The Alphaville Herald

16 Responses to “Business Week: In SL, Boxy Buildings and Objects Look Best!”

1. 

   Cocoanut Koala
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   Enough with individual residents being charged the same as major corporations!

   Enough with LL giving insider information to their prefered residents!

   BOYCOTT CORPORATE ISLANDS!

   Here, from the Blog:

   ———–

   • Catherine Cotton Says:
   November 1st, 2006 at 9:25 am

   “Among those who got the early word was Electric Sheep, the biggest third-party “Second Life” developer. Its clients include Major League Baseball, Nissan and Starwood Hotels.

   For Electric Sheep and other developers, the advanced warning allowed them to give their own clients the most up-to-date information.”

   “I was taken by surprise when the information leaked to some people who might have tried to take advantage of (it),” said Zdanowski. “Clearly, there is a delicate balance between soliciting feedback from our customers while also not giving them an information advantage–and we will be much more careful in how we approach this in the future. ”

   http://news.com.com/Second+Life+land…3-6131334.html
   ‘Second Life’ land prices get hefty hikes

   ————

   Amber Palowakski Says:
   November 1st, 2006 at 10:25 am

   Well, if LL insist in maintaining these outrageous high PI prices for all users, I for one shall boycott and an every corporate Private Island. In fact, I call upon all of Sl residents to do likewise.

   ————

   http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/2…#comment-13490

   ———–

   Boycott Corporate Islands!

   Spread the word!

   coco
2. 

   Prokofy Neva
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   Yeah, that’s why I made my own Do’s and Don’t for Business which I posted long before the BW:
   http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/10/dos_and_donts_f.html

   Yes, I can only hope that screenshot is helping to sell RacerX Gullwing’s snail races on Saturday morning lol.

   What’s annoying about the BW list is that they claim that more elaborate buildings will somehow lag out the server more. But that’s ridiculous. So many of the corporate buildings are in fact crenellated complicated torqued prim monsters that may indeed already lag the sim, the twisted beams and reinforced concrete.

   Lag comes from having textures over 512 — if they can observer that simple rule the build itself shouldn’t be a factor, no?
3. 

   blaze spinnaker
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   Uri, ESC are nothing more than the modern equivalent of con artists. The disappointment and deception they are spreading is going to come back and bite SL in the ass, big time.
4. 

   Cory Edo
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   blaaaaaze. Haven’t heard from you in forever! Can you define exactly how ESC are con artists? Because every definition I can find involves intentionally misleading someone with the promise of personal or financial gain. Or maybe you were exaggerating for effect.

   I also think you’re shooting at the wrong people on this one. Why are you angry at the people that got advance notice, and not the people that gave it out? Its not like ESC asked for advance notice, and trust me, I checked on that one.

   Prok, while textures are the biggest source of lag, a large amount of torii in a build also lag, and quite badly, because your computer is trying to render all the sides of the polygon into something that resembles curves. I have an early build that was almost all torii and no textures that drops your frame rate dramatically.
5. 

   Prokofy Neva
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   What does it matter if *my* computer lags server-side, Cory? No doubt your clients have the kind of kick-ass state of the computers that can handle any torii you throw at them — and isn t that what matters?

   And yes, in a way, you are con artists, Cory, because you are charging these fantastic sums for merely terraforming and building out a sim, when the inworld indigenous prices for doing that are far, far below the cost you are charging. Even if new prices are in order for more skilled builds, lets say, I think the point of Uri’s post here is that the boxes and poured concrete and reinforced steel beams we’re getting out of you aren’t even your best work, or anybody’s best work, and considerably diminish the world.

   I think it’s appropriate to be angry both at LL, which gave the early notice AND those smug bastards who got the early notice and think the rest of us are feebs and choads and who have been justifying this practice furiously, benefiting from it financially, and trying to characterize us as jealous losers. It’s sick.

   What, we don’t plan and need to have heads-up for our customers, too? What, we don’t work our asses off? What, we don’t have businesses where in fact we have more on the line than you all?

