Prokofy Neva

I continue to puzzle over why the Lindens allow one resident to take over all the public highways in this way. It is widely believed that Lindens approve this scourge of the Mainland, or that they like the free load testing that they can just get done for themselves. But talking to Lindens who work on sim seams and such, I discover that in fact they have no need of these free load tests and don't need anything "research" like this at all. So it's a mystery. Part of the problem is that the Lindens don't know how to say "no," given Philip's original vision of the Mainland as merely a kind of sandbox where everyone would get to experience the joy and thrill of *cough* getting along with one's neighbours. These vehicles do not add life to sims, but add menace and mayhem. There are too many of them. They come too frequently. They almost never have people in them. They crash and go on lawns and into stores and homes. Worst of all, they are always out of character. The bus rides on the water. The railroad car caroms down the road. The Trojan horse runs on a city sim. The jalopy burns up the bridle path. They seldom fit the theme of the sim or area at all and are just a ruination of immersion. I'm for banning them completely, or implementing a policy as was done with ad farms, where several individuals tried to take over Second Life as 16 m microbarons: limiting the number of vehicles on the grid by any one owner, and no fair having alts.

Throughout my entire Second Life (eight years today!) I've always heard Lindens solemnly tell me that we must Avoid Collisions. That if a sim is acting up, it's probably because we have thingsg colliding. That we should not put chickens in coops because it makes them bang again static objects as they wander and all that physics dings the sim's performance. Always and everywhere, we try to remove colliding objects using the estate menus where you can see them -- pets, other automatic things moving. We try to keep the number of those colliding things down because they add to lag. So now along comes this Pathfinding thing, and I have to wonder (since you didn't mention it in your essay here) what all those collisions are going to do. Here are pets that are designed to deliberately wend their way through things, and likely they're going to collide on the sides of things on their way, no? How do you see this playing out?

I love it when SL pictures are this crisp, it would be great to know what graphics card this person uses to get these results.

No, it's not about land ownership, single owner or group. It's about land settings that don't work that used to work. I've been in SL eight years. These checkoff boxes worked differently in the past. The whole point of group rentals is that they must be in a group -- otherwise you a) can't get the group tier bonus and b) can't have roles in the group that apply to the land, like some getting the ability to ban, others not, some getting the ability to deed and sell objects, others not, etc. etc. This is been in wide practice in mainland rentals for ages. If you put your land on only group-set, then somebody can set prims on it, but you can't apportion different roles as you can on group-owned land with different levels of access to the land. And no, I'm not going to set up roles that have no build. That's not the solution. In a rentals group, you have to have people be able to build. And I as I've explained, I'm keeping the group open for the convenience of tenants and friends. A checkoff box that doesn't work to do what it says it does has a bug, and is not "a feature request".

It sounds like you might have to move to a private island if your shows are the paramount issue for you, but then you'll have a $1000 set-up fee and $295 a month tier unless you find a used island for grandfathered $195 and a lower set-up. You could try buying another full mainland sim, but it gives you really no more rights over the land -- you still only get the 40 avatars of space, and you get the problem of ugly builds or grief builds still by your namers. On mainland as distinct from islands, there's the issue of the "child agents," when you have avatars looking into the other sims nearby, that can cause lag. I still like mainland better because it's geographically contiguous and people just exploring and roaming can find you serendipitously. You noted the idea that someone gave you the idea that just your server was "stressed". Actually, there are 4 sims on every Linden server -- or more -- so you have unwitting "neighbours" -- your server neighbour, not the contiguous sim you see inworld, but some random server somewhere else. This has been a big issue throughout SL history. Because a laggy club or somebody with a zillion pets and scripts burning can be parked with you as your neighbour. And frankly you with the club and 40 avatars are then lagging out some Mom and Pop who might only have a farm and nothing else. But this isn't a static situation -- think of the SL grid as a lot of spinning tops that are constantly being moved around, falling over, being restarted. So the Lindens can and do move "stressed" sims around to less lagged out servers or newer servers, even though we all know "they don't do classes any more" (that means they simply don't describe their product in that way, but of course, there are newer and older servers). On your end, you have to reduce lag by doing all the usual housekeeping: o get rid of unnecessary scripts -- scripts that say "hi, I'm online," mailbox scripts, avatar scanning scripts, security orbs, these are all laggers o get rid of high pixel textures -- if your texture is over 256 or 512 and getting into 1024, then it can lag the sim many times more o attachments -- people with hair, scripted shoes, etc. can lag the sim -- go and read the wiki on all the stuff about lag. Don't take "tell your neighbours" as an answer from the Lindens. Customer service refuses to help on griefing, they tell you to file an AR. So get a group of people filing them, because that gets their attention. You are not required to endlessl put up with no-show neighbours with grief objects -- keep mass ARing it until the Lindens get rid of it. They will. Use some of the techniquese like muting objects and turning off particles to get rid of the view of griefing and it will feel less stressful. Check out my office in Alston for more help cards.

