get the regular 7,500-polygon one. So suddenly Premium becomes a status symbol: the elite are the ones that can have much nicer-looking avatars. This would also automatically mean that these very same "elite" is the one with money (from stipends) to pay for content: so clothes designers would very likely abandon all their current content, give it away for free, but start developing high-quality clothes and outfits for the high-polygon avatars instead.

Imagine the revolution this would cause in SL :) From one day to the next, all content creators would launch millions of new items for sale — and at the very least, have close to a hundred thousand eager customers who would need to buy everything again.

That's a major change!

Or imagine that only Premium accounts could run Mono-compiled attachments (or Mono-compiled vehicles), with more memory and a higher priority in the sim. Again, programmers and device builders would recompile their items and sell them again. "Low lag vehicles!"

Prokofy Neva has long ago suggested that people pay for the resources they consume, and he was always criticised heavilly by the "freebie crowd", who mostly says that a Basic account is a valid user as well, specially because many of the most talented and creative content producers in SL are Basic accounts. Well, his argument might be way more important in the days when Premium accounts was one of the major sources of income for LL (these days it's just islands and mainland tier).

However, artificially changing the rules by giving more resources to people who are willing to spend more in SL is not a terribly bad idea. It's not diferent from, say, Flickr, which allows paying accounts to have more than 200 photos and even upload videos: they consume more resources, so they ought to be paying for them, and, reversely, they ought to get access to more services if they're willing to pay.

In SL, LL doesn't really encourage people to pay more. You don't get better service for paying more. Or, put it in another words: even if you wished to pay for better service, LL only provides one type of service for all kinds of users, paying and non-paying.

I'd certainly change that.

There are some "hints" that this might be in LL's plans. Two hints: the first is that these days you can buy low-quality sims ("openspace sims") but you shouldn't expect them to work fine; if you want to have a whole CPU for your sim, you'll have to go for a regular one. And the second thing is the recently introduced LSL-based HTTP Server. Look at how it's closely tied to parcels, and the more land you own (and pay for it!), the more HTTP requests you can serve. That's a pretty good way to start giving paying residents "more bang for the buck", so to speak.

Is that all? Well, not really. Techological innovation certainly pushes more people to become paying customers. Imagine that you could only use voice in SL if you were Premium, or perhaps just initiate conversations if you were Premium. That's a model used by other MMOs and VWs too — paying customers get voice, non-paying ones use text. Second Life is already the second or third largest VoIP platform in the world (yes, really!) but very likely the only one that has no business model on top of it. Sure, Skype is used mostly for free, but the number of people making outgoing calls from Skype and pay for them is large enough to allow Skype to survive financially (well, having been bought by eBay also helps, of course). So that would be an area worth exploring: tying the Vivox servers to voice gateways and allow paying customers to make a certain amount of phone calls from inside SL, or even getting your avatar name a phone number and have friends calling you while you're in SL.

As you can see, this works two-fold. On one side, of course, it increases LL's income. But more important really is the stipend: that's what makes residents willing to put some extra L$ circulating in the economy, by spending it. However, right now, with the LindeX rates as they are, there are no reasons whatsoever to be a Premium account — if you're willing to spend L$ in SL, you get (often) a better rate at the LindeX (US$9.90 will get you US$2650 or so, while a new Premium account will only get L$1200 per month for the same amount). So there is no incentive to become Premium — and the people willing to spend money in SL's internal economy are far better off downgrading to Basic and just use the LindeX.

(Older residents like me, who pay annually, get a far better deal from remaining Premium thant buying from the LindeX — we just pay US$6/month and get L$2000 in stipends — the only reason I'm still a Premium, because certainly it's not for the free tier on the tiny plot I've got with SignpostMarv Martin on Lanercost ;) )

However, I feel that starting to give paying customers better access (somehow), more features (somehow), and a larger stipend than what they get at the LindeX (somehow... remember that too many stipends lead to inflation and a devaluation of the L$!) is way against LL's own policies and might be impossible to implement thoroughly.

Re: Shadowy details! [UPDATED AGAIN]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:52:58 -0000

Carola, go to the link on the previous comment, and get a pre-compiled version of SL :)

Re: Walking on a tight rope with the SL client

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:57:38 -0000

Interesting comment, Opensource... so LL's solution to their own problem is that we drop all calling cards and lose our friends' list to get a boost in performance?

Ouch, what a mess for a platform that is supposed to promote social networking!...

Re: The Wisdom of Pavig Lok

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:34:01 -0000

Note that in spite of everything, Linden Lab had an exceptionally good month of October, as reported by Gene/Ginsu Yoon: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/11/20/lind...

So, no, LL was not going broke...

Thanks for Tateru Nino for the link.

Re: The Wisdom of Pavig Lok

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:33:43 -0000

@Andabata, so true — we're eons away from a mainstream product. The question is if SL will ever become truly mainstream. Our friend Pavig Lok sort of hints that it won't. Ever. Like, for instance, Apple's computers will never become mainstream either (they were once — in the Apple II era — but Apple changed its message and marketing too much, so that it can only appeal to an ever-growing "elite" group of users, but never the mainstream). Having a product for an elite isn't, however, a problem at all, so long as LL is profitable (and that they certainly are!).

@mireille, you can read a bit more about the Thinkers group on the Second Life Wikia.

@Ichabod, what you call "weird" I call a "geek" ;) I dislike the negative connotations of the word "weird" — it implies someone excluded from the mainstream society, which is certainly not the case with most geeks. A fashion geek will certainly spend insane amounts of money in shopping for clothes, and a substantial amount of time as well, which for other people might sound completely unreasonable. But fashion addresses a huge "geek fandom" :) No wonder the same happens in SL as well.

Interesting how you describe yourself as a "games fan" and your reasoning is that SL is not good for a gaming platform. ;) (yes, I'm being ironical; game geeks are also a substantial part of SL's resident population, but SL definitely doesn't cater to their needs). I found it also amusing that you think there are not enough servers for the amount of users. Ironically, SL has about 1 server per 9 users online (32,000 regions on about 8,000 servers for about 77,000 simultaneously online users). World of Warcraft has 1 server per 22,500 users. What gives?

@Ashcroft, ultimately, you're right. My little finger says that this is exactly what will happen in 2009. That's my prediction ;)

Re: The Wisdom of Pavig Lok

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:16:37 -0000

@Ichabod, you're right on your description of why Second Life is not really the most appropriate platform for games design — specially fast action games, first-person shooters, or things like racing games and flight simulators.

Two comments, though. First, those do not represent the totality of all possible gaming environments — although, granted, definitely a large slice of the market (I'm old enough to remember that "3D games" and "action games" where just one tiny part of all the possible games being played on computers ;) ).

Secondly, you claim that the "vast majority of online players" are "games fans". Well, I don't know about that — statistics tend to show that there is quite an overlap of both "gamers" and "socialites" (as well as articles such as this one), and that both have dozens of millions of users world-wide.

Granted, after 2003 Linden Lab gave up on SL as a "games developer platform". Indeed, as you claim, five years ago, LL really thought that game fans and game designers "should have been the natural end users of SL". But they weren't. LL quickly gave up on them, and let them find other platforms to design games (specially, as said, 3D action games — other types work reasonably well in SL).

It's also true that "content designers" create content for other content designers, or, well, at least for the ones willing to pay for content (who are most often users that happen to earn money through SL, and that mostly means being either in the content business, the land business, or the event hosting business). The problem here, however, is different. Most (and that means a bit over 99%...) of the registered users have no interest in spending money in SL to buy content. It's a very small economy. I could certainly agree that if SL was more appealing for game design, it might have paid games working inside SL, and these would be another source of revenue in SL's economy.

Granted, it won't be thanks to p2p networking (that's all very nice to say, but virtual worlds with user-generated content require persistence, which is something that p2p networking doesn't provide), but possibly, as you mentioned, by pushing more of the work done by the servers into the clients. However, there are some things that definitely will always have to come from the servers: textures and prims.

WoW can get rid of all that since all content is installed/downloaded by the clients — including pre-generated and pre-rendered scenes. WoW servers do little else but tracking avatar data. You simply cannot use a similar model in SL. It doesn't work that way.

Extie: oops, you're sooooo right. I'm sorry!

Re: Hitler Explains Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:22:02 -0000

Hi Olga! I don't think the original movie uses "real" footage, just pretty good actors... the content is not "offensive" by itself, but I can imagine that as a relatively realistic documentary on Adolf Hitler, and showing lots of Nazi regalia, it might be termed as "offensive" in Germany.

I think I saw the original video once. As an historical documentary, I found it quite good.

Re: The Wisdom of Pavig Lok

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:03:31 -0000

Darren, your comment mentioned something I wasn't aware of — the hypergrid! It looks very exciting, and I think that instead of writing another long and boring article, I'll be upgrading Beta Technologies' minigrid to the latest OpenSim release and see if I can manage hypergrid to work on it... Thanks so much for the heads-up!

