Andromeda Media Group

Killing Zombies [ SOPA | PIPA ]

2012-01-18T01:17:00.001-05:00

Why I support an Internet #Blackout Protest

If the Internet looks a little dark today, it’s because of the self imposed censorship in protest against SOPA and PIPA. I’ll be participating today in this protest, because both of these legislations are broken at the core, and threaten the very premise of the Internet itself (Not to mention SecondLife) on all levels by putting in the hands of corporate interests the right to circumvent due process and existing methods of piracy alleviation through the mere whim of corporate holders. It’s legislation that elevates the premise of Web 2.0 and social media to a Felony.

This is what SOPA and PIPA look like. Strangely, they may be the inspiration for Silent Hill 3

There will be no due process, no proof, and nothing short of total obliteration without recourse of entire websites and services online wholesale for the most trivial of infractions. The worst part about SOPA and PIPA, in any form they wish to take, is that neither will have any of the intended effects that they claim to have in curtailing piracy. If anything, they will both serve to actually destroy the Internet, and exasperate the problem ten fold through what is known as the Streisand Effect. (Note: Wikipedia is blacked out today Jan 17th in protest)

I do not support even an amended version of SOPA or PIPA, because at the root, they are both designed on a foundation that is a destructive premise. While I agree that piracy should be fought, I must concede that SOPA and PIPA are both the very wrong way to go about doing so.

They both represent an industry that would very much like to buy their way out of being a better company, and problem solving in the digital age, instead of evolving without the premise of stripping away freedom of speech and many other perfectly legal means.

If anything, PIPA and SOPA constitute one of the highest forms of insult to a free world.

Arm yourself against the Zombie Apocalypse

SOPA, which is currently being considered in the House, purports to protect “prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property.” But this bill, along with the Senate version called PIPA that’s being put up for a vote on January 24, would likely destroy much of the creativity fostered by the Internet. It could cripple not only the sites you use today but also other companies that are part of the glorious thing we call the Internet through unintended consequence. That’s why Google, YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Vimeo, Reddit, and many other companies and organizations are opposing this legislation.

While the recent statement from the Whitehouse condemning SOPA and PIPA is encouraging, that is not to say that an earmarked and amended version wouldn’t pass, much like the situation with the National Defense Authorization Act. As far as I am concerned, in any form, these pieces of legislation are both toxic and shouldn’t be considered at all, even in part.

If there is one thing we should know as gamers, it’s that you don’t kill zombies through apathy or doing half a job. They’ll just rise again and come back to bite you, and unless you suddenly like the taste of brains and the smell of rotten flesh, you better do the job right the first time. No, you have to make certain that those zombies don’t get back up looking for a meal at all if you want to win that fight.

I urge you to contact your member of congress and arm them with the tools needed to kill this zombie before it’s too late, before the Internet turns into a real life Silent Hill, and before places like Second Life are snuffed out of existence entirely in what constitutes a corporate pissing match.

This is your fight, and in the immortal words of Dan Brown – Please don’t be a zombie.

Today I’ll be joining that protest. I won’t be updating Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc… and this single blog entry is my explanation for anyone who is curious as to why. If anyone needs me, I’ll still be available in Skype for the day.

Something Completely Different…

2011-12-28T00:26:00.001-05:00

From #SecondLife to Second Fiddle in 2012

Is it a surprise that @Rodvik wants to focus on making video games?

I’ve been quite busy lately with research and development on some projects, so quite noticeably people have asked if I’m still around. The short answer is “yes”, though some other things have been keeping my attention other than Second Life. I won’t go into details about what I’ve been focusing on, but I will say that the technologies are really cool.

More importantly, however, I’ve been keeping an eye on the recent events concerning Linden Lab and Second Life through the usual channels, such as New World Notes, and more specifically the following little gem of news from them made me laugh.

I’m in no way surprised that Rodvik has decided to focus on video games that are unrelated to Second Life and “expand” Linden Lab’s offerings past their flagship namesake. He’s a video game executive that was hired to run a Metaverse company, and I expected he wouldn’t do so well at this job.

Now, when I say he wouldn’t do so well, what I implied many months ago is the only thing this man apparently knows how to do is create video games, which is an entirely different market than managing and growing a metaverse. It’s a lot like the difference between a Bugatti Veyron and a Tricycle.

The Metaverse is the high performance, open ended, user created masterpiece of virtual environments. A tricycle entertains you for a few hours without actually adding any culture or wider appreciation.

Rodvik is a master of making tricycles.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t money to be made in making tricycles, or that Linden Lab couldn’t be profitable by making and selling those tricycles, but that isn’t what Linden Lab as a company is about. At least, that’s not what it should be about. Linden Lab was and is a metaverse company, with a flagship product and culture that is Second Life. When a CEO decides that the flagship product of the company is not worth the effort to give his or the staff’s full attention to, but instead decides that the future of Linden Lab is to pretend to be Zynga… there’s something seriously wrong.

Let’s face it, Rodvik has Farmville envy.

Rodvik’s assurance that there will be continued updates and functionality additions for Second Life is not comforting, because we already know what it’s like when the Lindens aren’t able to address the JIRA, fix bugs, or ultimately create a viewer that isn’t half assed and broken. There is no reason to believe that splitting the focus and resources of an already stressed team so they can make unrelated video games will have any effect other than to justify less support for Second Life going forward in favor of coddling whatever video games Rodvik wants to roll out for Facebook instead. This isn’t speculation, this is simply common sense management in knowing that splitting an already overworked team to focus on unrelated projects will mean:

1. The new products will be poorly executed.

2. The original product will suffer from poor execution.

3. Both areas of focus will suffer from mediocre execution at best.

Because his focus is on the new games, I’m likely to say that #2 is the most plausible outcome, which means that Second Life (as far as he’s concerned) is now Second Fiddle.

The decision he has made is the executive equivalent of changing the focus of the entire company to something unrelated in order to mask incompetence in the original venue he was hired for. If he cannot expand or properly manage the flagship product, but he knows how to make cheap little video games in spades, the latter will be his and the company’s new focus to make their projected growth going forward. Like I originally said when he was hired – when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We already went through this scenario with Mark Kingdon where he decided the focus was on enterprise servers, and if I remember correctly, through all of this divided focus, that didn’t bode well either.

Now, I could theoretically interpret Rodvik’s direction as a skillful manner by which to focus his and the company’s attention on rebuilding a better version of Second Life for the long run. Something from the ground up, or a total overhaul into a new system, which later he will encourage migration from Second Life to the new system as a result.

I could interpret it that way, but I choose not to do so simply out of common sense. If this were the focus, he wouldn’t have said “… unrelated to Second Life”.

Today marks the day that Linden Lab has begun its transformation into just another Zynga wannabe. Rodvik never really left his old position as a VP at Electronic Arts working on The Sims. He simply carried his old job into his new and unrelated job. In the process, instead of focusing on the job he was given, he’s decided that the focus of the entire company should instead cater to his whims and expertise.

In the process, he’s even practiced some great acts of cronyism by surrounding himself with video game executives and industry names to justify his reasoning why Linden Lab needs to pretend to be Zynga and pay less attention to it’s own flagship product and community.

From day one, all Rodvik saw as the CEO of Linden Lab was this:

Click the picture for a link to this item on Marketplace.

The real question in the end is two-fold:

Why did anyone not expect this to happen from day one?

And more importantly

What makes anyone think that this is actually good for Second Life?

3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse:

2011-12-16T16:03:00.001-05:00

Current Status and Future Possibilities | #SecondLife

On December 1st, 2011 there arrived in my email quite astounding news from Dr. Dionisio and Dr. Gilbert that the Association for Computing Machinery had not only accepted our research paper 3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities for publication in their next journal, but that the reviewers had given the best praise of the paper that the editors had ever seen. As I read through the critiques from each reviewer, I was humbled by their responses.

As Dr. Gilbert succinctly put it:

After my recent return from the European Summit of the Immersive Education Initiative (I'm still jet lagged as you can see from the early hour I'm writing this!), Dondi sent me the news that ACM Computing Surveys had accepted our paper with relatively minor revisions. Even more significantly, the impressions of the editors and individual reviewers of the paper were outstanding with all the reviewers suggesting that the work be considered for a best paper award, the main reviewer viewing the work as a "seminal" contribution to the field, and the Associate Editor calling the first round reviews the best he's ever seen!

What I've also learned is that ACM Computing Surveys is one of the most cited and respected journals in the field of computer science (I had no idea that Dondi had decided to reach so high in submitting the paper). To get accepted into this journal, especially with such high praise, is a great honor and once the article is published our work will be widely read and could have a real impact on the field. After we submit the revisions in the next few weeks you can crank up all your social media expertise and begin to distribute the article as "in press."

It’s definitely an honor, and quite humbling to receive that caliber of review from not one but four independent sources across the industry. My understanding of the process was that we should have expected multiple rounds of revisions before being considered for publication, so having it accepted immediately after the first round of peer review is astounding.

In the words of the Associate Editor at ACM:

These actually are the most positive first-round reviews of a journal article I have seen. If you revise this and include a document that explains how you did, and did not, address comments, I will not need to send this out for further review if it looks satisfactory to me.

Let’s put aside the banner waving for a moment, because despite how groundbreaking this all is, it is only a prelude to a bigger picture concerning the Metaverse as I usually provide in articles like this.

The Down Low

There is a lot of subject matter covered in the paper for ACM Journal, but the title says it all: Current Status and Future Possibilities.

Essentially, what we wrote was a comprehensive survey paper looking into the various areas of virtual environments, or immersive environments as some refer to it, and addressed the fundamental challenges and technologies that can further the progress. There is also discussion in the paper concerning what areas are deficient and in need of further research initiative in hopes that those areas will be focused on by some of the countless people reading and citing the paper.

Literary influences that led up to the current state of affairs are also outlined, in order to give a proper history of the subject while framing the further understandings as the paper continued on. As one reviewer put it, we presented the most comprehensive paper on the subject that we could short of writing an entire book about the subject.

As the message from Dr. Gilbert suggests, I will be making the entire paper available as a PDF when it is sent off to ACM for publication. While there are a lot of topics covered in the paper, I’ll only be addressing one of them here in this blog.

The Take-Away

One of the biggest things that can be taken from the paper concerning the future direction of the Metaverse (in my opinion) is the implicit understanding that centralized networking is our Achilles Heel. It always has been, even before we really got into the hardcore 3D Immersive Environments like we see today. All the way back to Lessons from Habitat in 1991, Bandwidth being a scarce resource has always been a concern in something like this, and centralized networking was pegged as a culprit.

Yes, we can alleviate that stress by offloading across a datacenter, or buying more powerful servers. But the limitation is still there, and all we end up doing in the process is kicking the can down the road instead of actually trying to solve the problem at the root.

Whatever the future holds for immersive environments, it is likely that decentralized networking will be a major part of it in stark contrast to our massive datacenters today and centralized bandwidth.