   It takes two to tango on this one, and the FIC/SIC and LL collusion is one I’ve written about for years, and suffered a huge amount for, as many know, including being permabanned from the LL forums, having my RL outed against my will, being pilloried with wrongful charges drawn from somebody else’s RL fetched up in Google, and suffering intense harassment of every conceivable sort.

   It’s morally wrong to have such a system; it’s even economically and business-wise simply not justified!

   Look at the fallout it calls — all of it unnecessary.
6. 

   Hiro Pendragon
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   Boxy is best? Business week clearly hasn’t been speaking to our clients.
7. 

   Cory Edo
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   >What does it matter if *my* computer lags server-side, Cory? No doubt your clients have the kind of kick-ass state of the computers that can handle any torii you throw at them — and isn’t that what matters?

   Nope. Torii will lag any computer, it just depends on if your frame rate dips below the rate if you notice it or not. And implying that we or clients only care if the sim runs fast for them is like implying web designers don’t care if a site loads slow for the people that make it. Kinda pointless to make something that the average user can’t utilize.

   >And yes, in a way, you are con artists, Cory, because you are charging these fantastic sums for merely terraforming and building out a sim, when the inworld indigenous prices for doing that are far, far below the cost you are charging.

   That’s not the definition of con artist, Prok. That’s your interpretation of something you think is overpriced, while not taking into account things like scripted interactivity with databases, willingness to conform to a deadline, ability to put in 10 hour days 6 days a week with a team of other creators to meet a deadline, and a myriad of other details administrative and otherwise that someone has to do, and someone has to get paid to do.

   >Even if new prices are in order for more skilled builds, lets say, I think the point of Uri’s post here is that the boxes and poured concrete and reinforced steel beams we’re getting out of you aren’t even your best work, or anybody’s best work, and considerably diminish the world.

   Now we’re getting pretty subjective, and there’s no point in debating what “best” is to you or to me. Some people like it, some people don’t, some people just don’t like it because of who built it. Still not sure how its diminishing the world any more than two story ranch-style houses or bling does.

   The rest of your post is the same old same old.
8. 

   Prokofy Neva
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   Cory,

   1. Are you talking about server-side or client-side lag? Client-side lag is, well, in the inimitable words of Lindens, the problem of clients, not servers. And yes, I imagine you work mainly fory our clients, and not for “the Internet” or “websites” because SL isn’t that yet. And do your clients also step out and buy skins and fly around and sit in bars and concerts by home-grown artists and dance at clubs? Of course not. They’re just your clients in RL, and the effect anything they do on the world of SL is completely immaterial to them.

   2. Well, I didn’t call you a con artist. I just said you are charging fantastic princely sums that sooner or later businesses will understand that a) they can get done for less and b) have their own inhouse programmers/art departments do for less and better.

   3. You’re implying that inworld businesses are lazy, idiotic slugs by implying that they don’t worry about scripts talking to data bases; they don’t conform to deadlines; they don’t work 10 hours a day. Huh? What *are* you smoking? All of us conform to the worst deadline there is: getting a tier bill paid or *not*. It’s a harsh taskmaster. All of us work more than 10 hours many days and more than 6 days. All of us are mired in total minutae of the sort that you never have to think about like prim counts and tiny micropayments and getting them paid or return. Honestly, you have no idea.

   4. I think there’s quite the aesthetic commentary to be had about the architecture we’re getting served up in Second Life by these corporations and their hired hands. It’s a bleak one. You don’t wish to hear it. Everything looks exactly like Adam Zaius recruitment center built for the Lindens back in the day or existing modernistic style of various top FIC designers. It’s the FIC school of architecture. All empires have their schools who prevail (Stalin gothic, for example). It’s life in the big city. We don’t have to pretend the power equals beauty.

   5. The heart and soul of the two-storey ranch lit up by the blingtard’s bling is something I’d prefer any day to those miles of poured concrete stadiums that sit empty day after day after their first big event.
9. 

