Second Thoughts

Pandora's Light-Use Sims

by J.W. Waterhouse. Pandora opening her box on a light-use sim where she never, never overloads the sim -- ever.

I find the latest wrinkle in the Lindens' decision-making process around the openspace sims makes me... queasy, I can only say that. First, there was the abusiveness and Stockholm Hostage Syndrome aspects implicit in "an announcement about an announcement" when obviously...if you already knew about the thing you were planning to say you could, well, just say it and not make people wait another 24 hours.

The Lindens did exactly what I thought they'd do which was to stick to their last, and keep their price. It's hard to see that cold, hard fact through all the blizzard of *other* things they are saying, but it *is* what they are saying. The kind of sims that are being used as rentals now will indeed rise in cost to $375 for purchase pricem, starting in January 2009, and at first will cost $95 in tier and them ultimately $125 in tier -- only in July 2009 instead of January 2009 -- a six months' reprieve.

And just as I predicted, they have created another product, an extra-light sim that will continue to bear the name "open space" of only 750 prims that can only hold 10 avatars that really, truly has to be used as water or landscaping -- with the script limits "to be determined" (I predicted it exactly right).

The three-card monte aspect to all this is that they have basically switched the names. They made the "new" product, which will be called "Homestead" (ick), be essentially what everybody already has now called "openspace sim" with the 3750 prims overloaded with even as many as 100 avatars and numerous scripts. Then they gave what is actually the new product the name "openspace" with only 750 prims (there isn't a third option of 1875 prims as was the case pre-March 2008). As one wag on the forums says, essentially, "before whining: $125 tier hike but no restrictions; after whining, restrictions and still a tier hike. Vive la revolution!"

So they've opened up a Pandora's box of endless wrangling, splitting resident groups and pitting them against each other, and pitting themselves against residents -- all over the definition of what "load" is because the Lindens -- these quintessential script kiddies at heart -- have a) never met a script they didn't like and b) never wanted to deprecate or restrict a script in their lives -- ever. Now they will be asked to jump over their own knees and it will be terribly hard for them. I can imagine some of the really die-hard old-school ideological script kiddies leaving the Lab over this. Tekkies HATE the idea of mechanically curbing scripts or CPU or loads -- they want *user education* so that people voluntarily "just know" what to put out (hence their awful concept of making high-prim avatars be browbeaten by "thecommunity" to get them to lighten their usage of facets.

Each and every person who lives on an openspace sim thinks they, alone among islands, are only light users. *Those other people* are heavy users but never them. People will be endlessly tempted or emboldened to use temp rezzers and every other damn thing to overload sims, and will even just do nothing, counting on Linden bureaucracy or inefficiency never to notice them (that actually happens a lot in several areas -- if it hadn't been for a really concerted campaign of howling by angry residents with junked-up abandoned or griefed land in their sim, the Lindens would never have gotten off the dime to finally go reclaim several hundred sims' worth of land and recycle it on the auction, enriching their coffers; yes, that's a good example of how these people are in this to get rich, as they wouldn't think to do this for years on end before, losing the revenue.).

NotReadyforRentals Life

I finally got my sim delivered at OpenLife, after complaining that they don't notify you of the time it takes to deliver a sim. I got an email thus about 5 days after purchase, and a notice that I was now enabled for the Foundation member chat and toolbox. The toolbox appears to have no actual tools. I think all it does is change the sub-name or something. My avatar's name was spelled wrong, so there isn't a system that matches this automatically obviously.

OpenLife isn't really ready for mainland rentals. They are claiming -- and making their boosters claim -- that by having parceling ability on the mainland sims now that you can now have rentals.

But you can't, because there are no groups, and no group land. Rentals are very hard without being able to group land. Obviously, they didn't study this sort of facet of a virtual world, as they are obsessed with geeky stuff like RealExtend.

If I hear one more person laud RealExtend I'm going to puke. It's like the great communist future that can't put food in a starving belly today. It's some sort of avatar editor -- and so what? It does nothing for the average person, and even if it offers more creative capacity for making avatars or clothes or whatever, without a secure monetary system and currency exchange, what is the incentive? They also constantly brag that your can use a 3-D editor to import your creations. Again, whoop de doo -- but without money, a currency exchange, and most important, copyright protections and a spirit of protecting intellectual property (utterly absent from the OpenSim worlds), how can you make an economy.