I've replicated this bug. Thoughts? I seem to recall this is a relatively new problem. There may have been a JIRA on it. The purpose of the check-off box for build on the land menu having two components -- "everyone" and "group" -- is to enable you to close your land to building only buy a group AND also close it even to the group that the land is set to. This is obviously vital to rental homes, malls, various group projects. Yet it doesn't work, leaving a vulnerability for griefing.

Actually, there's every reason to assume a third-party bug tracker will fail, just like every other attempt to make any other third-party governance thing really work (like the community councils on the mainland, for example, or even arguably the whole TPV enterprise). And there are two reasons for this: a) Just as in high school, the football jocks and cheerleaders took the class president and government positions because they were popular and others couldn't be bothered to challenge them, then did nothing except organize a snack bar for themselves, so in the rest of life -- people hate putting in the time and effort on governance, and so they get what they get. b) The Lindens have already deftly and smartly pre-empted any third-party drive by coopting some of those with already signed contributor agreements (willing to use their real names? Have a CC on file? What were those rules?) and certain special "helpers" (what were the criteria for them?) and letting them view others' bug reports. Clever! This is Rob Linden's dream of elevating the "good citizens" on the JIRA to leader status, something I opposed because I didn't think the criteria was transparent or fair. It doesn't matter what I think. The Lindens already picked their friends who do get to see bug reports, and you aren't on that list, and I, all the more so, am not on that list: http://blog.nalates.net/2012/09/10/sl-news-week-37/#more-8492 I still think it's worth it for a group of interested bug trackers to make a group and a web site anyway, despite these very big obstacles.

Open source code ecosystems and app ecosystems are really the same in their culture. I've followed both of them extensively. They have the same morals and laws and beliefs. The app ecosystem that proprietary companies like Facebook or Apple set up with app engineers is really very much like what Linden Lab has created, with its hybrid of proprietary server code and open source viewer code. The culture is really very similar. And again, in open source in general, the ecosystem really only exists for the traveling nomads who feel like working on something -- until they don't. Like Diaspora*. Like some rental script or old TV script in Second Life. Same result -- users, customers in the dark, up a creek. You can liken USG, commerce etc to sort of "apps" like the i-phone apps, and I get the metaphor, but I would submit that it still suffers from the same cultural problems: http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2010/11/10-reasons-why-you-dont-want-to-adapt-geek-open-source-culture-even-if-you-use-open-source-tools.html You can continue the discussion there if you like.

When you say "we," apparently you mean only coders, or only those cleared by an in-group of power users? You're on the record as saying this: "Under no circumstances should support have ever told users to 'go post on bug <n> on the Jira'. I don't know when this started, but it was just silly to have these bewildered non-tech types show up and say "me too!". But...why not? A user who is motivated enough to report a bug and even understand a bug and replicate it is perfectly capable of posting a report. It really isn't rocket science. The "bewildered non-tech types" can follow simple instructions if m motivated because they, too, use Second Life and they, too, are affected by bugs. The JIRA needs to be open to all. I see from Nalates blog that in fact an in-group still has access to it or at least some kind of bug reporting in the new regime? http://blog.nalates.net/2012/09/10/sl-news-week-37/#more-8492 This isn't scientific.