To Boldly Go…

There is also a hint toward the data itself, in that the distribution of that data would likely not be the same as how we are accomplishing this task today. I’d like to say that in order for a powerful Metaverse to really evolve, the data has to be agnostic. The best way to understand this is to imagine the replicators in Star Trek and how they work.

When the captain walks up to a replicator and says “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.” the replicator isn’t looking for a cup of tea in its inventory. Nowhere on the ship is there a room with thousands of cups of hot tea on a shelf waiting to be beamed to the replicator. Essentially, there is a holding tank of sorts on the ship which contains the raw molecular “soup” of materials, and the replicators are simply using a digital recipe to pull the components and “replicate” that molecular recipe.

A replicator works almost like magic. Just like the plot to every Star Trek series.

If we apply this understanding to purely digital files, the same process works. Let’s say that the replicator is a software program on your computer whose sole purpose is to reconstruct digital files based on digital fingerprints (keys) that you give it. Since we’re already talking about a decentralized network as our future, the “holding tank” full of agnostic data to be used for those reconstructions of files should be spread across every user of the network.

Why not? We all have a cache folder sitting on our computers from virtual environments and web browsers. What if that cache folder was simply agnostic data and available to the entire network of users in a P2P manner?

First off, it would mean that our cache’s are meaningless to human interpretation. Completely random data not representing anything in particular until we give it the fingerprint to reconstruct the file we need. Secondly, it would mean that the data becomes multi-use data.

That last point is very important. It means that 1GB of multi-use data represents or contains any file that is 1GB or less. We can say that Photoshop CS5 is under 1GB for the installer, correct? So that multi-use data would contain Photoshop CS5, and anything else that is 1GB or under. The key, so to speak, is that while such a system just about invalidates the premise of current copyright law, making it impossible to prosecute somebody using such a system, it brings up something even more interesting.

11 Herbs and Spices

It’s not the data that is really copyrightable, but the means by which such data can be arranged in a unique configuration as a representation of a work. What is really copyrightable happens to be the unique fingerprints which tell the system how to reconfigure multi-use data for a specific file output that is no longer multi-use, or in layman terms – it’s the digital recipe.

Another interesting side effect to multi-use data is that you’re not storing a 1:1 representation of anything. Since the data is multi-use, that means (for the most part) that you don’t need the storage equivalent for a copy of every single file in the system. All you really need at the very least is enough agnostic data available in order to cover the largest file on the network.

If the largest file you have on the network is about 50GB (and I’m being very generous here), then on a multi-use data system, you would need no more than 50GB of data total for everything you ever store into that network. That’s the bare minimum. Yes, at that level it would take longer to reconstruct the data, but it would still work. the more agnostic data you have in storage, the faster that reconstruction goes. Think of it like over unity…

Needless to say that a multi-use data structure in combination with decentralized networking would mean that, in example, the entirety of the Second Life asset servers could be housed in about 100 terabytes or less (for redundancy), and the reliability of that system would mean that the odds of anything in your inventory ever disappearing would be so close to nil as to make no odds.

And that, is how you solve the root of a problem instead of addressing only the symptoms.

A Rosedale by Any Other Name…

2011-11-22T06:49:00.001-05:00

clearly is not the same when it comes to @Rodvik in #SecondLife

As reported by Wagner James Au on New World Notes (and probably other places), Kim Salzer has left Linden Lab for greener pastures elsewhere. As the former Head of Marketing & Product at Linden Lab, Kim found quickly that a Metaverse is a wholly different platform than a video game. This is a valuable lesson that can be learned by Rodvik and Will Wright who remain at Linden Lab in official capacity and guide the vision of Second Life ongoing.

The problem is that the vision lacks actual vision.

Rodvik Humble at SLCC | You can only bullshit your way for so long.

I’m not as enthusiastic about the direction that Kim Salzer was looking to take Linden Lab and subsequently Second Life, in that from the start I had my reservations concerning her appropriateness and understanding of Second Life as a Metaverse construct and not a video game. It was not a stretch of imagination to believe she, along with @Rodvik, was making a left turn with their understanding of Second Life and how to address it going forward.

I expected that she would, coming from Activision/Blizzard and Electronic Arts, see Second Life as just another video game and focus solely on that aspect with her efforts which would, in turn, be expedited by Rodvik who is coming from the same background of video games. After all, they are both veterans of the video game realm, and seeing Second Life with similarities to a video game, they would be more than likely to blanket their approach likewise thinking that if there is a minor similarity with video games, then the entire approach being the same as video games would be most appropriate.

But the fact remains;

Second Life is patently not a video game.

It is not a game... it is a Virtual World. Wikipedia defines a Virtual World as an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. – APixelLife4me

Why is this such a hard concept to understand at the executive level of Linden Lab? First we see Mark Kingdon completely ignoring the community and trying to make Second Life about Enterprise Solutions, and now we see Rod Humble trying to treat it like a video game. We may never truly have insight as to what was really going on in Philip Rosedale’s vision, but I’ll bet the virtual house that there are people in the existing community who can come damned close to revealing that vision with clarity.

I find it nothing short of irony that a high profile woman working for Linden Lab, the makers of a vast virtual environment, would cite “the regular commute to the company's San Francisco office from Los Angeles” as the defining factor for her moving on. Second Life being, among many other things, a platform which by its very nature facilitates in-world communication and telecommuting opportunity for business use. It becomes, yet again, a moment where we take pause and wonder if they truly understand the nature of the product as a platform for content and communication. If anything, her stated reason for departure glosses over the fact that her tenure at Linden Lab enacted some of the most draconian policies which directly led to some of the worst PR disasters I’ve seen, PR disasters which could have been trivial to avoid on the whole, yet were not only facilitated but actively fostered to fruition with the blessing of Rod Humble.

Ginny Business Center – Because it has nothing to do with machinima, Meeroos or Vampires.

After all, there is countless business ongoing within the virtual environment itself, and even regular business meetings and such for marketing and other business use, yet the memo hasn’t reached Linden Lab, as we see by their action… or more appropriately their inaction. This constitutes a systemic failure on the part of Linden Lab to immerse themselves in their own product and environment, and thus become the champion example of the benefits of their technology. If the company isn’t willing to seriously utilize their own product, then it becomes little surprise that no other company in the real world would want to either.

Focusing on the in-world games such as Meeroos, reopening the development of further gaming aspects to facilitate further gaming development in-world, and focusing on the A.I. framework to facilitate the equivalent of NPCs and unintelligent “bots” disturbs me because it shows a contradiction in understanding for what truly matters with Second Life. It was the blatant position of stonewalling and ignoring the community that led to a very public community effort to raise the money and hire Qarl to code Parametric Mesh Deformer, in light of policies that likely stemmed from Kim Salzer.

As I’ve said before, that’s the sort of colossal PR screw-up that is grounds for termination, and company-wide re-evaluation of priorities. Again, I’ve been on that evaluation end of a company a number of times and have made those observations and decisions. It’s not easy, but it’s far better than the alternative of consistently running a company into the ground and causing widespread public damages to your own brand. Doomsayer or not, I still called it in advance – she didn’t stick around too long and her misunderstanding of what Second Life actually had rendered her nearly incompetent in relation to the job position she held, doing far more damage to the long term image of Linden Lab than we may possibly imagine.

It is the real, breathing and living people that make Second Life what it is. The community are using the platform (because that is what Second Life actually is: A virtual environment platform which is use agnostic) to create a wide range of virtual goods and services, fostering an in-world economy and literally creating most aspects of the virtual environment and not a multi-million dollar design team in-house. So again, I find it counterproductive when I see Linden Lab essentially undermining that community time and again by pillaging the existing ecosystem for “added value” and applying those things to exclusive Premium Accounts or even worse, polarizing the vision of an agnostic system by seeing only ways to facilitate games or machinima.

What good is artistic measure when Linden Endowment for the Arts may as well be defunct – seeing the demise of Shakespeare Theater and Frank Lloyd Wright Museum in-world? What good is having a platform that is suited for immersive education when you aren’t intelligent enough to subsidize those educational institutions and indoctrinate the future generation to your technology? Even Apple had enough sense to donate computers and equipment to schools for free or drastically reduced cost for this very same reason, and write it off as a charitable donation.

Where is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Second Life? Where is the Aerospace Museum? Where are the Universities? I’ll tell you where – They’re rapidly jumping ship and moving over to OpenSim or elsewhere, because Linden Lab essentially screwed them over royally in exchange for cuddling Meeroos and Vampires.

Loyola Marymount University – Coming to an OpenSim near you, thanks to Linden Lab.

It’s not a priority… but Meeroos and Machinima are. Being a Vampire is the marketing focus. I’m not saying that Meeroos, machinima and roleplaying vampires aren’t important in SecondLife, but they are all things which can be integrated and put to use much better than they are currently presented today – especially not at the expense of cutting the things which have greater importance for breaking the stigma that your platform is nothing more than a video game niche’.

This is what you would expect from a group of people who do not really understand what Second Life is, or that there is a thriving ecosystem of community which the system itself is built for. Instead, it is the sort of myopic maneuvers that you would expect from somebody coming in and seeing only a video game, while surrounding themselves with video game veterans. After all, it is no surprise that the message isn’t reaching Linden Lab when they surround themselves with video game “yes-men” and “girl Fridays”.

The focus also on machinima is endearing but still heavy handed, as is promoting as an official stance that you can be a Vampire on Marketplace. Again, these are the sorts of attitudes you would only expect from a video game executive mentality, but clearly not from somebody who has a deeper understanding of virtual environments on the whole.

Of course, I cannot mention Marketplace without noting the unbelievable amount of grief content creators receive concerning the usage of marketplace and their own inventory. This content is time and again sabotaged, leaving little recourse for the content creators except to wait it out and manually change their listings in order to compensate. If you want to know what sort of horror this creates, simply ask Avril Korman at @DamnedGoodesign

This isn’t a Public Discussion

Furthermore, as James Wagner Au reports,

“Kim was instrumental in implementing a corporate policy that tightly controls information and internal communication within Linden Lab, both between departments, and between Linden Lab staff and the community”

This direction has been extremely clear over the past year and has had wide-reaching detrimental effect. A recent altercation with Oz Linden in the JIRA left me completely taken aback at the shear ignorance of his response, which I know must have stemmed from Kim’s own ridiculous policies of tight control. At least, I seriously hope it wasn’t the sort of attitude that would come out of his own accord. It was this same asinine approach that led to the string of events concerning Parametric Mesh Deformation as well, and I point the finger clearly back to Kim and Rod for that – because the Linden staff are only taking their marching orders.

One would believe that actually correcting the broken feature you spent years on is a priority.

