The Road To Scalability
by Pixeleen Mistral on 11/05/07 at 7:19 pm
Garrulous Gwyneth Llewelyn speaks out for less loquacious Lindens
by Onder Skall
Llewelyn threatens luddites with 5000-word Linden love-fest
Project Open Letter, the controversies surrounding it’s writing, and the ensuing fiasco of a town hall, all ended with a giant question-mark. We still didn’t know what the strategy was for making things better, how many of this “69%” of employees were working on existing bugs or bugs in future feature rollouts, or what in the world all of these vague references to “architecture” meant. My best guess was that a “2.0″ version of Second Life was in the works; a fundamental shift in the way the grid operates.
As it turns out, Gwyneth Llewelyn’s most recent blogpost echoes this sentiment and gets into the details we’ve all been asking for. She actually uses the term “SL 2.0″ in the post and reveals a lot about the behind-the-scenes thinking, although it’s hard to tell where she’s getting this information from. This may be from personal relationships with various Lindens, but it’s never really stated.
Gwyneth’s take on these things is pretty specific, characterizing those who’d rather grid stability than more bling as “Luddites”. Her stance is decidedly pro-Linden, and borders on the sycophantic. Still, if she wants to love the Lindens and how they do things, she absolutely has a right to. [quid pro quo for inside info? - the Editrix]. What makes it worth reading for the rest of us is simply this: it’s hands-down the clearest set of details yet on what in the world is going on here. This far outstrips anything the official Second Life blog has offered.
In her post she details an upcoming white paper from Cory Linden on a server-side implementation of “SL 2.0″:
“We, from this side of the screen, will not notice any real difference on how SL operates – the client will not be affected -except that suddenly IMs will work, teleports won’t fail, inventory won’t be lost, and our L$ account will always display the correct amount.”
That’s what we’ve been waiting to hear!
This, largely, has to do with re-thinking the fundamentals of how the servers operate in the first place. It’s not just a question of throwing more hardware at the problem, but in changing the way the hardware processes things in the first place.
While the server simulators are self-contained and perfectly capable of handling the load demanded of them individually, the grid as a whole doesn’t scale well. The solution would be multiple grids, but the experiment with co-location facilities in Texas and California have demonstrated many of the hurdles there. This is where the major shift is going to have to be: the code that moves an avatar (along with everything they “own”) from one grid to another needs a complete overhaul. This overhaul is being done, and is the major focus of design efforts. We’re not talking about killing bugs here. We’re talking about rebuilding the machine.
Gwyneth also makes the point here that nobody has ever attempted something like moving an avatar from one grid to another. She has a point: moving characters from one server to another in a normal MMO is often either forbidden or involves a rather cumbersome process. We’re asking for it to be seamless, which may be possible, but it’s also unprecedented.
She also gets into many upcoming features, quotes a percentage of 72% for developers working on fixing bugs, and – oh yeah – Linden Lab is profitable now. Guess that means Second Life won’t die any time soon.
You know, I have to be honest: I loved this post. I mean, I didn’t always agree with her complete fandom of all things Linden, but this was real content! These were real answers, real information, and the first indication that Linden Lab may have a plan and was preparing to enact it! This is what the Town Hall should have been. I can’t imagine why Cory Linden didn’t get into his upcoming white paper or the details of how they were looking at grid stability, but if he had, I imagine that we would all have taken it a lot easier on LL.
Economic Mip
May 11th, 2007
Few points from the (actual blog):
1. What is a “conspiration theory?”
2. Why should I trust these Integrity folks any more then I trust Linden Labs? (which is really not a whole lot).
3. Why do people seem to think that authentication will reduce or remove the amount of gambling and griefing in Second Life? (especially since island owners will simply ignore the abuse reports about “adult content flagging which will now go to them).
nimrod yaffle
May 11th, 2007
Eco, for #2, you shouldn’t.
http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/news/2003/12/61543
http://www.lowbrowlowdown.com/9.14.shtml
Joannah Cramer
May 11th, 2007
“You know, I have to be honest: I loved this post. I mean, I didn’t always agree with her complete fandom of all things Linden, but this was real content!”
Interesting; personal reaction having read it all was am afraid, “rarely so many words were used to tell so little and yet with so many self-contradictions”
tl;dr: “SL is to become sanitized corporate showcase, and the new platform code will cause everything suddenly and magically work just right… even though this new code is based on something that no one has ever attempted, there is no way to debug such complicated code until it’s deployed live, and the company in charge of this development not only has far from stellar record when it comes to stability of their software, but also operates under belief it doesn’t actually matter if said software performs as intended to begin with.”
Really. Entirely real content, none of this has been known until now.
marilyn murphy
May 11th, 2007
ok i went and read gwyneth. on her blog. a lot of what she said has made me do a lot of thinking and my head hurts. bad gwyneth. anyway.
she talks about this ban list. and lists being linked. now if i read that right, its saying this: avatar a hates avatar b because they broke off some relationship/drama last year. avatar a puts avatar b on some list, which is linked with other lists causing b to be banned over half the grid. avatar b has no recourse to justice but is simply banned for life.
did i understand that correctly?
Pixeleen Mistral
May 11th, 2007
> avatar b has no recourse to justice
> but is simply banned for life.
> did i understand that correctly?
yes, you understood it correctly.
Prokofy Neva
May 11th, 2007
http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/news/2003/12/61543
1. An article from 2003, 4 years ago.
2. In which two journalists create the crime that they wish to accuse the company of — they make false accounts and buy lists under false pretexts.
3. The company responds by saying they have procedures in place to protect data and will review them.
4. The company thrives, the journalists look unethical, and we read the fine print: they were really writing about the imagined “political machine” of “Amerika” that didn’t secure them the left-wing candidate they wishes, because, well, they, their behaviour, their lack of ethics, their extremism, just wasn’t persuasive to the voting public.
nimrod, please, use your Lindenhood or godhood or whatever it is you have to come up with better stuff than this, please.
Ronin Kurosawa
May 11th, 2007
Since I’m one of those Luddites who cares about things like the security of my inventory and overall grid performance, here’s the part that really jumps out at me:
“The server simulators are self-sufficient — this was the part that Philip and Cory always got right.”
The problem with that statement is that server simulators are NOT self-sufficient. Just ask anyone who lives near an even moderately successful casino or nightclub.
In addition to scaling the grid Linden needs to work on scaling the SIM.
marilyn murphy
May 12th, 2007
wow. hrmmm. if thats true.. wow. i think if thats true and the lindens are going to institute this ban list thing as part of the basic structure of sl, this could be the biggest social change coming, not the age verification at all. im ordinarily not a sky is falling type but a ban list that affects the entire mainland that anyone can put anyones name on is going to have some really big repercussions.
marilyn murphy
May 12th, 2007
wow. hrmmm. if thats true.. wow. i think if thats true and the lindens are going to institute this ban list thing as part of the basic structure of sl, this could be the biggest social change coming, not the age verification at all. im ordinarily not a sky is falling type but a ban list that affects the entire mainland that anyone can put anyones name on is going to have some really big repercussions.
Cocoanut Koala
May 12th, 2007
A few comments:
1. Jeska was not the first person to drop the hint that LL was now profitable.
I’ve been mentioning that for quite a while now, because Philip (in the audio of the town hall before last, I believe was the source), said that the SL was paying for itself and also paying off the investors, who were almost all paid off.
2. Gwyneth says that now that we will have Voice in SL, the next step will be some sort of face-morphing, making your avatar more resemble your real physical self.
“Sorry, immersionists — you’re out of this game,” she pronounces. “Bye-bye, anonymity — it’ll be really you in-world.”
Well, I don’t think so. While Gwyneth seems to be somewhat unseemingly overjoyed at the idea that no one will enjoy any further anonymity, I think she is incorrect, and her victory dance not just premature, but probably in error.
3. As to the age verification plan, she says: “So, what will this impact SL? Sure, a few will leave — so what?”
If she were speaking out for less loquacious Lindens here, she should stop, because this is a business-killing attitude.
Her estimate of the losses due to this is “about a million in a month, but we will hardly notice that, since SL almost grows by the same amount.”
Losses – over this, that, or the other issue – are cumulative, and none of them should ever be blown off in this manner. (I doubt the Lindens have this attitude at all.)
I disagree with the number, though – I personally don’t think a million people, or anywhere near that figure, will leave over the age verification plan.
4. She points out that though the purveyers of adult material may well go to the trouble of getting verified, their customers may not. “They [the purveyers] will not disappear overnight — but their customers will.”
I agree with this. I also agree pretty much with her prediction that “we’ll have a mostly Disneylandish landscape, all PG and politically correct, and ‘ghettos’ where the few validated adults will enjoy themselves to the fullest.”