Oh yes, OpenSim has a bright future... in about two or three years :) For now, what amazes me most is that it works at all. My team has just completed a major building project, still using OpenSim 0.5, and after a month of work, it was presented at a public conference. We never told anybody that we did it on OpenSim and not on LL's grid ;) (the client didn't have a budget to pay for LL's servers' monthly fee, so this was the alternative) The fun is that the whole grid just required 5 or 6 reboots in a month or so — not too bad, for this early generation of software. And it allowed the builders to stay long stretches in-world on a poor, low-powered server (a mere 512 MB of RAM on a low-end dual-core, running 4 sims with about 10,000 prims among them). I wish I had asked you for the name of the provider that gets you four times the RAM for pretty much what we pay :)

Still, SL is by far not "doomed". To be honest, and although it doesn't look like it for most of the residents, SL has barely started. Granted, in my view of the future, the MetaGrid will encompass sims from both LL and a whole host of different providers. OGP might be seen as "dead" because LL moves ever so slowly — a patch of two or three lines of code that was submitted to the JIRA can take up to half a year to be implemented, due to staggeringly complex Quality Assurance testing. OpenSim doesn't require that — patches are applied immediately, and if something breaks, a new patch will be out after a few hours. That allows for an insane pace of development, and it's fair to say that OpenSim today resembles Second Life in 2003 (in terms of stability), but with half the development time. It has far more developers than LL had in the 1999-2003 period, though, and, if you add up the OpenSim residents on all the different grids, they're about 4 or 5 times the number of residents of SL in late 2004 — and they all accept far worse performance, far more glitches, and less stability than we had in 2004. So, yes, the future for OpenSim looks bright, and OpenSim improving way faster than I actually believed to be possible!

What LL has — and will continue to have — is a momentum. If right now they fail to attract more residents (or, to be honest, fail to keep those 10-20,000 new daily subscriptions in-world), it's mostly because they find SL too cumbersome to use, too flawed, too demanding on old hardware, too slow, and, for many, too boring. OpenSim is all that — and worse. So even if tomorrow 10-20,000 new users joined OpenSim daily, the ones remaining would be far less than the 1% that LL still manages to capture in spite of everything. OpenSim will thus grow much slower.

It is an old adage of the software industry that any software application requires about a decade of heavy use by hundreds of thousands of users (as opposed to a handful of beta-testers) until all bugs are ironed out and the application is robust and stable. That's why these days Unix users don't laugh at Microsoft as hard as they used to — Unix might be 40 years old (next year), but Windows is around for a bit more than two decades, and it's becoming stable enough for regular use. Second Life's first lines of code were written back in 1999 — so by the end of next year, it'll become stable, too (well, it's getting there!). While OpenSim still has some 8 years ahead to rough out all bugs. And it's not a question of having more people working faster (which they have) — Microsoft also used to think that way in the late 1990s, and found out that it's not the number of developers that count, but the complex mix of years of use by hundreds of thousands of people reporting bugs and having them fixed. Software gains maturity like a good wine.

However, I can imagine that by 2020 Linden Lab will have no choice but to switch over to OpenSim as well ;)

Just take a practical example. If LL's server software implemented OpenSim's hypergrid, they wouldn't need the insanely expensive fibre deployed between their two co-location facilities. They'd just run two asset servers on each co-location data centre, and use hypergrid to teleport between both. Simple. So, even in 2008, bad implementations are already hurting LL financially. At the end of the race, in a decade or so, the winner can only be OpenSim, and as soon as LL figures this out and actually uses OpenSim internally, the better it will be for their business as 3D content producers.

Alas, it'll take a few years until they realise this ;) Nothing at LL ever happens "quickly". :)

Re: Lively Is Dead

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 18:56:19 -0000

Hear, hear, Ciaran! The timing is just right, and if I were LL, I'd certainly be capitalising on what they have now — a loyal user base, even if a dwindling one after so much bad treatment — and relaunch SL for 2009 as a solid platform/product which doesn't just pop up and disappear after a few months.

Re: Lively Is Dead

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:39:37 -0000

My apologies! The upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 made the Ping.fm plugin go haywire... I'm doing some tests with a few simple fixes, deleted a lot of self-injected articles, and... let's hope it works... sadly, however, the RSS feed gets cached at several stages, and it'll be a while until it gets "cleaned out".

Re: Remembering Kendra Bancroft/Maddie Joan Blaustein

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:25:57 -0000

BTW, the Confederation of Democratic Simulators (of which the sim formerly known as Neualtenburg is a part) is doing a small "remembrance" session today, at 3 PM SLT, on Kendra's most favourite spot of the old city, which she named "Altenburg".

Everyone's welcome to join.

Re: Remembering Kendra Bancroft/Maddie Joan Blaustein

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:20:38 -0000

The transcript for the "remembrance session" was posted by KlausWulfenbach Outlander here.

Re: ‘Virals’ And ‘Definitives’ In Second Life®: An Essay By Extropia DaSilva

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:29:38 -0000

Extie, you're far too clever for your own good :) Now I don't even know if I do exist, if I'm myself, or if people have been surreptitiously logging in to my account (having hacked into it) and pretending to be myself (and not even I have noticed!)

It would certainly explain why some people claim having objects and items from me that I have never created ;) (then again, Occam's Razor will say that a far simpler explanation is an exploit in the permission systems ;) )

Nevertheless, this essay of yours was unusually thought-provoking in all aspects. We might not take your assumptions as being correct ("a personality is the highest-resolution set of patterns of behaviour of a human being, usually stored in that human being's brain"), but, if the assumptions hold true, there can be no doubt that what follows, according to your essay, has to be pretty much correct.

It's scary, specially because it seems "too easy". I've always assumed that a "personality" is the set of all quantum states of all neurons in a person's past, and those would be quite impossible to record (or "play back"), of course, even assuming unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage. But that "hard" answer doesn't take into account two things: one, that you're just a person because others say you are (ie. your Ubuntu-web) — and you definitely don't need to store every quantum state of your brain (present and past!) to do that. People's recollections are imperfect. You don't need everything, just enough. And secondly, of course, because one thing is to record all bits of information in your brain (again, present and past); the other is just to store patterns, which, by definition, can be modelled into formulae — as opposed to, well, random data, which has no way to be "turned to an equation" and thus requires far more information to record. As every student of Information Theory knows, an ordered set requires far less information to store (or transmit) than an unordered set. The textbook example is storing the information of a wall made of exactly the same type of brick, or a wall that has fallen down and has all bricks scattered all around the place. As everyone knows, in the first case you can describe the wall with "start with a brick, then displace it X times to the left and Y times upwards", which requires little information ("ordered state"). In the second case, you have to describe each brick's translation and rotational parameters individually, since there is no other way to capture the information of the pile of randomly-scattered bricks.

So, yes, "digitally storing each quantum state of your brain" is quite overkill when you can just figure out the patterns and store only those. Your essay definitely presents a convincing case for the possibility of this coming true in far less time than we might imagine.

It's quite interesting. Scary, too.

Re: ‘Virals’ And ‘Definitives’ In Second Life®: An Essay By Extropia DaSilva

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 04:48:37 -0000

Hehe Andabata :) Riiiight...

Actually, Extropia sort of led several in-world discussions over a period of a few months around this subject at the Thinkers' weekly meeting (every Tuesday at 3:30 PM SLT at the supportforhealing sim). I don't know how many people overall attended to the many discussions — the "core" group of Thinkers are about 20 or so people, but there are always a dozen or so "new faces" every time. This was a way she used to gather some feedback and test out the reaction to some of her theories, which are anything but controversial ;)

Re: Democratic Companies?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 12:24:32 -0000

Exactly, Prok — indeed, LL seems to be selling what I now claim to be an enlightened absolutism neatly packed in a leftist wrapper :)

That was the whole point, really.

Re: OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:23:23 -0000

Apparently not, if this is true...

Re: OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:08:39 -0000

Dusan, I'm flattered and honoured by both your comment and your own blog post! No, I can hardly say this is the "definitive post" about OpenSim; in fact, I'm looking towards something written by either you, Tara5 Oh, or Tao Takashi that is much better — or that the OpenSim community once more exceeds expectations and totally renders this article obsolete. That would, indeed, be quite good news :)

Like you, I'm pretty sure that the majority of corporations out there — and that will certainly be quite a high number — will just love to buy LL's solution for "private grids" instead of relying upon the unstability of OpenSim. I can only expect that this might become one of the major sources of income for LL as soon as they launch that product, and this is excellent news. It is also a quite open-minded attitude by Linden Lab — I still feel terribly frustrated for being unable to buy a license of either Basecamp or Ning to run inside my own servers instead of relying on external hosting with a lack of features that my developers could quickly implement if we could just use their code... LL apparently has no problems in doing that, and the parallels you draw with Google are quite on the mark.

Unlike you, however, I'm quite skeptical about the ability of LL to provide corporations with a more flexible product to run behind their firewalls. It's just by looking at LL's track record — they have gone totally the wrong way with their "monolithic" product — you can see, for instance, how integration with Vivox was done using an external application that runs side-by-side with the SL viewer. VoIP servers are also separate from servers running sims. I was pointed to a discussion with Zero Linden during his office hours where Zero, in spite of his flawless engineering background, actually sort of "defended" LL's monolithic product, astonishing his technical-savvy audience, because of course Zero ought to know better...

What these announcements seem to indicate is that LL is suddenly doing a 180º turn and recreate their own server software as a configurable product instead? Hmm. 4 years to upgrade Havok, and now all of the sudden they'll be able to push a server version that can have pluggable external physical engines? Really, I'm quite, quite skeptic about that — I'll believe it when I see it.

No, instead, I can only believe that LL will give their corporate customers the choice of getting the server software as it is today and allow them to run private grids with all of today's limitations and little else — at least not for several years. I'm sure that for many corporations, the technical support, as you say, will be the key selling point, not the "configurability". Because, you see, if a corporation seriously wishes to develop things with LL's technology, but capitalise on their internal developer force... they'll find out that learning LSL is simply not worth the trouble, specially when all their developers will be 'fluent' in C#/.Net or Java/JavaScript. So, extending LL's feature set inside a corporation's own grid will hardly go via a deployment of LL's software... and I don't think that LL will even push their product that way, but just show them a feature list and say: "this is what our product does; here are our credentials (X billion hours of use, etc.); you can get it running inside your corporate firewall with this list of features and nothing else".

