Quote of the day
Bartholomew GallacherPeople are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if the light is from within.
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Fix SL, damn it!
I’ve had enough! Since I joined SL back in 2006 the service only went down, down, down the hill… reliability is laughable, key components (asset server, transactions, teleports) are getting worse and worse from day to day, and they fail to work when you need them most!
I wonder if in my lifetime Lindenlab is going to be able to fix all those annoying bugs or if they are going to go bankrupt. Argh!
Happy rezday to me!
Finally! Today is my first rezday, meaning I entered Second Life exactly one year ago.
And boy, what a ride it has been. Considering that I am now somewhat of an SL oldie already and still don’t have intentions to leave this platform at all.
World of SL
There’s been a planet for SL based news around for some weeks already, I forgot the URL, but now again stumbled upon it, so without much further adago I present you World of SL. It belongs to Tao Takashi aka mrtopf.de.
Lame pickup lines
Something that just happened to me at Phat Cat’s:
[13:01] X: Are you a homo?
[13:01] Bartholomew Gallacher: Now what’s that kind of a pickup line? That’s lame.
[13:01] X: Jeez, apologies
[13:02] X: you just look like a raving woofter
[13:02] Bartholomew Gallacher: If you’d taken the short time to look at my profile you’d know that I’m partnered up with a lovely wife.
[13:03] X: Beared wedding if you ask me
The nerves of some people; such behaviour cries out for "mute me for a lifetime!"
How misunderstandings come to live
There’s an article in the Information Week, citing Mitch Kapor:
But virtual worlds have a long way to go until they become mainstream, Kapor said. They need the equivalent of the Web application server
— building content in virtual worlds is still equivalent to
hand-coding Web pages and code. They need an improved user interface;
Second Life is dificult to use. They need to be decentralized, to
permit creation of private spaces — the equivalents of intranets and
extranets.Linden Lab is taking steps to decentralize. It open-sourced the client
in January, and plans to allow people to put up their own servers and
attach them to the main Second Life grid. They’re moving to eliminate
proprietary protocols. The company is driven to do this by the
conviction that its biggest threat is not an existing company, but
rather a future virtual world that runs on those principles.
So far nothing new, the server side is going to be opensourced sometimes, nothing new. The people of The Daily Galaxy wrote an own entry about SL, covering this theme, too, also linked back to Information Week and wrote this:
Linden Lab is currently moving towards decentralization. Since January,
they have allowed people to put up their own servers and attach them to
the main Second Life grid. They also want to eliminate proprietary
protocols.
See the difference? Something not in the original article about already connected private servers to the grid, which is not stated at all in the original article. So – this information is false, plain and simple, as a comment states under this entry.
But guess what? This is now making its round in the blogosphere, another blog is now referring to the Daily Galaxy and stating:
Have I missed something? Do any of you know anything about personal servers attached to the Grid?
Nope, you just missed to validate at the source if this news is true or not. Of course, untrue, but this is how rumors come to birth.
What I hate: howling in clubs
It happens at some places more or less, depending where you go to dance: howling of the guests. Some consider it fun. Well, it is – the first time. The second time you can live with it, but the more and more often you hear it, the more annoying it gets over the time. Why? Because it’s ruining the atmosphere, it is rude behaviour and most people over the grid just use the same two or three sound clips that are around to do it.
Oh, and many don’t only howl, no, when many howl the macro also makes big ASCII art of wolves and or other things in open chat, too, while howling. So that when you’ve disabled noise you still know that they’re howling. Arg!
One of the best kept secrets: Philip Linden’s office hours
While most of the Lindens have office hours on a regular base and you can look them up on the web, it is of course some kind of different matter, when you want to meet the CEO of Lindenlabs, Philip Rosedale better known as Philip Linden in world.
Yes, he’s got office hours, too, but normally on short notice. You won’t find them on the schedule, you’ve got to lookup his profile and take a closer look at the tab "1st life" – that’s the place to look for this information. Today there were indeed scheduled office hours at 9 AM SLT at his office in Waterhead.
So, since I still remembered the masses of avatars attending the technical town hall meeting, I was one hour before there. Well, nothing happened at all, I just sat there and talked with my friend via messages. I wondered if he really is going to show up or not, but around perhaps 9:03 AM SLT he showed up and sat down, rezzed some chairs for other guests to sit down, if they come by, and was ready to talk.
I talked a little bit with him for over 5 minutes, no other guest showed up at all, so he put his office hours in the motto of the day of the Second Life login and other avatars began to show up, too. Well, the office hour lastet about one hour, it was nice to chat with him and in the end there were perhaps 10 avatars at all. You should expect really more when the CEO of Lindenlabs moves in world and is at his office, but what the heck, it was far nicer that way.