Essentially, in a JIRA that is designed for discussion, bug and feature reporting/requests, and targeting a demographic of the community which is on average technically savvy and of the highest contributors – their biggest proponents to the world – these are the sort of people you want to have discussions with, and when possible in the safe harbor of the JIRA and in-world, I was informed by Oz Linden that the JIRA was not an open forum of discussion. Even though the discussion was pertaining directly to that particular JIRA and whether or not it still held relevance in light of current roadmap implementations.

What’s worse is the dismissive attitude overall for community requests which possibly mean the absolute most to the community and Second Life as a whole. Case in point: Parametric Mesh Deformation, which is a necessity in order to make the much touted Mesh import feature of actual use on a wide scale. Instead of understanding the absolute need for this correction, it was officially dismissed and largely ignored by Linden Lab until such point as the community not only publicly raised the capital independently but went ahead and contracted a former employee of Linden Lab to do the job Linden Lab was unwilling to acknowledge or do.

This, in itself, is absolutely unbelievable. It shows that Kim Salzer (facilitated by management at the highest levels) clearly did not understand the repercussions of her policies in the bigger picture, and more importantly neither did Rodvik Humble. For instance, it would be common sense to actually encourage on-topic discussion in the JIRA and with Linden Lab employees because it is a safe harbor. The JIRA is the first arena of discourse behind relatively closed doors and a first line of defense for addressing issues properly before the most passionate of your own community takes that discussion worldwide and public through social media and blogs – much like you are reading here.

If anything, the very concept of Agile Development is a system of work habit literally designed to handle rapid iteration and changes as they arise. So where was that Agile Development practice when the need arose to focus on Parametric Mesh Deformation? Better yet, where is that Agile Development prioritization when Linden Lab is writing out their roadmap going forward? Is it not disturbing that in the process of rapid development by Linden Lab, major features and components of the system overall are left in the wake indefinitely?

Whatever happened to finishing what you start? Where are the mirrors, what happened to Dazzle and the ability to skin the viewer, what happened to the other half of Windlight technology itself? What happened to making Windlight Settings an in-world asset tradable and able to be used by double clicking the asset in inventory?

“They are not on the short term roadmap” is the common answer. But more importantly, they aren’t even on the long-term roadmap either. Windlight being a system acquired in 2007 and left half dead on arrival for now going on 5 years. Mirrors following suit shortly after, and so too Dazzle. Whatever happened to sincerely blending the Web and 3D together in a seamless manner using a layer over the 3D Canvas like you do with the login screen itself? Blending virtual worlds with the web has been the dream of the industry since it began, and here we are twenty years later and no closer to realizing that dream on a wide scale*.

* Note: And I don’t mean pre-created environments or pseudo-plugins that cram a full viewer into a web page.

Viewer 2 shows full well what having half-baked priorities and implementation looks like. We have an address bar at the top and no UX logical connection for why it should be there – even though I’ve clearly and concisely explained why it should be there if it were to be finished properly.

Built-in Web Browser Uses New Canvas Rendering Layer [VWR-22977]

If public perception from Linden employees are such a concern, simply institute a policy which states the following:

The views and opinions of Linden Lab staff do not necessarily reflect or represent the attitudes or opinions of Linden Lab as a company and should be taken as personal opinion only.

Then you remove the gag order from your employees and allow them to converse with the community freely, as long as their opinions and expressions are respectful and do not incite. When you allow the community and your employees to speak freely, you’ll find that there are grievances and issues which should definitely be looked into, and you’ll find that the sentiments of the community may also reflect the sentiments of your staff. If you want true feedback and direction, you have to be willing to face when you are screwing up and make changes for the betterment of all. The alternative is surrounding yourself with people who will only serve to lie to your face and tell you everything is under control when the empire is crumbling down around you.

This is why the community itself gets it right, even when Linden Lab continues to get it so wrong. The community isn’t afraid they’ll be fired from Linden Lab for telling it as it is, but those employees are. You’ll never likely hear a more honest evaluation of what Second Life is doing right and more importantly what they are screwing up beyond recognition than from the most prominent members of the community. They speak the raw and unfiltered truth of the situation.

The fact that they are often speaking that unfiltered truth from the confines of OpenSim should be the most telling indication in and of itself.

I’m not the sort of person that will lie straight faced despite knowing full well the situation is rapidly deteriorating or highly likely to have profound negative consequences. I’m also not the sort of person that isn’t capable or willing to point out the raw and unfiltered consequences (good or bad) that current actions are likely to have. For that, you’ll have to hire people like Kim Salzer, a woman of professional pedigree but no professional experience within the context of a Metaverse. All the professional pedigree in the world didn’t make up for the fact that she was wholly unsuited for the position she was offered, nor had any willingness to truly understand that position. No amount of business pedigree made a difference in the ongoing public relations nightmare that has been the status-quo at Linden Lab since 2007.

By all means, not having this hang-up often makes me the messenger of very harsh realities, and there are quite a lot of people who would rather I didn’t put these things forward unfiltered. I get called all manner of names from people across the board – but it doesn’t phase me in the least. Nor will it phase me – because I continually prove to be correct well in advance despite not being the perpetual ass-kisser. Virtual reality needs a reality check – and I have no problem being one of the messengers, because you’re nobody until somebody hates you in the professional world.

I’m more than qualified for that position, too, as a Synthetic Environment SME with well over 15 years of actual, hands-on experience in virtual environments and technology research. There are people more qualified than myself, and I readily admit that. What I will also admit is that those people and myself are the last to be heard in a priority that is horribly skewed in the industry. We aren’t the sort of people who are going to tell you only what you want to hear, and in fact are likely to tell you what you don’t want to hear (but is highly necessary).

It’s time to understand what innovation and creative vision really mean on a wide scale.

The issue here is that the JIRA isn’t likely to show up in a Google search for Second Life, but all of those social media posts and blog entries will, in abundance. So one has to ask the obvious question of whether or not Kim and even Rodvik really understand the repercussions of those policies of restriction and how much damage it does to the image of Second Life and Linden Lab in public when enacted. Just like the Internet itself, censorship and restrictive control is treated as “damage” and is routed around in a virtual environment, much to the grand demise of the company trying to enact them. This also applies to IP protection policies in a virtual environment where every single user is capable of creating every part of the world at will. Second Life and Linden Lab owe its existence to the very fact that it is the very users of the virtual environment platform which are wholly responsible for a majority of the in-world content and services.

The best policy Linden Lab could muster on that front was a typical non-solution. Make everyone take a questionnaire about IP policies and swear on their scouts honor they would be honest and uphold those policies.

From day one, the Mesh policies for IP protection were widely violated – even on the Beta grid itself in plain view, and it wasn’t a surprise (at least to anyone outside of Linden Lab). It is wholly unenforceable as a solution, and any company thinking they can adequately enforce the public sentiment to the contrary is outright delusional. However, there is an actual workable solution to curb and enforce IP protection that actually becomes beneficial to Linden Lab, real world brands and the content creators in-world simultaneously if they really thought about it.

The underlying point to this is that not only is something like JIRA a public discussion forum, but outright denying that safe harbor for discussion wherein Linden Lab has some expectation of PR damage control in order to push those people out into the open of the Internet in general serves only to create collateral damages. This is a fundamental understanding that one would expect to see from the likes of a high profile Marketing Director at a major corporation. Second Life on the whole is a community driven experience, and absolutely demands public involvement and discussion on all levels. No amount of restrictive policy at Linden Lab is going to turn that tide, and all attempts to do so will end in failure on a grand scale.

Not-So Agile Development

Let me be perfectly clear. Agile Development policies are absolutely not an excuse to make half finished and broken products the official face of your company. Agile Development is a method by which rapid iterations can be worked on and implemented, facilitating rapid solutions and stability in shorter periods of time before making those changes the release candidate or official software release. When you miss that underlying point, you end up adhering to Agile Development even when it means putting out broken products to maintain the development roadmap timeline.

New features do not become release candidates until such time as within rapid development they become stabilized and proven within a high degree of stability across many use cases. To push them out half finished and widely broken, and call them the official viewer of your company is disastrous at best and lazy coding at worst. There is absolutely no sane person that will today state that the Official Second Life Viewer is remotely a stabile or finished product worthy of being the public face of Linden Lab to new users or existing veterans.

Again, I will not fault the actual staff at Linden Lab for this, because they are taking their marching orders from management and higher up. They are only doing their job, even when that job includes severely breaking the community and power that the wonderful platform they design and implement has.

Copy + Paste Premium

No.

Absolutely, unequivocally no.

If I had a rolled up newspaper, I’d be swatting the ever-loving hell out of Rodvik right now and yelling “Bad CEO! Baaaad!”

At the very least, squirting him with a spray bottle.

Premium accounts serve professionals in Second Life more than consumer demographics. It should be billed as a Second Life Pro account, and not as something that desperately searches in vain and steals existing community structure for added value to appeal to consumer usage that has all of those added value available to them without the monthly surcharge.

You cannot poach the existing offerings of the community and offer them as added value for a Premium Account. There is absolutely nothing of added value in rehashing existing offerings from your community and calling them exclusive access only. If anything, you are deliberately polarizing the community and alienating your biggest supporters.

The community does not need exclusive sandboxes, they do not need Linden Homes, they do not need “exclusive” gifts, and they do not need a company so narrow-minded as to deliberately undermine existing content and practices within their own community for short term expectation of profitability – a result of which is one of the many reasons OpenSim exists. Targeting new users with this premium content is little more than a slap to the face of the existing ecosystem, and functions on the premise of the P.T. Barnum business model (sucker born every minute). Linden Lab is literally preying on the fact that new users simply don’t know that a majority of those “added value” offerings exist in abundance without a premium account, and many times far better in every way imaginable.

Contrary to popular belief, Linden Lab does not have the luxury of continually driving their product into the ground without repercussion, nor do they have the luxury of playing the P.T. Barnum vision statement.

When new users who buy premium see this, they feel like Linden Lab ripped them off.

There is a healthy land rental market, there is a healthy custom homes market whereby the entire infrastructure facilitates the sales of those custom homes and rewards content creators. There are sandboxes maintained by the community – and if anything, a “premium” sandbox offering only makes sense to professionals in the very slightest of sense, only because one of the major real incentives for having a Premium Account is the ability to actually buy your own land, defeating the point of premium sandboxes. There are countless amounts of merchandise available to free members, so offering “exclusive premium” gifts is insulting to that foundation and misses the greater value of the community by ignoring what already exists and subsequently playing favorites with content creators.

Instead of poaching on the existing ecosystem and delivering it to the consumers, why not instead promote Premium Accounts as Second Life Professional accounts, showcase the existing content, land rental, and marketplace in conjunction with Second Life Verified Professional Accounts – which in turn encourages more users to pay for Second Life Professional accounts to become high visibility content creators to the consumers? Encourage it from the foundation of the Second Life ecosystem, and not the tip of the iceberg. In this manner, you are rewarding existing producers of content across the entire virtual environment, collaborating with them to foster a balanced and sustainable prosumer ecosystem instead of sabotaging it.