OpenSim-based grids will, however, be much like Linux distros — everybody will have their own "flavour", most will be very unstable, most companies providing these services will fail and disappear after a uear or two — but they will all be interconnected, meaning that if something goes wrong you'll be able to put your content elsewhere and start there from scratch. In a sense, it reminds me the days of 1994/5, where a lot of start-ups asked themselves "can we create an Internet Service Provider only based on open-source software, and run Linux/Apache/Squid/sendmail and compete with the Big Ones which use Microsoft's software?" The answer in those days was a "yes", but you surely had to have both the required amount of skills and a solid business model to succeed.

Actually, I'm a bit skeptical about LL being able to play "catch-up" on OpenSim's feature list in the middle-term (1-2 years). The reason is mostly because they'd have to drop their current Microsoft-like attitude towards product development, and go back to the days of 2004/5 where development was way faster. I don't think they'll do that — unless they split their teams, one going towards reckless innovation, the other towards a Microsoftesque approach to innovation. In fact, the best of both worlds would be to start with OpenSim and tweak it until it does what LL needs ;)

As said, 2010 will be the interesting year, where you'll be pitting LL's obsolete (but field-proven) technology against a feature-rich and stable OpenSim :) LL has two years or so to show what they can do until then... and I'll certainly be closely watching their efforts :)

Re: OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:34:42 -0000

Prokofy, lots of separate issues in your comment :)

First, a point of order: I'm not — yet — telling everybody to drop all their land on LL's grid and run to the nearest OpenSim grid next to you :) That would, at this stage, be premature and even irresponsible. I think that, at the current rate of development, OpenSim might be close to the 2004 stage of LL's development in terms of stability — in 2010. The 2004 grid was "stable enough" for people to run business on it, even if obviously we have gone a long way since then. OpenSim is "not there yet" and will not be for at least one year (and likely only in two). And that's just the software part of it; then you also have the infrastructure part to consider, and that's where the wheat gets separated from the chaff.

Let's start with permissions. A year ago there were none, like there was no way to use a grid currency for anything. Today, we have very limited permissions (and no groups, so no group-based permissions, and without those OpenSim will never be able to compete) and a way to integrate an "economy server" not only throughout a single OpenSim-based grid, but across several grids with agreements between them. Permissions are, however, just one side of the story, the other side is trusting the company/individual running the service.

Now, from a technological point of view, OpenSim will, sometime closer to 2010, be able to offer a full and rich permission set, at least at the same level as LL's own. However, as you pointed out, that doesn't mean that a company is "trustworthy" just because their software allows permissions.

What makes a company "trustworthy"? I have no clue, besides them signing a contract with you to guarantee that, a contract that you can bring to a RL court and sue them if they break it. Long-term reputation obviously helps. For instance, I don't "trust" Facebook or Twitter — I have no clue who the techies are behind it, and I happen to know that their shady terms of service actually help them to sell profiling data for third parties, without my explicit consent (on the other hand, I never removed explicitly my consent, either, so both companies are not doing anything "illegal"). When I upload pictures or movies to several social Web sites I cannot prevent the owners of those sites — who almost invariably started as a handful of geeks in their basements — to simply copy my content and make it available on the Web as their own. I might not even be able to track down what they're doing with my content.

Start-ups providing OpenSim service are not inherently malicious ("geee, people are such idiots, they register with us and leave all content for us to sell on XStreet SL with full perms, har har har") but they also aren't inherently trustworthy, either. They're just start-ups building a reputation — like LL in 1999. Why should you trust LL with your content in June 2003 when they opened their service to the public? Because Philip and Cory were never involved in content theft before? What would assure you that they wouldn't do it now?

Why was under-the-stairs Linden Lab in June 2003 more "trustworthy" than any of the many OpenSim operators today? It's way too easy to say, in 2009, that LL is a trustworthy company who knows that to keep their customers happy has to abstain from stealing their content. But... the truth is... it's easy to say that in 2009, but it was impossible to claim the same in 2003. Or even 2004 or 2005. But that never prevented those millions of users to register with LL and trust their content would be safe.

All start-ups have the same problem, Prokofy. I don't know if Basecamp won't randomly disconnect users "because they can", and thus dumping all the project management task lists my company has — and basically ruining our business, since we would have no clue of what we have to do. But that never happened. I have to trust that the agreement with them was made in good faith. If not, the best I can do is to sue them. If I didn't trust them, I'd use a different online project management provider.

That's what I meant with "caution" in picking an OpenSim provider. I'm sure that many are legitimate businesses and are just waiting to make a happy buck while the insatisfaction with LL grows for a while. A few are not legitimate. Most have no business experience at all and might fail just because they didn't have a business model. Others might be clueless about providing services in a corporate environment. At this stage, it's like shopping for hosting web sites in 1993 or 1994, when the Web was brand new. Whom should you trust? (Most of the web hosting providers of that time aren't around any more, but a very small group actually survived). Even in 1993/4, not all of them were crooks; not all were clueless about business; not all were clueless about the technology (which was so new back then that few could ever claim to be "experts" anyway).

This is the stage we are now with OpenSim hosting providers: a bunch of energic wannabe grid operators, a few of which are not crooks, technologically savvy, and solid businesspersons with a good track record of successfully ran businesses in the past. Most haven't got all those skills, and at this stage — I would recommend to avoid them. If it's too good to be true, it probably is.

So, to recap — the lack of groups, incomplete permissions, search features (or classifieds), etc. are technological limitations, they aren't available on OpenSim grids because the software simply hasn't those features yet. Not yet, but one day they will. Just not today. The aspect of IP protection, overall control of griefers and script kiddies, and trustworthiness of the companies running those grids — are business issues. Like any start-up, they have zero references, and no history to validate their claims of trustworthiness. That's a completely different story, and one faced by all new companies.

Your comparison to what happens on Web hosting is mostly true for 2009, but it's just because the technology behind web hosting has evolved dramatically in the past 15 years! In early 2008, a reputable hosting provider in Florida who hosted part of my company's content, simply ceased to exist from one day to the next, never replying to emails or phone calls. A few weeks afterwards, even their Web address disappeared from DNS. What happened? I don't have the slightest idea; but one thing is obvious, web hosting companies come and go, no matter how reputable they appear. You also pay what you get — if I wished to get 100% uptime and my money back, I'd have to host with Verio or Rackspace — and be prepared to get charged 4-10 times as much to what a regular web hosting provider charges. But I'd have more guarantees. With "cheap" hosting providers out there — and there are millions! — it's always a question of luck and reading reviews and hope that they remain good for a while... Dreamhost was a mess with less than 95% uptime when I started hosting with them, but for US$9.95/month, I didn't expect more. Today they charge even less and give me close to 99.5% reliability, a huge increase in performance. But... their servers can still fail... if I don't keep backups, it's my fault if everything disappears from one day to another, unless I'm prepared to sue them and at least get some money back that way.

So, no, Web hosting is far from 100% reliable, even in 2009. I used to be happy with web hosting to have 70-80% reliability back in 1995 — for the price I was willing to pay, of course :) I don't expect a 100% reliable OpenSim-based grid in 2009. I don't even expect LL's grid to have more than 95% uptime! You surely remember back in late 2004 when whole sims disappeared, when it took days for a reboot, and when lost inventory became, well, lost forever, because LL didn't even back up their servers regularly. They still charged us US$195/month a whole sim's tier ;)

What makes the difference in "reliability"? Well, the software part of it (ie. OpenSim itself) is just one of the issues. The rest is managing the servers, the bandwidth, and the infrastructure. This requires a completely different skill set than "being a cool programmer". Granted, these days programmers do some infrastructure management, and infrastructure engineers do some programming, but they are two different skill sets, really. To run a reliable grid you need both, which is what LL has. I have no idea about the other OpenSim grids operators, although I seriously suspect that 3Di, for instance, has both kinds of people working for them.

For some typical fallacies associated with running distributed systems, I have found this nice white paper. It's pretty techy, but it will show a bit what infrastructure engineers have to deal with when deploying something like OpenSim...

So, how do you manage a sim that is already live and active on the grid with content on it to become “only available sometimes”. Only by *taking it offline,* Gwyn.

No no, not at all. Explaining in minute detail how exactly the process works — how to take a running application from one server to another while not losing any connections to it and within an unnoticeable time frame (ie. milliseconds) — is the subject handled in a semester on distributed applications in a computer science course. They're subject to complex research papers on advanced techniques like this one. I can't possibly explain all the details before boring you to death, but I can give you an example: when you're running a script on an attachment and crossing sims, this is what happens: the sim you're leaving saves the status of the script (ie. where it was running at the time), flags the next sim to get a copy of the script and of the status, and destroys the original running virtual machine for that sim. The new sim now has to launch its own virtual machine and start the script at the same point. And do that in milliseconds so that the resident crossing sim borders doesn't perceive the delay to be very great (ideally, everything should happen under 250 ms, which is the threshold the human brain registers as being "instantaneous").

In fact, Second Life's grid is the largest distributed application framework ever, where applications (scripts) migrate to different CPUs (even on different data centres) all the time, hundreds of times per minute as people cross sim borders or teleport elsewhere. This is an accomplishment by itself, one that is never fully grasped and appreciated (when Babbage Linden explains the process to a techy audience, they all open their mouths in disbelief since nobody has ever done this at this huge scale before).