It looks as if you can't create groups at all. There is one big commune called "The OpenLife Everybody Group" or some damn thing and apparently there are "chat channels" inworld to make the IRCers feel right at home. I tried making a group, it asked me if I wanted to REALLY spend $100 and risk losing the group if I had no friends to join it, then went flat after debiting some fantastic sum out of the $10,000, which variously appears and disappears out of my wallet.

NotWorkingLife

I tried logging into the OpenLife web page again -- and couldn't. The template in the upper right-hand corner simply wouldn't. Yes, I allow pop-ups, cookies, java-script, yes I have Mosaic. The cursor lands in the middle of the box, you keep trying to type, and meanwhile it pulls up a screen I never saw before, with a name like "Microsoft X Docs" or something. I keep trying and trying, and it keeps trying to open up a document-like template and save a file...while I'm trying to *log in*. Right.

I try and try, finally logging in, press on the land store, and I arrive and show that in my shopping cart is the sim "Whiskey", which of course gives the lie to pyotr who claimed there were no sims for sale. I have no idea if I've been charged for it, but I try taking it out of my cart, and finally get it out. When I get back on the land page, I see it's gone, and in its place is another one called "Spice". I decide to try to buy it, it's only $89, mindful of Paisley's horrible experiences.

I buy it -- that is, I go through the screens, which this time, do have a country pulldown and don't ask for my Tax ID number. I believe that likely what happened before and which the owners never bothered to see or fix or understand, is that if you do NOT log in and go to the land store to buy, it doesn't prompt you to log in, it prompts you to fill out that huge template.

I went through all the screens, it took me then to PayPal, NOT giving me an option to use a credit card, which is fine, and then...nothing. No email saying "Congratulations, Prokofy Parvenu, you have become a Foundation Sim Owner!". Nothing. Not even a PayPal receipt. I waited, and about 8 hours later, I did get the PayPal receipt. Nothing else. No email. No notice, and I couldn't find the sim in world.

ClosedLife?

Quite a few people are flooding over to OpenLife Grid, and I was one of them today. I will be taking a very keen weather eye to this service, however, to see if it is the usual goofy and incompetent geek operation with lousy customer service we can expect in the opensource movement reverse-engineering Second Life -- or whether even being a pioneer, it can work with reasonable competence. I'll also be watching the forums very keenly to see whether the responses to my newbie help query are the usual smug, arrogant assholery, of the type "But I never had that problem, you must be retarded" or "there must be something wrong with your computer" or "I could help you but you can't be rude" blah blah blah. You can tell A LOT about a service on the basis of these simple tests -- and let me say, Linden Lab flunked them all when I came 4 years to SL, too, because the community they had enabled and supported at that time was nasty, snarky, belligerent, and sneering about newbie technical problems, and used social Darwinism to cull its ranks. I expect absolutely nothing less of new open sim communities -- if anything, the attitudes will be worse, redoubled with their sense of entitlement and hubris about escaping the evil Lindens.

I wasn't surprised to find that my name "Prokofy Neva" was seemingly taken there -- I find that in many places because goons get there first and grief me in this fashion. And that will be a test too -- whether the makers of OpenLife can fix that problem, or whether they take a Linden-like libertarian extremist position of saying, well, you didn't trademark the name, and everyone is free to chose their own name so blah-blah-blah. I took the name Prokofy Parvenu, because I won't stay long if I don't find reasonable access and service in a place like this -- service is paramount if you start a business and other people have to depend on you.

The template for trying to buy a sim is the most daunting thing I've ever seen on the Internet, even the U.S. government's electronic tax-payer site, that requires LESS information from me and has LESS repetition and frankly WORKS unlike this site. These idiots have you typing in the same information at least 4 or 5 times, very detailed, with MANDATORY cell, fax, etc. numbers and even "department' of your "company". They demand your tax ID number twice on each of the four repetitive templates -- it's insane. I've never seen a requirement to turn over a social security number for an $89 purchase on the Internet, even with recurring billing. It's not rational. These people are either paranoid freaks or amateurs -- the template is home-made or some sort of totally anal-retentive third-party biller, I think the former.

Worse, when I selected the $89 sim (yes, sims only cost $89 for 65536), I couldn't purchase it, even after filling out the ridiculous template. It kept telling me shopping cart was "empty" although of course...duh...I know how to select an item and click off a box showing that I want it into my cart. I refreshed...I struggled for a half hour, and then finally I wrote on the forums, "Hey, do you want to sell sims or not? Or do you want to keep it close"?