:: The most important paragraph in the virtual universe ::

What can you offer as Added Value and incentive for purchasing the Second Life Professional account upgrade? It makes you a Verified Professional in Second Life, and eligible to participate in submissions for Real World Brand Names coming to Linden Lab looking for virtual product representation for marketing purposes. Those Professional accounts then get to include those brand names within their own in-world store for added revenue and notoriety (Verified Vendors on Marketplace), Linden Lab benefits from increased volume of legitimately branded sales through transaction fees, and the Real World Brand Name receives innovative and brilliant viral marketing in-world for a fraction of the cost and orders of magnitude of meaningful longevity. This also solves the problem with supply and demand for real world branded IP in the virtual world in that verified professionals will facilitate the supply aspect of those brands readily, thus reducing the consumer need for illegitimate products.

For somebody who is largely ignored at Linden Lab, I seem to have just succinctly and brilliantly outlined a wide-scale marketing strategy that Kim Salzer couldn’t accomplish in all the time she worked at Linden Lab, despite her video game marketing pedigree.

The funniest part about all of this is, it will never be considered by Linden Lab. They will continue looking in all the wrong places for somebody capable of coming to the same conclusion as above, and they are likely to continue finding more Kim Salzers instead.

I wish with all my heart this wasn’t the case, I really do.

The sad alternative is that at literally every possible level of engagement, Premium Membership not only misses the point and deliberately undermines the community, but it is the very example of misunderstanding the ecosystem that is a virtual environment such as Second Life. It is the expectation of a video game professional in a world where only 10% similarity to a video game exists, and applying video game management practices as though they constitute 100% of the very different ecosystem you are working within.

What we have is excellent vision and perilous execution at best.

The Second Life X-Factor

As I said shortly after Kim Salzer was hired, if you cannot recognize the potential and the x-factor that a virtual environment like Second Life offers within your first week on the job, you shouldn’t be doing that job, let alone making sweeping policies concerning it.

Clearly this was the case, and she didn’t last long – regardless of whatever politically correct reason she gave as her reason for leaving. It’s in her nature to act as a marketing person, spinning a bad situation into something else, but for some reason she could not foresee nor adequately react to the myriad of situations which arose as Director of Marketing and Product for Linden Lab. see also: the most important paragraph in the virtual world above

The job of Marketing Director means it’s your job to reverse corporate ghost towns like this.

It’s very simple:

Facilitate and expedite the existing prosumer community to be paired with real world brands wishing to utilize your platform for long term marketing potential and ROI on behalf of the prosumers, Linden Lab and those brands.

This has been the missing factor since 2006 and is highly likely the underpinning cause to the hype bubble and subsequent collapse of the Second Life brand in relation to real world brand proliferation.

All of the infrastructure is in place today, with the exception of official policy and vision from Linden Lab to utilize it all to their advantage. Worse still is the misunderstanding of what exactly the ultimate power for the Marketplace itself holds in terms of long term ROI strategies. If you want innovation and something new, look no further than this as it brings to the table something fresh, new and massive potential for rethinking the way we approach virtual world marketing and community based producers and consumers. It also serves as a solid method by which to harness the creative power of the community, while helping to curb IP infringement on a wider scale, all while bringing in a successful revenue stream to Linden Lab and the in-world content creators.

What’s not to love about this?

At the base of it all, Linden Lab should first make it a point to realize that even “free” users of Second Life are highly valued customers. The free users outnumber the premium users by far, and they are providing a massive secondary revenue structure in their purchasing habits, making them one of the most valued commodities in the virtual world, even though they are routinely treated as the very last priority.

Instead, Linden Lab focuses on direct revenue streams at the expense of lucrative secondary streams, which in turn serves only to fracture the entire ecosystem overall. This needs to stop if they ever want to return Second Life to another Golden Age of virtual environments. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory should not become the battle cry of Linden Lab.

The Virtual Light At The End of the Prim Tunnel

I know full well that I come down hard on Linden Lab and many other virtual environment companies. I offer a cynical and harsh reality check to current situations. However, keep in mind that while the things that I’m pointing out are those that are the negative sides of things, they are also alluding to the positive side as well when you read between the lines.

What I do not want to see is blatant and ignorant decisions which harm this company and the community. What I do not want to see are all of the educators leaving Second Life for other virtual environments, what I do not want to see are perfectly good content infrastructures squandered for short term gains.

I want nothing more than to see Second Life and Linden Lab return to their rightful position as the darling of virtual worlds, and I want nothing more than to see them rise again and taken seriously on a worldwide basis. Most importantly, I want the CEO of Linden Lab to succeed at doing all of this.

I want to see Second Life as a viable platform for Education, The Arts, Collaboration, Business and Real World Brand Marketing. I want to see this once amazing ecosystem of prosumers return to their golden age and find balance once again in conjunction with understanding at Linden Lab. I want to see Linden Lab actively promote and utilize their own system in the myriad of ways that I know it can be used for, to be the champion of their own technology on an ongoing basis.

What I want to see is that Linden Lab can not only work hand in hand with OpenSim and the greater community as part of the greater Metaverse, but that doing so would be the most beneficial thing possible. What I want to see is that the spirit of open communication and collaboration be restored between Linden Lab and the community which continually helps to build this wonderful and awe inspiring environment. What I want to see is that Linden Lab understands that doing all of this will give them everything, while ignoring it will leave them with nothing.

What I want to see more than anything, is the future of Second Life.

Down With The Sickness

2011-11-16T03:04:00.001-05:00

We live in a very sick world. Here’s how we fix it for real. #Zeitgeist #OWS

Usually I’m the sort of person who writes exceedingly lengthy articles about complex ideals or viewpoints, much of which I am fully aware the average person (aside from the most technically devout) essentially tune out in an age of Attention Deficit Media.

However, this post concerns something entirely different, and is my official position concerning Occupy Wall Street and the worldwide protests in solidarity. It includes a full video lecture that is likely one of the most important that you could ever watch on the subject, and I highly recommend, just this once, that you put aside your attention deficit and take the time to digest the information that will be presented in this post.

I’m an avid supporter of Occupy Wall Street but for entirely different reasons than the #OWS crowd are supporting it for. While the people are protesting inequality, corruption and greed, they are still at a phase of understanding where they believe working within a system that is inherently corrupt will bring them a solution.

There is literally no way to pay the mounting debts of this nation, or the world. Period. End of story. Every bank note in your hand is a representation of debt, with interest that can never be repaid. It is the representation for everything that is absolutely wrong in this world today.

Take a good look at it.

We cannot fix a system inherently designed by nature to deprive a majority of people on this planet in order to provide an excess for a few. A system designed for cyclical consumption and consumerism, infinite growth, in a world of very finite resource. It is a logical impossibility.

Nobody, not you nor I, will ever be able to vote these facts out of existence. There are no laws that we can possibly write and enact that will change these immutable laws of nature, or of the nature of this parasite we call money.

I support Occupy Wall Street because they are a catalyst to realization, if not still premature. They know something is terribly wrong with the world and this country, and have a vague idea what the root of that problem is. However the solutions they propose at this time are nothing more than addressing the symptoms of the problem, and are doomed to failure on the whole.

I still support them, because they are a much needed catalyst, and I am patient enough to wait for those protesters to truly have a revelation as to what the root of the problem is and how we can truly fix it. They, and you, will inevitably realize this immutable fact sooner or later.

If you realize this immutable fact later, you will likely be fighting for water, food and basic resources. Wars, famine and disease running rampant in what used to be a 1st World Country.

The choice is ours.

You can take an hour and forty-five minutes of your day to change your mind and help change the world through education, or you can spend that time looking for pictures of cats on the internet.

Weigh it out for yourself. Life is short, use it wisely.

Social Pathology – Full Lecture | The Zeitgeist Movement

It’s a Matter of Trust

2011-11-03T18:58:00.001-05:00

Should the inmates actually be running the asylum? #SecondLife #OpenSim

When we think about virtual environments, often we’re in a perspective of one dimensionality; We can relate to a particular virtual environment that we’ve been involved with for a length of time but we find it much harder to expand that personal experience to reach into multitudes of other virtual environments or even the possibility that they are merely components of a larger system which we can describe as a complete Metaverse construct.

Take, for instance, Second Life. It is the product of a company that we know as Linden Lab in California, United States, but in and of itself it is a walled garden virtual environment with no real incentive to be part of something larger unless that something larger has itself as the central authority and gateway to the whole. This is not altogether uncommon in the virtual environment industry, and as we look to other systems that are similar, there is little (if any) interoperability among the many which exist today.

We can, of course, look at systems such as BlueMars, ActiveWorlds, VIE, and countless others (Kaneva, web.alive, Jibe, OpenSim) but the underlying concern is that despite the advancements being made individually, they are all essentially symptoms of technology lock-in.

In relation to Second Life and subsequently the OpenSim based Hypergrid, we see what is essentially a minor evolution in open thinking. OpenSim being the natural progression of Second Life into a larger and more decentralized grid of interconnected virtual environment spaces which do not necessarily reside under the authority of a single company or entity, yet connect together much like we see the structure of the World Wide Web.

Much of what I contemplate when dealing with Object Interoperability for IEEE Virtual World Standard Group is to really break all of this down into the base components and take a hard look at what we know should be happening (an end-goal) versus what we actually have today. Whether or not I’m a user of Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Kaneva, BlueMars, OpenSim, or any number of other virtual environments is inconsequential to me in much the same manner as whether or not I use any particular flavor of operating system or even what particular websites I frequent online using a web browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc).

I do happen to lean more toward SecondLife as my chosen flavor of virtual environment, not because I believe it is somehow the best choice, but merely because I believe it represents a fundamental and underlying truth to what an open and interconnected Metaverse should look like. This is, of course, despite the very glaring shortfalls of the company responsible for maintaining and progressing the software responsible for SecondLife, in that while the company (Linden Lab) is acting in a manner by which is self-interested and a walled garden, the underlying technology itself is agnostic and has much potential if applied correctly. I see a lot of this progression happening more on the side of OpenSim based systems, and while I am still not convinced that OpenSim has a stake in the overall future of interoperable Metaverse standards, I do give those dedicated developers quite a lot of credit for at least trying.

That is not to say that I have somehow written off OpenSim or the efforts that are being made in that community. One must realize that I’m looking at this ecosystem as a whole and not for the individual components which may or may not comprise it. Which brings me to a bit of a history lesson concerning virtual environments, and rules by which I base my overall understanding for interoperability on; The Lessons Learned From LucasFilm’s Habitat.

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer: Creators of the first Graphical MMO – Habitat

I know I quote this document more than a preacher in a pulpit on Sunday, but I have every reason to do so. Essentially, for a document that was written and published between 1989 and 1991 by two men who more or less invented the massively multiuser graphical online environment, it outlines many of the fundamental things which we should have been focused on in the development of virtual environments but somehow seem to have been openly ignored. For instance, in relation to the punk-ass kids in virtual worlds (such as Linden Lab) today who seem to have no respect for the grandfathers of the technology or the wisdom they passed down, we can apply the following lesson:

The implementation platform is relatively unimportant.