I haven't evaluated 3Di's software yet, but the point is, the process is fully automated, and the ideal "delay" for a sim to move out of an overloaded server and enter a fresh new one is probably very low. Avatars do not get disconnected. The sim does not go offline. You might have a temporary delay — since I'm sure that, no matter how good 3Di's algorithm is, pushing a 150-MB database with hundreds of connections from one server to another has to have a large enough delay! — but probably it'll be as short as an intra-grid teleport.

So it's not about having people's sims offline and just sometimes get them up when the admin is willing to do so :) You've quite misunderstood me on that. It's like working with caches: textures get downloaded to the disk cache, from disk to memory (1000x faster), and from memory into VRAM (10x faster). You can only keep a few textures on VRAM, so you'll just load there the ones being used. The rest stays on slower memory or even much slower disk space, ready to be swapped in if needed. This system of load balancing works a bit like that, although, granted, saving the sim's state and keeping all connections to the avatars is far more complex than pushing textures from disk into memory into VRAM...

Those ratios — 1000x slower, 10x slower — is what makes a good programmer decide how to fine-tune their algorithms to push textures around the computer's many storage systems. A good caching mechanism (say, on a web server) will try to leave 1% of all data in fast memory and expect 90% of all hits to come from there; the remaining 10% of the hits will go to the 99% of data on disk. Those ratios are usually correct for most websites. For Second Life, I have no clue if the 1:10 ratio is correct or not, I haven't done thorough statistics, but just took a look at the map at one instance and tried to gauge how many events were happening with more than 20 avatars, compared to sims with just 1 or 2 avatars. Under this technique, just the events hosted on sims with more than 20 avatars would be on "exclusive" high-performance servers while the event lasted — while the remaining sims could be on older servers, or have a server hold all 10 low-traffic sims in the same hardware. As soon as the event finishes, the system "swaps out" the sim and puts it back into the slower servers.

This doesn't guarantee a 100% use of CPU resources, of course, since guessing the correct ratio is not easy, and it fluctuates over time. For instance, there are far more events during the holidays and during the summer, as people have more time for them. During "peak hours" (say, noon SLT until 6 PM or so) there are also far more events than during the rest of the day. Juggling with the parameters to get the "best" ratio — the one that always gets all sims needing the performance at peak times into the super-fast servers — requires constant tweaking and is the work of a good infrastructure administrator :) Those are not "tekkie formulas", but simply a result of statistics — metrics you gather to understand how the load in your system is produced, and automatically allocate more resources to alleviate the load. There is some art in getting that right, but the end-results are usually worth the effort.

Re: “All you need to do is to figure out how many sims you’ve got, divide by ten, and buy that amount of high-performance servers to give your users a good experience. The remaining 9 servers can be on “low performance servers” — until they’re needed.”

So, uh, ok. Let me explain how THAT works, in reality. “When sims we like that are overloaded or that have our friends on it, or with loudly complaining foul-mouthed sailors from USS, we will lay on the CPU for them, and let the ordinary stiffs have a laggy mess.”

That's just the way you see things, Prok :) You can argue that LL might have designed their texture cache algorithm so that Linden textures or FIC textures load faster (they might never get saved to disk cache, but always remain in memory). Or that their routers filter out IP addresses, and raise the QoS settings on them if they detect the IP address from a FIC and give them a larger slice of bandwidth. If you start thinking that way, gosh, everything is possible if you're mean enough and your clients don't suspect of what you're doing :) Oh yes, I worked for companies where the CEO had in fact better performance through the corporate VPN, so that he could show off how good his Internet access was during business meetings — while thousands of users had to grumble with "network problems" during those shows. Sure, that happens in real life too.

On the other hand, that's not the point at all :) Let's get back to web hosting for a while. If your site has no access at all, the CPU doesn't need a slice of time to process anything — it's just idle, waiting for requests. Idle? Not really — it's serving requests for all other web sites on the same server. When it comes your turn, you'll get your slice of the CPU — as big as you need to serve the requests. Now imagine that your site is so popular that a single CPU cannot handle the load — if you have a multiprocessor/multicore machine, it'll be slicing time off other CPU's as well, in an effort to better handle the load that way. However, during off-peak hours, it won't need to allocate slices to your website — it can happily run other people's websites during that time. System administrators will hope to get a mix of sites on the same server that don't have all peaks at the same exact time — or, if they do, that they have enough CPU/memory to handle all requests simultaneously. If they did their maths wrongly, your site will be slow (but so will everybody else's).

High-end web server hosting providers use load balancers to use the same techniques to deal with an increased load. You might just be using one server's resources if your load is light. Suddenly, your site gets slashdotted and the traffic increases a thousand times — a well designed load balancing system will immediately allocate as many copies of your webserver as possible, to handle all those requests. In fact, this is the type of service provided by Amazon's AWS. It's a quite fair system, since you just pay for the resources you actually need for your websites — if you need more, you can immediately — and automatically — get more CPUs to run your website, and fall back to just one server on off-peak hours. That's the whole principle. Amazon, of course, charges for the resources you use — it's not as if "only Amazon's friends will benefit from more CPUs for their websites" while the rest of the paying customers have to endure lag on their webservers during a traffic spike. Not at all. Everybody can get this service, and pay only for what they use. If your website is idle most of the time, you don't need many resources (as said, disk space is cheap), and you pay little. (Katharine Berry's Ajaxlife uses AWS).

In fact, what you are describing is what the Lindens *did*. They allowed tens of thousands of openspace sims out into the wild, with only a certain capacity, and relied on the system to just apportion the load balance in a sort of “creative” fashion.

Linden Lab doesn't have dynamic load balancing technology on their grid :) and to the best of my knowledge it's impossible to implement it on the current codebase, although if I were LL, I would certainly consider developing it...

No, LL just did some maths based on their statistics, and calculated that, on average, one of their four-processor Class 5 servers is able to manage 60,000 prims and 400 simultaneous avatars, at best. This allows for 4 regular sims or 16 openspace sims per server. What they missed is intra-region communications. 16 sims don't require 4 times as much intra-region communication as 4 sims, but probably 64 times as much, if the sims have the same usage. LL relied on openspace sims to have far less need of intra-region communications (based on their own usage of void sims in the past) since they would be "almost always empty". Well, they totally miscalculated things. This is supposed to be the "official" reason for the price change, and technically, it's a plausible one, although IMHO I think that there were far more "political" reasons than technical ones behind the decision...

Putting just one sim per server is not just a political/business issue. Rack space has a cost — the more servers you have, the more you pay, obviously. Increasing density is always the trick to lower costs. This means that buying a server with twice the performance (but with the same footprint) is a solid business decision, as it allows to keep the same rack lease costs but serve twice the number of users. LL's move from one sim per server to one sim per CPU is purely arbitrary, but somehow fundamented on their internal metrics, of course. Overloaded sims would probably be far better off with more CPUs (and more bandwidth) per sim, not just one.

This, of course, is not related to the land metaphor at all. In spite of many disagreeing, I still think that having a metaphor instead of charging per CPU and for bandwidth is far more reasonable for a virtual world. In fact, I cannot understand how possibly a different model would work — how much bandwidth ought a resident hire from LL if they have a 300-prim house? How do you "translate" building sizes into CPU/bandwidth? Ah well, I guess that the same issue will arise when meshes are introduced later this year, and I see no other option than moving from a prim-based economy into a polygon-based one... but still keeping the land metaphor intact, of course.

Re: The Traditional Predictions List for 2009…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:19:31 -0000

@Prok, I should have added point 11. Measures to implement DRM and a way to automatically 'bots and malicious SL viewers will NOT appear in 2009...

@Andabata, you're right. Since LL abandoned the work on their in-world browser and further HTML-on-a-prim development (after the cute feature of being able to point anywhere on a prim — an important step to allow clicking on links — the last news I've heard was that LL was dropping Mozilla and trying WebKit instead), we have no clue what is going on.

Re: OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:35:15 -0000

Wow, I'm quite glad that the discussion turned from the "pure technology" behind OpenSim to what can actually be done with it, and hints about its policy...! Thank you guys for your very insightful comments and explanations.

Dusan, you're quite right about all your points regarding policy. From my point of view, of course, OpenSim is "just the technology" — e.g. I have as many worries about it as Adobe has when Photoshop is used to allow people to steal pictures and change them to look as their own. Adobe doesn't have a "policy" for dealing with copyright content, that is, if a known photo pirate is caught, nobody can sue Adobe because they didn't care that their technology has been used for illegitimate purposes.

Similarly — and this goes for lots of technological solutions — you can't sue Nokia or Motorola for making mobile phones used by terrorist cells and drug dealers to coordinate their criminal efforts; or Microsoft for developing server software that allows extreme-right or extreme-left groups to publish their blogs. Technology is "neutral"; the use of it, of course, requires legislation/protection/policies.

LL has access to 2.2 billion items in their asset servers. At any point in time, any of the 300 Linden employees could, theoretically, download them and upload copies of the content "as if done by Lindens" and, say, give them away as freebies on the Help Island. But we all know they won't do that. Why? Well, mostly because LL is a reputable, trustworthy company, and has a contract with all their customers guaranteeing that LL will not copy our content but allow you to retain your IP licenses on it. Forever. Without any charges.

So it's just a matter of trusting LL on good faith — because if they break that good faith, they're liable in court.

Now, OpenSim is not a "company providing a virtual world", nor an organisation of people that are building a competitor to SL. It's just — code. Technology. Tools. A platform. What will happen is that some companies providing services using OpenSim will naturally have to include their policies in the agreements they have with their own customers — just like LL does with their residents. The option to "trust" these startups is as hard as the option people made when trusting the 20 or 30-employee company in a garage in San Francisco back in June 2003. LL was not "more reputable" back then as any of the start-up OpenSim providers are in 2009 (well, Philip had a reasonably good track record... but he could have "turned evil" ;) ).