Actually, Qie, we DO need that. Just like when I was documenting that share-bear bug with the returns, I had to test it many, many times, even demonstrating it inworld to others who were skeptical. Especially in a situation where you only see a behaviour some of the time, you have to test it with controlled batches. And in fact I always keep rental boxes paid by myself so I can see what is happening to them with sim resets and the like. The problem is in the sim, sure, aren't they all? Oh, except when they're in my "outdated consumer router"! But there's something then *interacting* with that problem in the rental script, a timer, a something, that might be nudged to accommodate the new server bug. Or whatever. I have no idea. Anyway, please return to that other thread in Scripting about the rental box issue with any further thoughts. It happens enough times to be of concern. Others have found it too. I will try to get them to post. As for the ecosystem -- the problem is, the ecosystem doesn't exist. Say, do you have a problem with Diaspora? Do you still want to use it? Well, good luck. That project died and went to VC heaven. It was given to "the community". So call the "community" and get your alternative to Facebook working, mkay? I dare say that the Apple, even proprietary, does not hide bug reports because it's bug trackers and forums resemble nothing like the Second Life "ecosystem". That's because the purposes of an i-phone are pretty 2-dimensional -- you make phone calls, send a picture of your cat to Facebook, make a reminder to yourself, turn on your subway app, look at Yelp -- it's like a pocket Google and social media thing, but not really where you live and move and have your being. In a 3-d world, you are existing more in the round in 3D and there are a zillion issues. There are purely technical problems like whether occlusion works or whether an avatar's gaze into the next sim at the child thingies causes a whoosh of bandwidth suckage or not (that last of the big bug discussion -- I am summarizing). But there are *governance* issues in abundance -- privacy, business, intellectual property, etc. etc. Many bugs concern just those governance/society issues where the emotions run the most high and notions of how economic and world systems should be wildly differ.

Der, I'm posting in Second Life Server. So, nu? The server code is not open sourced, herr. The viewer is, derr. But there is no indication that *shutting down the mutual view of each other's bug reports* is the same thing as "stopping development of *server* code. The JIRA, after all, was used for reporting bugs both in the open sourced viewer AND in the server code, with the latter arguably being its more important function because we were solely dependent on Lindens to then do something about the bugs, there was no TPV alternative. Oh, dear. Ayn Rand and Kropotkin?! So you confess that the JIRA was an anarcho-syndicalist operation?! I thought as much! Vot takiye pirozhki! As for "extolling the virtues of greed," that's nonsense and not worthy of taking up space here to rebut.

I've already made it abundantly clear on my posts here and on my blog that the shutting down of the public view of the JIRA and its interactivity is a bad thing. And it is indicative of what happens in an open source cult. The notion of what is "technical" is a political one. And there's nothing wrong with that, so it should be remain open and free to comment on. Those who care about public discussion of bugs should make a group and an alternative JIRA.

Oh, I see what you mean. You mean the dollar listing of an item on the Marketplace for those who want to pay with a credit card in dollars. But is the gap really that big? I'd have to check. Obviously, they have to use some standard rate to make that dollar determination. Do they change it often in keeping with the fluctuations on the LindeX? And are you sure it really is so different? Because in order to assess the dollar equivalent, you have to calculate in the commission and the cashout fee for sending it on PayPal. After you do that, you see what the Linden is really worth. The question really has to be examined scientifically and I'm really glad you flagged it. If the new Steam people are going to tend to buy things on the Marketplace with dollars instead of Lindens, then this has to be watched, and the commission may go up to satisfy a potential demand from Valve for a cut. But if Steam players get SL accounts and put a credit card on it, why wouldn't they buy Lindens to use in world and then spend those on the Marketplace, too? It's a question of how they will be steered, I guess.