   Cory Edo
   

   Nov 1st, 2006
   

   >1. Are you talking about server-side or client-side lag? Client-side lag is, well, in the inimitable words of Lindens, the problem of clients, not servers. And yes, I imagine you work mainly fory our clients, and not for “the Internet” or “websites” because SL isn’t that yet. And do your clients also step out and buy skins and fly around and sit in bars and concerts by home-grown artists and dance at clubs? Of course not. They’re just your clients in RL, and the effect anything they do on the world of SL is completely immaterial to them.

   I’m talking lag, period, no matter if its server side or client side, because the end result is the same, and its undesirable, just like a web site that takes longer than 30 seconds to load is undesireable, and for the same reasons – people won’t stick around if they have to wait.

   And yes, my clients do go out and buy skins and check out clubs and meet people and generally enjoy SL. The ones that don’t (a small majority) wouldn’t get into SL anyway. Generally clients aren’t a single individual, there’s a team of people involved in the project. I’d say 75% of the team ends up going into SL on their own to explore, purchase, hang out.

   >2. Well, I didn’t call you a con artist. I just said you are charging fantastic princely sums that sooner or later businesses will understand that a) they can get done for less and b) have their own inhouse programmers/art departments do for less and better.

   “And yes, in a way, you are con artists, Cory”. Make up my mind, already! Check out the prices web development companies charge for corporate websites. Do they hire people at their own firms to develop and run their websites, or do they pay a one time fee to have it done? It goes both ways but it depends on what’s more cost effective for them. Most outsource to a company that specializes in it. In addition, the major difference is the fact that SL has its own setup which is pretty specialized, and its own culture which you aren’t going to learn unless you’re in it for a while. That’s even more time you’re paying employees to learn about the market you’re trying to enter.

   >3. You’re implying that inworld businesses are lazy, idiotic slugs by implying that they don’t worry about scripts talking to data bases; they don’t conform to deadlines; they don’t work 10 hours a day.

   Your words and your insinuations, not mine. People in SL work damn hard, but a majority of them also have RL jobs to pay the bills as well. There’s only so many hours in a day. The ones that make the jump to working totally in SL devote just as much time as many people devote to their jobs outside of SL. It sounds like you’re comparing the land business with the development business, apples and oranges.

   >4. I think there’s quite the aesthetic commentary to be had about the architecture we’re getting served up in Second Life by these corporations and their hired hands. It’s a bleak one. You don’t wish to hear it. Everything looks exactly like Adam Zaius recruitment center built for the Lindens back in the day or existing modernistic style of various top FIC designers. It’s the FIC school of architecture. All empires have their schools who prevail (Stalin gothic, for example). It’s life in the big city. We don’t have to pretend the power equals beauty.

   Yell at the companies that want a RL recreation of their businesses. You’re quick to defend residents that prefer RL touchstones in their creations like roofs and stairs, but you’re also quick to proclaim the same aspects when seen in corporate builds are “bleak”. Again, taste is personal, and given your own branding, its just as easy to dislike something because of who built it.

   >5. The heart and soul of the two-storey ranch lit up by the blingtard’s bling is something I’d prefer any day to those miles of poured concrete stadiums that sit empty day after day after their first big event.

   What you prefer still isn’t explaining the difference between the two (besides, again, who built it) or how one diminishes Second Life and not the other.
10. 

    Scott McMillin
    

    Nov 1st, 2006
    

    I think you mean “gobsmacked”
11. 

    Urizenus
    

    Nov 1st, 2006
    

    I like that expression too, but it is a bit british for my taste. I was thinking of the band.
12. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Nov 2nd, 2006
    

    >I’m talking lag, period, no matter if its server side or client side, because the end result is the same, and its undesirable, just like a web site that takes longer than 30 seconds to load is undesireable, and for the same reasons – people won’t stick around if they have to wait.