So when we talk about "interoperability" we're actually talking about two levels here. One is purely technological — your comparison with email is incidentally quite on the spot, that's exactly why we have spam today! — and there are limits to what "code" can actually protect, specially if it's relatively easy to subvert code, and if we want a totally decentralised model (ie. anyone can interconnect to anyone else, and it's just up to those two parties interconnecting to forge an agreement; no third party acts as middle-man). The other is simply an issue of business and company/consumer relationships, where policy becomes part of the agreement.

What this mostly means is pretty similar to what happens on the Internet. For instance, we have seen all those neat mashups where you log in to one service and grant another service full or partial access to your data. Typical examples are logging in with OpenID, adding applications to Facebook, using your Yahoo Account to enter Flickr or your Google Account to enter YouTube, and so on. When in these cases you're crossing the company boundary (granted, the examples about Flickr and YouTube are "inside the company boundary") things become interesting — since you have to trust both companies, the one where all your data is stored (you're assuming that only the data you wish to push over to the other company is going to be visible and nothing else), and the one you're logging in to (where you have to assume that they won't just get all your data — including the password — and use it maliciously). What "policies" are there to safeguard the process? In fact, absolutely none — except two companies' terms of services, with which you have to agree, or, well, forfeit the easy integration and interconnection.

At this stage, that's all we need for the metaverse or intergrid.

When I say that I recommend "caution" is just because at this stage, many small OpenSim grid providers are virtually "unknowns" and you have no way to validate if they're going to be honest with their own terms of service and policies. However, why do people automatically trust anything on the Web but, at the same time, automatically mistrust anything on the virtual worlds? Right now, I have thousands of pictures on my (other) Flickr accounts that might being used maliciously by thousands of people, selling those images as if they were theirs, using them inappropriately on third-party web sites without my permission... and I have absolutely no idea of what goes on! Sure, I have posted those pictures with an Attribution CC license, but how do I track down anyone who ignores the license and refuses to comply with my requests? Even if I managed to find out who's doing things with my pictures, how would I even start the whole lawsuit process against the offending parties? Should I file a suit against Yahoo because they allow Flickr to display my pictures and anyone to copy them?

Similarly, if someone develops a game and sells them online (through one of the many websites that sell microgames, for example), how can you track down if someone is doing multiple copies of your game and giving it away to friends? Granted, you can invent some kind of licensing scheme, but how will you track down crackers and key generators that are a keystroke away in Google? The answer is, of course, that you can't. And, of course, I won't even get into the discussion about copying music and videos... We took 15 years to get used to the idea that everything posted on the Internet is there to be grabbed and used maliciously by others in one form or another — and, surprisingly, the crime rate and the malicious use is actually negligible in most cases. Music, as we all know, is the big exception that almost brought the worldwide music industry to its knees — but in spite of that, musicians are surviving, even if possibly the labels aren't making such a profit as during the pre-Napster years.

Of course, everybody will be saying that "this is completely different" and people know that posting their content on a Web page is "unsafe" (to the degree that it can always be copied) unless you have a host of lawyers working for you, some lobbyists at the many governments, and are thus able to enforce your rights.

Second Life is not different from that. The message to be passed is simple: when logging into another OpenSim grid, beware. You're going to take a risk. A serious risk. Try to figure out the reputation of the grid operator you're logging in to before you regret your choice. But in reality, I can imagine that with few exceptions, all other grids out there are "as safe" as LL's own — which, as we all know, is not "safe" from content copy, and very likely will never be, unless LL reverts their decision of releasing an open source client and close down the access to their grid to official SL clients again. This is not likely to happen.

Code rarely can replace law. And, in some cases, it shouldn't even attempt to do that. If enough people are scammed by a grid operator, it'll be quickly the target of someone who can afford a lawyer.

Tessa's model is precisely the way I see it happening — pretty much as so many other things have been created on the Internet in the past. A "closed model" where the best and largest grid operators establish a board of trust, and only accept members willing to enforce a common set of policies. If you abide by the overall set of policies (and paying a fee is obviouly a good idea), you'll remain interconnected. As soon as you start violating the rules, you're out — and no amount of public drama will get you back in, while, on the other hand, abiding by the common set of policies and enforcing them will definitely allow that.

In fact, if I read Tessa's proposals correctly, her suggestions will probably be way easier to enforce on non-LL grids (where content theft is a quite low priority), since all those grid operators will wish to maintain their reputation and reliablilty as trustworthy operators, and will go through pains to keep high ethical standards in order to attract more customers. So I believe that this is the way to go ahead.

I'll reserve my opinion about Raph Koster's ideas for another day ;)

@Justin, thanks for your many corrections, and your very insightful comments. Oh yes, I know I'm quite an optimist :) Still, even if some of the modules are at a pre-alpha stage, the good news is that they're there and can be "seen" (even if they totally and completely crash your grid ;) ), which is far more than what we can expect from LL at this stage...

I'm also aware that I tend to mix up in my text OpenSim as it was in late 2008 and how I expect it to be by late 2010. For instance, Asterisk integration is something I haven't tested yet, but I can only imagine — from the comments in the configuration files! — that it's obviously not production-ready yet. Or not even at an alpha stage. But... the point is... it will be. All it takes right now is to get a company very interested in the possibility to use OpenSim for exactly that purpose, download OpenSim, and start to develop the appropriate module starting from what's already existing :) Well, it might take a year or two, but... at least it will be available. One day.

I found it amusing that you consider the lack of "your own client" a limitation of OpenSim and that "replicating SL" is a "niche market". Well. Looking at the current population of virtual world users, I'd say that SL has perhaps a quarter of that market (taking into account IMVU's 20 million or more registered users), so it's not quite a "niche market". If we go further and look at all virtual worlds with user-generated content, persistence, and contiguity, well, SL has 100% of that market (or, well, 99.999%). That hardly qualifies as a "niche market". I understand that being able to use OpenSim to emulate, say, World of Warcraft, Sony Home, There.com, IMVU, realXtend, OpenCroquet, and Second Life, all running simultaneously and being served from the same software would truly be the ultimate goal — the "Universal Virtual World Simulation Software". That would be insanely cool, of course, but for the next 5-10 years, I'll be more than happy with something far less ambitious but with higher practical use: full compatibility with Second Life with lots of plugins to do what LL will never manage to do with their software. That would be "good enough" for me.

A last comment. Since the past two years or so, using the pretext of "we're so bad at deadlines that we'll never tell what we're working on", Linden Lab pretty much stopped letting us know on what they're working on. Allegedly they have 200 developers — surely not all are fixing bugs and doing quality assurance tests?... So... what are they doing? Turning LL's sim server software into a modular, plug-in-based solution? Programming Second Life 2.0? Well, I can hardly believe any of that... so I'll be stepping back and wait to see what they're really doing...

Re: The Traditional Predictions List for 2009…

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:12:25 -0000

Well, Hiro, on 3. ("Return to the Mainland"), I'd imagine the following scenario:

- announce the new Class 6 servers
- available only on the mainland at first, for the reduced price; later, Class 6 might be available
- auctions for whole sims start much lower, AND they include Estate Tools
- a new "move back to the mainland" programme where LL will forfeit the moving costs of getting all your sims connected to somewhere in the mainland (using the USS model: allow just one edge to be connected so that the community can expand)
- introduce a "mainland community programme", where existing mainland rentals, specially the larger ones (one sim or more), can get a free "upgrade" to Estate Tools (of course, very fragmented sims won't benefit from that "upgrade")

That should get the ball rolling :)

Well, for 6., perhaps the problem is with the word "all" :) I mean, what is the percentage of US and UK universities already offering some educational options to their students (and usually this starts with post-docs and docs, not graduates)? I have heard some numbers like "over a third". In my backwards country, all major cities (curiously, except for Lisbon...) have at least one university already doing that — although this is by far not a third, and most just offer a few courses. Still, "all" might be an exxageration... but I remember when Moodle started to be introduced in the universities, and these days it's almost mandatory for every university out there...

7. True :) hehe. I don't think we're seeing any, either. Some existing ones under development will never leave beta testing, or will postpone the launch to 2010... if they manage to survive 2009.

8. By "massively" I'd say that at least half of what LL counts as "regular active users" will use a third-party viewer (note: I'll be happy if it's just 10% by the end of 2009, of course — it'll still show a trend!)

9. A few more offices elsewhere in the world, a few more information (in-world) in more languages, a few more available Liasons and tech support, and a way to make sure that newbies drop on 'welcome areas' with the language of their choice (again, quoting wildly from memory, LL at one point claimed that 10% of all new users already came from "communities" — SL Brazil is the typical example, with 1 million registered members — and not from LL's default login page. What is the percentage today?). At this stage, dealing with newbies on the help islands still faces the barrier of language — although we can usually get the appropriate Mentor easily enough, the newbie will still be surrounded by signs, boards, and people that don't speak their language at all. So I see the push towards welcome areas done for each different language, and have these clearly labelled the moment someone views the http://secondlife.com site. Right now, the site is only available in 4 languages; it would make a huge difference to have at least a first page in several different languages, with just brief pointers to the "right" place to log in. Also, there is plenty of translated information everywhere on the SLogosphere, LL just needs to get permission to use it...

