Prokofy Neva

Against, you forgot the most important thing: o Lindens may want to examine how editable and modifiable mesh is by second parties.

Translation: "I'm superior to you all and I'm going to make sure you all know it by posting a faux meta comment and engaging in faux self deprecation."

What's more important than the 1000 or so that might make an actual RL living from SL are the tens of thousands who make at least *something* -- maybe merely enough to pay for tier on a homestead or a 4096 m rental; maybe just some extra gas money. If mesh makes it impossible for those people to earn *at least something* they will leave.

How are those "building widget sales" coming along in Blue Mars, Daniel? Again, I'm raising the principle of the matter. It's silly to imagine that I'd oppose lower-prim houses made of mesh because...I want to rent more land with more prims. In fact, Philip is doubling the ante by increasing prim counts on sims, or so he said. And any land lord in fact wants lower prim houses to enable tenants to be able to decorate more. On most of my land, the tenants put out their own house. The idea that people only make criticisms based on some sordid self-interest is big in SL, and I guess you speak from experience. What's in it for you? Prims in Blue Mars are like...a fish needs a bicycle lol. I've yet to hear a simple answer to a simple question in the miles of hundreds of answers and repartees and barbed snarks here: can you or can you not edit and change another person's mesh? End of story.

Open source doesn't mean decency and solidarity. Au contraire. Blender is wonky and infuriating, and forces you to buy the manual. See above. Again, why aren't you learning Chinese or Russian in this global economy? Don't you worry about getting left behind?!

Change is what *you're* afraid of, Danball. Change that means people other than you and the others in your "skilled class" aren't the only ones in charge of the world. Yes, I realize that's a scary thought.

Look, that sort of snotty remark is exactly what I anticipate in my original answer to Jack below. Of course those *in* the class of coders and designers to benefit from this new technology are going to claim, as they always do, that their class doesn't even exist, or that it doesn't benefit -- that's always the gambit here. But of course there will be a widening gulf of haves and have-nots in SL and we all see that if we aren't in SL-dev or licking our chops to make a buck off this as others are. And duh, we all get that avatars are meshes. But hey, when was the last time you saw a t-shirt or dress for sale made in appearance mode? Except in my store, as a joke. The supplying of people with elaborate avatar attachments and skins and enhancement is a huge business and one rocked by a very small elite at the top who commandeer the viewable space on classifieds and Xstreet. THAT has been the result of "having mesh for a decade" duh. Such elitimism will be even more the case when entire sectors of prefabs and furniture and knick-knacks will be now not prim, and hey, not even sculpty, which was last season's Next Big Thing, but mesh. Let's not pretend this isn't what it is. It's like Daniel RavensNest (note correction!) constantly going on and on about how "you can so create" in Blue Mars because...he himself is selling some widget that lets you have some placebo of creation nothing like SL, and because he won't admit that in fact you have to a pro to work there, and quite the finicky pro at that. Let's at least see you guys argue this one out on the merits of the truth about it, that it is indeed a Linden windfall to a select class of people and it will CHANGE OUR WORLD COMPLETELY. No more amateurs, hobbyists, ordinary people able to set and manipulate and modify simple builds or others' creations and serve as co-creators.

Uh, no, there aren't three camps, one of which is "the smart people" the other two which are caricatures and "the dumb people" or "the hysterical people". Let's point out how the rest of the Internet lives, shall we? How the *rest of* technology out of the little Second Life bubble, where wannabees can project fantastic images of themselves as "professionals"? The Rest of the Internet and Social Media Technology: Big computers that take up a room A little smaller computer that take up part of a room Regular people can now start filling out punch cards Desktops Desktops with light pens Desktops with a mouse Laptops Weblogs of tekkies Blogs Twitter Netbooks Blackberries My-lo i-Phones i-Pad Now, look at our favourite virtual world: Prim building Teleport via telehubs Teleport by having to pinpoint location on the map Windlight Sculpties Shared Media/Viewer 2 Mesh See what I mean? The rest of technology is getting simpler and simpler to use, with more and more people able to use it, with simpler and more intuitive interface, taking up less and less space. Meanwhile, Second Life rolls back to the Middle Ages, to the era of medieval guilds, before the Iron Age, before the printing press, before the Enlightenment, becoming more and more complex, less and less available to people.

Thanks for confirming with such detail that you got a leg up over others in the market.

Oh, sheesh, Autodesk! And telling people who disagree to "hush up"! This Mesh gang may not be along for along with this sort of attitude. People may boycott their wares. Worse, they may laugh at them.