I don’t view that as a bad thing, and view it as somewhat akin to the zoning that people have always wanted.
6. She also talks about LL putting a Banlink-type system into SL, allowing everyone to subscribe to banlists and share all their bans with all their friends (with little or no recourse for those banned, and abuse reports being handled (or not, or mishandled) only by estate owners.
I agree with her consternation regarding these plans, but would go further: I consider them monumentally brutal and a step backwards in history.
7. I hope she’s wrong about sculpties putting an end to prim content, and building becoming the more or less exclusive purview of real-life 3-D who have studied “for years and years until they are able to do what they want with those tools.”
She predicts that “you’ll have very high quality items from a handful of professional 3D modellers, and lots of junk (and copied material) from the rest of the residents.”
If all that comes to pass (and I doubt it will, but I could be wrong), then SL would no longer have any attraction to regular people who want to create things.
The greatest strength of SL, in my opinion, has always been that people (1) have virtually complete freedom to make things, anything they want, with relative ease, and (2) can enjoy selling these things to others. (My theory regarding entertainment: People love for things to be about themselves.)
If SL stops having that unique draw, then I hope some other company steps in to fill the void, because I will be so there.
8. “Luddite views.” (Regarding Project Open Letter.) I believe it’s that kind of talk – in addition to making light of residents who wish the actual program they are paying to use actually worked – which always brings the arrogant to their knees, given enough time and rope.
Paying to use. Paying – to – use.
Real-time, paying to use. Now. No one should be expected to constantly pour money into something that does not work as advertised, and when they object, be called “Luddites.”
Those who are so enamored with what might someday be that they feel free to use and literally abuse those who are paying them now absolutely deserve abject failure, and will probably get it.
9. “Then, encouraged by the repeated pleas of ‘new shiny things’, LL entered a development spree and would launch a brand-new version with cool new things…”
Too facile by half.
I’ve been in SL two years, and I don’t recall any significant clamoring for “new shiny things.” Quite the opposite. Appreciating new things, yes – but even that has dwindled, to say the least.
And over that time, particularly for the past year, resident frustration with a product that doesn’t work has only grown, recently culminating in Project Open Letter, with almost instantenous signatures from thousands of people who don’t realize they are simply ignorant Luddites who fail to understand the bigger picture and the presumed greater glory for Linden Lab and the metaverse.
Oddly, all these people are concerned with getting something that works as advertised,and increasingly concerned with paying for something that works less well over time, rather than better.
10. “LL would try to launch a few more features on subsequent releases until the ‘wrath of the residents’ would be unbearable,” says Gwyneth.
“And then, it would mean about six months of painful debugging, dealing with scalability, introducing new servers, and so on . . . After this cycle, they would gather some encouragement, and try to introduce a whole bunch of features again.”
I have a hard time believing Gwyneth even said that. If SL is bug-ridden and doesn’t scale, and basic elements like teleporting and transactions don’t work, that is – or should be – pretty much a priority.
11. Thanks to the Project Open Letter, says Gwyneth, “Alas, we have seen the pitchforks again — this time, however, they have the RL media backing them up. And this means that LL had to answer them.”
Gwyneth thinks LL should not have to answer to their customers? Is it so terrible to have to address their issues?
I’ll answer that question. I don’t think Gwyneth thinks LL has any customers, but rather, people who are privileged to hand over their money to the Lindens, and who should expect nothing particular in return.
12. “Most of the development efforts will now be targeted to scalability issues — a very worthwhile endeavour, of course, since reducing things like lag, instability, inventory loss, and login/teleport difficulties will go a long way with appeasing the Luddites — and minor tweaks here and there.”
I wonder, does Gwyneth actually spend time in world? Isn’t she affected by lag, instability, and all that, too? Fixing those things she listed – wouldn’t that please her, too? Please everyone, in fact?
Or is she somehow being ironic here, and I’m just not catching it?
13. “It’s very hard to explain to anyone without formal training in complex distributed network architectures why the impact of a slight change is almost impossible to foresee, when something that was thoroughly tested in a ‘lab’ environment suddenly breaks apart when deployed on the “real” grid. The best analogy I can come with is to try to predict the weather for a century by observing just local changes . . .”
We all understand about weather. We also understand that if something isn’t working, it isn’t working. There is no rule that says LL must follow a certain set of priorities, or move ahead with new things at a certain pace.
There is nothing about SL so complex or incomprehensible to mere mortals without formal training in complex distributed network architectures that people can’t see when a thing isn’t working well, and can’t come to the reasonable conclusion that more time needs to be spent on fixing what clearly doesn’t work, rather than plunging ahead at all costs at all times with whatever you would like to do, while ignoring the problems each new step forward causes.
14. In the comments section, Gwyneth makes her distaste for any form of immersionism even more clear:
“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.”
To this I answer – no.
They will not go away, and they will not have to go away.
There is no reason why you can’t have both kinds of people in the same environment. In fact, without the immersionists, all you have left is an advertising and possibly educational platform. And if the platform isn’t reasonable reliable, you won’t have even them.
Gwyneth’s is an extremely limited view, and I think it is startlingly indicative of her personal distaste for anyone who comes to SL for fun.
I never realized that some people’s idea of the metaverse – or even of SL – was so incredibly strictured. So discriminatory.
“No more room for them in SL.”
How about if there were no more room for Gwyneth in SL?
If there really were to be no more room for people who wish to remain anonymous and have fun in an environment that actually works, then I think that environment would be by definition useless to advertisers, educators, and regular residents alike, anyway.
15. Also in the comments (does this never end?), Gywneth says how she would like the process to go:
“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.”
Tolerance isn’t called for. Action is.
LL would ignore real and pressing problems with their platform, and undeniable resident concern, only at their considerable peril.
16. “When ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ starts to tell scientists how they should do research, innovation and research are stifled down,” she says.
What she forgets is there is always someone footing the bill for scientists and researchers, and scientists and researchers must always answer to them – whether it is their University department head or the provider of their research grant.
In the case of SL, we are footing that bill, entirely. We have paid off the investors, and we have made SL a profitable venture. It is our money that has done that. We pay their salary, and no one else.
We have purchased their product to use for ourselves. Not as a charitable cause to let wacky scientists do whatever their hearts desire, which doesn’t even happen in the scientific world.
And SL is not a scientific world. LL is not a group of scientists and researchers working in an ivory tower somewhere. It is a business, selling a product, a product we buy. Without us, they cannot continue research and development.
We foot their entire bill. We pay their salaries. We are their customers, and we expect a usable product, with reasonable customer service.
No SL resident is so computer-unsavvy that they don’t expect bugs and so forth. But when things stop working wholesale, when not a night goes by that something isn’t borked that used to work, Houston, you have a problem.
17. “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.”
I understand that Gwyneth is impatient to have the goodies that lie at the end of the developmental tunnel, but you simply can’t avoid having to fix the “irrelevant” issues as you go along.
Otherwise, there will be no money coming in, and there will be no goodies to reach, and the progress through the tunnel comes to an abrupt halt.
I understand that she believes now is the time to make major developmental changes, before more and more people come in. I get that. My point is that more and more people will never come in anyway, if the thing doesn’t work to a reasonable standard.
You must have a minimum amount of stability, or you have no future to look forward to.
——-
My conclusion:
“Luddites with pitchforks.” If Gwyneth is even metaphorically speaking for the Lindens here – and I don’t think she is, at all; I don’t think the Lindens are that blindly fanatical or impractical – she would do them a favor by curbing her enthusiasm.
coco
Prokofy Neva
May 12th, 2007
I believe it’s that kind of talk – in addition to making light of residents who wish the actual program they are paying to use actually worked – which always brings the arrogant to their knees, given enough time and rope.
Paying to use. Paying – to – use.
Real-time, paying to use. Now. No one should be expected to constantly pour money into something that does not work as advertised, and when they object, be called “Luddites.”
Coco said it so well, I couldn’t improve much, except to say that Gwyn is stupidly mixing her metaphors. Luddites were people who broke machines — or so the meme goes. (There’s actually a more sophisticated discussion to be had about the RL Luddites and who they really were, but that’s neither here no there, we’ll accept for the purposes of this discussion Gwyn’s meaning of “backward people who can’t get used to technological change).
And…Cristiano and company aren’t people who want to *break* machines, they want a machine to *work right*. As much as I loathe Cristiano and find his methods wrongheaded and his message elitist and self-service, blaming unverifieds for his problems, he isn’t a “Luddite” and is as capable as the next tekkie out there adapting to whatever “shiny” the Lindens come up with.
No, people want a thing to *work* are the *opposite* of Luddites.
What Gwyn is getting at is probably correct, however, that the Lindens want to shake loose the amateurs, and usher in the professionals. They are cynical and exploitative about having used the amateurs to become profitable, and now can throw them away as they usher in professionals and corporations and various large entities.