10. was the easiest prediction to make for 2009 :) I got it right all the other years — and this one won't be different :D

Re: OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:22:26 -0000

Thanks, Hiro :) I was using one of the two popular uses of the term reverse-engineering, namely "clean room reverse engineering" where the actual source code is not known.

Hiri, you're right that the number of regular OpenSim users is quite minuscule compared to SL, of course. Then again, it's about the same number of users SL had in early 2005, and there were quite a number of content creators getting an interesting revenue from it. The key aspects here is trusting the grid you're connecting with; in my opinion, if Tessa's project goes ahead, "complying" grids will actually give more protection to content creators than non-complying ones (ie. like LL's own grid which doesn't recognise any organisation protecting content creators' designs).

Re: OpenSimulator: The Choice for 2010

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:32:57 -0000

Hiri, point taken, of course :) In fact, that's the same argument why people design digital content for SL (potential customer base: 16 million consumers) or IMVU (20 million potential customers) and are leaving Renderosity (where only another 100-150,000 3D designers are potential customers).

You're just plainly stating pure and simple economics, the effort of attracting another 5% of the market with uncertain risk is too high for a regular designer to take that risk (since the use of CopyBot on the main grid is by far less than 5% of your risk).

I couldn't agree more with you. And since by 2010, the probability of OpenSim residents surpassing Second Life residents in size is effectively zero you're quite safe in developing just for the main grid, at least until, oh, 2015 or so :)

Still, I'm pretty sure that some content providers will follow Tessa's endeavour to create a federation of grids that actually protect more user-generated content than LL currently does, and will not hesitate to launch their content there — for just one reason: there is high risk, yes, but also a higher margin for profit, as designers in SL are reluctant to move over to OpenSim, and for a while (let's say 5 years) you can offer your products and services without fear of competition and for the price you wish — pretty much like low-quality products made a huge profit in 2004/5, since there were few choices available. When Namssor Daguerre invented the concept of avatar skins in 2005, he sold them for L$6000 each — and he sold thousands :) (today, you get them in packs of reasonably high quality for a few hundreds of L$) The first person who devised a way to make animation overriders sold the script for L$400 without any animations inside. These claims sound absurd today, just because we're used to competition to lower the prices for the consumer. OpenSim is still virgin, unexplored territory; but, of course, it requires first for people to trust it. Nobody made any money on the Closed Beta SL in 2002, when permissions were introduced and the L$ was a novelty :) — and nothing really worked well yet.

Re: Post-immersionism

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:44:29 -0000

@Extie, yes, well, humans are a gregarious species, so the self is definitely a social construction, or at least a big part of it. The authors of the quoted paper are a bit more careful when talking about the physical self, since it's obvious that you can live all your life as a hermit and most of them don't "lose their minds" but still have a sense of self ;) Nevertheless, hermits are an exception to the usually gregarious nature of human beings.

On the other hand, there is no digital self without online interaction.

@Ranma, your "discovery" of your virtual self being exactly the same as your physical self is one that only you can make; for everybody else, they're different. That's why the authors of the article define the digital self not as something you define, but what others define. I also claim the same thing as you, of course, but my claims are futile — my digital self is on other people's minds, not in mine. And this is the crucial difference between both. It goes beyond visual appearance (which, anyway, is always different just because a pixel-based environment depicts images differently than a atom-based environment).

As for the interest of real business in Second Life, the list is way too long for a simple comment :) and I'd certainly suggest the many sites dedicated to that — Kzero's is a pretty good start. Just remember that 15 years ago nobody would believe that people would buy clothes or vegetables via the Web, because "watching a picture" is not the same as feeling the texture of a dress or smelling the freshness of vegetables. Today, online shopping is widespread, and companies have no problem in making sales via the Web. Then again, brand awareness and community-building are two good starting points for companies to be in Second Life, specially the later: companies like Harley-Davidson or even Apple mostly sell through building a strongly-knitted group of individuals who are solid evangelists of their products and naturally come together to discuss it. This is called the "Culting of Brands" by author Douglas Atkin, who never mentions Second Life in his book, but what he explains definitely is a perfect guideline for companies to "do business" in Second Life.

You also mention the issues about validation, identification, and Government's typical obsession about making sure that a person is what they claim to be. This is mostly a 20th century obsession, where old-fashioned concepts like 'honour' have faded into the background. Remember, fraudsters and scammers also have ID cards, and when transacting with anyone, even in the flesh, no amount of IDs or fingerprints or DNA samples will tell me if I can trust the person sitting in the meeting room. Likewise, just because I'm willing to show my ID card or passport to my lover, it doesn't make me automatically a decent, honest, faithful partner that they can trust to raise children and give them a good education. Replacing "validation of identity" by values like honesty, honour, faithfulness, loyalty, is sadly an illusion created by the post-WWII society which has mostly abolished those values. A person does not become "more honest" just because they are able to provide an ID card. And there are other issues, too. I remember once trying to sell a company to someone with a very solid business reputation whom I had the pleasure to have met for over a decade; and I was given a check from him for a huge amount of money (millions of dollars) to buy that company. I certainly met that person several times over the years in the flesh, had copies of their ID cards, and a way to validate the legally-binding signature on the check. 24 hours later I was talking to his family at the waiting room of a mental institution, where he had just been sedated after a huge mental breakdown and a collapse due to stress. So... what good was that signature on the check? What good were all the "proofs" I had of having made a successful, honest business transaction? I did not see inside that person's mind to see how it worked, and, ultimately, that's what counts (if I had sued — which I hadn't — any lawyer would easily claim that the person was not mentally stable to sign checks and the court would obviously rule against me).

On the Internet, millions of transactions for billions of dollars happen every day without people meeting in the flesh. They occur on Amazon or eBay or on several other places, from people selling software, web hosting, or clothes, groceries, or even cars and houses. Millions of transactions! And you hardly ever meet those people or see their ID cards. On the other hand, in almost all these cases, things like reliability, credibility, and intimacy — the core of business trust — still occur, and often to a degree that is impossible in the non-digital world. Just because you don't trust people to do business over the Internet, millions nevertheless do it every day.

@Dale, I agree that "new residents" tend to ignore those labels, but that doesn't mean they don't exist ;) In fact, it's absolutely unsurprising that when they finally hear about them they find the concept preposterous. That's fine: nobody, I think, is claiming that everybody who becomes a SL resident has to become a philosopher, too :) Perhaps the difference between the early generation of SL residents and the current one is that there was a higher number of amateur thinkers in the past who thought about what virtual worlds would do to transform society and mindsets (hopefully, "improving human condition" that way, as LL says in their mission...). These days? Oh sure — that has become the object of serious research in universities, and it's there where you'll see people discussing these and similar subjects. Not by watching newbies popping in on the Welcome Areas :) SL, overall, has become professional in all areas, the number of amateurs still around doing things is slowly fading away :)

Ah, and lovely short story, I had missed it, and you're right, that's pretty much a good vision of the future :))))

Re: Post-immersionism

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:10:42 -0000

<-- LOVES Peter F Hamilton, one of my favourite space opera authors ever, and I'd love to see Peter come to SL and talk to us about his fascinating ideas — Edenism is definitely one of those ;)

Re: Automated Avatars in Second Life — ‘bots 2.0?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 11:41:17 -0000

Good luck, David, this definitely looks promising for a "start"; it definitely reminds me of the idea that you cannot have AI without an immersive environment, but RL is far too complex for the current-generation pattern-matching techniques to have AI software deal successfully with it. Second Life, however, presents a neat "middle ground", since you can easily flag/tag objects in your environment (you know where everything is) and get properties from them (ie. is that object touch-enabled, or can I buy it, or can I get a copy of it, or what colour is on the surface). Also, thanks to gestures, AI-enabled 'bots can also express themselves emotionally in a way that looks "reasonable" for everybody around — after all, excepting extreme "gesturistas" like myself, most avatars don't express a lot of emotions in SL. So, all in all, it sounds like the perfect approach for "training" AIs!

Dale, oh yes, much better indeed! In fact, although AIML chatbots are interesting enough to have funny (if not meaningless!) communication with them, they're lacking something that Daden managed to do: a 3D integration into an environment. "Automated Avatars" are able to chat with other humans about their environment, and that's a huge step towards making the conversation so much more interesting.

I actually do think you cannot programmatically figure out if an Automated Avatar is a 'bot or not. The reasoning is simple, there will be few "canned" responses over time (since answers from Wikipedia or Amazon will invariably change, not to mention the BBC programme :) ), and the behaviour is, even at this very limited stage, way beyond what pattern-matching techniques are able to figure out as "deterministic". Put into other words: an algorithm that flags an Automated Avatar as a 'bot will invariably flag thousands of newbies as 'bots too, since the Automated Avatar, at least on the video, exhibits a familiarity with its environment which is actually higher than what a newbie experiences. Typical issues are having the avatar face the speaker, knowing how to travel across the sim to meet someone, recognise that certain objects are touchable or sittable, and so on. Newbies take some time to learn all that. So, a Turing-esque test that filters out Automated Avatars would start by filtering out all newbies first!... and if the test is "dumbed down" to allow newbies to be correctly identified as such, Automated Avatars would remain un-identified!

A suggestion for further research: learn about abstract and subjective characteristics of SL elements. A typical example, present the Automated Avatar with a selection of chairs using textures of different colours, and ask them to sit on "the red chair".

