DISQUS

true, there is a lot of factors in that equation. One more to add.... traffic between two users on the same (Earth) continent would be much faster than Europe-America for example.

Thanks for the explanation. Now, only to think of the way to implant this into minds of attachment nazis.

BTW,

And where do all the textures come from? You guessed it — from the sim server. Which has to send those 300 MBytes to 100 avatars, or 30 GBytes total. So, on any busy event, we have the poor sim server struggling to push 30 GBytes downstream to all the unhappy and laggy avatars around. There is no way to avoid this step!

Well, there is a way. It would require reworking of the server structure from the scratch but if textures are shared P2P between avatars on the sim, server load would be much lighter. Before IP guardians start screaming at me on the mere metioning that textures are stored locally, they are stored locally already. One can grab them anyway if want to. So it won't hurt IP rights more then they are in risk now. But it would make the world running much faster.

Wolfie, you're missing the terms. As Tateru said, we're not anonymous on the Internet. But if we skip that lapsus....
How do you get to know somebody? Just by knowing the name? If I tell you my name, the one that is in my ID card, what do you get? A string of 14 characters. That's not much of knowing someone. Knowing someone takes much more. it takes time and repeated interactions. And then, you can use any handle for the person. That is the point of pseudonymity.

It doesn't matter if one takes SL as a game or not. You can be quite serious about SL and not reveal surplus data. Actually, only having an identity (which includes pseudonymes) makes SL worth living.

Oh, I absolutely support any idea of letting trees live their lives and not ending up as substratum for boring text :) Especially if the replacement is not one-time use piece of plastic which would be even worse solution. But, they'll probably make those things flexible and durable enough so we can take them in our pockets. I love that idea of transferring page from the web on something I can take to the bed or outside.

But, while touch screens sound interesting for moving icons around, I couldn't live without keyboard, not even with speach recognition systems. Some old solutions are just simpler.

Yup, looks cool... pity it comes from the company that has nothing to do with making cool things. And, it, if we keep watching, it is just a fake promise of bright tech future. Half the things shown in the video are just "Minority Report" stuff, breathtaking but with less usability than a simple mouse+keyboard solution we're using now. And some are just nonsense like that newspapers with dynamic page content with more than one page.

Though, if touch devices become that cheap as presented in the video, someone will make something useful out of them. So, it is optimistic after all....

Prokofy said: "the uglier the better"

Well, we cannot be all have the same brain damage as you do. Some of us actually have taste.

Yeah, stronger web-shopping might do much damage to the ugly malls with third grade content. Nobody beside mall owners will have a tear for them. But I don't think big shops will disappear. Shops that are well built and with good content will stay. As you said, they provide much more than just getting the item, they provide shopping experience. It might turn out as cleaning of the SL. Which, in the long run, can attract RL brands.

It's good to see the light on the end of the tunnel. Finally that silly imm/aug story will end. Bennetsen's article brought more harm than good, but that's the way things usually go.

SL can a game as any "RL" activity (and the life itself) can be. Media calling SL a game just shows their lack of knowledge about what they report about. It's the same as calling the web server a game.
And then... fun in the education is not bad thing at all. On contrary. Assertion that anything worth and fruitful should be boring is a product of a poor mind.

ops, this was supposed to be under iYan's comment.

You made me think here :)
It may be a cultural thing, but recently I've heard enough "angry freelancer waiting to be payed" stories that it seems that some things are more in human nature than in local culture. maybe percents differ (I hope they are).

Actually, for me it's more personal thing. Name is also just a social construct. And i happened to realize that fairly early in life. I got my first nickname before I was born and got a real name. And nobody ever use my "real name" to the extent that I might not notice if somebody call me by it. So much about that name being "real". :)

I apologize for not being clear.

I know I sounded a bit confused up there, but I actually tend to trust people (even if they are presented by avatars). Call me a witch but I largely rely on the intuition :) And call me a geek but I do whois as well to support the intuition.

But I also say that name is not a proof of anything. We can say whatever we want, and we can register our websites with fake names (though it is illegal). There are lot of usable names and pictures on Facebook and scanned ID's and driving licenses on Google image search, people successfully used them to verify on Aristotle. You'll agree that having a company name is a bit more trustworthy. If nothing else, you have to pay that domain from company's account (there is no cash and no questions option) and governments usually take care of companies and their businesses.

As you see it is not a matter of possibility to sue somebody. If things go to the court I find it a problem. Lawsuits take a lot of time and money, and one is in lose even if winning the case. And additional problem is that suing somebody for US$100 costs much more than that.

There are two aspects of reputation. One is old way, the one that is much older than the Internet, and is usually called "word of the mouth". We have heard from somebody we trust that entity X is trustful. That might be or might not be true. And we can hear opposite experiences from different sources, which exactly happened to me recently. Second one is based on reputation systems, like on eBay. That one also may or may not be true. And that one can be cheated. So, both of them involve some risk, but it's better than having nothing.

Problem with reputation systems in SL is exactly what you said, there is not enough data to make it work good.

But there is something about it that we don't agree. Reputation can work without RL names. One can connect reputation with RL name, or avatar name, or company. It doesn't matter as long as that name is a persistent one. If one change the name, reputation rating resets (or at least there is some actions needed to transfer it). Of course, legal contracts are signed with RL names (we got agreed about that on digado blog), but which name will be connected to the reputation is mere marketing decision.

Yes it is. But that's the one of the activities one can hope never to be caught in. That's exactly why it happens so often. many people just don't feel fine with providing all the info that will be available to the whole world.

Don't get me wrong. I am not against reputation. Actually, that's the only thing we can have to prevent the problems. That's exactly how financial institutions function.

But if reputation system fails only thing we can have is law. And law is not efficient in the cases of small amounts of money in the international cases.