Keep talking, as the more people can see the nature of this New Class, the less long it will stay in power. You don't want to hear the basic points from me? Hear them from Maelstrom or Vivienne or Morgaine right in this thread, all people I never heard of until this thread and whom I don't know. It's not about uravnilovka, Soviet levelling of everybody and dumbing down. It's about access. ACCESS. FREEDOM. I have a healthy respect for a wide range of talents and abilities. I respect the newbie weekender making a box and texturing it with a wood texture and giving it to his lady love. I have respect for the people I've paid hundreds of real dollars to who build amazingly talented and beautiful builds. But here's the thing...I can access those builds. When they get prim drift, I fix them. When they are too primmy for a changing scene, I can de-fat the prims. When the texture might need a change, I can change it. I can put it in and out of inventory. I can even add to it and link to it. And so on. And none of that sounds possible with mesh items. Again, it's not about me, and your obsessiveness in making some wacky caricature of me to satisfy your own malicious spleen only discredits you. Nobody is telling talented people not to use new technology, nor is there a call to smash new technology. What is called for is access to tools; diversity of tools for abilities that differ; and some attentiveness to the economy by the people who control this artificial economy.

Yes, that's another angle, SL as third-rate environment by contrast with those with "real jobs". in fact, the reason you see such utter ferocity here in this thread, and such extreme social Darwinism with regard to inflicting pain on other people is because of the *insecurity* of those whose who are big-deal creators *only in this contest* with Mesh as a viagra for them *only in this context*. There's nobody more savage about capitalist extremism than people new to business and insecure and looking over their shoulder at what they imagine to be role models. And yes, you have to wonder, why didn't these magical Lindens put these tools *inworld*?

Communism, of the Zuma third-world type, is awful, but what opposes it at the other end can be awfully unattractive, too. what you mean to say isn't that the future is "now"; you mean to say the future is "me". Do nude people on nudist beaches even need mesh?

No, Masami. In SL we are not consumers. We are prosumers because we co-create. The world is taking a step backward and making us passive consumers again. It's not about this artificial "choice" you substitute for the real choice of accessibility of tools. It's Soviet-style communism to pretend that Mesh, which is highly complicated, with expensive tools, or wonky and obfuscated opensource tools forcing you to buy the manual. That's not capitalism; it's extortion. Smart people accessed prims and even sculpties, go know. Mesh removes that freedom.

Open source always imitates, never innovates, and imitates badly, then obfuscates to force people to either buy the book, or buy the geek by the hour to endlessly tweek it.

Is it up to you to learn Russian or Chinese or Portugese in the new global economy where all those countries will be surpassing the U.S.? No, you imagine you will use...Google translator or something. *Some accessible tool,* eh? That's why the "power tools" analogy is silly. The power tool was the ability to edit and build simply. The old hand loom is the mesh. Just look at the idiotic machinations people have to indulge in to wrestle an item off one of those 3-d makers, dividing it into parts, and pushing it inworld. Insane. It isn't "up to the individual" to accept forced changes. It's "up to the individual" to demand accountability when democracy is removed.

No, the dream of the creator/coder elite in SL has always been to figure out how they can torque the tools and the rules their way. There were even calls for giving creators free texture uploads and making everyone else pay, or having newbies have to wait until they could save scripts, or having newbies never be able to sell anything -- there have been numerous proposals that are all about trying to ensure that a narrow class of people rule the roost. This is the latest iteration. Here's the difference between the history of cars and mechanics. At first, mechanics, often stable hands who used to care for horses, or handymen who used to perform odd jobs, were the drivers and fixers of cars. But they were not in a upper social class. In time, they began to lord it over the owners and casual drivers and charge a fortune. Even so, they remained in garages, and remained in the lower classes, whatever their capacity to bilk the owner class. Computer and the Internet work differently, as the New Class of geeks not only considers itself above all other classes in intellect and ability; they believe they should rule every aspect of life because so many aspects of life are digitalized. So whether politics or education or brain research, they feel they know best and can control everything. It's not at all about "holding back innovation" to "protect those who are prim craftsmen" as if they were Luddites. No, because the innovation was in fact the prim that enabled anyone to edit it, and the regression is the medieval mesh that requires only a guild class to make, locking out ordinary people. That's the issue.

No, not "self-selected," any more than you could say the same thing about people who learn Russian. The person who has learned Russian doesn't turn around and scorn the person who hasn't, or tell them to go learn it. In fact, that's why geeks invented the awful Google translator, because they want to even out abilities and prevail with technology and not have anyone who might know something they don't. Indeed, putting Mesh in now *is* handing out passes to a select elite -- the NDA crowd got a total leg up on preparing items for the market. Watch the Mesh gang demand that prims-based technology be removed because it will be characterized as "confusing" compared to their confusions and "newbies can't understand it".

Linden Lab has not said that, nor have I, so stop being tendentious and looking for fake quotes. In fact, Jack Linden said at SLCC that prims would be maintained. However, the reality is, if a woosh of Google sketchup and turbosquid and such content comes pouring into SL, it could completely wash out the prim based economy. Just because you're personally looking forward to it and it may benefit you doesn't mean it's an unalloyed good. Try to zoom out beyond your own narrow caste.