I hope to answer more on her blog soon. Gwyn reminds me of Sovietologists who try so hard to study and understand Stalin that they end up apologizing for and admiring him. She’s like that with the Lindens. It’s pretty awful stuff.
Hiro Pendragon
May 12th, 2007
Told you so.
Hiro Pendragon
May 12th, 2007
My reply:
http://secondtense.blogspot.com/2007/05/re-hotspots-second-lifes-new.html
Ian Betteridge
May 12th, 2007
There’s no Sovietology required: all that’s required to glean the kind of information Gwen’s talked about is the ability to attend Office Hours, ask questions, and read topics on the Wiki. Oh, and of course, the ability to understand a bit about technology.
My own post on what seems to be being called “Grid 2.0″ is at http://www.ianbetteridge.co.uk/technovia/?p=1081. One thing to note: this is not going to happen until next year, so forget about it as anything but a long-term cure.
In other words, when Onder says “now that’s what we’ve been waiting to here!” he’s wrong. The new grid architecture isn’t the fixes we’re looking for, although it WILL fix a lot of the issues of scalability and reliability in the longer term.
The fixes that we want are the ones that LL is working on for the current model grid, the ones that since the last patch have allowed the grid to work more reliably with 42,000 users on it than it ever did with 35,000. Plus, the ones they continue to work on which will, I expect, see a reliable concurrency of 50,000 by the end of the year at the latest.
The 9th Circuit
May 12th, 2007
@Onder Skall>>”You know, I have to be honest: I loved this post. I mean, I didn’t always agree with her complete fandom of all things Linden, but this was real content! These were real answers, real information, and the first indication that Linden Lab may have a plan and was preparing to enact it! This is what the Town Hall should have been. I can’t imagine why Cory Linden didn’t get into his upcoming white paper or the details of how they were looking at grid stability, but if he had, I imagine that we would all have taken it a lot easier on LL.”
You loved this post?
You have got to be kidding me!!!
This is the snobbish, most selfish, and opinionated post I’ve read in a long time. The “My way or the highway/matter of fact/I got the inside scoop” manner in which its written makes it all the more sickening.
The reason Cory did not go into all of this crap is because it’s not going to happen. Don’t you think if it was going to go in this direction we would hear it from Cory himself.
I can post an equally opinionated “this is the direction I want SL to go in” post myself.
I can’t imagine LL would go in this direction with their platform.
This statement is downright elitist; “Sorry, immersionists — you’re out of this game”
Why on earth would LL alienated what could be if not the large majority of their current customer base, and indeed their future customer base by eliminating the “immersionists” from SL.
In any case, I’m going to stop here. I think my point is well made.
This blog entry is science fiction. The fact that you love her post, hence you obviously love her point of view, is baffling to say the least.
Barney Boomslang
May 12th, 2007
Well, Gwyn’s post might be seen as useful information – if you ignore the fact that most what she says is just taken from what the Lindens said themselves, while the rest is pulled out of her ass. Do you really believe that she has some secret information source? She’s just speculating. The only difference to others: she takes on Prokofy-level in posting size
And I agree with the 9th circuit – I rarely have seen a such selfish, egoist and arrogant post on SL in recent time.
Inigo Chamerberlin
May 12th, 2007
Good old Gywn…
Never use one word when 10 will serve.
Always publicly pro-Linden, thought privately NOT such a fanboy.
You gotta love her.
And NEVER underestimate her intellect.
But, crowing about the death of anonymity in world? Welcoming voice? ‘I expect eagerly the impact this will have on people’s lives, when one more layer of anonymity is finally revealed’
Woah! THIS I gotta see, er, hear
It’s either whistling in the dark, or Gwyn’s got something up her sleeve. I for one shall be having a chat with her on the subject as soon as voice comes online.
As for SL/Grid 2.0, I really couldn’t face wading through that post to see if she revealed one very worrying aspect of it – the hardware implementation looks rather like it will require a doubling of the physical servers (OK, cpu cores, memory too if it’s going to be done right) required to run the grid. WHO is going to pay for that? Go on, you guess…
It MIGHT be doable at minimal extra cost by changing to octo-core cpus (more likely complete server boxes – and forget a 2x quad core ‘solution’ – there are issues that make that a sub-optimal solution) – and the actual timescale the people who are working on the project anticipate – 18-24 months, NOT next year (so add 50% for the inevitable project overrun) – would neatly fit in with Intel/AMD roadmaps, the inevitable post-introductory price drops of the required hardware and Linden Labs server replacement cycle.
And THAT is why 69% (WHERE did Gwyn get her 72%? The rest of us got 69 straight from the horse’s ass) of the LL dev team are attempting to find ways of making the SL we have WORK.
Because SL/Grid 2.0 is a LONG way off and it’s completion – or failure – depends entirely on paying customers. Satisfied paying customers. Continuing to pay the bills.
Right now SL is in its most vulnerable condition since it’s inception. There probably isn’t any further chance of investment input. The existing investors may have had their initial investment paid off, but they WILL be expecting to see income from their shares in Linden Lab.
If that’s not forthcoming they might sell their shares to third parties (if they can). The other possibility is a boardroom revolt, depending on just how much control Philip had to concede to secure the initial investment.
Either way, Linden Lab have little choice other than to make some fairly drastic stability/reliability improvements over the next year or so, just to keep enough cashflow running to finance SL/Grid 2.0 AND maintain a level of profitability that permits an acceptable level of return to keep the shareholders happy.
Bear in mind INVESTORS in a startup have a somewhat limited influence on company policy, that’s how it works, by US law. However, SHAREHOLDERS can, and do, have a great deal more say.
I don’t think Philip would consider a buyout, either by a third party, or one or more of the original investors, and besides, I think the ‘open sourcing’ of significant parts of SL would make that at all attractive to anyone who might command sufficient funding.
So. This is it. ‘Shit or bust’ as the saying goes.
And just to complicate matters we have the current ‘age verification’ issue, and the ‘Rl child porn in SL’ issue to contend with… Both with their implications for RL corporate involvement in SL – never mind what the rest of us feel about our involvement in SL at this point.
Talk about it never rains but it pours!
On a lighter note – Gwyn’s views on content creation regarding Sculpties (God! Who coined that horrible term?) is WAY off the mark.
The world will belong to the RL 3D experts?
The rest of us are too dumb to learn to use 3D apps?
Gee, thanks Gwyn – I’ll remember that. Sure, Maya has a bitch of a learning curve, which I’m slowly climbing, but I’ve learned to use similarly complex and unfriendly software thanks, and I’m not ‘special’
Besides, while it appears you can do pretty amazing (by current standards – check out Chip Midnight’s ‘legs’) things with Sculpties, I think the texture size/resolution limitations of the initial implementation (at least) will limit their usage somewhat. And in some fields of content creation they will be largely redundant, for example, is everyone going to move into ‘bloboid’ houses? I don’t think so, architectural tastes in SL pretty much reflect RL conventions.
Oh, Sculpties will be big, I don’t doubt that. But I don’t agree with Gwyn’s vision of the future of content creation.
(you might like to check out Chip Midnight’s ‘Show us your Sculpties’ post at http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=182727&page=1&pp=15) to get an idea how wrong Gwyn is on this – still, I could live without a metallic SL thanks!)
Oh, and I’d like to thank Hiro Pendragon for his very competently done ‘walkthrough’ of Gwyn’s original post. I KNOW a lot of hard work went into that Hiro, and it’s appreciated, because a lot of people simply wouldn’t have bothered wading through Gwyn’s usual verbiage to get to the point otherwise
Syd Loon
May 12th, 2007
I read some of the comments well put…I does seem like there is some sort of inside source connection going on…
As far as age verification rebellion here is a link for anyone interested…
http://yanai.blackmage.org/sky2/?page_id=2543
oh and if you want a shirt I got a nice one that someone gave me that basically states “Verify This” fill in the blanks provided by a nice picture of a finger im sure you can guess which one
anon
May 12th, 2007
This seems like as good a place as any for me to muse.
at Virtual Worlds in March, Joe Miller said:
“very soon we’ll be updating the simulator to support multiple copies of the simulator running different versions, so we won’t need to take the entire grid down on wednesdays as we do today. we’ll be delivering assets thru a completely different method that will offload that entire flow from the simulators. we’ll be open sourcing the back end of the system, we’ll actually be moving trust and transactions out of the sims so that simulators can run anywhere on any machines, whether they’re trusted by us or not. we’ll be using open protocols. we’ll have multiple linked grids and indeed we’ll have plugins at the simulator level for simulation, collision, visibility, scripting, and many other applications.”