Now, a typical approach would be to scan for the object's name and see if it contains the word "red" in it; if not, proceed to look up some of the prim faces to see if the colour of them is within the range of what we humans call "red". Naturally enough, an object that is called "wicker chair" and just uses textures, will never be found that way. So what does the 'bot do? A typical human reaction would be just to sit down on one of the chairs. A human watching the 'bot will say "that's wrong" or "that chair isn't red", and the Automated Avatar would promptly stand up and move to the next one, until it gets some positive feedback (or lack on negative feedback for a while). This is typical human behaviour when learning a language (or, for all purposes, learning how to use SL's interface). Due to the "training engine", the avatar will be able to flag "redness" to a subjective experience of a "wicker chair" and learn that way. So it might have to go through trial-and-error the first times, but not so in future attempts; also, since most furniture sold in SL is usually non-modify but copyable, it's highly likely that the Automated Avatar, by cross-checking the item's name and creator, would manage to correctly identify the chair as being "red" quite often, and even surprise the audience, when asked to "take a seat" to prompt "I'll sit on the red chair".

We humans won't be fooled by that behaviour, of course, but it's hard to imagine an algorithm that is able to correctly label that kind of behaviour as coming from a 'bot as opposed to a newbie... who might not even know how to sit properly, or might not have loaded the textures to identify the colour, or might not speak English at all :)

Re: Cloudies!

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:14:26 -0000

I wonder why this popped up on LL's Hotspot Headlines... lol

Re: Linden Lab buys XstreetSL and OnRez Shop — why?

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:29:28 -0000

Fleep, I'm not the only one, Riko Kamachi has a quite detailed description of what's wrong with XStreetSL and what's good with OnRez here. It's a very thoughtfully written analysis.

Prok, I don't know if it's "good" or "bad" to emulate IMVU/There/Kaneva/Moove/whatever and replace in-world shopping (unique to SL) with web-based shopping (common to all other virtual worlds). My personal feeling is that something huge will be lost if LL pushes web-based shopping with strength. I'm actually afraid they do that because of the inevitable comparisons with "other" virtual worlds.

I've heard the argument that "people search on the Web but buy in-world" quite often. I don't have any data to sustain that argument at all; it certainly is NOT the case with myself, where all sales are made on the Web. And I never got an in-world contact saying "I bought your product on XStreetSL and wish to talk about it" (or get a refund, or something). People use the messaging service on XStreetSL for that. It's like SL doesn't exist at all. I'd be even glad for an email or a message on MSN/Yahoo/Gtalk, my contacts are publicly listed, but no — if they shop on the Web, they contact me on the Web. Granted, others might have a different experience. And "shopping for content" is a vast world — fashion, skins and attachments are easier bought that way, but I'm sure that people prefer to do a test drive on a vehicle, or walk inside a prefab, before buying those. If LL developed an in-world "preview" feature for clothes and skins, well, I'm sure that would definitely make a difference...

Nacon, SL is not going to die ;) Really, if I got L$1 for every time I hear/read this, these days I'd be able to buy Linden Lab several times over, and the more time passes, the more I'd earn lol

As for CopyBot, as said elsewhere, it's the analogue hole problem: if it's in your computer, you can copy it. The only solution is "going RIAA" on the pirates, and LL is reluctant to do that, although they certainly have banned quite a lot of people... just not enough.

Torrid, thanks for setting the record straight :) I had this vague idea (since I quite well remember to be able to login to SL using a simple PHP script, when libSL was in development, based on the docs they had published, and that was before the client became open source) but unfortunately my memory is not so good for details...

Madame, nice to see you here :) I have to agree with you. I have a mixed approach as a consumer myself: I love to do in-world shopping, but that requires time and patience, due mostly to the lag (using Kirstens Viewer certainly helped that!!), but also because it's not easy to find exactly what you want — shops are huge and rarely well organised (one might say this is deliberate). I remember looking for a hair style at Six Kennedy's Girlywood that I wished to buy for my "twin alt". That took me a whole week, logging in an hour per day, just to rez a few more hundreds of textures, and look around to see if I finally got it. And I even knew the name of the style (and had pictures and images, even on her blog and all)! Sadly, there was no way to search for it, and Six is too busy to answer those simple questions. I eventually found it, of course, but that required persistence. If she had it on sale on XStreetSL, it'll have taken 5 seconds — but of course, miss all the fun.

So I agree with you, it's hard to say. New residents, specially those coming from IMVU, There, etc. will probably only use the webshops, since that's what they know, and what they expect SL to provide. Old veterans will miss the shopping experience. But at the end of the day, what will matter is "how much does it cost to keep my 3D shop in SL, compared to just listing things on the webshop?". If you have a budget of, say, US$500 to pay for tier and events that drive traffic to your shop, won't those very same US$500 buy a lot of ads on the webshop instead, and provide way more sales that way? It's obviously very early to answer this with "yes" — specially because brand new residents are not the best consumers...

Re: Philip’s Vision, 1999-2009 and Beyond [UPDATED]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:02:53 -0000

Oh, excellent bit of research, Hiri! Do you have a link for a reference? Mind you, I was mostly quoting Philip, I never checked that out for myself anywhere...

Re: Philip’s Vision, 1999-2009 and Beyond [UPDATED]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:54:19 -0000

Philip's words, not mine :) I've seen this video and learned that the country with the largest English-speaking population in the world will be... China :)

Re: Shift Happens

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 07:39:10 -0000

Oh, just to set the record straight, the "Shift Happens" presentation is not from a bunch of "techno-commies" but from US educators originally addressing other US educators, specially the ones teaching on K-12 schools.

From their wiki:

We want all children to be successful. We do not view the growing importance of India and China as negative but rather as additional opportunities for everyone in the world. We do not mean to gloss over the very real issues that countries such as India and China face, and we recognize that globalization and "flat world" factors have downsides just like other societal shifts. We prefer, however, to focus on the positive benefits and on doing what we can to help children learn and grow so that they may become successful digital, global citizens.

Re: OpenSim Physics Engine Beats Linden Lab’s Havok

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:11:45 -0000

Ah yes, Rui, true... the video doesn't tell which one, so I suspect it's a patch on Open Dynamics Engine.

Re: OpenSim Physics Engine Beats Linden Lab’s Havok

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:36:07 -0000

Not that I'm aware of... it wouldn't make any sense, now that LL is going ahead to make the SL protocol an open Internet standard by the IETF.

Re: Updating your social websites status from inside Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:53:41 -0000

Oh, just for the record, the Ping.fm gateway works flawlessly, now I just need them to approve my application key :)

It was actually quite easy, since HelloTxt has clearly inspired themselves on Ping.fm's own API. There are some very slight and not significant differences. There are also a few nifty features: you can send your location in SL to some social websites (Twitter, for instance), and so people can stalk you... wait... that might not be such a great idea!! (in any case, this seems to be broken/unsupported by Ping.fm)

Re: Updating your social websites status from inside Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:39:26 -0000

My pleasure, Yesterday! I'm now working to integrate SL's snapshot feature into HelloTxt (and Ping.fm in the future) since that will allow residents to publish pictures not only to Snapzilla/Flickr or on their blogs with the BlogHUD, but virtually to any social website that allows images and is interconnectable with HelloTxt :)

Should be fun to do!

Re: Valleywag shuts down but still publishes another doomsday prediction of Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:35:44 -0000

Oops, thanks again to Hiro who correctly pointed out to me that the decision to shutdown Valleywag was made before they published this rant against Second Life..

Put it that way, it looks like a twist at "revenge": "if I go down, you go all down with me too".

Pam, I'm a very occasional reader of the Onion, and perhaps I gave a bad example — I wasn't aware of that article of theirs which, frankly, seems to be in quite bad taste. Anyway, the Onion is quite a bad example, since it doesn't really publish any real "news" at all with a funny twist. A better example might indeed be the Daily Show, which at least has some relevance to actual news, but they're always twisted and quoted out of context to make them deliberately more funny :)

Re: Valleywag shuts down but still publishes another doomsday prediction of Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:31:19 -0000

You're so right, Harper! In fact, a university professor in my country, where it's quite unusual to have non-human avatars (it's a cultural thingy, I believe!), told me once that many teachers like to appear in class looking either like fancy magicians, huge dragons, trolls or ogres. He found out that this subtly passed the message along of "who's in charge" in the virtual classroom :)

I know, it's a minor issue, but I'm always fascinated about all these questions about representation of self in a virtual world where you basically use your appearance to project an image. In real life, bankers and lawyers are always primly dressed for effect, to "inspire authority". In SL, the same "authority" has produced more creative forms.

Re: Valleywag shuts down but still publishes another doomsday prediction of Second Life

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:48:52 -0000

Thanks, Mark, for finding another typo!

Re: Politics and Interoperability Standards

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:15:32 -0000

Thanks so much, Eadwacer! I've corrected those mistakes... and yes, lol, I pretty much believe that the last one was a typical lapsus linguae ;)

Re: Politics and Interoperability Standards

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:20:23 -0000

Ann. I'm pretty much in agreement with you. In fact, the latest messages on the MMOX mailing group tend to follow your last paragraph: a few use cases have been proposed, a few documents are roughly setting up what will be, indeed, presented for standardisation, and a few people are leaving the political/ideology discussion and, well, starting to do the right work. You might be right: given enough months, the political/ideological group will tire out and go discuss their ideologies somewhere else, where they might still get an audience. Not on the MMOX list though.

We'll see. Yes, two years is enough time for that to happen — you're right on that.

Re: Politics and Interoperability Standards

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:01:08 -0000

Andabata Mandelbrot interestingly had published an article on last month's edition of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research talking about why interoperatibility is so necessary and important. A pity I just read it today, since he definitely echoes some of the early history of the Internet, and how BBSes and private, proprietary online systems slowly opened up and became the Internet of today.