Why would you convert a call to make tools accessible into a pretense that this is a demand that more skilled creators be locked out? That's pretty diabolical. It's not about complacency, and real diversity means accessible objects that people can easily change, edit, collaborate on. Doesn't sound like that is the route we are taking with prim-sculpty-mesh.

Third worldism goes digital. Can you grow digital food that will feed your real body, too? What happens when all the laborers in RL have to be digitalized? Have you thought how they can earn money to feed themselves? See above.

Re: "Object trade within Sl will collapse." I tend to agree. I'm raising the issue of the creation of another FIC elite class "beta mesh elite" that lords it over the old prim and sculpty craftsmen, and effectively sticks it to the hobbyist or weekend amateur making a box table. No one can manipulate the new products, interactivity, interest, collaboration falls way off, except within this little hothouse elite. You're raising another globalizing problem, which is the existence of vast hordes of 3D artists out there in the gaming/Internet/art world that can now come rushing into SL (assuming the obstacles of the viewer and graphic card demands don't hobble them). So both an elite formation with higher prices will occur as well as a globalizing hurricane (in theory) that will undermine that elite -- and each other -- and drive objects to the zero cost that the Stallmanites, geeks, hippies, technocommunies always dreamed of. Um, now they can "share". A big interest in SL for a lot of people -- just like in RL -- is buying and selling, making and shopping. Once that is gone and we've got instead something like a giant Soviet flea market, where the only thing for sale of any value is the stalls near the door to get the eyeballs, then the hustle will move to classifieds, search gaming, etc. to position to see and obtain those free/dollarbie things. Meanwhile some rare, better, exclusive content might sell, but it will be an exoticism. "This is not visionary or progressive, this is reactionary corporate profit driven madness." I agree. It's quite a depressing stage of technocommunism, which is what the Lindens and their fanboyz seem always to have been after, even the Randians (especially the Randians!) among them. Because they want to sell the search and the "customized skills," making a certified dev class and promoted coder/design class that gets the big jobs. As I have often written before, the commodity then becomes not the object, which is free to change hands (if on transfer) and be modified (if on modify) and enhance and democratize the economy, the commodity becomes that worker-for-hire and the experience that he creates, which is a mixture of object/event/connection/cool whatever, a gestalt. So, this isn't the Grateful Dead letting you make tapes for free off the sound board to trade and selling t-shirts and the odd album to make a buck, this is the Grateful Dead able to package the concert music/venue/dope/people next to you as a multimedia device and sell that, or try to. A TP into a crowded sim of the cool sort might be what becomes available for sale then. It will be interesting, if not painful if you're affected, of course, to see how this flood of "outsider" 3D stuff comes in -- or not. Maybe the Lindens and the FIC have already whistled to their friends in the SF gaming/dev/Internet world that this is where they can now have a playground. Maybe this will only happen in fits and starts as people come in and find a) search is broken and stupid still b) the viewer is a pain c) "there's nobody there". I found it interesting that when Skye Galaxy, the SL boy wonder singer always touted by Hamlet, had his big break with the Internet personality Zefrank on a Pakistan fundraiser, what soared as a result wasn't people joining SL to see him in concert here, but what soared were his Twitter followers. And there is this, perhaps, to save us: everybody will stampede to some other place of virtuality/web that is more cool, perhaps only on their i-phone, and the Lindens will be forced to be nice to those that remained here and serve them.

Um, forcing people to learn something new to participate in an economy *is forcing them*. It's not about me, it's about the principle of the matter. Forcing out people with skills, people in business, in line with some new "better" technology (a dubious proposition at best, as we've heard from some here) can *hardly* be described as "choice". That's like the sort of "choice" the Soviet government gives you. Learning new skills isn't for everybody. Will you be learning Russia or Chinese today? My kids are doing this. Do you have something wrong with you that you can't go on the free youtubes and participate in the global economy? It's not about learning *ANYWAY*. It's about ACCESS. It's about whether or not YOU CAN EVEN MANIPULATE EDIT meshes in the first place. We heard some babbling from Lindens at SLCC that oh, yuh, sure, we'll have mess that you'll be able to modify. Now all of a sudden, they've fallen silent on this score, and there's nothing here in Jack's post on it. Figures. It's not about me making something, so stop being a pedantic nerd about it. It's about the principle of access and the principle of collaboration.

Yeah, I do have to wonder about the "change or die" gang. Everyone was told "learn sculpties or die" and step on prims -- and they went along with it. And...look where it got them now.

Why don't you learn Russian, WADE1? Or Chinese, for that matter. You're missing out on understanding the world's up and coming markets and much of the planet's thinking not to mention rich historical and literary heritage. What's wrong with you? All it takes is an open mind, just like you learned English. There are even free programs for learning languages. Nobody needs to be left out in the cold in the coming global economy.