So here’s a little picture from the first minutes of the office hours, when I was still alone with him (just click on the thumbnail): 
The talk was nice, he wanted to know different things, for example where Lindenlabs does right, where it does wrong, which features we’d like to see in upcoming versions and so on, but the whole bunch of us talked not only about Second Life.
Some points being discussed and insights were:
- Philip Linden likes putting his office hours in that kind of manner like described to get a random set of people,
- he tries to become an in world art collector,
- he’s been happy so far from the technology perspective with what they’ve been able to achieve, though he did not really knew when exactly this would all take off and he’s happy that at least now people get why the virtual world is so important,
- when comparing his company with a baby, he considers himself a very proud father,
- another attendee raised the point that when accounts are cancelled or deactivated that the group membership of the avatar should cease, too, he considered that a good point,
- he asked how our Second Life experience was this weekend in terms of lag and other potential problems,
- he thinks that Lindenlabs needs a better survey tool to know when lag and stuff is getting better or worse,
- he’s unable to reverse gravity in a sim,
- I asked him if he feels that there’s now a shift toward more companies entering Second Life, he answered that he doesn’t know, he thinks the majority of signups by a long shot are normal people, but there are a lot of new biz apps in SL and they don’t really know since they don’t have any sort of relationship with companies in SL,
- he thinks it’s great to have creative energy, people trying to find new stuff and that in any case marketing and advertising in SL will be more interesting than in RL,
- he stated that it is hard to find the right balance between fixing and developing – true,
- I mentioned to him as a possible new feature the group IM muting, he said he is going to consider that
and much more things. It was really interesting to get in touch with him and discuss Second Life with the founder of the whole show, and it seems he really wants to know the unfiltered opinion of the community and what is going well and what they should make better. That’s a good policy to run a company in my opinion.
About virtual rape
Wired.com asks: "Virtual Rape is traumatic, but is it a a crime?" Well, it is written behind the background of such a thing happening in Second Life and the Belgian police investigating it right now. The author of the article disagress that it is a crime, to quote her:
Rape is the ultimate perversion of sexual intimacy. Like sex, rape has
mental and emotional elements that go beyond the body and the damage to
the mind and spirit generally takes much longer to heal than the body.But that doesn’t make the psychological upheaval of virtual
rape anywhere near the trauma of real rape. And I can’t see us making
virtual rape a matter for the real-life police.It’s a shitty thing to do to someone. But it’s not a crime.
What myself always strikes is, of course: why the heck don’t the people just logout or turn their computer off? But ok, just a thought, either way, it’s not happening in real, it is still affecting the psyche of the raped person strongly.
Well, the first documented virtual rape ever happened back then in 1993 in a MUD (multi user dungeon), a text based form of online games, very popular back then and still available today. They were considered hightech back then and hip, today they are lowtech but still have their fanbase.
Here is a paper from about the implications of such things by Richard MacKinnon.
A feature I’d like to see: +V
I’ve attended last week a panel discussion with some politicians and around 60 attendees. A feature I’d really like to see for such kind of events in Second Life to handle such events better is available in IRC for over a decade and more already: +V, meaning giving voice.
What’s "voice" meaning in IRC? Simple. IRC is a channel based way of online text communication. Some channels tend to be rather large and for many open source projects e.g. it’s still a very important way to discuss stuff and things. The channel could be compared to open chat in Second Life.
All men are created equal, but not all are equal in IRC. Every channel has its owner. The owner can per default put all other channel members on mute. This means, they can type what they want, but it’s not going to show up in the channel at all. This does not hinder them from sending private messages to others, but the channel is muted first.
If someone should be allowed to speak to the channel, the owner sets the voice flag, +V. This allows then the voiced member to speak to the channel.
That’s a feature I’d really like to see in Second Life, parcel based, of course. It would make discussion events much easier to handle. How? Well…
The moderator of the discussion has voice. The discussion members on the panel have voice. The audience after the event started? Has no voice. So they need to direct their questions to the moderator in the room. He decides then, which questions should be asked and either asks them on behalf of the avatar or gives the avatar voice for the time to ask. If then it gets to open discussion the moderator could either give voice to all (bad idea) or make a list of speakers and give them voice one after the other.
This sounds perhaps a little bit on the harsh side, but would really help to handle open discussion events, where not all people are on the civilised side, quite more efficiently and squashes spamming in open chat very well.