I landed on newbie island with a half dozen other newbs, in Ruth format. That's always annoying, but understandable. Unfortunately, appearance mode and its edit for body shape, etc. was stuck -- you couldn't get into it. I was glad to see there was a reasonably easy and workable downloadable viewer that puts you on newbie isle quickly, but I see in the forums lots of other people have problems. I crashed, and gave up for the day.

So here's what I had to say to these folks: hey, write when you want to sell me a sim. Make it easy. Otherwise, I will not be jumping over hurdles.

Gwyn Mugged by OpenSource Thugs

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Gwyn had a very well-thought-out post about how to plug the "analogue hole," which apparently is the name for that problem called "if you can see it, you can copy it" in Second Life -- and in general with digital media. Step by step, she goes over how you could at least make it *more difficult* to steal, instead of just shrugging and throwing up your hands and saying it is impossible, as all the opensourceniks, from Zha on down to Gareth, will tell you ad nauseum.

Gwyn, an enthusiast of opensource and user of OpenSim, nevertheless "gets it" about the content theft problem and the economy.

She comes up with a plan that involves encryption of browsers and digital signatures. Sounds like all that is needed is political will. The usual suspects like Bolshevik Adam Zaius/Adam Frisbee comes to tell her it "can't be done" -- blah blah.

I post thanking her for this, and expressing dismay that she has now withdrawn her proposal. As you can see, it was under violent pressure from the opensource thugs who wish to go on justifying theft and keeping open the ability to steal, all under the guise of "reality" or "pragmatism". No one can do a thing to stem the flow of their ability to steal -- or, as they constantly assure you, "just use that one copy or two copies or three copies in my i-Pod, on my other computer, on this or that". It's nauseating.

SignPost Marvin, a charter member of the opensource gang, then tells Gwyn "we told you so" and "it can't be done" *again* and comes up with something that will amount to a fingerprint check that enables you both to "take appropriate action" if you find a theft -- and also to spam customers to tell them you have a new creation. Great! They always come up with solutions that are worse than the simpler solutions to stop the theft in the first place by MAKING IT HARDER to steal. That's all. MAKING IT HARDER, and doing so in a mechanical way, so that you don't have to go set up copyright and lawyers and takedowns just to run a business in SL that may only generate you $50-100 US income per month anyway. Sorry, but micropayments and microsales require microsolutions to deter theft at the microlevel, where it happens.

All may not be lost, however, as there are signs that the Lindens aren't rushing to heed the call of "Mr. Linden, Tear Down That Wall" from the AWGroupies freaks. Another charter member of the Opensource Let Me Rip Club, Gigs Taggart, bemoans the failure of the Lindens to move out of their Walled Garden. Good! He's bitching because they have so far only come up with schemes for making it easier to connect to the Garden, rather than destroying the garden. Good!
The Lindens have figured out which side their bread is buttered on: renting of server space. They need to go on doing that until they can figure out other stuff like going into the Certificates business and figuring out how to make something like Gwyn's certificate encryption on browsers and on islands and on content all work to make a viable IP security system that is implemented mechanically inworld, not on a notecard or a lawyer's phone call.

Web or World?

A lively discussion on whether Second Life should go in the direction of Web or World?

Given the Lindens' hell-bent determination to make it "go Web," perhaps nothing can be done about it.

But it is worth thinking what you get when you webify the world. Do you want to be in it then? If you are on the web, are you in the world?

Destroying User Content to Make SL "Like the Web"

Wow here's something to make me sputter -- the Lindens' plan to muck around with the viewer, like Windlight, includes concepts that could utterly destroy very basic activities in business and socializing in SL.

You wouldn't know about this unless you were a very astute student of the SL-DEV list (the elite one, not the grungy one) and also followed what M was saying, and Jacek "Go Around the People" Antonelli's blog, in response to Dusan's blog. Basically, Jacek discounts M's claim that there is a "new viewer to ease new user experience" -- it's not new, he says. It's just some embellishment on the old viewer that might make it easier to use (the notions for this, if they are in the realm of the existing geeky Lindens and Torley Linden, who has lost touch with reality, will not be "easier" for anybody, new or old).

Jacek is just splitting hairs, and it's not interesting to debate. But what he does say in refuting M Linden is that the Lindens' "Landmarks & Navigation" project may be what they *do* insert into the viewer. Alarm bells went off for me, because I remember seeing something about this on the God-awful wiki some time ago, and thinking "I better to something about this" but it was one of many things. I remember seeing that a group of graduate students were being hired by SL to work on tagging and such; but this seems to be an actual firm now hired by LL as an outsourced viewer-fixer.