This divide between the Agent Domain and the Region Domain, with all(?) inventory remaining centralized is nifty and all… but how can you have ‘no-copy’ items on untrusted open-source servers? I don’t just mean copybot-type issues, I mean the actual ‘no-copy’ object rights. I’m sure there will also be prims on these open-source servers that don’t come from anyone’s inventory, they’re just local. LL can ignore those I suppose, but the ‘no-copy’ dilemma seems like a much bigger problem. I wonder if Cory Linden’s white paper will say anything about THAT.
Tabatha Dagger
May 12th, 2007
I’m sorry this is just Rude.
Voice in SL
Due to launch on the next release (May 23), I expect eagerly the impact this will have on people’s lives, when one more layer of anonymity is finally revealed. No more pretension of being someone you’re not; the mist of illusion about your true self is dispelled and Second Life will slowly abandon “the place where you wished to live” to become “the new communication medium of the 21st century”. It’ll be a huge jump into unchartered waters – specially because, as so many point out correctly, there will be no alternative. All Metaverse wannabes these days include voice, even the ones that are just vapourware right now.
Sorry, immersionists — you’re out of this game. It’s augmentism from now on that will dominate the shaping of the Metaverse.
Ban List Detractor
May 12th, 2007
Particularly on the issue of Banlists and on the falsly banned victoms ability to get anytype of vindication if somebody wants to put them to a global ban lists on the virtue they they dont’ like them. I don’t know who the advocates of the banlists are, but what’s to stop those that fear potential abuse of the banlist from putting those that advocate its’ intstillation in their own banlist for no reason other then illustrating how it’s a flawed and abusable system? I’m not sure if the banlists as they are designed would accomidate this. Is this possible ? advisable?
Gaius Goodliffe
May 12th, 2007
anon: Reread your own quotes, you answer your own question. Note specifically “we’ll actually be moving trust and transactions out of the sims” and “with all(?) inventory remaining centralized”.
coco: “No one should be expected to constantly pour money into something that does not work as advertised, and when they object, be called ‘Luddites.’”
If that’s all they did, then no, they shouldn’t, but you’re (deliberately?) missing the point. Those who say problems should be fixed aren’t Luddites, the Luddites are the ones who scream bloody murder whenever you try to fix problems by trying something new. The paradoxical attitude that I see displayed far too often is the “no more changes to the software until the problems are fixed”, ignoring the fact that often the most effective way to fix the problems is to change the software. Insisting problems should be fixed is quite reasonable, but those insisting there be some sort of moratorium on development are fully deserving of the ‘Luddite’ title.
They’re not being called ‘Luddites’ because they object. They’re being called ‘Luddites’ because they’re acting like Luddites. Suggesting the former is just a lame attempt to divert real criticism away from them. They forward a ridiculous policy, and use the fact that they’re objecting as some sort of shield to deflect any criticism of the ludicrous nature of their policy views. Theirs is the only way, and if you don’t agree with them, you must be some sort of LL fanboy.
Sorry, but just because LL isn’t golden doesn’t mean all its critics are. And unfortunately, the shrill and irrational screaming coming from the loudest of them does a lot to ensure LL never hears, much less listens to, truly valid criticism.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
May 12th, 2007
You’re all Luddites and against SL working as I intend, even you Prokofy, and I TRUSTED you!
Tabatha Dagger
May 12th, 2007
I would like to thank Gwyneth Llewelyn for reminding me that human wonderful human quality of hate and prejudgice now exist in SL as well as the rest of the world.
Cocoanut Koala
May 12th, 2007
No, Gaius, I don’t think anyone is as simple-minded as all that.
When people talk about holding off on new features until things (that used to work) are fixed, they are talking about just that – new features. Not new ideas intended as ways to fix what doesn’t work.
And while we’re on the topic, I’d like to point out something else about this term “Luddites” which is so popular with some in SL.
It’s actually just a tactic some people use to quell any and all criticism.
No one can ever critize a new feature (and here I AM talking about something new), or a new plan, or the way it works, or whether or not it is a horrible idea in the first place, without some of those in favor of the feature or plan invariably calling them “Luddites.”
New = good; end of story.
Different = always be better than whatever was.
Change for change’s sake.
IF the new thing happens to be what those people want, that is.
“If we like something new, you have to like it, too, or you are a Luddite.”
In this view, there is no such thing as a horrible idea in the first place – that simply doesn’t exist in the universe.
You can always put down any opposition to whatever it is you happen to want by saying those who don’t like it are Luddites and “against change.”
See what I mean?
And no one is doing any “shril and irrational screaming” here – you are accusing people of it, though. And no one did any “shrill and irrational screaming” in the Open Letter.
In fact, I think that forge ahead at all costs and ignore any problems is much the more irrational position.
coco
Nacon
May 12th, 2007
Told ya that the open letter was pointless.
It’s a Mad Mad World.
Prokofy Neva
May 12th, 2007
Yes, change for change’s sake and maintaining power over people, disrupting them and keeping them off balance is “Bolshevism” not “progress”.
Ian, the stamina and perservance in being such a fanboy that you know all the Lindens’ endlessly changing and no-show and rescheduled office hours is prodigious. I try to get at least one of them but I hear about it only because I have SL open and tabbed down while I work in other windows in case customers or friends IM me. The Wiki is a morass, and navigable only by the cognoscenti. Like the Lenin Library, LL and SL’s knowledge fonts are things you have to know what to ask for, in order to get.
The Linden who coached her and leaked all this stuff for her latest blogation is now free to go back to bug-fighting, that 3 percent of his time is now freed up back for that job budget as Gwyn only posts about once every 6 weeks.
Veronique Lalonde
May 12th, 2007
Even though I have a WordPress account, I don’t seem to be able to log in and leave a comment on Gwyneth’s site, so I’ll have to comment here.
I’ve read some of Gwyn’s blog from time to time. She knows tons more than I do, and I appreciate being able to learn from her. I don’t read enough of her prose to know what is and isn’t her style (other than too lengthy for me to read online), but what seems like gloating — “Sorry, immersionists — you’re out of this game. It’s augmentism from now on that will dominate the shaping of the Metaverse.” — just seems weird. Why would anyone gloat about such a thing, even if ends up being true, which is far from a certainty? There’s a lot of the tone in that post that strikes me as odd. Did someone hack into Gwyn’s account?
If it’s no longer “Your world. Your imagination,” which might end up being true, then I have no reason to be here. No biggie, I’ll just take my money and time and go. If the “metaverse” becomes just more RL, just 3D MySpace with an economy, then I have little reason to spend time in it. I’ll just spend more time in RL. What a concept! It would be a shame if imagination was pushed out, but I have little control over this metaverse. Guess I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing for as long as the world lasts.
Still shaking my head at the gloating, wondering WTF.
Anonymous
May 12th, 2007
f you’re reading this, then congratulations! You have just met the next form of social evolution on the Internet.
To some, we will be their greatest enemy. Spoiling their fun and doing everything in our power to ruin all they hold dear.
To others, their greatest friend and ally, always willing to make them laugh.
How you react will decide your fate.
As the internet has grown in popularity, a disturbing phenomenon has occurred: Everyone thinks they they are SPECIAL.
A special little snowflake handcrafted by God to make the world a better place. Sites like Livejournal, DeviantArt, Myspace, Habbo, and now SecondLife have all helped to support this idea of individuality.
We have news for you… You aren’t special.
You aren’t unique. You may not even have the destiny of making a living room a better place to be, let alone the world.
You are a mindless horde of filth, traversing the universe on a small ball of dirt. A speck upon a speck in the vastness of existance.
We are here to remind you of this.
We have embraced our deindividuality. We have embraced the filth. We have embraced our smallness as human animals. And we are going to show you what it’s like. We will take all of the filth in the world; images you never want to see, stories you never want to hear, memories you never want to see again, we will bring it all into the light of day and laugh at it as you run screaming, trying not to vomit.
We cannot be stopped. We have no leader. We have no true names. We are Anonymous, and our numbers are vast. We are everywhere, and we never forgive.
Wherever someone takes themselves too seriously, we will be there. Wherever someone has an inflated ego, we will be there. Wherever someone screams of fursecution, we will be there. Wherever someone forgets that a game isn’t important, we will be there. Wherever anyone puts themself above common sense, or puts fantasy before reality, we will be there to tear their lives apart.
After all, what is a man? A miserable pile of secrets. We will expose your secrets, force you to face your demons, and demand you listen to your own stupidity.
We will do it through madness. And we will remove you from the high place you have built yourself.
Deflate your eglives apart.
After all, what is a man? A miserable pile of secrets. We will expose your secrets, force you to face your demons, and demand you listen to your own stupidity.
We will do it through madness. And we will remove you from the high place you have built yourself.
Deflate your egos, get off your high-horses, and stop your yiffing. The Patriotic Nigras are coming.