The presentation level and the conceptual level cannot (and should not) be totally isolated from each other. However, defining a virtual environment in terms of the configuration and behavior of objects, rather than their presentation, enables us to span a vast range of computational and display capabilities among the participants in a system. This range extends both upward and downward. As an extreme example, a typical scenic object, such as a tree, can be represented by a handful of parameter values. At the lowest conceivable end of things might be an ancient Altair 8800 with a 300 baud ASCII dumb terminal, where the interface is reduced to fragments of text and the user sees the humble string so familiar to the players of text adventure games, "There is a tree here." At the high end, you might have a powerful processor that generates the image of the tree by growing a fractal model and rendering it three dimensions at high resolution, the finest details ray-traced in real time, complete with branches waving in the breeze and the sound of wind in the leaves coming through your headphones in high-fidelity digital stereo. And these two users might be looking at the same tree in same the place in the same world and talking to each other as they do so. Both of these scenarios are implausible at the moment, the first because nobody would suffer with such a crude interface when better ones are so readily available, the second because the computational hardware does not yet exist.

The point, however, is that this approach covers the ground between systems already obsolete and ones that are as yet gleams in their designers' eyes. Two consequences of this are significant. The first is that we can build effective cyberspace systems today. Habitat exists as ample proof of this principle. The second is that it is conceivable that with a modicum of cleverness and foresight you could start building a system with today's technology that could evolve smoothly as the tomorrow's technology develops. The availability of pathways for growth is important in the real world, especially if cyberspace is to become a significant communications medium (as we obviously think it should).

Given that we see cyberspace as fundamentally a communications medium rather than simply a user interface model, and given the style of object-oriented approach that we advocate, another point becomes clear:

Taken directly from the document, we see that the mode of implementation seems to have turned out quite different than what was rightly proposed. We see in this walled garden ecosystem that there is much more effort put into the platform (but strangely not in actually finishing any particular feature or part of the platform: Windlight, Mesh, Marketplace…) than the content agnostics. Taken together, by any measure, this should be regarded as a fallacy up front. Indeed it has become somewhat of a misstep in that we’re faced today with content that is locked away in proprietary methods, servers, and ultimately out of reach to all but the most determined content creators who jump through countless hoops to export and re-import their content from one environment to another manually. With the introduction of mesh based content into SecondLife, one would believe that a step has been taken to alleviate this issue, but if anything it has only exasperated the issue further by offloading the content creation outside of the walled garden and still leaving the onus of responsibility upon the content creator to systematically import that content from system to system manually. Of course, this lesson also applies to interoperability in a manner by which the actual assets and media are dynamic and standardized as well, allowing greater flexibility on the end-user for a myriad of access types.

The platform should be inconsequential, while the focus on content and facilitating the propagation of that content in a controllable manner automatically, should be the focus.

When I was a guest on CrossWorlds with Mal Burns (shown on left) recently I made it a point to hammer this point home, even if it was subconsciously on my part. Like anything regarding interoperability, we’re faced with a cascading domino effect whenever we try to look at any particular aspect or make changes to it. It isn’t as simple as changing a single thing and having the whole ecosystem work out, but instead we look at how those small changes affect the rest of the system down the line. When we shed this light on Linden Lab, we see how the seemingly inconsequential side projects and diversion of attention to vaguely related things has shown time and again that even the smallest infraction of these rules can result in a snowball effect later on with all of the related systems – sociologically and technologically.

For instance, in order to enact a universal and decentralized asset system for a greater Metaverse, we must also look further down the line of influence and ask what else must be taken into consideration for that to happen. In regards to this, we can see we need the equivalent of a trusted identity standard as well as a certificate of authenticity for the servers themselves in order to facilitate the asset server and exchange even across SecondLife and OpenSim based systems.

This isn’t too far fetched, however, because there already exists the underlying basis for this even if it isn’t entirely being utilized. Whether this trusted identity comes from an internal methodology or whether the virtual environments which are increasingly connecting to your social media will offer the solution is up for debate. I can see the trusted identity aspect going in either direction, or even a combination of the two as simple as logging into SecondLife with the ease of a Facebook Connect, Google Account, Twitter OAuth or other method already in widespread use. My bet at this time is placed squarely on OpenSim in being the likely candidate for implementing this before Linden Lab, and thus pushing the overall Metaverse closer to reality.

If we were to look at the SecondLife Premium Memberships, the question immediately becomes what such a service offers in added value to the customer that isn’t already available to the overall community without that level of premium access. To this point, Linden Lab is still seemingly scratching their heads with the addition of Linden Homes, Premium Gifts (furniture, etc) and even adding customer service into the mix as an incentive. None of these things are a proper match for why anyone should pay for a premium membership, and it is no surprise that none of these things has really increased the uptake of premium membership purchases.

Sandboxes, homes, furniture, and customer service aren’t added value.

After all, we’re focusing on the platform but not the reality of the content agnostics. Without a premium membership there is a fairly healthy land rental ecosystem by which anyone can merely rent land and set up their own house which they can readily purchase on the marketplace. Premium gifts aren’t much of an incentive either if countless items which are similar are also available to non-premium members for purchase and use. The question becomes, then, what exactly are the real added value things which a premium membership actually offers that are not available without it?

We can evaluate this from a truly agnostic viewpoint and consider that the ability to actually purchase land as opposed to renting it is a viable added value for having a premium membership, as well as the ability to increase your L$ purchase and selling limits. This is a beginning to understanding what a premium membership is actually good for, while premium gifts, Linden Homes, and other inconsequential things should be discarded (at least metaphorically).

While it does play into the mentality of new users who wouldn’t otherwise know where to look for those same things, I must stress that this isn’t necessarily a good thing, mainly because it is essentially preying on a new user’s inability to know there are alternatives, not to mention deliberately undermining the existing systems and community which are already in place (ie: Committing the cardinal sin by going out of their way to violate the most important rule of virtual worlds: Work Within The System). To me, this seems like a very shaky revenue stream (P.T. Barnum mentality) to pursue in that it relies entirely on the ignorance of new users to sustain. This in and of itself explains a lot of the business focus of Linden Lab in looking for avenues by which they can increase total concurrent users through outside means – maybe internal projects which somehow utilize the Skylight in-browser viewer in a Facebook page.

Why exactly does anyone actually need a Linden Home? It undermines the existing community.

Now that we’ve identified the base added value for Premium Memberships, we can also assume that customer service itself should never be a premium service. A customer is a customer whether they are paying you outright for a premium membership or whether they are readily subsidizing a revenue stream through the in-world marketplace and transactions. After all, a system such as SecondLife is literally built on the premise of user generated content and in-world currency transactions, and the marketplace itself should be earning a healthy revenue stream through transaction fees to Linden Lab for the countless transactions which occur daily.

When we sort these things out concerning Premium Memberships, one pile which says Added Value and the other essentially being a Discard Pile, we’re left with the truest form of a premium membership and the associations which actually have added value and incentive by which a person should want to pay for it. What we’re also left with is an uncluttered view of what a Premium Membership should be offering as further added value without delving into gimmicks and shady practices.

A Premium Membership in SecondLife/OpenSim offers what should be recognized as a fundamental interoperability component.

When you sign up for a premium membership, you are divulging personally identifiable information for that account in order to allow both accountability and secure payment. This, in and of itself, is the holy grail for interoperability if it were ever utilized effectively. The idea of a premium membership which is tied to a trusted authority of identification, trusted enough to allow higher purchasing limits and the purchase of actual server space and regions, should also be considered the added value of a Trusted Identity in terms of assets and an avatar passport in the virtual world.

Going back to the content aspect, trusted authorities, and the ability to have access to agnostic digital content which you are legally able to access, we can see that a trusted identity is a major added value for a Premium Membership in SecondLife in that if you have that trusted identity, you should pair that with trusted certificates on the server side of operations in order to allow trusted simulators to participate in the greater Metaverse in conjunction with Direct Delivery built into the viewer.

In the same manner, paying for a Premium Membership, and being granted the level of Trusted Identity (an Avatar Passport), you should then be able to use the same login credentials across all trusted simulators and grids, and subsequently have access to all inventory content you have purchased automatically on any of those trusted simulators. In the end, it’s a matter of adding the trusted identity and trusted grid authentication into the mix which immediately solves a greater interoperability dilemma while also solving a big question for Linden Lab (and even OpenSim grids) as to what truly is added value as an incentive for offering Premium Memberships.

This approach doesn’t undermine existing OpenSim efforts for similar practices, either, and if anything should strengthen it. For instance, if we were to look at SpotOn3D and their Double Dutch Delivery system, would it not make more sense for them to instead be on board with a trusted identity and trusted grid interoperability, participating in the overall structure by becoming a trusted grid with their own certificate, and then switching their focus over to offering their own Premium Memberships which then allow their own users to have Trusted Identities which are available everywhere? The difference between this and what they are currently trying to establish is that with trusted certificates for grids, there isn’t a biased commercial entity controlling them for their own singular benefit.

Where one proprietary solution is closed off, another revenue stream opens up with much wider appeal and benefit. The idea of a trusted identity and trusted grid certificate isn’t necessarily centralized in the hands of Linden Lab to control, in that it would apply to asset servers and other grids as well in practice. For instance, a trusted identity from SpotOn3D (somebody paying for premium membership in SpotOn3D) would be able to link their account to other grids under the trusted authority; In this instance let us say InWorldz, SpotOn3D, ReactionGrid, Avination, etc all would have a certificate of trust for their grids, and my single premium membership would act as my passport across the interoperable Metaverse. I should only be paying one instance for a Premium Membership, which then becomes agnostic across the entire Hypergrid and even SecondLife.

Let’s say I am paying Linden Lab for a Premium Membership, which then grants me a Trusted Identity in the greater Metaverse. I go to log into SpotOn3D, InWorldz, Avination, or ReactionGrid and find that my Trusted Identity which I am paying Premium Membership for in SecondLife is now an acceptable set of login credentials for the entire Hypergrid.

Any number of trusted certificate grids would query the other trusted Grids to check my “Passport” for verification – a one time authentication, by which that information is then associated to me on that particular grid for immediate use going forward. After that authentication, my inventory then becomes agnostic across the entire trusted Hypergrid as a result, with purchases from places like Marketplace delivering to my inventory across the trusted hypergrid as well. This is much more preferable than to have a dozen competing marketplace systems, proprietary methodologies that only work within the confines of proprietary systems, and a slew of walled gardens competing against each other.

It is better to facilitate the ability to offer platform agnostic content which propagates across countless virtual environment spaces than to delude yourself into thinking it is both profitable and sustainable to remain a walled garden indefinitely.