I was appalled just reading it, and put in some wiki contributions right away -- I hope others will do the same.

While they claim this is "Food for Thought" only, and would "have to be done carefully," this outside firm -- and their Linden fans and FIC boosters -- are mounting these concepts precisely because *that's how they think*. What their vision involves is "How to make Second Life like the Web". And that's where they go wrong. Second Life doesn't *need* to be like the web! It is not a web page. It is a world. It has people in it; not texts and pictures. It is about interacting, not merely "accessing content" that you consume alone.

So what they want to do, God save us, is 1) remove landmarks from inventory and 2) deprecate, i.e. erase and get rid of, User Picks in favour of 3) putting in a browser-type function with saved bookmarks.

Yes. That's right. Remove User Generated Content. That these Web-mimicking monkeys should consider sacred, but don't.

Ducking Rights

I've been sort of goggling at this huge, baggy, vacuous interview that Robert Bloomfield has done with Philip Rosedale (Philip Linden), whose content-free status he has earnestly sought to cover up by inviting some of his close friends to comment on various facets of this interview, taken at SLCC. I guess it's because Rob, not content to be an accounting professor in RL and a sort of Ed Sullivan for the Metaverse with his reallly big Metanomics sheeew, wants to play journalist and interviewer as well. Metanomics has gotten more and more hypey, however, and untethered from anything related to economics as time goes on (they are now deep into education, which I guess kinda sorta relates to the SL economy because edu types buy sims and that helps the Lindens' bottom line -- and the gown is supposed to trickle down to the town, too.

Philip was looking as cute as a button as usual at Picnic interviewed by Mixed Realities' Roland Legrand, in a white jacket with large black-bordered lapels that looked like it was made on that cartoon sim but probably cost a fortune in a RL boutique. But he didn't say anything new. I mean...not..a...thing. I almost felt embarrassed for the guy, except that he seems as enthusiastic as ever. If you were wondering what Philip does now all day, well, I thought he was working on the viewer, or on easing the interface. So it came as kind of a shock to learn from Dusan and the Blob that M Linden has farmed out that task to an outside design firm. Wow. Well, the Lindens couldn't get it right, I guess they had to do that but...wow.

We've all been over this ground, of course, and we all know what I think -- get rid of that ugly drop-down blue thing and put the search up in the middle and ditch "search all" which returns loads of junk anyway -- keep it all in tabs like amazon.com I shudder to think what a geeky nouveau VW design firm will do with this viewer. It's of course annoying to be working on an orientation infohub and know that anything I write about the viewer now will be OBE'd soon -- but then, we're used to that experience in SL all the time, Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football.

Still, I miss Philip, because Philip always seemed to me more approachable. AFAIK, M Linden has never come in world for any kind of town hall or office hour or anything, and I think that's wrong. All the other Lindens come. And, there's now to be a T Linden (not to be confused with that long-ago-canned T-bone Linden) who is going to be called grandly Senior Vice President of Product (does that leave Robin Linden Senior VP of Marketing of Product that she doesn't get to have a say in as much now? How does that work?)

Out of all the stuff Philip has been saying, one reiteration that -- not surprisingly -- Benjamin Duranske was assigned to comment -- is the most disturbing. Again, he's not saying anything new when he tells you that law will be decentralized, there won't be any Magic Law of the Metaverse, just local regulations that will govern servers that are in those countries. This is awful stuff, and of course -- again, not surprisingly -- Benjamin Duranske is acquiescing because I don't really think he has a very healthy respect for the concept of international law and the rule of law. Given his prosecutorial zeal about gambling and investments and his conservative and cautious commentary on IP law around SL, he's more about rule-by-laws than looking to push the envelope for any sort of more enlightened international norms. I find this more and more these days, and I wonder what they teach in law school...

E-DUCT-ation: The Pipes, The Pipes

So there I was, trying to do my Connectivism homework this weekend when...but wait, you wondered how I "figured out what the assignment was"? Well, finding out what the "homework" is could be done just as well by laying out a fleece to see if the morning dew would appear upon it or playing Bible roulette, but you can also just click around on the teachers' blogs, as they have no shortage of papers and podcasts and whatnot to follow. Checking through email (I had the firehose shut off, but it started spraying again for reasons that bewilder me), I found that on September 4, George in fact did provide links to a) a course line b) the Moodle c) a wiki (*holds up cross*) so for the real eager beagers and get-aheads you could have seen the essentials of a crib sheet back then. But, somewhere -- and don't ask me where -- I found what I will call a Car Talk by the Click and Clack of Connectivism, George and Stephen, on ustream.