Actually, the answer I got on this was that I put it in the wrong sub-category. The rule appears to be that if there is a category like, say, RENTALS, and it has sub-categories like DEVELOPED and UNDEVELOPED land, you have to stick it in a sub-category, and can't put your listing and its enhanced ad in that top category. I guess that makes sense but I wonder if it is fairly policed.

The claim that Lindens were "shutting down server development" merely because they shut down the *view* of multiple bug reports and removed interactivity was never logical or justified. You didn't attack that as off topic, however. There isn't much more to say about the Lindens closing the JIRA because...it's closed now. Make your own JIRA. So the discussion is about the larger issues, and in that sense, my critique of the problem of open source cultishness is relevant here. My banning from the JIRA isn't a good thing; it's an example of the failure of this "science". If a person reporting a bug in good faith that is acknowledged as a bug by both the original coder and by employee no. 2 as a real bug is then hounded off the boards because another Linden likes the bug effect and think removal of it is a feature-removal request, then we've illustrated the heart of the problem.

Yeah, I understand the literal meeting of the word "orthogonal". But in our context, it's a cult word that was popularized by the Lindens and caught on among the scripters. I watched this phenomenon over the years. I have never heard the word "orthogonal" before or since, outside of math class...until of course I began to listen to the speeches of Alec Ross, head of "Innovation" for the US State Department -- and of course he picked it up from Silicon Valley. Philosophy and politics are areasof human thought that don't easily lend themselves to the reductiveness of math and science, so saying you think some argument doesn't apply because it doesn't fit a rigid parallel notion and seems "at right angles" to "the point" is merely a way of saying "I disagree with you" and trying to make it "science". My conceptual arguments against open source *culture* are in fact relevant and very important because they help you to see why the JIRA was eventually closed, and why this was logical from the perspective of open source culture, in fact. I have always said in compressed fashion that open source=closed society; now we see it in living colour.

No, it's not "dishonest" or "hypocritical" to use open source scripts while denouncing open source *culture*. After all I buy Chinese-manufactured sneakers for my kids because they're much cheaper, but I denounce Chinese oppression of Tibet and dissidents. It's about normalcy and practicality, something that Internet-rooted people often have trouble grasping. I use this script because it's the only open source script there is in Second Life, and it's one that I was in fact able to get fixed. I'd love more competition in this arena, but it's always been an area where monopolists and greed hold sway. Several of the big rental script companies combine this service with a mandatory hookup to their website where they grab all your data and then give you the convenience of seeing your own data -- for a percentage cut. No thank you to the cut, and no thank you to the turning over of data to other people who scrape and manipulate it. This is a chronic problem in SL. I realize these are subtle concepts and they may go over your head but normal people in the real world are forced to make pragmatic decisions and work with what they have. The minute someone *else* makes a *different or better* open source script, I'll change to it in a heart-beat. The minute someone makes a rental system that doesn't involve me having to be tied to their website, I'll look at it. So often these great merchandisers go out of business -- the reason that open sourceniks often cite for their cult is that proprietary scripts are "locked" and when the people go out of business, you can't access them. True enough, except open source scripters go out of business or refuse to serve customers far, far more often, in my experience. This is also a research and learning exercise for me. I'm seeing that my worst criticisms of open source are in fact borne out. There isn't any "community" -- only a gaggle of neuralgic and easily-offended freaks who shriek if you criticize their script and criticize you of entitlement-happy dishonesty if you put out the request to fix a broken script in their realm. I don't need "coddling" nor do I expect even gruff answers to questions. I get them, in fact, because there are at least enough obsessives on the forums that within 24 hours someone will look at a script and answer a question, which says more about their need to feel needed than altruism, but no matter. But then what happens is that the inevitable occurs: patch or GTFO, there's the door, etc. etc. Qie tells me that I haven't answered questions -- by which he means I haven't run experiments on sims to replicate the bug to his satisfaction and documented it -- hours of work. Working with software *is* work. It should be paid work. The scripts shouldn't be copyable if someone can then get paid for that hard work. This is a religious matter, however, and I don't expect to change your faith precepts. But the real challenge for all of your castigating me for my critique of the open source software movement is to explain away your own intellectual dishonesty in championing open source, but not being able to explain why these open source devotee friends of yours, the Lindens, have so many times gone against the letter and spirit of your movement. They're the ones who took all your hard work and monetarized it in the creation of a special viewer sold to the CBS/Electric Sheep CSI sim projects, remember? Well, a dual license or some such thing enabled that, but the fact is, you were all chumps for working for the Man for free. They're the ones who took a viewer in an ostensible open source open development setting, and locked it up from view for 18 months (viewer 2) while they completely changed and ruined it, without only a few NDA'd elites being able to look at it, but certainly not the commuuuunity. They're the ones that suddenly said, sorry, 1.23 is dead, and we don't care that you're developing on that version your way, and we don't care that we declared "Dia de Liberacion" in our day and claimed Second Life could tolerate multiple, different versions of the software running on various servers. That affected every TPV and they had to scramble. They're the ones who have now closed off the interactive bug tracker, hobbling scientific collaboration and TPV work. All of these impulses came out of the CULTURE of open source. Every single one is dictated by the Benign Dictator. Yet you go on calling *me* intellectually dishonest for criticizing this software cult.