This brings me to yet another point in the discussion for interoperability, as well as a fine example of the previously mentioned domino effect of changing one aspect and how it cascades into greater or lesser things down the line.

Work Within The System

Wherever possible, things that can be done within the framework of the experiential level should be. The result will be smoother operation and greater harmony among the user community. This admonition applies to both the technical and the sociological aspects of the system.

The existing system which is defined by SecondLife actually constitutes a wealth of revenue streams if only the rule above were to be acknowledged and respected. As it stands today, Linden Lab seems to be doing quite a lot to buck the hard learned lesson and run in the opposite direction.

Of course, I am talking about the potential for focusing on Marketplace and the user-generated content and in-world transactions. This is what open ended virtual environments such as SecondLife were built for, yet time and again I see these walled garden mentalities sabotaging a perfectly good source of wildly successful revenue models.

Let’s look back at the prior lesson for a moment, with the inclusion of the Trusted Identity tied to Premium Membership, trusted grid certificates, and a universal inventory access.

The obvious incentive to move forward with this course of action is the interoperability foundation aspect, however, from a purely commercial standpoint there exists countless revenue generation potential for doing so as well. Within the framework of the experiential level we see a wholly unfulfilled need for branded content within the virtual environment, despite the foundation for such to exist quite profitably for all involved. There is a disturbing lack of real world brand crossover into the virtual environment spectrum which has persisted since as far back as I can remember, and this isn’t a focus of merely SecondLife, but most walled gardens in the open content creation sandbox environments over the course of the entire industry.

On one hand, we have a perfectly capable content delivery platform in Marketplace as well as in-world, yet it is boggling to see that even today there are no real-world brands working within that system, nor is there any real protocol enabled from the company end (Linden Lab) in order to focus on and facilitate such to happen. Would it not make perfect sense to enable your own content delivery platform to allow an easy and legitimate channel for real world brands to participate under the guise of marketing in a verified manner?

How can Linden Lab marketing look at this picture and not see a million dollar revenue stream?

There is a wealth of opportunity here being squandered, and it is very disconcerting to see this continue the way it has since the mid-1990s. I’m sure there have been real world brands participating in virtual environments in one way or another, but the focus is officially supporting this channel within the system itself instead of putting the onus of responsibility on outside companies as middle-men to make those connections independently. The other point to be made here involves working within the system itself in that there is still a lack of meaningful acknowledgement or inclusion for the prosumers which open ended content creation environments have given rise to.

Instead, what we see are countless “third party” knock-off and counterfeit brand look-a-likes available in these virtual environments. This alone tells me that there is a fundamental need by the community to have these brands available, and that few if any are being met. If anything, this demand is being met with hostility and possible legal action which in and of itself is a sure sign of a broken approach to handling what could be a very profitable revenue stream for all.

In terms of trusted identities, trusted grid certificates and universal inventories, when we add to that the idea that there now becomes a widespread appeal for real world brands to participate appropriately within the work within the system rule (Marketplace), we see content agnostic approaches which can not only proliferate known brands within the confines of SecondLife but also across the greater Metaverse as a whole.

These few fundamental changes quickly show how both a level of interoperability can be achieved, while exploding the opportunity for revenue generation across the board. The idea of trusted identity, grid certificates, universal inventory, and branded merchandise channels on Marketplace have collectively solved a lion’s share of current issues, at least in theory, showing how it can be wildly beneficial to focus on them versus the current situation of segmentation and walled gardens whereby we see nothing but frustration and countless tedious hours of manual export and import of content which in turn stifles and suppresses what an interoperable Metaverse construct could offer.

Trying to convince content creators to adopt a new OpenSim platform and set up shop there is tedious, time consuming, and costly. Offering proprietary delivery systems which only a handful of grids can benefit from doesn’t do much in the way of solving the root of the problem, either. Instead we’re only masking the underlying problem and benefiting only a few who control those proprietary delivery channels.

There is a definite need for interoperability and sociological understanding of the platforms when it comes to virtual environments. Sadly, after more than twenty years since the first graphical MMO (Habitat) and even despite blatant documentation of the lessons learned from that system to pass on to future generations, neither mainstream interoperability nor sociological understanding of the Metaverse exist. Only a handful of professionals seem to actually “get it”, and clearly those aren’t the people in charge.

Make SecondLife into a Facebook game, stripped down and only vaguely resembling the actual experience. Build it for attention deficit mentality and to make a quick buck off of people who don’t know any better. Ignore the long term components or blatantly obvious revenue streams to chase whatever buzzword is on the Internet at this moment. It’s not that hard to really sum up what they’re doing over at Linden Lab, and it’s very obvious they still don’t get it. I don’t even think they want to get it, either.

Admit it… you expected a company which is amassing high profile gaming names and marketing to have some flipping idea what they’re working with. Don’t feel bad, I’ve perpetually had that feeling since 1994.

For what it’s worth, you’re not alone.

Crossworlds with Mal Burns

2011-10-27T14:08:00.001-05:00

I’ll be a guest tonight to talk about kittens & ninjas | #SecondLife

I've been invited to attend the show Crossworlds with +Mal Burns tonight in #SecondLife as a guest. We'll be talking about IEEE Virtual World Standard Group and Interoperability in Virtual Worlds. Mostly, though, we'll be focusing on what matters: Ninjas and Kittens

Show starts at 3PM SLT (Pacific) | 6PM EST
Live stream available here: http://metaversetv.com/live
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Metaverse%20Island/163/146/113

The sim doesn't open up until 2PM SLT - so grab a tent and camp on the outskirts to get a good seat :) By all means.. come down and join us.

You never know what sort of crazy stuff we’ll talk about.

Spotlight TV Open Invitation

2011-10-19T01:30:00.001-05:00

Talking about mixed media and reality tonight in #SecondLife

It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to do interviews and public appearances, but tonight I’ll be a guest on Spotlight TV to talk about mixed reality media and how reality and virtual worlds can blur for the better. Maybe a bit about Augmented Reality and the role it will play in our digital future? Join us tonight at Spotlight TV with Scorpinosis Nightfire for a conversation that should prove to be interesting (even if we’re wildly off topic).

★ Host Scorpinosis Nightfire welcomes First and Second Life author Clairwil Oh to discuss her popular virtual vampire novels and the expansion to new worlds outside of SL.

★ Academic Author of The Future of Virtual Worlds in E-Commerce, Object Interoperability Leader for IEEE Virtual World Standard Workgroup, and synthetic environment researcher, Aeonix Aeon (Will Burns) will be joining for a conversation about mixed media and reality.

October 19th, 2011
6PM SLT | 9PM EST
SLRUL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cyberstar/183/189/1710

You Say you Want A Revolution?

2011-10-14T02:20:00.001-05:00

Well, you know. We all want to change the world. #OWS

I’m an avid supporter of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which now has a basis around the world in solidarity, and has grown considerably around the United States. However, I ‘m a forecaster by nature and the facts remain that there is little to no chance that the 1% that the #OWS movement is against will in any way find a reason to negotiate. After all, those very same people hold the rights to the land the protesters occupy, and have little to no incentive to forfeit any of their holdings in negotiation.

If anything, they see the 99% movement as a bunch of people complaining without any real power structure to actually change the situation, nor should we have expected alternate behavior from them in a world where they essentially define and call the shots. I’m all for peaceful revolution, but I also know from the cold, hard, facts and statistics that a peaceful revolution is merely a warning shot leading to bigger things.

The very laws and corruption that the protesters are against will inevitably be used against them for claims of perfectly legal opposition, albeit entirely immoral. This comes as no surprise to me, because I know this will end in a more violent revolution than we are led to believe today in our peaceful outreach of protests.

It’s only a warning shot.

At 7am in Zucatti Park (Liberty Plaza), they have been ordered to evacuate for “cleaning” with the stipulation that they cannot return as a protest as they were prior. It’s a convenient excuse, but effective because the people who actually own the park are perfectly within their legal right to demand such things. It’s a matter of slanting the rules and laws, and the 1% are exceptionally good at it.

There are those who will refuse to leave, and I expect there to be mass protests and arrests. I even expect there to be a considerable amount of police brutality. What I do not expect is that the peaceful protesters will continue being on the receiving end of that abuse – physically or through corruption, much longer.

Remember, the peaceful protests are merely a warning shot.

I’ve been accused of beating the war drums, and trying to stir up violence in a peaceful protest, but I must correct those people outright. I’m not advocating violence, because I would very much rather see a peaceful end to a means. However, that being said, I am not blind enough to ignore the very real possibility that a peaceful protest may evolve into something bigger and less peaceful as this continues. It’s not beating the war drums, it’s facing reality.

Peaceful revolution is the ideal, but never rule out alternatives. Always be prepared for all contingencies.

If we’re brave enough to face the corruption on a wide scale, we must not stop short of being blindsided by ideals that may not produce fruition. We must expect the best and be prepared for the worst, in that we may (as a whole) lessen the casualties in the future. Be they political or physical.

Somebody has to think of these things, because a majority is unwilling to. If it comes to that, just be glad there are those who have thought ahead and will have an answer for you if you get to that point.

Peace is the one thing we all want, but only a few are willing to truly fight for it if the need arises. Don’t be surprised if the militias come to the #OWS aid when they need it most. We all want a peaceful solution, but sometimes we have to be willing to truly fight when our options run out. I make no qualms about it – the American Patriots are ready to fight when peaceful negotiation and protest is ignored. It’s what our founding fathers did, and it’s a tradition of these United States of America.

Expect the best, be prepared for the worst. Never be surprised.

Will

Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Windlight

2011-10-08T01:52:00.001-05:00

Native Weather in #SecondLife with Zones @Rodvik

I’ve probably said this before, so please bare with me. Windlight as used in SecondLife has the native ability to include Weather built in. Why it was never really implemented has been sort of a mystery to me since 2007, but I’ve been told by @onikenkon on twitter that the reasoning behind not implementing the native weather system in Windlight happens to be along the lines that the Linden Lab programmers didn’t seem to know how to stop it from raining inside buildings.

Raindrops keep falling on my head…

SecondLife JIRA Report

Integrate Windlight Weather

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-23322

If you would like to see Weather natively enabled in SecondLife, I urge that you visit the JIRA page and click on “Watch” – I also invite discussion and comments on the matter.

This blog post is a companion to that JIRA in order to explain in further detail how the User Created Zones requirement would work in conjunction with Windlight Weather in order to block rain inside buildings (among many other things it would allow).

I have to say that this is quite a bizarre claim for a team of programmers whose sole purpose in life at Linden Lab is to program a video game engine. In the gaming industry this should automatically have been answered with “Implement Zones”, which in and of itself should be on the list of things one would be expected to know about when dealing with 3D game engines. Why the hell do I, a presumably under qualified dolt who can’t grace the doors of Linden Lab, know this is a solution yet the apparently overqualified rockstars who grace the name Linden leave a fundamental component in 3D game engines out of the release since its inception? It can’t possibly be that ridiculous to implement if a place like ActiveWorlds managed to code it from the ground up because they didn’t have the luxury of prims to start with.

