Second-Life

Basically, what the Lindens are telling us about open spaces sims, is that:

one normal sim runs on the core of a quad core server (e.g. Opteron), meaning 4 normal, full blown sims are running on a quad core normally.

An open spaces sim is 1/4 of a normal sim, so four of them are running on one core of a quad core server or 16 at whole, all of them put together serving the same prim count.

Being overused, the underlying maths about Open Spaces sims is that 1/4+1/4+1/4+1/4 is bigger than 1. Now that’s at least what the Lindens are trying to tell us, which I for myself don’t really believe at all.

Technorati : business, development, openspaces sims, second life

In this article I want to talk about some common prejudices the public has normally about Gorean roleplay, well the stuff I’ve encountered so far yet, and how it is for real or not.

1. Gor is for men just all about battling in shiny armour everytime while wielding big, expensive weapons and being proud of it. This is wrong. Normally real battles are mostly for members of the warrior caste, members of other castes tend either to carry weapons only for their job, like hunters, or for self defense, aside heavy armour is uncommon on Gor. Of course, the warrior caste is quite a proud caste, true. But Gorean role play is more than only battling all the time, in fact sims that tend to do only battles fast get a somewhat bad reputation in the community, because this is only one aspect of Gorean culture, an important one, that’s true, but you should not narrow it down on that only. The typical weaponry in the novels for a warrior is a sword and a spear while in SL it is a sword and a bow.
2. Being a kajira is just all about looking nice, obeying your master and having, sex, sex, sex. Wrong. Being a kajira involves quite many different stuff to do, like house hold chores and other stuff, sex is just one of the aspects about it, also not all kajiraes have a master, but are in ownership of a city. Of course, when you play a kajira, the possibility to get involved into role play featuring sex is there, especially when you are becoming a love slave. If you are playing other roles, though, it is not necessary, you can have it, but don’t need to have it.
3. All kajiraes are dumb. Wrong again. While many kajiraes tend to speak about themselves only in third person like “This girl likes to please.” and such, this is not necessarily required from them at all. Also the training a kajira needs to get at the beginning is one of the most elaborate and complicated you can get in Gorean role play.
4. There are only female slaves. Wrong. There are also male slaves around, called kajirus or kajirii in plural, but they are not so common like kajiraes.
5. Gor is just there for people who want to have easy sex all around the clock. Wrong. Actually it involes much more than that, though it is part of it, it is not the main part.
6. Masters love their slaves. Wrong. While many tend to play it that way and like it like that, this is something others, who are playing more accordingly to the books, despise, because it is against the natural order, with men being dominant and women succumbing to their whim. I guess there is place for both kind of play.
7. The caste system is static. Wrong. While you can be born into a caste, according to your abilities you can either raise or lower in the system if necessary or fitting.
8. All Goreans are dumb considering how long they live on that planet and they are still in quite some medieval state compared against the state Earth is already in. Wrong. There are actually quite decent people around, also people which try to invent new stuff and such and in some cases also quite some advanced machinery, but the development of new technology is being monitored firmly by the Priest Kings, which e.g. hinder the development of more advanced armor or weaponry. If there’s someone developing too much advanced stuff, expect the blue flame death to happen soon on that item. So most Goreans don’t even try their hands on that kind of development because they know the consequences would follow quite soon and fast.
9. Gorean science lacks in all kind of fields behind Earth great lengths. Wrong, just take a look at the physicians.
10. This is all sooo bad… Well, no one is forced to play in that kind of role playing universe, or is he? So all are there voluntarily and has its own reasons for being there, trying to get some fun out of it, which is the way it should be.
11. All lifestylers are quite fanatic about Gor and intolerant. Wrong, most I’ve met so far are a bunch of really nice people and take a relaxed stance on it.

More to come later.

The Lindens have recently announced a new preview of the SLim client, free for download. First you need to download a normal, special prepared, fully blown SL viewer, then you need to download the SLim viewer, too. Both are no leightweight downloads at the moment, so it wonders how “slim” SLim is going to be in the near future.

Technorati : client, second life, slim

This article has been wandering in my mind for quite some days now, since I’ve been taking recently a lightly interest in so called Gorean role play in second life. I am now over two years in Second Life, but never really paid any attention to it until now, so this is how the state of affairs is so far to me. So, without further preliminary, let’s get started where the meat is.

Why did I take an interest in Gor at all?

There are several reasons about it: first I was curious. Some friends of mine have been playing it actively for quite a while or started playing it in their Second Life some time, and most of them still do. Gor is by far the most popular kind of role play in Second Life. You just have to take a look at either the classifieds in SL only or take a look at a good running SL web forum, which has a section about role play. Expect by far the most questions there are about Gor normally. So Gor is a part of Second Life for many, which cannot denied and it is also quite popular. Then, on the other hand, Gorean role play has not the best image at all. In fact, most people consider it in reality some of the worst kind of role play available in Second Life (I guess, ranking slightly about child play), there are many common images and also prejudices around, like that in Gor all women are only slaves (kajiraes in their own language), needing to serve men at their whim and so on and on. Many consider it a nightmare for feminists, while other women are claiming that only through playing Gor they reached a level of satisfaction, which they would be unable to reach otherwise. Either way, the image the public has about Gor in mind is quite contradictionary, and if you talk with people who play Gor, most are quite fond of the role play and enjoy playing it great lengths. So, after all this time, I finally decided to investigate further and get a grip of the concept - or better underlying concepts of Gor - as a whole to be able at least to make my own opinion about the whole issue.

