DISQUS

Unconvinced that the arguments hold together.

Students in SL who are millennials will only suffer the from the need to be able to freeform play if their class consists of instructions such as "go and explore Second Life and write a report." Whilst there may be classes like that, most classes have someone creating a structured learning environment and setting goals - whether you call them the teacher, lecturer, professor or whatever. No need to set your own goals as a student in Second Life, you still have that authority figure there to do it for you. However, your analysis may suggest a reason why students tend to view SL as a place to learn only and don't remain active outside of class time, although in my experience about 10% of students go further than that despite the demands on their time which is a much higher rate than LL think are retained (of all users) going through the orientation process (they currently estimate 1%).

Any given class in Second Life has the same structure as a RL class. There are a small number (maybe only 1) of Gen X's or Baby-boomers, and a larger number of Gen Y's/Millennials. The students come with a pre-formed pool of their contemporaries with whom they have or will develop a relationship, and probably outnumber the older generations locally. Perhaps we should apply your analysis and stop teaching them altogether since they won't trust their RL educators either and are outnumbered in their educational institutions by those evil older generations?

Now, if we move away from considering students your comments about why SL doesn't appeal widely to millennials might hold up - except SL doesn't appeal widely as it exists to any generation. Gen X-ers by your dates may predominate (although one of the other comments suggests this isn't as heavy a domination as you think when adjusted for population profile) and this may be a generational thing. It may also be a financial thing (Gen X-ers and older have the free cash to be in SL from home reliably and well more than Gen Y-ers), it may be a time thing (kids are older and demand less time, working a single job, etc.) and I'm sure there are a several other things that are related solely to being older rather than generational differences that could equally be advanced to support this.

Whilst I can't comment on a lot of this... no parallels for me, no way to log in to Lively until I can find someone with a PC I can use for a while, it's not true that all new virtual worlds don't work on a Mac.

Small Worlds, which seems remarkably similar to Lively from what I've seen in the former and read about the latter, runs quite happily in a browser (just about any browser) on any OS.

Lively? The comments I'm reading make me wonder if it will be a really bad choice of name in a month's time. But then if they called it Moribund it would never last for a month.

Actually you're wrong about skins I'm afraid.

We know that the three clothes "items" that's head, upper body and lower body, are composited and streamed as 512 X 512 pixels. If you waste your time uploading a clothing texture as 2048 X 2048 any "improved quality" is a figment of your over active imagination.

Each texture has no alpha channel, so it rolls in at 3MB. Each avatar wearing just clothes and skin is 9MB, regardless of the detailing or simplicity of the clothes and skin. Stripping off to a Linden skin won't help at all, you're just changing the textures that cause the load (that might not be entirely true, if you all change to the same skin, once it's loaded once it should load for all I guess).

Attachments still add lag, because, as you've identified, they have extra polygons to draw and moderately often have stupidly high texture details too.

Sadly, removing AOs *can* have a benefit. You have people who have "shifting sit" AOs: that gives you cycling animations to load if you can see them, and that contributes to lag badly. Don't believe me? Go to a class with 40 seated students and watch the fps etc. Take the same students to a dance and watch them - even in the same location the fact your client has to draw, and stream, all those moving polygons will slow things down (and you can see a pause in dance anims as the animation is streamed to you if you're not dancing the same as everyone else).

But, a good, thought-provoking article, thanks Gwyn.

30 minutes for DNA profiling - yeah right.

New Scientist reported that Saddam Hussein was indentified by DNA in a bit under 16 hours and that was "surprisingly fast". I've seen it done, and it usually took 48 hours. There's a limit to have fast you can cycle your Taq polymerase and get the melting and annealing cycles to run without just degrading your results.

DNA typing in the CSI stories is hugely time-shrunk for dramatic effect. I don't have a problem with that, but it's way more dramatically compressed than your suggestion of half an hour to "a quick wait" Gwyn!

One of the other comments that came up a lot: LL apparently coughing up data on people to police very quickly. We know, especially today with the news on Reuters and Virtually Blind about Eros' lawsuit reaching a name at last. We also know the process took several months, not less than 4 minutes.

Actually it's any concierge member who can test the service.

You need RL name, dob, address, and one of a number of ID forms, driver's license number, SSN/NI number or similar, passport number and a few other things (ID card number I think).

Last I heard, it's not working for Canadian's at all, all of Europe is having no problem, USA too.

Oh, and LindeX didn't take an appreciable hit with the gambling ban. In-world transactions did though.

Interesting take on it. I come from a country where we're rather strongly opposed to identity cards despite our governments desire to make us have one.

I also come from a country where I can, 100% legitimately sign my name as Eloise Pasteur on a contract as long as I do not do so with intent to defraud or impersonate. I couldn't, for example, pretend to be Kate Moss with the hope of stinging her with the bill, but as long as I signed it as Kate Moss and acknowledged it was my signature at a later date, it would be fine.

However, you've provided the only explanation I'm vaguely convinced by for why Linden Lab want to force this on us. The hot air about "trust requires knowing who you are dealing with" is smoke and mirrors of the kind that they should be embarrassed to produce (surely you choose to trust someone, or not, far more without verifying their ID?). Keeping the kiddies out - well I can't give a polite comment to that, it's just far too easy to get around it. When I was 16 the internet didn't exist, but producing my mother's name, date of birth, passport number and address as proof of ID, no problem. Simple biology suggests she was in her 30's at the time: easily old enough to be verified as an adult.

But, laying off liability, if children do try to sneak in and then their parents try to blame LL, I guess that makes sense. Shame the world, well parts of it, as so twisted that this is regarded as rational, even laudable behaviour from a parent.

Putting hard core porn on street corners in one thing, but on the internet, behind something where the child has to lie to get in, which is the situation for SL, that's meant to be LL's fault?! Sad. And on that note, I sound far too horribly like my mother. I'm going to go and lie down in shock.

If there was the same mix of freedoms and significantly better performance I'd go like a shot. That said, a system that lets us build, script and animate freely, import textures etc. and make money if that's our thing is quite a bit ask.

SL is moving towards a web-api rather than a centralised system as described at http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/03/04/malleable... - what that will actually mean is anyone's guess, but it could well be 100's of people in a sim with no problem.