Re: Politics and Interoperability Standards

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:31:25 -0000

@Prokofy, no, I didn't delete anything :( And I didn't find your long post on the spam queue, either. The comments here are supposedly unlimited in size, so that wasn't it...

@John and @Rui, you are right to an extent, and this has been actually under discussion too. The idea is to use Hypergrid as a reference: Hypergrid allows avatars to jump across OpenSim grids, and their inventory will be always hosted on their grid of origin. So that does, indeed, allow, multiple asset servers.

However, there's a problem: what should happen when an item is rezzed on a foreign grid? Currently what happens is that the sim looks at the item being rezzed, notices it comes from a foreign asset server, and asks that asset server to send it over. The asset is rezzed and cached locally. In fact, under the Hypergrid Protocol, the notion of "local" assets, "local grid" assets, and "foreign grid" assets tend to be blurred a bit.

So this works... if you're not worried about permissions. As soon as an asset is retrieved from a foreign grid, a local copy is created. And as soon as the copy is rezzed in-world, it remains on that sim's cache, and, of course, depending on how honest the local grid manager is, they might respect the original perms or not (by default, the item will be rezzed with no perms). I don't know what happens if someone from the local grid then takes a copy — I'm pretty sure that on the standard implementation this is not possible. Even OpenSim's limited permission system will not allow that to happen. However, as said, anyone can change the code on OpenSim and change the behaviour.

To try to overcome this model, there is a plan to make the rezzing of objects on foreign grids a function of the client, not of the sim server. Under this model, it's the sole responsibility of the SL client to retrieve the assets from as many different asset servers as possible to view them locally. This means that the sim server will only cache objects that are on the local grid, but not on foreign grids. So, yes, that looks pretty much like what you're saying.

The concept is interesting, although in reality it's just pushing the problem out of the server towards the client, ie. you have to "trust" that the SL client is also "honest" and doesn't break permissions. Also, it means worse performance for any other viewers on the same scene, since you cannot rely on the in-built caching mechanism on the simulator software.

I'd say that the model of "embedding YouTube videos" is really not applicable here. Once you get an YouTube video link, you can download and store it on your hard disk. Google/YouTube can "pull the plug" on a video as often as they want, but your copy of it will never be affected. That's the analogue hole problem: YouTube can't really control what happens on your own computer — once a video is viewable once, you can always make a copy of it locally.

Put into other words: pushing the issue towards the SL client is not going to solve anything.

Re: Politics and Interoperability Standards

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:15:07 -0000

@Rui, when you store a copy of an YouTube video locally, you have a copy that is the exact size and quality of the video that was just streamed (since the original one is, indeed, changed/compressed/modifies by YouTube).

@cdz, well said :) All those industry standards that you refer, however, are more focused on describing objects in a scene and less on describing interconnection of different virtual worlds (which might, indeed, use one of those standards to describe objects in scenes).

Even LLSD, Linden Lab's "object description language", is more designed to describe the message to be transmitted and less as a file format (ie. to backup/upload objects and assets).

You've still got a point, of course!

Re: What Time Is It?! [UPDATE]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 11:36:31 -0000

/me thinks that LL ought to get a Swiss watch.

Re: What Time Is It?! [UPDATE]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 11:50:10 -0000

Mmmh. Things seem to be slightly more complex. Apparently, you just get the SL time wrong IF you're currently living in a place that did not change to daylight savings today (March 8 ) — ie. basically the whole world except for the US and Canada.

This might also be different from SL client to SL client. A few might have this fixed.

I've done a simple check using an in-world script: it definitely shows the correct time, called from the servers. It's just the SL client that displays it wrongly! So, Crap, your clocktower might continue to work fine...

Oh my. I guess I'll have to start telling people the time in UTC...

Re: What Time Is It?! [UPDATE]

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:10:13 -0000

I've checked it with LL's latest Release Candidate and with Imprudence; both actually report the correct time. Kirstens Viewer doesn't :( and apparently some others don't, either...

Re: Second Life’s New Red Light District

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:33:20 -0000

Well spotted, Ananda ;)

In fact, further clarification from LL has shown that they will only really flag "Adult content" extremely hard core pornography. This mostly means that regular (and even ever-so-slightly-kinky) sex pose balls will be perfectly legitimate on Mature areas. As well as (apparently) all sorts of fetish wear, ever outrageous ones.

On the other hand, legitimate businesses and educators have a real simple way to keep out "wanderers" and griefers: just flag your parcel as Adult-only, and let your clients, partners, or students verify themselves. It can't get simpler than that!

Re: Second Life’s New Red Light District

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:36:19 -0000

Jabba, the "Game Card" idea is an excellent suggestion!!

You're quite right about credit cards not being a good idea outside the US — thus LL at least said "other options".

May I suggest that you add your wonderful suggestion to this forum thread as well?

I know it has a disadvantage — LL will need a global distributor to get those cards in all game shops around the world. But — think of the marketing possibilities! I haven't seen a Game Card for WoW, but I can imagine this to be something real fun to do, e.g. being able to place a picture, your name, and your avatar name on it, and have a small fee — like, say, €5 — which would be converted to L$ once you call LL up with the code for validation.

LL once suggested that there would be a "small fee" for validation services. Well, your idea would neatly solve the issue, give people another opportunity besides credit card validation, spread SL's logo all over the world, and get you a small amount of L$ to spend. What could possibly be a better idea? :-D

I really think you should push that idea to LL!

Re: Second Life’s New Red Light District

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:54:29 -0000

Dale, excellent points... sometimes I should be "softer" on the way I write things. :)

The "push-on-your-face-sexual-content" is... well, cultural, I guess. It's hard to explain it really. We both have been around long enough that it doesn't really bother us any more, and so, speaking of "pushing" is incorrect. I usually give a typical example from my youth. Our high school class did a field trip to the red light district of Hamburg (Germany). For almost everybody, it was a first time. Needless to say, most of the guys — except for the teacher, who used to live in Hamburg — were drooling at what they saw in broad daylight on the sex shops. The girls were nauseated. However, even back then, I used to observe people a lot: and what actually surprised me was that the natives of Hamburg just walked by the shops and did not take any notice (except for the occasional customers, of course). For them, this was just a part of their city, just like many others. There was a de-sensitising effect: get exposed to mature content too much, and it becomes "normal". I had a similar experience, much later, as an adult, while visiting some areas in London and Amsterdam: it was quite easy to see who was a tourist or a local. The locals weren't bothered: it was part of their city, and they were used to it.

There are always exceptions, of course, but I feel the same happened to me in Second Life. The sheer amount of mature content when I travelled around in SL, during my first weeks, did not exactly nauseate me, but I was definitely conscious of it. But after so many years in SL, all this slowly faded into the background. One of my best friends in SL is an enthusiastic BDSMer (and she's my landlady on the mainland — her castle looms in the horizon from where I live), and so is the community manager for the company I work for. Their attire never bothered me, since it pretty much became commonplace for, well, SL's standards. But in both cases, it shocked customers, who refused to talk to them unless they got "properly dressed". When I heard that, I was shocked in turn: who are those people that tell my friends and colleagues how to dress?? Who are they to judge them — and their qualities as human beings! — just because they have their fetishes? (We all have them, even the most Puritan ones!)

And ironically, I was also once or twice accused of showing "too much leg". Pfft! And I remember one silly little story when

I guess I'm digressing! Anyway... from my point of view, as someone who is pretty much familiar with SL's environment, culture, and people, I cannot seriously say that "adult content is pushed in my face". Not for me! However, for someone who has not been around so long, and is mostly tied to their own little spot in SL (say, their virtual university campus or their company's "walled garden"), SL does, indeed, give the impression that everybody is "pushing adult content at you". Put in other words: it's not that non-adult content doesn't exist, it just seems "less" than it actually is. Taking a look at MItch Wagner's article on Information Week it seems that adult content, however, is "only" 4-5% of all content on Second Life!

You also quite correctly point out that Aristotle doesn't give LL any real data — just a "flag" saying if someone is validated or not. However, it seems to be implied that LL will not really rely so much on Aristotle and have reverted their policy to just accept credit card and "other forms" of validation (e.g. sending over a faxed ID card). Ironically, using Aristotle's services might be the best way to verify your age anonymously — however, due to the way the public has perceived how Aristotle works (ie. "they will sell my RL data to tele-marketeers!" while in essence what they do is sell profiling data to marketing agencies, quite a different issue, but one so subtly different that most people cannot distinguish both), it's hardly likely that this facility of age verification will be little used, if at all. Credit card data will be the way to go. Or PayPal validation. In either case, Linden Lab has a tag on you

And finally, I'm pretty sure that the biggest discussion will be on "what, exactly, is adult content?". I gave extreme cases, because these are the very few ones that probably a vast majority (ie. over 99% of the resident population) will consider extremely sexual in nature and extremely violent: re-enactment of raping using chainsaws with the victim's blood spilled all over the torture rack in a gore dungeon (or a Gor dungeon, pun intended) will most certainly be flagged "adult", even by the ones indulging in that fantasy. But once we soften up the examples, it's quite obvious that someone's "graphical adult content" is someone else's "mildly erotic fantasies", and I expect that Linden Lab will keep those "merely mature". At the end of the day, this looks like something quite similar than the ban on using SL's trademark: a way for LL to act just in the extreme cases by using the ToS and not fearing counter-lawsuits, and not exactly a way to impose "correct thought" upon the residents. If so, that would be quite consistent with what LL has been doing for a long time. Seriously, except for banking and gambling, most of LL's "extreme measures" were never "extremely enforced" (and while banks have all but gone, illegal gambling is still around, it's just not public — like in real life).