Of course, in this same vein, I’ve also seen the idea of Parametric Deformation for Mesh proposed and marked as “Someday/Maybe” by Linden Lab, only to be picked up by the community as a fundraiser to scrape together the money to pay Karl Stiefvater (Qarl) to program this feature. With over 857 votes, 357 people watching that particular JIRA, and a solution proposed to fix the Mesh defect, you would think Linden Lab would have looked into it as a priority. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend checking out the Mesh Clothing Parametric Deformer Project and maybe making a donation.

@Rodvik, if you’re reading this (though I doubt it) I highly suggest Linden Lab tosses in the measly remainder of the donation to get Qarl to work on Parametric Deformation for Mesh as an independent contractor, and to save grace with the community. This is clearly very important to the community and should not be ignored. Matter of fact, look… stop the book tours and public appearances or whatever it is you’re doing and hold a meeting in your ranks at Linden Lab. You need to teach those programmers the difference between priority and not a priority. If you’re the one sabotaging their idea of priority with arbitrary milestones or whatever, you need to chill out and really see what you have on the table. Seriously, you’re dropping the ball and I really don’t want you to. As far as zones are concerned, you come from EA, a flipping video game company. Even you know that Zones are a staple of video games to offer design control over many aspects of a 3D environment.

But I digress…

If anything, upon hearing these sorts of things in the ranks of Linden Lab, I would have either docked somebody’s pay or seriously reconsidered whether the programmers were truly qualified to be working on that project at all.

I understand I’m quite cynical about this, but something so basic a premise as user defined zones, which are a given staple of game programming, should not be a mystery to a well paid team of rockstars at Linden Lab. I mean, this is one of those things where literally years worth of important or half-assed priorities at Linden Lab have consistently superseded a basic fundamental inclusion of a game engine. It’s such a fundamental inclusion that the mere lack of it forbids Linden Lab from properly utilizing what must have been a multi-million dollar technology purchase (WindLight).

In ActiveWorlds, the ability to define user created zones has been a staple since at least 2005 and entails essentially the following premise: http://wiki.activeworlds.com/index.php?title=Zone

In terms of SecondLife, this should actually be easier to implement than the work required to implement it in ActiveWorlds, in that ActiveWorlds is primarily a “Mesh” based virtual environment and has no concept of “Prims” as in SecondLife. In this manner, ActiveWorlds had to essentially code prims from the ground up simply for use as Zone definition spaces, whereas SecondLife already has prims as the native building system.

So what does a user defined zone really mean?

Well, in respect to SecondLife, you as the user would see another tab on the build menu for Zone, whereby enabling that Prim as a Zone (a checkbox) would turn it into a special primitive with the zone qualities contained within it. The prim would also be natively phantom and normally invisible unless you add the option to “Show Special Objects” to the build menu, much like there is an option to show invisible items. There would be the option to make the zone prim visible as well, in the case the builder is working with a lot of zones and needs them visible while building.

Here is the window for Zones in ActiveWorlds, where you can see all of the options available to the builder:

As you can see, there are numerous options available when creating zones in a virtual environment. For people who didn’t jump to the wiki link provided for zones at ActiveWorlds, that information will be found below (with some comments pertaining to SecondLife). From here on, it gets pretty technical and wordy without much in the way of pictures, so bare with me:

Tag Name

Assigning a tag name to a zone allows the user to trigger events for entering and exiting the zone.

// This would essentially be the Description field or Prim Name in SecondLife

Volume Shape

This controls the shape of the area. There are 3 types:

Cube - The zone is a rectangular area in size as defined by the Size values.
Cylinder - The zone is a cylindrical area. The X Size defines the radius of the cylinder, the Y Size defines the height, and the Z Size is unused.
Sphere - The zone is a sphere whose radius is defined by the X Size value. The Y and Z values are not used.

//This is pretty much not needed in SecondLife because we already have Prims

Priority

Priority defines the most important zone when two zones intersect. A higher priority number means the zone will have more importance over other zones with lower priority numbers.

For example, on the diagram on the right there are two shapes. On the top, the red square has a priority of 1 while the blue circle has a priority of 0. Therefore, the red square becomes becomes more important than the blue circle. On the bottom, the blue circle's priority is changed to 2, higher than red square's priority of 1. Therefore, it has become more important than the red square.

A useful example for priorities are for large weather zones, where a large zone dims the lighting in a pale blue haze for ice. However, this zone may intersect a building, where it will also affect the interior. A zone with normal lighting can be placed in the building with a priority of 1 while the ice zone has a priority of 0. Therefore, the building's zone will cancel out the pale blue haze inside the building.

Zone Properties Dialog Box

Size

This defines the size of the zone. See "Volume Shape" above for details on how these values are used.

Gravity

This controls how fast users will fall when in this zone. A value of 1.00 is "normal" gravity.

Friction

This controls how fast users will stop when walking in this zone. A value of 1.00 is considered "normal" friction. Lower values will make walking "slippery", while higher values will slow walking speed and cause the user to stop more quickly.

Water

If checked, the zone is filled with water (or whatever liquid) and a user will swim when they are inside of the zone. Note that a zone is invisible, so users will not see the surface of the water. You will need to add an object to the scene if you want to make the water surface visible.

//In terms of SecondLife, adding the top face of the zone to use the water shader as the oceans do would be a bonus.

Block Particles

If checked, this zone will be included by particles when checking for collision.

//Essentially this is how it doesn’t rain inside buildings in ActiveWorlds unless you forget to create a zone for your building or structure. The same would apply to SecondLife and Windlight Weather.

Block Lights

If checked, lights created with the light command will not be visible if they are outside of this zone.

// SL: Essentially any item outside the zone that has Light enabled will not have any effect on the lighting inside the zone.

Block World Light

If checked, the world light ("sunlight") will not be visible from within this zone. This is useful for making underground or dark areas where the world light source should not be visible.

Block Audio

Any audio that was started by action commands using the sound or media command is muted or faded, if the trigger object lies outside the zone, while the avtar is inside the zone.

Audio played within the zone can only be heard while the avatar is inside the zone and will get muted or faded as soon the avatar is outside the zone.

Audio played by the media command is faded in and out when entering or leaving the zone.

Audio played with the sound command is faded in and stops without been faded, cause of the underlying principle for the sound command only playing the nearest sound at a time.

When a noise command is triggered outside the zone while the avatar is inside a zone, the noise will not be heard. When a noise is triggered right before the avatar enters the zone, the noise will be heard also when the avatar is inside the zone, the noise won't stop playing until the trigger has finished. A noise command triggered inside the zone will not be heard outside the zone.

Ambient sound set in the world feature settings is not affected by this option. To mute global ambient sounds use the Ambient sound field with the zone settings.

//Anything outside of a zone that is playing sound/gestures/etc will not be heard inside the zone. Any sound/gestures/etc inside the zone will only be heard by users inside the zone. This would include Shared Media and Video

Block Chat

If checked, users within this zone will not see the chat of users outside of the zone. Note1: Zones do not block Public Speak either direction across the zone barrier. Note2: Zones do not prevent non-Global bots from hearing across the zone barrier.

//Private spaces for open chat without having to go to group chat internally. Essentially a zone with Block Chat enabled will use its own chat channel transparently for all people inside the zone. Very nice for nightclubs on a sim where you don’t want the text chat, gestures etc to bleed over to the neighbors.

Block Join/Invite

If checked, users within this zone cannot have other users join them and cannot invite anyone.

//SL: Can be extended to allow only certain Group members to invite others via teleport

Color

This controls the color of the fog in this zone, and the color of the water (if applicable).

//SL: This would control a native Windlight Setting within that zone.

Fog Range

This controls the near / far fog settings.

//SL: Another Windlight setting control within the zone

Ambient Sound

This sound (if specified) will repeat in the background when the camera (usually the avatar's head) is in this zone.

//SL: Only a single sound, or chain of sounds for ambient within the zone. As of this post, the equivalent would be a multitude of ambient sound spheres placed across the area to achieve the same effect. Enabling Ambient Sound in a zone would not harm the ambient sound sphere market, but lessen the need for multitudes of them.

Footstep sound

This sound is used if the avatar's feet are in this zone while walking or running.

//SL: Native sound for running or walking on various materials like sand, wood, metal, etc as defined by the space of that zone.

Camera Tag

This specifies that name of a particular camera object within the scene. When the user enters this zone, their camera will switch to the camera matching the given name, and will return to the previous setting when they leave.

//SL: Zoning a furniture set, for instance, would allow the designer to specify a forward facing camera override when sitting on the furniture – where the user could still adjust the camera as they please after that switch. How many times have you sat on a couch next to a wall in a house only to have your camera fly outside the building? Allowing content creators to attach zones to their creations will give them better control and lessen the wild camera positions.

Target Cursor

This specifies the texture that will be used as the center cursor in Move Mode (mouselook).

//SL: Possibly custom target cursors for shooting games?

Voip Enabled

Enable/Disable Voip Rights within a given zone.

//SL: Already an option as a Parcel or Sim owner, this would allow fine tuning of where VoIP is enabled in an area on a zone by zone basis instead of an all or nothing scenario.

Voip Rights

Specify a list of users who will have the rights to participate in Voip conversation within the zone.

//SL: Not restricting VoIP entirely, but giving only certain people within that zone the ability to use VoIP. Business scenarios where there is a single speaker.

In the scope of SecondLife, a Zone is simply a specialized Prim in wireframe which defines an area with special properties. When we talk about whether or not it’s raining inside of a building, we should also ask if that building is within a user created zone with Block Particles enabled, as we would ask in ActiveWorlds.

Defining zones is a staple of video game programming and quite common. To hear that there is a possibility that the programmers at Linden Lab did not know how to stop it from raining inside of buildings puzzles me.

While I admit the implementation of user defined zones would be a complex project within Linden Lab (I’m humoring you, Linden Lab, because ActiveWorlds did it from scratch with a single programmer in 2005), I must also insist that the very lack of this ability is subsequently limiting and/or crippling the technology and what is available to it – namely Windlight which was acquired in 2007 and still has yet to see full implementation.

My Moment of Rage

Waiting since 2007 for a fundamental component pisses me off

Honestly, and I truly mean this – I swear to all that is holy and good in this world, if a Linden shows up on this post and tries to sling a ration of bullshit at me in a comment to excuse themselves for why this hasn’t been properly addressed as a priority, there will be hell. Any manager worth their salt, let alone the CEO of the company, would agree in the face of such negligence to the product and community which it serves. Whether this is addressing user created zones (which instantly negates a large amount of JIRA requests through facilitation) or whether it’s the Parametric Deformation.