Oh, yeah? Sure there's a point, *if that's where the money is*. We all realize that. Digital sales are the hope of the Internet. The question is whether as a business-to-business agreement, LL has a fee it will pay Valve, that is a flat fee, or based on something else. Per sign-up? Per sale of digital goods? The deal with EA.com faltered *just on this question* if you read the New York Times. Valve didn't like EA.com just being content to selling the game and giving a cut to Valve of each individual subscription sale; if there were further downstream digital goods sold, they wanted a cut of that, too. EA.com doesn't have user-generated content in games, so it was game-god content. But the same issue applies to the user made content in SL. Valve will want a piece of this, in one way or another. Either per sale, or per Lindex exchange transaction, or something. Note that the CEO hired a Greek economist (!) to study virtual game currencies and sales on the margins of games. So he is serious about this. CTL?

I'm not sure if I follow you. Whether someone acquires Lindens inworld from others as gifts or as proceeds from sales, or whether he goes and buys Lindens, they are still worth the same amount -- the LindEx indeed determines that uniform value. I saw something Desmond Shang wrote to the effect that he believed that if you bought Linden dollars, you couldn't cash them back out -- you could only cash out those from other residents. But that's not true. The LindEx is a place to sell any Linden, regardless of where or how you got it. While technically true as a legal issue, SL isn't "play money". Technically, it's a license to access content. That license has a variable place on a marketplace. The $500 is still worth the same in dollars whether you cash it out or not. The only way for it to become a different value is if there is inflation, which used to occur, and still does occur I imagine, through Supply Linden coming on to the LindEx and printing and selling money. So $1000 might not be worth $3.70 when all cashed out and all fees paid to Paypal, but only $3.50 The way a cut could be taken is the way Linden Lab already takes it -- at the point of sale. They take out their percentage, and if you sell a thing on the marketplace for $100, you don't get that full $100, but you get $95 or whatever it is that is left over after the commission. The commission could increase, if LL has to pay Valve, or there could be a second, Valve commission. What you're saying seems to indicate that at the level of the LindEx, the cashout, Valve could charge something. That would only be the case of Valve takes over the LindEx. And I guess that's my prediction. They see the value of game currency exchanges. People want to exchange the World of Warcraft loot for some other game's guilders. And they can do that on a big game currency exchange, like ICM or the old Gaming Open Market which helped the Linden dollar acquire real value.

Thanks, I thought as much.