    I’m really really REALLY finding it hard to believe that the staffs of these corporations and the mainstream media covering their launches stick around and worry about lag or not. They are long gone. BTW, as far as the media crest, we’re now down in the weeds with the Charlottesville papers, and even with that mention in the New Yorker, we might be “done”.

    >And yes, my clients do go out and buy skins and check out clubs and meet people and generally enjoy SL. The ones that don’t (a small majority) wouldn’t get into SL anyway. Generally clients aren’t a single individual, there’s a team of people involved in the project. I’d say 75% of the team ends up going into SL on their own to explore, purchase, hang out.

    Do they? I’m still somehow needing to test this claim. Do they stay? When I see these folks with grey instead of a picture in their profile, when I look in the groups I’m in with them and see their last log-on times, when I see no green dots on their islands, I just don’t find your statement credible, Cory, and please, you know better.

    >”And yes, in a way, you are con artists, Cory”. Make up my mind, already!

    Um, since I’m not the one who introduced or used this term, I don’t feel I have to do anything lol.

    >Check out the prices web development companies charge for corporate websites. Do they hire people at their own firms to develop and run their websites, or do they pay a one time fee to have it done? It goes both ways but it depends on what’s more cost effective for them. Most outsource to a company that specializes in it. In addition, the major difference is the fact that SL has its own setup which is pretty specialized, and its own culture which you aren’t going to learn unless you’re in it for a while. That’s even more time you’re paying employees to learn about the market you’re trying to enter.

    Cory, please. This is all so fake. This is a subject I and othe readers actually know something about. Corporate websites don’t cost in the “low and middle six figures”. And when they are built, they last every day, they are refreshed with new content, they have a long-term purpose, they are tied to sales, or news bulletins or press releases. And what of these islands in Second Life? They sit like abandonded warehouses in Queens. Nothing occurs on them. They are dead. That’s what we keep trying to get across to you and you prove impervious to the obvious perhaps because you yourself continue to hang out on your sims and hang with these staffs or something?

    Um, where is Ben Folds? Did he log into Second Life in the last 2 weeks? How about Suzanne Vega or Kurt Vonnegut, are we going to get to chill out with them and fool around with laser swords? How many people clicked the Nissan dispensor today? Anybody listening to Regina Spektor’s records?

    We all understand companies outsource to little companies. Duh. That isn’t at issue here. What’s at issue is that the Lindens feted and groomed a small cadre of people over 2 years, let them rule the forums with impunity and suppress criticism and debate, let them get other people banned, let them torque and tweak and bork and nerf the platform this way and that according to their needs and whims (no, let’s not get rid of push! We need it for our guns and our 17 elevators in Second Life!).

    And then after that ignomy, they fed them major contacts, gave them saturation media coverage, and then set them to serve as worker bees for these big companies. It’s all quite disturbing because of the influence and political clout that these people were given in a world where there are other adults — educated, creative people — who aren’t stupid blingtards and who didn’t elect or acclaim this bunch. When Adam Reuter needs to do a story on the island scandal, who does he turn to? Not an actual top landlord in the world itself, or any kind of knowledgeable commentator, must Aimee Weber, who has been spoonfed to him like Maypo by LL, and served up over and over again by their steerage to the media. Aimee Weber isn’t even a landlord; she owns an island with stores that have as low traffic as Adam Reuter. Could he look on the list and go talk to the people with high traffic who are actually affected in some real way by this decision of LL’s?

    This kind of stuff reminds me of correspondents in Eastern Europe. They take the $50 cab ride from the Warsaw airport because they don’t know any better instead of the one for only $10 or even the bus. They talk to the cab driver on the way to their Western hotel and he tells them the economy is in ruins or the people are unhappy. He writes his first story as a reporter or his report to his company HQ based on what the cab driver told him or what he reads in the English-language newspaper in his hotel. He then talks to a few smoothies from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with impeccable British English to get the spin, then retires from the evening to drink at the hotel bar with some Australian reporter who has been in the region for 30 years. Now he thinks he has “done” Eastern Europe and knows something. He’s never talked to an actual real person on the street or an actual leader in the society or even a fellow reporter or businessman who is educated and is his peer.