I listened to them being interviewed by a guy who seemed impatient after each question, who held up the microphone for them to talk for awhile, then abruptly said "cool!" each time and tried to move them along -- he wasn't listening. For some reason, of all things, he began to Car Talk with the Skeptic thread started by one Catherine Fitzpatrick. Good Lord, these people don't get out much. I would figure a thread like that would collect some hardy resonances, and then be buried in the avalanche of threads from 2000 joiners. But, that's not how life is online, where people live in rigid conformity and conservatism, wrapped up in the guaze not only of Netiquette but notions of feel-good and positive discourse that makes you feel like you're either at a Club Med bunnyhop or a Lifespring seminar in the 1980s. You keep glancing nervously around for Tony Robbins and perhaps some health shake. But instead of engaging with the actual content of the ideas and questions I had, they were all marvelling over the phenomenon itself of somebody just not believing. Somebody just stepping up and saying "I don't buy this." As good Connectivists who have a kind of dutiful nod to democracy and freedom (but not really), they have to concede skepticism and critics. But, as we learned from Stephen, you don't have to engage them, because it's important just to get everybody to believe first, to explicate the doctrine, and then you can parse it later with those who seem particularly competent -- but not every passing doubter.

Stephen distinguished himself by saying that his politics were based on his science. Now, I know a politics based on science like that. It's called "Marxism". I look forward to hearing what Stephen's politics are, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that he has the usual collection of lefty college beliefs playing out with predictable patterns, all as if they are original and not all traced back to Chomsky lol.

But as I was saying, I had taken some notes on Car Talk, and also read an essay of George's that ended with something like "or is this all self-amusement" (answer: yes!), and was getting ready to blog it, when WHOOPS my computer crashed. Ah, connectivism, that fragile and flimsy flower that blooms for an hour in paradise and then is no more. I bet they have a backup plan for when they really take over with Connectivism to have all kinds of redundant systems to make sure connections aren't lost.

I also found a guy who had sort of critiqued George and digested him a little bit better than he digests himself -- but all this is gone now. At some point I'll dredge through History, but as they used to say at one cult workshop I attended, "what sticks, sticks."

And here's what sticks:

The Magic Box

I'm finding the Connectivism thing to be a total hustle so far -- more vaparous Web 2.0 hoo-hah, dressed up as "science". I'm still waiting to make up my mind as to whether it is a big pretentious bore or more dangerous and destructive (it's complicated enough so that it may not catch on widely, and that's a boon for us all : ) )

I simply believe that you don't have 1,900 of anything that becomes something coherent other than the Pied Piper of Hamlin leading people to their doom, or some other demagogue with the fanatically blind in his trail. The idea that people are "learning in a course" is a vast fiction. Er, please don't teach heart surgery or even international affairs with these, uh, "methods" -- mkay?

Start with the Moodle Muddle -- it's just an old bulletin board with stuff on it, a forums, people's icons, the ability to have "multimedia" blah blah but glorified by being "free" and "opensource" and having like zillions of people joining it and translating it into other languages (sure, if you have enough Marxist professors of digital arts flogging it, each one can force 100 or 1000 of their students every year to sign into it at least once just to get graded, most likely, so they have a captive audience.

There was one of the most hilarious "mind maps" or "technology maps" or whatever the hell it was that I found to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. And thinking about that ridiculous Rube-Goldberg machine for "e-learning," I suddenly saw a flash, and I'll try to explain it.

My God, it's all pipes. Just pipes. Er, tubes, if you like. Really. And these plumbers are trying to pass off the pipes as important as the content inside, and pass off the joints -- the Connectivity -- as the magic feature -- hence Connectivism that is better than the content, too. What a load of crap!

This system appears to be more radical than Constructivism, which basically says that little Johnny or Janey constructs their own world, as child-centric little darlings, never referencing any sort of culture, tradition, religion, morals, or even great works of literature -- God forbid, as such things would be oppressive, white, hegemonic, or evil and imperialist. They "learn" as they "construct a reality". But...This is still too stilted and institutional (!) for some real extremists, hence the idea that everything is just a lot of neurons connecting and firing randomly, and it's all good. Nobody in charge. No experts. No students. Everyone just learning in a sort of connected plasma of feel-good. Can't resist it, because that's *just how things are* so *adapt or die*. Pretty awful stuff!

But to understand all this better, let's remember the world before the Internet.