We’re now on the aftermath of the OpenSpace drama, as thousands of owners of OpenSpace sims, after weeping and moaning, are dropping their sims or consolidate them into “regular” sims. My friends report that almost a thousand sims were immediately discarded after the announcement (there is no market value for them), but I have no clue if that’s true: we’ll have to patiently wait for LL’s “official statistics” to see the results (most of these “sim counters” out there don’t take into account non-visible land, of course).

I think that dropping so many sims was a bit premature, though — after all, people will enjoy the same price until the end of the year, and OpenSpace owners could simply drop it at the end of December (timing it right so that they wouldn’t pay more monthly fees). But, alas, like the worldwide financial crisis, it’s the perception of a crisis that counts…

As usual, Linden Lab is counting on residents to calm down, bite the bullet, and focus on other things. They know that Second Life® residents have short memories: once a few thousands have left SL, nobody will remember any more what “OpenSpace simulators” are. As a proof, take a look at the vote count at the JIRA: after a huge exponential growth in votes in the first few days, it just got some extra hundred votes in the last week. People are forgetting.

In the mean time, I was looking for an answer for my own question on the last article on the subject — the question of why Linden Lab suddenly dropped the OpenSpace product and replaced it with something pretty useless. And by chance I have met Pavig Lok; we’re often together at the Thinker’s meetings (every Tuesday at 3 PM, in case you’re interested — it’s announced on the Linden Event list) and this was an opportunity to learn about his ideas. (...)
Read the rest of The Wisdom of Pavig Lok (4,468 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: openspace, pavig lok

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Imprudence is here. Oh yes, it’s Yet Another Second Life® Client, interestingly released a bit before Linden Lab announced a new Release Candidate for the “official” viewer (or, rather, they didn’t exactly announce it; we have to rely on old faithful Tateru Nino to fish the news for us and publish the release notes, since LL lately seems to “forget” to announce those things).

With a team lead by Jacek Antonelli, Imprudence has quite a different goal than the many other SL clients around there. Most focus on stability (from the days of the Nicholaz viewer and its many spin-offs) or sometimes on making the SL client a bit more useful (like perhaps the OnRez viewer, if you like their style).

Imprudence, like its name promises, has none to do with “stability” or “bug fixing” (although it does include most of the Nicholaz patches, as well as several bug fixes whose code was ages ago submitted to LL’s public JIRA but that LL never managed to incorporate into their viewer, for reasons unknown). It’s about bleeding edge technology, and a completely new user interface — one that is designed for veteran residents, not clueless newbies, who need powerful tools to build and programme in SL, not a crippled-down version.

So Imprudence is not “another SL client for the masses”. It’s the SL client of choice for the techies; for the geeks; for the nerds; for the artistes; and for everyone who likes to live dangerously in Second Life. You might think of it as the Harley-Davidson of Second Life clients: it’s way cool and powerful, and you’ll be dressing in leather jackets and wear spiky armbands while using it.
(...)
Read the rest of Walking on a tight rope with the SL client (3,592 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: imprudence, jacek antonelli, viewer

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In my case, I was lucky to be allowed to talk about a subject very dear to me (business in SL) and was honoured to be added to a professional journalist’s blog — Joan Kremer (aka Alas Zerbino in SL) — which made me much more uneasy than usually!

I’ll invite you to read my own article (The Future of Business in Second Life (an SL Bloggers Mix ‘N Match guest post) and, of course, add Joan/Alas’ fascinating blog about writing and writers in SL to your list of “must read” RSS feeds

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alas zerbino, arminasx saiman, blogger, joan kremer, mix 'n match, vint falken

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project. Thanks to Radar for the excellent article, and to Vint for launching this idea — Gwyn

Well, here we are in the exciting first SLbloggers Mix’n Match, and I’m stumped. I know I’m supposed to write about SOMETHING, but what was it?? Something management… something management.  Doh!! Oh, well… screw it, I’ll just write a little story and hope no one notices. Let’s see here…
Once upon a time… time… TIME!!! Once upon a TIME!! That’s it! I’m supposed to write about time management in SL!  That may immediately raise a couple questions in your mind, one is why time management, and the second may well be “why are you so qualified, you silly Radarvatar, to lecture me on time management?”  Good questions, both. I think I’ll try to manage my writing time such that I address the first so thoroughly that I run out of space and time to address the second question.  You see, it’s not so much that I’m an expert on time management as it is that I know what it’s like to have a laundry list of things to get done a mile long, and very little time to do them in.  And that’s really the answer to the first question - that in fact Second Life IS a second aspect of our lives, and we all have actual human, atomic person, meat puppet realities which take up most of our time and priorities.
(...)
Read the rest of Once Upon a Time (776 words)

© Radar Masukami for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: management, radar masukami, slbloggers mix'n match

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But how would M Linden react to crisis? We’ve finally figured it out. And, sadly for all of us, the answer to a crisis was nothing we expected.
(...)
Read the rest of Wrong Answer, Mr M Linden (6,791 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: openspace, void

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More info can be found on the Ill Clan’s site.