Linden Lab has a well known track of record for doing the wrong decisions to the wrong time, annoying the hell out of their paying customers frequently, not really listening to the needs and wishes of their customers, being bad at communicating decisions and overall bad customer service/care and limiting themselfes many times over and over. Still, Linden Lab has a good product, which is ahead its competition, which the people love and cherish and come back frequently, to invest into it and spend money into it. It’s what pays the bills.

The last few months there was not really happening anything in that kind of field, but now the Lindens did it, again and pissed off many paying customers great lengths.

In former times Linden Lab had high hopes in being profitable by selling premium accouns. This hope has been crushed completely. You don’t need it at all to play in SL nor you get anything really for it in return. So this is a product which gets quite few love and, being a shelf warmer.

The Lindens are finally getting serious and are going to axe out ad farms on the mainland really soon, starting in October. Possible, though, is licensed advertising. Way to go!

The new rumored thing about Second Life just turns out to be a another messenger. It mixes instant messages and the usage of voice, so you can remain online and reachable for all of your friends while not logged in using the normal, big fat client.

This has been a logical step in my opinion if you want to play in the field of big business and be reachable. There have been alternatives around, for quite some time, which play in the thin client business, like Ajaxlife or Slinked, but this is now the first one coming directly from Linden Lab and the only one which uses the voice capabilites of Second Life, too.

Well… how is this thing going to be adopted? I guess, it’s use will be not going to be so widespread, since if people really wanted to have something like that, they could have already used existing thingies like Skype for a long time and they have done that.

Second Life is growing again, which is a good thing. The concurrency level of logged in users is reaching new heights, so no one really knows why at the moment, and if it is going on like this we are going to have around 70K users logged in in two or three weeks. Nice.

What’s bad about is, is that the underlying architecture of the grid is still the same and while it’s been able to handle the normal loads now, it yesterday started to stutter badly, again. This hasn’t happened in such drastic manner for quite some time, now. I guess it’s really time that the new architecture, which is designed to scale more nicely, should be implemented and rolled out as soon as possible.

Well, what’s new anyway in the meantime in SL?

• Mono has been deployed to the whole grid. This means, that all LSL scripts now might run on this new engine, which makes computation of scripts up to 200 times faster than the former one. As a side effect, every script has now 64 KB of memory for data instead of 16 KB. But it seems that if you want to run Mono, you have to recompile the script for yourself. Old scripts are not going to be recompiled automatically, a thing, that perhaps might happen in the future, though, since it’s for sure not going to happen that both engines are going to be supported parallel for long, meaning the old LSL engine is going to fade out slowly. If you want to compile your scripts on Mono, you need a viewer of the 1.21-series at least.
• The Lindens have a new communication policy for their blog, it is undergoing a big relaunch at the moment in the background. While some are happy, that now Torley Linden cannot put up his “pink-green neon glowing junk of happiness” on the homepage anymore, others wonder what happened there in general. They are planning to change their ways of communication, again, well so far we have to see what is going to happen in October. For the meantime we have to live with it like it is.
• People are wondering which kind of product SLim is going to be and when it is going to be launched. So far, there are only rumors around despite the fact that Linden Lab recently applied for that trademark. Most agree, though, according to the application it is going to be some kind of messenger. This is exciting, because a new product is really something that might come in handy for Linden Lab to stand out against the less complex competition for an audience, for which Second Life is too complex, power hungry, whatever, in general not appealing enough. A first preview is expected though within the next couple of weeks. Makes me wonder… is this a project which has been initiated by Mark Kingdon aka M Linden or did the foundation for it already happen under Philip Rosedale’s reign as CEO still?
• The next big thing in the background might be the standarization of the protocol to build the intergrid, the thing at which they are working together with IBM.
• Copybot is supposed to get support for cloning prim attachments of avatars. I wonder, if this is ever going to really happen.
• Land prices still stay quite low. This is bad for land barons, who need to make money on sales, but good for the inhabitants and other content creators, too.
• Oldtimer Gwyneth Llwellyn ran an essay named “No more limits”, outlining some ways in which Second Life might develop in the future, for example more prims per sim (again), bigger or smaller sims than 256x256 meters, allowance of megaprims and getting rid of the limitations of LSL. Some of those might really happen sooner or later in the future.

The old fashioned votebox made by Alberto Linden

Some things in Second Life just die hard or not at all, even if they don’t serve any purpose anymore. For example, this vote box to the left was in former days quite a common sight in Second Life.

It is a scripted device, made by Alberto Linden, and consists of 13 prims. It was used in times before traffic (aka as dwell) was invented to measure the popularity of a parcel. People just voted for it, all boxes where polled once a day and that’s how they got their measures in former times. Parcel owners got some stipends out of it, if it was a popular place (or something/somehow like that). You could just take of a station standing somewhere a copy, so it was really easy to get one.