United as one, divided by zero. We are Anonymous, We are legion, We do not forgive.
Prokofy Neva
May 12th, 2007
“Sorry, immersionists — you’re out of this game. It’s augmentism from now on that will dominate the shaping of the Metaverse.” — just seems weird. Why would anyone gloat about such a thing, even if ends up being true, which is far from a certainty? There’s a lot of the tone in that post that strikes me as odd. Did someone hack into Gwyn’s account?
No, of course not. It’s her. And she’s always been a gloater. And all those at the Feted Inner Core and Superior Inner Core (the more technically-proficient next-gen FIC) are gloaters, and it’s always been something I’ve sought to counter.
I think there’s several reasons for this gloating. One is possibly just a very, very bitter experience with immersion itself, or the immersion of a loved one. That can do it.
Another is just a desire to have power over other people. That’s usually the most common motivation.
HoJo Kilda
May 12th, 2007
Maybe I’m uninformed. Who is she and why should we care about what she says? What’s her beef with people who like to roleplay? Something tells me this chick needs to get out more.
“If it’s no longer “Your world. Your imagination,” which might end up being true, then I have no reason to be here. No biggie, I’ll just take my money and time and go. If the “metaverse” becomes just more RL, just 3D MySpace with an economy, then I have little reason to spend time in it. I’ll just spend more time in RL. What a concept! It would be a shame if imagination was pushed out, but I have little control over this metaverse. Guess I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing for as long as the world lasts.”
Veronique hit it on the head for me, but I am not worried. As long as we can express ourselves in SL, there will be people living their dreams and nightmares. If not, I’ll move on.
…And how can I be a luddite if I’m online in SL???
Cocoanut Koala
May 13th, 2007
God, these PNs are a juvenile pain the the butt.
Yes, Prok, losing a loved one to extreme emersionism, that could do it, I imagine.
But there seems to be a overall misunderstanding about the entire idea of immersion – “normal” immersion – if you ask me. Or a strange sort of limited understanding of it.
This section from Gwyneth, particularly, about the arrival of Voice:
“I expect eagerly the impact this will have on people’s lives, when one more layer of anonymity is finally revealed. No more pretension of being someone you’re not; the mist of illusion about your true self is dispelled . . .”
I don’t have any pretension of being anyone I’m not. I am my true self wherever I am, whether in real life, online, or on any game I play.
I simply don’t want to announce who I am to everyone, or to show my physical self to thousands of strangers. I’m not hiding anything.
What people know of me online is my true self. No, my avatar doesn’t look like me much, and has no spoken voice at all. But when they meet the avatar, they are meeting me.
I think most people are that way – only a very few maintain this huge, distinct divide between their online personnas and their real personalities.
And I don’t think most people are much good at disguising their true selves anyway, even if they want to.
Most of the people I know in SL, and have known in other games, tend to share more of their real selves and personal lives as they get to know and trust the other person. (Not surprising, since that’s how it works in real life, too.)
Very few are presenting themselves as something radically different from what they really are. And if they are, when you get close to them, they usually tell you what they look like in real life, and so on.
And what does it matter what they look or sound like anyway?
I would never think of pretending with an avatar as a “pretension” or a “mist of illusion” about their real self. People are who they are, whether you can see their real bodies or hear their real voices or not. Character can be ascertained without those – through language, attitude, humor – all those aspects of the soul which shine through online.
As for immersionism – yes, people do enjoy flying free in a world where any real-life problems such as infirmity, illness, social strata, gender, or age don’t hold them back; where real-life prejudices don’t keep people apart as much as they do in real life. That is a good thing; not something to get rid of.
On balance, I think that’s a strength of online; not a weakness of it.
As for voice, I have a perfectly nice voice. But I absolutely don’t want to be on stage all the time, and for me, using voice with strangers is like that. (And forget the face! Not much question why answering home videophones never caught on.)
My layer of anonymity is not there for others to strip off if they so choose – or with glee.
What are we in, some sort of spiritual strip-tease? Where people are happy that no one can have the levels of privacy and anonymity they previously enjoyed online?
Gwyneth goes on to say:
“and Second Life will slowly abandon ‘the place where you wished to live’ to become ‘the new communication medium of the 21st century’.”
I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive. If they were, we wouldn’t all spend all the time online – on forums and in games – that we do. Living, as it were, in both.
If there is an online place presenting itself as a physical world and people DON’T want to live in it, well . . . it’s gonna be a pretty empty place.
coco
Curious Rousselot
May 13th, 2007
“If it’s no longer ‘Your world. Your imagination’, which might end up being true, then I have no reason to be here. No biggie, I’ll just take my … time and go”. Thankyou. That is exactly how I feel.
Veronique Lalonde
May 13th, 2007
For those who responded to or reacted to my comment, thanks. It’s nice to feel one is not alone. Thank you HoJo, Coco, and Curious, and yes, thank you Prokofy.
I “grew up” online in CompuServe forums. When I first started participating, I thought I was a critical thinker and a good debater. It wasn’t long after that I realized just how poor my critical thinking and debating skills were. It doesn’t take too many incidents of being depantsed in public to realize that you have to sharpen up or else continue to be humiliated.
So I worked on making sure that whatever I asserted was backed up by evidence. I avoided making assertions that basically came out of my nether regions, because I now knew I would be caught. I learned to avoid ad hominems, to stick to criticizing the writing and not the writer. Having done these things, certainly not to perfection but to a decent level, I’m afraid I don’t have much respect for those who continue to pull assertions out of their nether regions (and seemingly expect not to be challenged) and who engage in ad hominem attacks.
Argumentum ad Ludditem is not quite at the level of argumentum ad Hitlerum (i.e., dragging Hitler into some discussion, which either stops it cold or sends it entirely off the rails), but it seems to have a similar effect. Imagine: wanting software to work in a reasonably correct fashion gets one labelled a Luddite. In debating circles, that’s known as complete bullshit. Anyone who had a solid argument would never need to resort to such a mischaracterization. Imagine: preferring an extremely fancy car that looks great but is a complete piece of shit because it’s poorly built. Many such cars have existed. They are now off the market. I wonder why.
As for immersion vs. augmentation, I agree with Coco. My avatar is an idealized RL me, but the personality is completely RL me. I’m not trying to mislead anyone. Why would anyone gloat over my losing that idealized me? Why would anyone gloat over “the place where you wished to live” being taken away from any of us?
I will allow that maybe Gwyneth was saying “this is the way LL is taking things” not “this is the way I want things to be.” If that were the case, however, you’d think the entire extremely lengthy post would have been worded somewhat differently.
Ned Ludd
May 13th, 2007
Luddites of the Virtual World Unite!
Ludd Fudd
May 13th, 2007
From Gwynn’s blog post:
“On complex environments like SL, some of the deployment is done instinctively because there is no scientific model that can be used to make an accurate prediction. People will work on “gut feeling” based on their past experience. LL has just a few years of experimenting with something quite new and unlike anything else in the world. In a decade or so, we’ll have Metaverse Engineers who will know all about it by reading textbook cases and knowing what to do (or what to avoid).”
That’s good to know! Now I know for sure that my investment in SL based on LL’s advertisement of it as a business platform has been for naught. False advertising extraordinaire.
Class action suit, anyone?
Obscure Doodad
May 13th, 2007
A quote from above, I think coco’s
>>
3. As to the age verification plan, she says: “So, what will this impact SL? Sure, a few will leave — so what?”
If she were speaking out for less loquacious Lindens here, she should stop, because this is a business-killing attitude.
Her estimate of the losses due to this is “about a million in a month, but we will hardly notice that, since SL almost grows by the same amount.”
Losses – over this, that, or the other issue – are cumulative, and none of them should ever be blown off in this manner. (I doubt the Lindens have this attitude at all.)
I disagree with the number, though – I personally don’t think a million people, or anywhere near that figure, will leave over the age verification plan.
>>
I asked a somewhat important question elsewhere that I will repeat here . . . LL is demanding that people put themselves in their Perv Database as having explicitly asked for access to LL’s porn shop (and the public impression will be child porn shop). Given the assurances about security of the database, will LL be demonstrating leadership to SL residents by making entry into that database mandatory for all LL employees? And no, do not reply that there is no need because they are already age verified. That is not the point.
As to what is going to happen, naturally it is about the critical question — what are the numbers? LL almost certainly earns most of its revenue in land tier and not premium payments. The questions become:
1) Are residents going to put themselves in the Perv Database and risk their RL reputations?
Answer: An informal survey of comments says no, for the vast majority.
2) Are adult content landowners going to set themselves ADULT and lose those customers?
Answer: Yes. Out of concern for liability, and LL coming by and telling them they must, yes, they will.
3) Will this, combined with item 1, affect their sales.