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Animation, loco pocos, machinima, tinies

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Why? The answer is pretty simple: a very strong reaction from the open source community with emphatic refusal to protect content in any way whatsoever, claiming “technical impossibilities”, and engaging in public humiliation of my own self with comments like the following:

If you fail to understand this, please, try studying encryption or network security overall. You’re missing a fairly basic thing.

Gosh, now that was a blow to my ego! I remember the Internet days before there was any concern on network security, and before people even thought of encrypting data channels, adding web-side and client-side digitally-signed certificates, or when even Certification Authorities (trusted third-parties validating digital certificates) were just science fiction. The days when network engineers talked to mathematicians to evaluate which encryption algorithms were mathematically sound enough to implement, and fast enough not to impact performance. That was decades ago. I was part of the process of seeing it all come together, slowly, over the years.

But arguing on the grounds of who understands encryption/network security better is not a discussion I wish to enter. It’s fighting with credentials, about who has more knowledge, about what is impossible or not, instead of discussing the whole issue: devising mechanisms to make content piracy harder, instead of arguing about who can write Triple-DES algorithms better in their heads (or implement it in LSL ). It’s a route I’m not interested to go; I’m not going to get old volumes out of my library just to argue minutiae that are academically interesting, but pointless to, well… make a point.

(...)
Read the rest of Stepping back from the analogue hole… (821 words)

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OpenSim is not a panacea that will magically give people cheap land, although people still look at it that way. OpenSim works, yes, but to make it work well, it requires expensive hardware (the kind LL uses), a lot of bandwidth (the amount that LL uses), and a staff of system administrators to maintain it properly (the kind that LL employs). What this means is that if you wish to get the same level of quality that LL provides on their grid, you’ll have the same costs. To be truthful to LL, it actually means more costs, since LL can leverage up those costs by distributing them (specially labour costs) over a far wider number of servers.

OpenSim is still interesting because there is a market for low-quality services. LL knows this or they wouldn’t be selling openspace (formerly known as “void”) sims. Alas, those have way too many restrictions, namely, in prims — OpenSim’s prim limit is not fixed, you set each sim with as many prims you wish (default is 45,000, but that’s just a number really — you can set it to a million if it pleases you ). Granted, more prims also mean more CPU, more RAM, and more bandwidth (more textures to load!), so there is a limit to what you can reasonably place on an old Pentium IV with 512 MB of RAM and a cheap 10 Mbps connection. The point here is that OpenSim gives you choices that LL doesn’t — not that it is cheaper.

In any case, the first and foremost issue about using OpenSim side-by-side with SL’s own grid is naturally: how do we get content from one grid to another? And while studying the available tools that allow this content transfer to work flawlessly (albeit with a lot of manual typing of commands, on old-style VT100 consoles), I suddenly stumbled upon a possible technical solution to prevent illegitimate copies of content. Put into other words, a rather simple and ingenious way to deal with the dreadful content pirates.

(...)
Read the rest of Plugging the Analogue Hole (3,836 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: content piracy

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This is such a simple rule… but so often misinterpreted. Or rather, people tend to interpret it according to their personal preferences (in the sense of what benefits them at the moment) and disregard the main rule of Economics when it doesn’t please them.

Join me in a journey across misinformation spread often around the Second Life® world, which I hopefully will attempt to debunk.
(...)
Read the rest of The Hard Facts About the Second Life® Economy (16,178 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | 32 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: economy

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But flipping over the coin of creativity and innovation, we have also Orange Island’s Innovation Week starting this Monday. This is pretty much a mix-up of evangelists, enthusiasts, visionaries, techies, and creative people who talk about Second Life and how its technology changed over time and influenced people to bring up with fantastic new concepts that were never possible before. Just imagine, three years ago nobody knew what a “mixed-media” event was! These days, we have them all the time — thanks to the intriguing use that people put to SL’s in-built voice, video, and streaming capabilities.

And finally we have this intriguing notion that SL is definitely truly global — an environment for creativity and innovation that skips all barriers of language and geographic distance. Very recently I was trying to hire another project manager for my company — a person living in the middle of the Atlantic. He asked me if being 1600 km distant from the offices in Lisbon (and 4000 km from the offices in New York) would be a problem. I’ve told him that he would actually be one of the “closest” people working with the two-person team in Lisbon (since almost everybody else lives further away), to his great relief and delight. Yes, for SL residents, the (real) world just became tiny, small — and interconnected.

(...)
Read the rest of Innovation Week, Internationalisation, And More Utterly Useless Devices (1,990 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: burning life, creativity, Google Translation, GUUD, innovation, innovation week, orange island, pirate, translation, translator

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