LL is obliged to give info to the RL authority in the cases of criminal prosecution. As is any other ISP. problem with LL and the law is that they are holding all of us as hostages of one country's law. As an European I am allowed to gamble online and to make drawings of whatever. Still, they break my rights and prevent me from doing do on the account of the country their servers are in. But, that's beside the topic now.

Third party agency that would handle the reputation system and/or RL data might be something I don't want to trust in a way I trust LL. So it has to be opt-in thing.

iYan, this has nothing to do with IMM/AUG debate. Those two are ways of experiencing the media and even not opposing each other. What you are probably reffering to is pseudonymity or corporate identity. While it sounds like connecting RL name with SL name would provide security in VW business, it is not like it seems.

Few months ago, when one of the virtual credit cards businesses appeared in SL I had to question myself what would make any of those institutions sound trustful after Ginko affair. So, I consulted a couple of economists to see what actually make a RL bank trustful. To my surprise, answer was: "almost nothing". They have to have a certain amount of money on their account (depending on the state law, usually several millions of US$) to register and start business but their trustworthiness is based on the reputation. That's why banks are so proud of their founding years. Sure there are names of the members of the board and employees, but nobody is protected in the case that bank crashes unless some of those persons actually transfered money to the private account.

But let's take a look at simple on.-line business. What makes us trust to a biz based on the web? Whois gives the name of the person who registered the domain, but we're all aware (hopefully) that that name might be not responsible for the actions of those who are running the site, like in the cases when registrar is the person who did the setup of the website. And we know that name can even be faked. Even if the name is true, is it always reachable by the law? If an US resident is cheated for US$100 on the site registered by an European (or any similar scenario) law suite is a very complicated and very expensive thing, much more than those US$100.

But still, for my SL affairs, I would check the web site and search for the section that clearly states that SL resident with specified avatar name is approved to do biz in the name of the company whose site that is. And to trust the site, well I'd expect registrar to be registrated company not a person name. And would hope for the best.

To roll this back to IMM/AUG problem... I wouldn't trust Artesia because there is iAlja's and iYan's RL names and photo on the site, but because the site is registered by a company that I can find responsible by the court of law in the country that I can reach.

I'm glad that topic is being raised in the meatspace. It would be great to have a peek there.

Great images, Torley. Thanks for a fresh breeze on the login.
You might be interested in this short discussion about empty landscapes on login screen http://www.plurk.com/p/21why

Hardly that I am restrictive in many ways, but Barbie World is a place I don't want to see my kid. Not even for free. When I heard of the place for the first time, I wasn't lazy, so I registered and took a short peek in there. And raised many questions and doubts.

In short, Barbie World is a terrifying world where new generations of consumers are grown. All the creativity is killed and there is even censorship over the chat. No, I really don't want any kid to play in the world where all the things s/he can say are predefined 60 sentences, most of them containing TM sign.

naima, if music companies have money that can buy them protection of free downloading, broadcasting and sharing.... why the world is flooded with music that nobody ever payed for?

Well, last year we saw many music releases (including two big names NIN and Radiohead) saying goodbye to copyright and turning to creative commons publishing. They just gave their albums for free download and placed their tip jars on the web. Some guesses (if anybody has accurate info on this, I would be grateful) that bands themselves are in profit comparing to former releases. Math is simple: if CD costs 17e less than 3 goes to the artist; average tip (donation) is 5e, and all of those goes to artists.

Sure, one can argue that publishing under CC license is good for big names that already used recording companies to make them names so they can freely go and use the Internet to publish on their own and cut down prices. Other group of artists that can afford that are those that nobody but their friends have heard about and that doesn't make their living out of music, so they just throw their music to the world hoping that somebody will catch it. Partly, that is true.

But on the other side, we shouldn't skip the momentum of web 2.0 and virality (I just made up the word, but you get the meaning). Your comparison with journalists and bloggers stands, but being both (blogger and journalist) I can witness that those two complements each other. While journalism is still a steady job, blogging is giving me additional exposure, more articles in more newspapers and some consulting gigs. And one more thing that is a big motive for me and many of my colegues that open their blogs: freedom.

As a paid journalist I am not expected to write what comes to my mind and what I feel like writing at the given moment. As a blogger, I can do whatever I want. That is a huge thing for any journalist, and that is a huge thing for any musician. Which opens the question of sponsoring. Will corporate sponsors be willing to have their name near many of the bands? Who would sponsor Rage Against The Machine? Could Sex Pistols do their swindle with corporations as they did with music industry? Hardly so. We see that corporations are complaining that there are sex somewhere on the huge SL grid and that they think their interest is damaged by that. And then we expect them to give money to musicians who might end up in sex & drugs scandals? Some musicians will find that biz model successful (and actually using it already) but most won't.

Most will turn to what bloggers do when they start thinking about profit. Tip jars, payed jobs they got because of the fame they got from what they already done (in the case of musicians there is a film industry and theatre), live gigs... but most of all: networks. They will join into groups, presently known as indie labels and fight their way together. Sure, labels will take their part of the profit, but they will provide the value of organizing and marketing. There will be bigger labels over them to do the same on the bigger level.

Actually, not many things are going to change except that somebody will have to realize that taking more than 10e per CD to feed the enormous machinery of recording company is not a good biz model. And sure, that playing music on the radio means providing value to the artist and recording company so the radio is not supposed to pay for that.

Welcome to the matrix.

You know, weapons used in grief attacks are rarely those used in combat. Griefing is a matter of security of the software not existence of weapons. Speaking of which, we could do a bit more about security. Please sign this JIRA. Thanks.

We do have parts of the grid that are weapon free, right?

Oh no! That will take all my money again.

Thanks for this tribute.