Well, look, there's no such thing in life as a free lunch. Either Linden Lab pays Steam for the privilege of listing its software there, or Steam finds Second Life so compelling it pays Linden Lab for that wonder. Somehow, I think it's the former. And...what is the nature of the deal? Does it take the form of cuts of sales? Either as a piece of the aggregate, or per sale? On the Marketplace? Through the view through sales? Or? Let's say an existing Steam customer wants to download SL and go on it and explore and shop. He doesn't make a new SL account, he uses his existing Steam account. That's the beauty and convenience of Steam. So...where/how does he buy Lindens? Presumably he downloads SL with a Steam Viewer. That Steam viewer takes him to the Lindex from the viewer, right? Or? How will it all work? Gwyn speculates that maybe we will all have a Steam log-on.

Gwyn's piece: http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2012/08/21/full-steam-ahead-for-new-horizons/

I got an odd message telling me that an item in my store was removed because of inaccurate advertising. Huh? It's a landmark for sale for $0 -- which is the cludge the Lindens themselves invented for us to all list land rentals. It's a landmark to $500 town house rentals in Free Tibet, a community I have with Asian themes. I can't figure out what is wrong with this, as it's like other landmarks to rentals that have been left still active. Huh? And where can you go to appeal these? Does filing a customer service relate to the Marketplace?

The story in the New York Times today talks about the Valve, makers of Steam, where Second Life will soon be listed in the "creation tools" section apparently, but in an environment of games perused by 40 million customers. The article mentions that EA killed a deal with Valve because they wanted revenue from the sale of digital goods. We don't know the nature of the deal LL is making with Valve now, but we should ask sooner rather than later whether this includes any notion of "sales tax" or even something as drastic as the LindEx going under the control of another company, or serving as some kind of Metaverse game currency exchange. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/technology/valve-a-video-game-maker-with-few-rules.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&hp Last year, the company had a dust-up with Electronic Arts over Steam’s policy of taking a cut of all revenue generated from a game, like the sale of virtual goods, even after a player has bought the game. As a result, E.A. is not selling a number of its latest games through Steam. Valve says that without such a policy, developers could easily game the Steam system by making all their software free and charging consumers for additional content later. It is worth pointing out, too, that E.A. last year began competing directly against Steam by starting its own online game store, Origin. My understanding of this news about Steam at first was that it is like a mere listing of SL in a directory. But it may be more than that. Does LL pay for this privilege? Does Steam pay for this privilge? Gwyn Llewelyn has an article about Steam in which she asks whether in fact we will all be logging on now via Steam.com or whatever. So what does this move entail?

1. Open Source culture is reprehensible. It's authoritarian. It's what led both to the awful practices and atmospherics that led the Lindens to shut the JIRA interactivity down; and it is that very culture as well that led to them shutting it down for their own reasons. All in all, a lose-lose. 2. I don't offer rental rebates, I offer 4 week discounts, that's different. But I'll take it as a generic premise. You can't compare a business practice that involves giving customers a break, like in a volume discount, with undermining the very concept of enterprise itself by giving away things for free. And that's what happened -- one scripter undermined the proprietary business of others by releasing a script into the wild, thereby undermining their business, but he and others who came afterward in this magical "community" of opensourceness didn't supply due diligence and customer support. THAT is the problem. The same thing happened with the free TV script released -- I could really bend your ear on that one! I'm all for scripts that provide basic "utilities" like opening doors or taking notecards or supplying a drink animation as being open source. That makes sense. No one is going to improve on them, really, and putting them into a proprietary situation only takes advantage of newbies. But rentals scripts, TV scripts, other kinds of things like that are more complex, have different features, meet different needs, and there is no need to undermine the *business of proprietary script making* which is *legitimate* and at the heart of Second Life, through ideological warfare via sabotage. THAT is what I'm talking about. A) if you go back to my blog post and see what I wrote, I didn't deal with anyone "rudely" -- that's your judgement B) if a script doesn't work and it is due to hasty and erratic work of a scripter, regardless of their niceness or friend status, you have to criticize them and tell them to do it over. The very "iterative" nature of scripts make all scripters rather casual -- they hastily hack through things over and over until it works rather than thinking through consequences. If they had to pay $10 for each blank script they opened, like texture designers have to pay $10 for uploads, it might make them more careful.