    >Your words and your insinuations, not mine. People in SL work damn hard, but a majority of them also have RL jobs to pay the bills as well. There’s only so many hours in a day. The ones that make the jump to working totally in SL devote just as much time as many people devote to their jobs outside of SL. It sounds like you’re comparing the land business with the development business, apples and oranges.

    Hardly. Those who do land business full time, whether kids swooping land to pay for college or people like Anshe Chung make it inside the world and live from the income. There aren’t that many — but then there aren’t than many content makers really making a living, either.

    Suddenly, those who keep their RL jobs full-time or half-time and have a half-time job in SL are belittled in your eyes. We’re to understand that the Metaversal Minions are the only valid workers in this world. Huh? This is total crap, and you know it, Cory.

    I really think for you to be wrangling on this blog in these comments like this is unprofessional and unseemly. It’s a wonder that your immediate bosses and clients don’t tell you to knock it off.

    >Yell at the companies that want a RL recreation of their businesses. You’re quick to defend residents that prefer RL touchstones in their creations like roofs and stairs, but you’re also quick to proclaim the same aspects when seen in corporate builds are “bleak”. Again, taste is personal, and given your own branding, its just as easy to dislike something because of who built it.

    I have no doubt in my mind that you all pitch them portfolios of an aesthetic that some of you have inflicted on the world, too, long before you had $10,000 US to pay for it and had only $10,000 Lindens. The modern steel-and-class thing with the green tinting is uber popular among a certain FIC set. Shall I take you to certain of your close friend’s builds or rez them out to prove it to you?

    Sure, corporations are free to build whatever they want on their damn land — that is the mantra of Second Life. But we’re also free to remark that for people who have spent millions, it sure is bleak and in places God-awful. If I have to park my avatar ass on one more raspy cement seat I’m going to scream.

    >What you prefer still isn’t explaining the difference between the two (besides, again, who built it) or how one diminishes Second Life and not the other.

    In RL as in SL, these huge corporations have a kind of public responsibility. If a Sony or a Times Warner is going to inflict some giant build on a city, they usually take into consideration at least to some extent how ordinary people, pedestrians and passersby, are going to engage with the building. The Sony building in Manhattan is actually a good example of a company trying to think of those things as their corporate responsibility for handling a public space.

    Why can’t they be the same in SL?

    When was the last time anybody sat in a concrete stadium in RL outside of Novosibirsk???
13. 

    Urizenus
    

    Nov 2nd, 2006
    

    Now Prok, I agree with most of what you say, but don’t be dissing Novosibirsk. In the old Soviet Union it was known as “The City of 5 Year Plans”! And it showed!
14. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Nov 2nd, 2006
    

    Oh, I love Novosibirsk, City of Science. As for the pyatiletki, I’ll never forget the Five-Year-Plan propaganda sign outside my dorm window in Leningrad. It said, “Pyatiletka–Kachestvo” (Quality). It was broken and falling over. Today, it has been replaced by a Coca-Cola billboard — and still falling over.
15. 

    Patch Lamington
    

    Nov 8th, 2006
    

    but boxy IS best
    all my stuff is boxy anyway.

    for example:
    http://doodler.wordpress.com/2006/09/15/13/
    (shameless plug. mind you its an old advert – im no longer at busy bens.)
16. 

    Effulgent Brown
    

    Dec 5th, 2006
    

    That Business Week article was priceless, did any one of those suits consider floating around in SL for a few weeks and decide if they even wanted in on this thing, they just see that people are finding better stuff to do than consume. SL is a SOCIAL THINGY.

    If nissan wanted to impress they should have opened like 4 sims that were sandboxes, and put a racetrack around it, and put their cars there, along with free space for anybody else selling stuff on wheels. Turn it into a place to hang out and do your own thing, then leave it alone.

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