Answer: Yes. If “vast majority” above is correct, yes, they will lose sales. In fact, likely a sales reduction of > 50%.
Given that sales GROWTH is the goal of any serious business, they will be going in the wrong direction.
4) Will this affect their ability to fund tier from in world sources?
Answer: Obviously yes.
5) Will they hang on and fund tier from RL assets?
Answer: Seems unlikely. The point of selling adult content inworld is to make money. If one wanted to fund tier without in-world sales, why have any?
So . . . will a million people leave over Age Verification? No. They will leave when they can’t go to Adult places they used to go to, and don’t want to risk their RL names and reputations and assets to lawsuits. And/or, they will leave when so much of SL gets flagged Adult out of self defense by the landowners and the unverifieds simply have nowhere left to go.
So it’s not Age Verify that will drive ppl away. It will be the ripples from it that do. I think folks underestimate how much money comes from sexual visuals and sexual innuendo and sexual options in SL. Disneyesque SL will retain some residents, but growth won’t be the challenge anymore. The challenge for LL will become survival.
Accasbel Barrymore
May 13th, 2007
Gwyneth blogged and repeated in comments:
“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.”
In a voice-enabled SL, deaf people and mutes will have to go away. Maybe we should have Disability (oops! ‘Other-abilty’) Verification for them so that we could allow them in out of pity?
In RL, either the religious fundamentalists or the agnostics will have to go away. The world is not big enough.
Gwyneth appears to be espousing a metaverse that embodies(?) intolerance.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled luddites yearning to TP,
The wretched rezzing of your inventory store.
Send these, the landless, group-IM-tossed, to me:
I lift my ll_amp beside the scripted door.
But fergawdsakes don’t send me Gwyneth’s metaverse! I couldn’t tolerate that
Accasbel Barrymore
May 13th, 2007
Oh for an edit!
How about
“Send these, the Ruth-ed, group-IM-tossed, to me”
Brenda Archer
May 13th, 2007
Just want to tell Anonymous | May 12, 2007 at 10:29 PM, that’s a nice example of manifesto-style writing, and I enjoyed it immensely. Good to hear the Future is still here with us.
It’s the Gwens of the metaverse who are Luddites, for clinging to the social and business hierarchies of the past. I also want to thank a number of the other posters in this thread, including Coco, Hiro and Prokofy. I don’t have a lot to add, but I’m definitely giving some deep thought as to whether I want to carry on in SL just as I have been.
Before reading this thread, I posted a reply at http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/05/the_view_from_g.html#comments
and the thoughts I have are the same now except I’m starting to doubt the value of verification, as it stands now… and it was something I wanted. I’m happy to trust LL with a lot of information; I know they’re progressive and without unpleasant social agendas; but any third party provider has got to be free of right wing politics, or I won’t trust it.
Prokofy Neva
May 13th, 2007
>I know they’re progressive and without unpleasant social agendas; but any third party provider has got to be free of right wing politics, or I won’t trust it.
Posted by: Brenda Archer | May 13, 2007 at 04:16 PM
Um, thanks for the vote of confidence, Brenda, but this is really over the top stuff.
It implies that an agency that performs a service, and sells voter lists to anybody, and helps them compile their own lists, has a partisan agenda. There’s no evidence of that. It’s idiotic and paranoid.
There is nothing inherently evil about selling lists of people in campaigns, whether for causes or politics. That’s what America is about.
What I’d find a lot more scary is the appearance of this or that list mailing house advertising itself as specifically “progressive” or “leftwing” — I’d worry a lot more about the colouration of politics entering into what should be a service, than I’d wish to have something certify itself as “free of right-wing politics” in the eyes of you, which is going to be some finicky sectarian thing anyway.
Veronique Lalonde
May 13th, 2007
As I mentioned, I can’t post comments on Gwyneth’s blog, but this is probably as good a place as any to mention that she has written a clarifying follow-up to her original post. In the original post, she says she was trying to use humour in the form of irony and sarcasm and admits that she doesn’t do it very well. However, to be fair, it’s very difficult to convey irony and sarcasm in writing. It’s very easily misinterpreted. As apparently it was.
I still think Gwyn might be wrong about there being no room for immersionists in SL. To be a resident of SL, you have to stick around for a while. Not only that, but you have to invest a lot of yourself in the effort. No doubt new people who stick around will change the shape of SL in some way. However, my gut feeling is that those who stick around will be the imaginative sort, not the 3D-MySpace-with-an-economy sort. The downside of revealing one’s entire life on the Web is starting to sink in, so I don’t necessarily think that people will simply give up all of their privacy for a brave new world of TMI.
No, I can’t defend all of this with evidence. It’s a gut feeling. I might be completely wrong. But I *am* glad that Gwyn will be around in whatever survives of an immersionist metaverse. I’ll be on that beach myself.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
May 13th, 2007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm
Prokofy Neva
May 13th, 2007
I find it so annoying that I can’t post comments on Gwyn’s blog either. It’s really hugely a pain in the ass. I’m a member of WordPress and registered there and post fine on other WordPress blogs. But her WordPress seems to require some special OTHER registration that no one can figure out. Then she offers a chance to use some other thing called ‘Open ID’ which I’d be happy to go to and register at, but pressing the links on her blog go nowhere and I can’t find it with such a generic title like that. So…I give up.
I don’t think she’s using irony or sarcasm at all. That is, if she thought she was doing that, her default superiority and elitism *still* came through, and we get it, that Gwyn herself will make sure that Gwyn remains on top, whatever regime prevails.
What is immersion? The ability to augment really, really well.
Lem Skall
May 13th, 2007
Gwyn has a new entry in her blog and she explains there that she was not “gloating” earlier, she was merely being sarcastic. She regrets the new changes as much as most of us.
Lem Skall
May 13th, 2007
Prok, hers is just another blog (using WordPress software but not hosted by the WordPress service, so it is not aware of your WordPress ID). And the “thing” called OpenID is not something you register at. And it is something used by the WordPress software as far as I understand that login. So blame it on WordPress and on your inability, not on Gwyn. I figured out how to use OpenID and so did others.
Prok, when you’re right you’re right, but when you’re wrong you’re wrong. However, you’re ALWAYS only in the same, attacking, mode.
Cocoanut Koala
May 13th, 2007
Well I’m glad this was just poorly written sarcasm after all. But I wish I’d known earlier, so I could have saved myself a lot of the typing above.
I read the new blog entry, and I don’t think it is going to come to pass that way, either. I think there will be room, for instance, for my shop, with it’s silent, typing little person on it, helping people to buy houses.
And if there are noisy people elsewhere, plastering their pictures and genders all over the place, well – who’s to stop them? They are probably looking for mates.
I think Voice is absolutely something SL has to offer. But I don’t think it is something everyone will use. It’s really quite … um … extroverted, in a way. And not everyone is, or wants to be all the time.
As for the general trend toward putting one’s picture and so on up on the Internet, this, too, will probably swing the other way eventually. After, say, enough teenage girls get their houses trashed when a bunch of strangers find out they’re having a party and their parents are out of town.
coco
Prokofy Neva
May 14th, 2007
>So blame it on WordPress and on your inability, not on Gwyn. I figured out how to use OpenID and so did others.
Prok, when you’re right you’re right, but when you’re wrong you’re wrong. However, you’re ALWAYS only in the same, attacking, mode.
Um, no, that’s utter and arrant bullshit. If she ‘uses her own software’ then she needs to have clear, unambigious instructions that explain how you sign up using HER WordPress and explain to everyone who has the generic WordPress ID that it’s no good. She really needs to do that, as I’m far from the only person with this problem.
Usually I spend enough time at it and eventually get it to work — this time I didn’t and got tired of suffering this annoyance. She needs to fix it.
Cocoanut Koala
May 14th, 2007
And I might add, Gwyneth really does believe that the people who signed the Project Open Letter (which you can still sign) are a bunch of Luddites.
So all those points I made above on that topic still stand.
coco
Gwyneth Llewelyn
May 14th, 2007
When having the patience of reading anything I write, whatever the reason, it’s important to make sure you understand my overall position on things
You’ll see that although I *do* change my opinion over time, I’m usually known for being pretty consistent… and it should be pretty obvious that my “glorification of the augmentist world” could not be anything else but pure sarcasm.
On the other hand, it looks like people have a serious issue with the word “Luddite” — probably due to historical reasons and cultural assumptions — and I’ll employ a more obscure reference next time, so that those paragraphs sound more politically correct. Really, comparing “Argumentum ad Ludditem” to Godwin’s Law is a new one to me; public posting on BBS/USENET/forums/blog comments apparently has evolved a whole set of new, fascinating laws/rules I wasn’t aware of (yes, this is more sarcasm, in case you’ve missed it again).
Sarcasm also seems to have been outdated recently. Really, claiming that “Gwyneth appears to be espousing a metaverse that embodies(?) intolerance.” is either total sarcasm or failing to spot my own sarcasm (your pick).
In any case, let’s set the record clear, shall we?
Although I’ve never hidden my own technical background, the truth is, I never placed my trust on “technology” as a solution for *social* issues, although I’ve certainly tried to observe the impact of technology in promoting (or avoiding) social conflicts, which is, in my mind, a much more interesting subject; conversely, the way social pressure impacts technology has also been one of my concerns. A good RL example is ecoterrorism destroying research labs that work on cures for cancer and genetic illnesses, just because “animals are harmed in the process” — ie. you sacrifice the humans that might get a cure, just because you can’t do research on animals. A complex ethical issue.
In the world of Second Life, fortunately, no animals are harmed in the process of deploying the metaverse. Only humans are.
In this case, if it wasn’t apparent, there are no coincidences here. In the space of a few weeks, Linden Lab has rolled out a series of apparently independent changes to the way SL will work, but they are all part of the same process:
- voice
- adult validation
- banlists
- abuse reports going to estate owners (with full access to chat logs on their sims)
- a different model for dealing with abuse reports and tech support
- abolishing ratings (and very likely traffic too)
- removing casino/gambling offerings through LL’s own advertising venues (will escort services be next?)
- vague hints that making copies and backups of your content on your local computer will be possible, and tied to (eventually) Creative Commons licenses
- the open source server “coming soon”
I cannot believe that no one has spotted the coincidence that most of these things will be launched on May 23rd or shortly thereafter. For me, things seem quite clear: it’s all part of the next stage of SL.
And it all points to a single issue. There are now quite a lot of companies in SL. They don’t want to have their virtual presences next to brothels and casinos. They know that LL is under investigation (notice that this doesn’t mean a lot — Microsoft is also “under investigation” for ages) from several sources. They are very likely being advised on what they should be doing in order to fully comply to all legislation (in some cases, *international* legislation). And the first step: apply for carrier status, consolidate their claim that they don’t have anything to do with Second Life as a virtual world, but are only providers of technology.
If someone uses a Microsoft browser to connect to a Microsoft-enabled web server to play at a casino, or hire an escort, or view child porn, Microsoft has nothing to do with it. They just provide tools, nothing else.
This is what very likely has been recommended to LL. Get away from “policing” the grid. Drop all attempts to regulate what people do there, for whatever reason they do it. Hand over responsibility of content onto the residents. Stay away from the grey areas. Open the source, allow more players in the field to interconnect to “your” metaverse. Dilute your responsability.
On the other hand, pave the road for politically-correct corporations and universities to be deployed in a “safe” environment (this mostly mean a Disneyesque definition of PG), and let individuals (not LL) explore the borderline issues of sexually explicit content and online gambling. Make sure that business in SL is transacted between individuals that can rely on trust built upon RL credentials, not SL “reputation”. Give them tools to validate these credentials: voice to talk to others, flags to inform that more RL data is available on a 3rd party server somewhere.
So, looking from afar, this resembles much more something like eBay or Amazon, with a difference: LL has *much less* to do with what goes on inside SL, and very likely, they will have less and less to do with it over time. Also remember what’s up on the horizon: several independent grids, interconnected. Individual sims running at people’s homes. LL has to have rock-solid arguments to make sure they’re not responsible for those grids that are beyond their reach.
All this is very nice, and although probably not exactly what people wanted, it certainly looks like it’s part of a plan — or some advice — that has been developed by LL, or being told to LL that they should follow, and do it pretty quickly. It definitely looks like a “charm” operation to me: “we’re behaving and complying with any laws you wish to throw at us, please don’t hurt us, we’re the nice guys”. Specially because (except for voice) most of the things are pretty unexpected; yes, sure, we always knew that LL would re-introduce some form of validation that wouldn’t require a credit card (since SL has grown dramatically on all areas of the world where a credit card is hard to get), but tying it to “age validation” and “adult parcels” is a twist that was unforeseen.
So who wins in this process?
- corporations and universities. Many have publicly stated that they would only be in SL if it was “more PG” and “more heavily policed”. Both also require voice for their business/conferences/meeetings
- gamers and event hosters (live music performers and DJs, artists, etc). They’ll get voice, which delights them
- newbies. Several studies, mentioned by Bartle as early as 2003, show that voice is a very popular way of attracting new free accounts (although a terrible one for keeping them as paying users). LL has read those studies and wants an even increased growth
- everybody concerned with the handful of teens that might be lost in the adult grid somewhere
- the RL authorities
- the Mafia groups in SL. A combination of banlists with flags for adult content will be an excellent new opportunity for extorsion (“flag your parcel as adult or we’ll ban you out of the grid”)
Who will be mostly indifferent:
- residents not exactly interested in adult content
- all content creators and shop owners outside the adult content market
- loners
Who will hate these new measures:
- paranoid followers of conspiration theories
- immersionists
- people with good reasons for not revealing RL data (ie. victims of discrimination, State-protected victims of RL harassment/molestation or witnesses, people with physical/psychological/social disabilities, shy people) — by far and large a very tiny and almost insignificant minority
All in all, not many are truly “against” — perhaps a million or two — which at this stage is probably something that LL can afford to lose. It would be too late to make these changes with, say, a hundred million users. Losing 20-30 millions would be way too much — just one or even two, well, this can be carefully hidden with some statistics-stretching for a couple of months, but then, remember, the new users will never know about the past history of SL, and they will join SL *exactly* because of these developments.
This is what I meant, in my laconic way, with the “death of immersionism” in SL. Which is obviously an overstatement — immersionism will be relegated to another of the many “role-playing” weirdnesses that will always exist in some spot of SL. It will be engulfed by the ever-expanding augmentist attitude. I’m *not* happy about the idea, mind you; if it was not clear before, take a look at my latest post, on the issues related to discriminatinon of what might still be a substantial minority (at least a hundred thousand users, but perhaps up to one or two million users).
Again: I’m totally against all forms of discrimination — direct or indirect one. As a smoker iRL, I’m pretty familiar with the forms of “indirect discrimination” — being part of a group that legitimately has no claims of self-classifying themselves as a “minority” since no constitution in the world accepts certain things as valid rights (there is no such thing as a “right to smoke” — in my country, for instance, recent legislation imposes heavier penalties on smokers that violate the law, than consumers of heavy drugs, which is, at the very least, ridiculous). This will, in essence, what will become of immersionism: a minority without rights, although these ‘rights’ will truly never exist any more, once the “sacredness of privacy” is in essence removed from the Linden ToS. Arguing that you have a right to privacy in SL henceforward will be a moot point — it simply has no place in SL. You will have either get validated, use voice to prove your identity, and accept that estate owners can publicly post your chat transcripts. All of these being, obviously, voluntary and opt-in: you can refuse to get validated (and get access to non-adult areas); you can refuse to use voice, and remain on the voiceless areas of SL; and you can refuse to go to private islands to avoid having your chats being recorded by the local estate owner. In essence, you have always the option to buy your plot in the PG mainland and turn voice off on your parcel, and have fun with all your fellow residents who share that “weird” concept inside the mainstream, augmentist SL.
How can *anyone* be *happy* about it? The best we can do is to try to enjoy ourselves as much as we can, in whatever corner of the world we’ll be delegated. Sure, it’s a market opportunity for some huge land baron to deploy an “immersionist subcontinent”, where they have potentially 100k or a million possible customers. I hope to be somewhere there.
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Point two, resisting technological change. Well, this is something quite different, and a very old argument which will never please all parties. Linden Lab obviously cannot afford two things:
- a broken infrastructure that cannot support an ever-increasing number of simultaneous users;
- lagging behind the competition, whatever that might be.
The major problem here is that to develop a brand new architecture that supports the infrastructure of Cory’s “SL 2.0 Grid” — which will look the same, just faster and better — this means an *intense* development of *radical* new features, and, worse than that, all these are at the very core of Second Life’s centralised servers. Cory has a plan (I haven’t seen it published yet, but it will be), but that plan is very painful for us all. It means *months* — not days, not even weeks — of breaking the core servers apart and redeploy something entirely different. Forget the occasional hiccup on the databases that make you lose a few L$ or an item or two, or breaks a teleport, or makes an IM come out of order. We’re talking about blowing apart the very brain and heart of Second Life, and coming at the end of the journey with something radically new — even if from the SL client’s point of view, things will pretty much look the same.
To do this, LL has to do *massive changes*. And these will, naturally, not be perfect. LL has reached, after 4 years, a blocked road in their evolution of the current infrastructure — but it’s one they know very well these days. They know how and why servers fail, and how to fix them again. They cannot predict why a minor change can have such a deep impact overall — a common problem with systems described by chaos theory, and not statistical approaches, or clear laws of nature — but they know how to fix it. And they started with small scale deployment, and evolved over time, as more and more users were added.
Now, however, they need to replace it all, with something new, as yet untried. And they’ve started doing so — a long time ago, incrementally, tweaking things here and there. But the things have to change faster and at a larger scale.
And you know all what that means.
So… claiming for a full stop on all the features, and a focus on “fixing things” and “removing bugs”… beware. You may get exactly what you’re wishing for: an ultimate solution to all problems that affect the stability and scability of SL. But the pain and the cost will be tremendous — you can’t change such complex environments painlessly, and the least one can expect, is that it won’t be worse than what currently is going on, and that it won’t take much time (but it will be a few months for sure).
The major problem that residents have here is a certain lack of information — and lack of information leads to mistrust and doubt. I think that LL fears to explain to their residents how huge the change will be — they would be scaring them off, instead of presenting them an ultimate achievement of network engineering and server deployment. But… let’s be honest… how many, among the 6.3 million users, are truly interested in “technical achievements”? All they want to know is if their account will still have the same amount of L$ after they logged off, and back again…
It’s very, very hard to *explain* such complex environments, specially when all analogies fail. We can explain to people how a refrigerator works or even a car; we can tell people that when the washing machine dies, an engine has burned out and can be replaced. Second Life, the metaverse platform, is too intricate, too complex, too esoteric to be “explained”. I seriously suspect, for instance, that there are few issues unrelated to the client software or the server software that couldn’t be easily fixed — even by regular residents — since all the problems come from the centralised asset/user servers, and many from the networking issues across all the grid. Cory’s description at the TH on how the servers on the Texan grid communicate with the Californian servers made me sweat — we’re talking about the same order of magnitude of having a half-century-old fission reactor with kids running around with duct tape to fix any leaks… it works, most of the time, and it’s a miracle that it works so well for so long, but… critical mass is coming, and duct tape is definitely not enough. While Cory’s team wants to get rid of the old fission reactor and place a brand-new clean fusion reactor in the middle of it. All that without losing more than a few hours of downtime every week.
That’s what he’s proposing to do. A very, very, very bold move.
So, innovation comes mostly from *allowing* Cory’s team to make this “experiment”, so that the *next* thing to come, is to make SL have as nice graphics as, say, Sony Home, a good reference for all purposes, since it’ll probably be the most popular social 3D chat world after SL, until the year’s end, if Sony deploys it right. SL, perhaps for the first time, will need to un to catch up, because they can look back at the history of all their “competitors” who gave up on the race and quickly fell back (who knows… perhaps because their own users also have written “open letters” to prevent further changes…).
Halting the flow of progress, preventing researchers and engineers to deploy things for the next stage of SL, not allowing them to attack the *core* issues plaguing SL, and instead making them focus on minor, irritating details, while postponing what *needs* to be changed (and no, it’s not Group IMs…) — that is what in essence I call a “Luddite mindset”: refusing to follow the line of progress and innovation, the one that will bring us the Second Life we all deserve, by insisting on grabbing on “solid ground” instead of pursuing a visionary and revolutionary approach of dealing with complex engineering and technological challenges. Sure, perhaps the Luddites killed people and destroyed machines, because they were worried about the income they had on the pre-industrial era; however, the mindset of the ones that want to prevent LL to go into a future, and cling instead to a past, are not so different. Perhaps different in scale; perhaps all in good intentions (which the Luddites certainly didn’t have!); perhaps hoping against hope that miracles can still be made with the *existing* infrastructure (which was never designed for such an explosive growth anyway) and that the future is too uncertain, too dangerous to be meddling it. The intentions are certainly good; but postponing the inevitable by clinging to the past never showed good results.
It’s *because* LL actually worries about their *future* residents that they are so eager to take this next step, even if it means that the *current* residents have to suffer… for a while.
—
Last point, and then it’s time for me to go back to bed
Every time someone patiently grabs the bits and pieces, the hints and comments, that Linden employees drop here and there, *in public* — be it on workshops, conferences, blog entries, forum posts, in-world public town halls or meetings, and places all the pieces together, and *thinks* about how the puzzle fits — the cries of “inside information” are raised over and over again, and that Linden Lab is “leaking” information to their “friends” and “beloved ones”, and that the FIC is as strong as ever.
Well, it’s impossible to dispell any kind of conspiration theory, but Occam’s Razor is still a very effective mechanism — if someone “knows too much” it must certainly mean they have access to privileged information.
My case is actually much humbler and quite uninteresting. I’ve been part of projects with similar issues to the SL grid: scaling in an environment with exponential growth and hordes of users complaining about how things are breaking apart from the sims. Obviously, they were much simpler environments, their scope was orders of magnitude below LL’s grid, and, in general, users were quite more tolerant… although they also depended on the service to work for their own pleasure and business.
Dealing with such issues over and over again — exchanging tips, tricks, and techniques with others who have gone through the same — gives people like me some experience in *understanding* what the issues are. Human beings are notoriously good at making decisions with incomplete information; that’s the way our brains were wired, and it’s a survival mechanism that is part of our own evolution. We don’t need to see the tiger close up to identify it as a tiger and run away (when it’s too late); rather, we can work from assumptions and partial knowledge (“if it snaps behind a bush and is big and orange, well, it might be a tiger, we should probably run first and make sure that we’re seeing a tiger *later*”).
And Linden Lab is very good at providing partial knowledge; in fact, as a company, they’re the ones that I’ve had the privilege to be a customer of that are the most open with so many internal workings of their own company. And, more exciting than that, they do it *publicly*. It’s obvious that they only announce things after-the-fact, but at least they give a *lot* of hints before something happens. I don’t need to read Cory’s white paper to have a pretty good idea on what he’s planning for the “SL Grid 2.0″. There are a limited number of solutions that are available for the type of environment that SL is; many are textbook cases, publicly available for anyone to read. If you have a certain background, and a little experience in dealing with similar things (even if at a much smaller scale), that’s enough “partial knowledge” to draw a complete picture, which will not be very far off the reality. It’s no “insider information”; it’s background, experience, and reading the technical papers on the subject.
Next comes the business layer. I’m quite unfamiliar with Californian-style management myself, and I’m only aware of anecdotal evidence published by many Californian managers from the dot-com era; but still, I have enough personal experience to understand *some* of the reasoning behind management decisions. It doesn’t surprise me why LL sometimes listens to the residents, and sometimes ignores them totally; however, *some* decisions have (and will) always surprise me, and they’re totally unrelated to any of the discussions that you find in the forums. For instance, why they never acknowledged the need, like any software house has — even Californian ones! — to develop a strong connection with their partners, who are bringing new customers in every day. There are obviously a lot of philosophical aspects of “Linden management” which will always baffle me, but, at the end of the day, they’re now profitable, their investors are happy, they have a lean company, and have huge media presence for such a small start-up — so they *have* to be doing things right! Success can be measured in several possible ways, and there is no question that they are a successful company in many of those. Still, this means that *some* decisions, which don’t make any sense from a purely technical point of view, make sense from a business perspective. Again, when the “techie” piece of the puzzle doesn’t fit in the hole, sometimes a business piece will fit perfectly in. There is no need for “special insider information” for that; just having some experience in shuffling pieces of the puzzle and usually being able to fit them together.
And, naturally, there is a last aspect, which is — perhaps! — the most important one: the human factor. Philip and his team are not “just a bunch of engineers and developers with a business model and some amazingly advanced technology”. No, first and foremost, they’re *Philip and his team*. This means that you cannot understand Linden Lab’s choices and motivations without understanding first what their *personal* motivations are in this. That’s why I’m such an unbeliever in common reactions like “Linden Lab wants to sell their company and that’s what they’re doing” or “they’re filthy rich now, that’s why they don’t listen to *us*”. These are facile explanations that are wide off the mark; they don’t address Philip’s (and his investors!) motivations at all. It’s not greed (they’re well off in any case). Not even “fame and glory” — they’re famous for their past achievements and already have their pages in the history books. It takes a bit of time, reflection, and lots of hours of reading what they *tell* us — and they do it on conferences and interviews, all the time — to understand what they believe in, what drives them onwards (and not backwards), and what their dreams are. If you can grasp that from what they are constantly telling, even the most irregularly shaped pieces of the puzzle will always fit in.
So, there is really no need of “insider information”, “FICness”, or sitting at the Linden’s lap to make sense of the puzzle. All you need is a bunch of pieces, which they’ll gladly provide — in public, and available to all. The skills to put them together and make sense of the overall picture, however, are three-fold: technical, business, and human. What Prokofy calls “FIC” are people who have all the three skills and enough patience (and stubbornness) to put the pieces of the puzzle together…