That level of absurdity in dismissing things is unacceptable – fundamental flaws and defects in the system should not be ignored for multiple years, and they should not be in a position where your own community walks off and raises the funds to do a job that the company itself should have been doing.

As far as user Created Zones (which would immediately allow Weather to be enabled) I’m pointing to ActiveWorlds, a virtual environment company that doesn’t even register on the grand scheme of competition any more, implementing user created zones from absolute scratch via a single programmer in another country that they have on contract – and they managed to do it in 2005. You cannot possibly tell me that an outdated, underfunded, technology with a single programmer is more adept than the entire team of programmers at Linden Lab.

I refuse to acknowledge that because it’s absolute bull. Just like saying Parametric Deformation is not a priority when it fixes a fundamental flaw with Mesh, which is the entire focus of why Viewer 3 was created.

I mean, is this really what it takes to have the major issues be addressed? Is priority assigned by how much negative publicity it’s drawing for not addressing it? Or you have to be some digerati and Linden kiss-ass for them to acknowledge you?

Geez… No wonder everybody uses Third Party Viewers. At least they are on top of things and really engaging with the community on this stuff. I apologize, but the more I think of this arrogant and dismissive behavior on the part of Linden Lab, the more it pisses me off. Waiting for years to even have a basic component in a game engine acknowledged in an official capacity and implemented is simply asinine.

I mean, the only reason I can see that the ATI 4500/5100 bug ( the one where Viewer 3 is entirely unusable) was looked at and addressed was because Tonya Souther (Firestorm) called out Linden Lab in a public interview. C’mon… seriously? That’s what it takes to light a fire under their asses?

This has got to change. It’s unacceptable.

I’d probably lose my sanity if I were ever a Linden.

True Patriots

2011-10-06T21:51:00.001-05:00

What the Occupy Wall Street Movement Means #OWS

Allow me to state this up front:

I am part of the 99%

and very likely you are as well.

You can split hairs and say you’re part of the 53% and are making ends meet, and that those people in the 99% movement called Occupy Wall Street do not speak for you. However, it is a matter of time and even if you are blessed to be in the struggling 53% (as your slogan says), you are still one paycheck away from being homeless. 1 out of every 6 Americans live at or below the poverty line with many more already categorized as severe poverty.

Even you are just as likely not to have any health care coverage at all, and you work ungodly hours (lucky, so you are told, to have the two or three part-time jobs that you have to hold down to barely make ends meet). In many cases, even you are faced with the constant decision whether you will pay the bills or actually eat. Whether you will eat or pay for your medication out of pocket. You’re lucky for all that, when the richest in this country earn your yearly salary every single day, and do absolutely no work for it.

I’ve heard the absurdity of the 53% counter-movement attributing those in the Occupy Wall Street movement as “Hippies” or “Communists” – I’ve read quotes from Republicans such as Mitt Romney (R) calling those protesters “Un-American” – I am absolutely appalled at this blatant ignorance. This guy is running for the highest office in this nation and he has absolutely no idea what it truly means to be a Patriot? I can’t blame him, though, because a majority of you have no idea what it means to be a true American Patriot, either.

One thing most Americans seem to consistently fail to understand is what an American PATRIOT really is. It is no wonder, then, that those who we elect are incompetent and themselves have no interest in the people or know what an American Patriot actually is. As George Carlin once put it: “Garbage in, Garbage out.”

An American patriot is not somebody who supports his or her government. If that's what the American definition of a patriot were, we would not have been calling George Washington, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Payne, John Hancock and all the rest of them "patriots" would we?

Those true patriots were all men who openly advocated revolt against their own government and even the corruption of bankers.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

Thomas Jefferson

3rd President of the United States of America (1743-1826)

That's what made them American Patriots in the first place.

Their government, the one oppressing them in 1775, was headquartered in London, England.

My government, the one oppressing me in 2011, happens to be located in Washington D.C.

Aside from that, there is little difference. My government today is at the mercy of large financial backers, those 1% who, while technically called upon to pay taxes and be held accountable for crimes they commit, most often do not. Those 1% are actually rewarded for their greed, corruption and manipulation of our legal and political system against the very people it was meant to serve, willfully oppressing and destroying the people and this planet for their own benefit and gain, because our politicians in the Whitehouse, Congress and Senate all are indebted to them. This was never a matter of Right versus Left in this country, Republican versus Democrat – no, this is now a matter of Right versus Wrong. This movement is isn’t about pointing fingers at a particular political party in order to justify policies or inaction – this movement is about the collective of this nation realizing that neither side from our leadership has done their job and that the real control of this country does not lay in the hands of the people, by the people or for the people any longer.

Make no mistake, oppression is coming from our government. When your vote means nothing, because both candidates are heavily funded by those of highest wealth and corruption (even in secret), and our “elected” leaders are more indebted to those financiers and bankers than to the very people of this nation, it is oppression and corruption across the board and we were warned by our own founding fathers that this would happen. We were warned by the men who defined the very nature of what it is to be called American Patriot and who fought for this country and freedoms that it represents.

To me, the citizen who

    • runs around waving the American flag,
    • pledges his support to the government in Washington,
    • and goes along with what that government says

is the same thing as what the colonials used to call a "loyalist." We Americans never used the word "patriot" to describe anybody who was a loyalist. The very term "loyalist" meant somebody who was "loyal" to the government in London and to King George III. A "loyalist" was the then equivalent of today's "statist" in that they supported the (then) state which was (then) the British government.

The true American patriot is the antithesis of a loyalist.

The true definition of what an American patriot actually is can be determined only by examining what those men who signed the Declaration of Independence (and their followers) actually did. So, let's learn what a true patriot is by taking a look at what those true patriots actually did.

1. They spoke and wrote profusely and published their beliefs and opinions clearly stating the truth, that their government was tyrannical and guilty of crimes against the liberty of the common man. They openly denounced the government and its agents, not only in print but in public speeches and gatherings. They did this despite great personal risk for doing so. This went on for some time prior to 1775.

Sounds like what our patriots are doing today in Occupy Wall Street. They’re following in the footsteps of our founding fathers, exercising their rights (First Amendment), and standing against corruption across the board which is against the liberty of the common man. If only we could all be so noble and patriotic to stand together as they do, instead of mocking our own people and trying to dismantle them. Ask yourself, who is really acting unpatriotic?

2. They conspired, both in secret and later openly, to overthrow and revolt against their government with the aim of throwing it out and establishing a new and different governmental system. In doing this, they were branded as traitors and seditionists by their government... but they did it anyway, despite the risk.

Occupy Wall Street was at first conspired in secret and now openly as a peaceful protest. It follows direct democracy in all things – not representative democracy as we have now. While they have no plans to overthrow the government, this may likely become a possibility if their grievances are not met or corrected in our government, and continued loyalty to the most greedy and corrupt in this nation continues. As more violence and opposition from those they oppose escalates, so too will their determination to be heard. Peaceful patriots will be beaten and abused only so long before they will fight back.

3. Eventually, after their government had fired the first shots, they took up arms against their government and began killing it's policing agents, who were the armed force enforcing the oppressive dictates of their government.

When the government and corrupt wealth in this nation fire the first shots, make no mistake – those peaceful patriots will fight back.

All these things were done by a small number of men, against great odds and at great personal and economic risk, but they did them anyway and that's what made them true American Patriots. They did these things, I might add, in an age when documents had to be all handwritten and communication was by means of letters carried on horseback. There was no Internet or social media to foster their revolution.

Those who would call themselves American patriots need to stand ready to do the same things today that our forefathers did in 1775, and we'd better be ready to be called conspirators, traitors, seditionists, communists and terrorists by the government loyalists and corrupted top 1% we oppose. We must not allow them to get away with branding us with those labels. Labels are the instruments tyrannical governments all use to thwart opposition. Any government born out of a revolution, as was ours, can be replaced by the same means. And it doesn't take a majority to do it, just as it didn't in 1775. When you see or hear patriots branded by the establishment using such terms, remember this:

The present American government, its establishment press and uninformed Americans using such labels here are no different from the government of Communist China branding its dissidents as "counter-revolutionaries".

A lot of people who frequent Internet websites such as this one like to think of themselves as patriots.

Are you? Unless you are now ready to do the things the real patriots did you are not, in fact, a real patriot. You are the very opposite of what it means to act as a patriot of this country.

The Bill of Rights –

Lest you’ve forgotten what it means to be a true patriot.

First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Second Amendment: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Third Amendment: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Fifth Amendment: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Sixth Amendment: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

Seventh Amendment: In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Eighth Amendment: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So, how is our government and those 1% acting against the people and subsequently duping you into being mouthpieces for their lies?

For one, the 53% movement clearly does not understand the scope of the First Amendment – criticizing the protesters for actually protesting and calling them communists when they are truly patriots. It is the same First Amendment Right that gives them and the 53% the Freedom to speak – but more so the freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. If anything, those who are protesting are acting more patriotic and American than the people who flippantly mock them in ignorance from the 53% and 1%.

To say that I’ve heard this “communism” label and mockery of true patriotism coming from not only civilians but even Ex-Marines who were sworn to uphold and protect this nation from threats foreign and domestic, to uphold the Constitution and the rights afforded to our nation, is alarming and insulting. If anyone should be a true patriot, I expect our armed forces, active and retired, to stand tall in this country’s time of need.

Luckily there are quite a lot of patriotic Marines and veterans who understand what it means to be a true patriot, and have decided to stand with this nation to uphold their oath. To know thy enemy, even if it is our own government, and to stand and protect this nation from threats foreign and domestic. I applaud those true patriots and ask why the rest are so eager to abandon their nation when it is truly in need.

Eat The Rich

The real question, and massive over-generalization, that is spreading around by the uninformed is whether or not the Occupy Wall Street patriots actually want to dismantle the rich en-mass and put an end to being wealthy.

The unequivocal answer to this absurdity is No.

We don’t hate the rich. If you’ve earned your fortune and aspired to the American Dream, and worked to achieve it then we applaud you. However, that success comes with a social contract and agreement to pay it forward. I hear constant cries of “Class Warfare” whenever increased taxes for the rich are proposed, and to be honest, those cries are intentionally deceitful. It is class warfare, but those waging class warfare are not the lower 99%, it has always been the upper echelons of wealth against everyone else. Right now, we’re simply fighting back.

Take into account that the current tax rate for that bracket doesn’t even break 40% (it’s closer to 34%), which seems pretty high until you realize that number is roughly half (or 1/3 if you want to go back historically) of what those exorbitantly rich were paying before they began systematically witling away and lowering their taxes through lobbying and other not so lawful means. Not only that, but the idea of Corporate Gains Tax is a farce as it stands today, with Warren Buffet (one of the richest men in this nation) stating that even he thinks it’s unfair that his own secretary pays more in taxes than he ever will.

That tells you something right there. It should tell you that despite legal obligations to pay what little taxes (in comparison to the time when they were taxed at 94%) they owe, there are benefits and countless loopholes to bring down what is already a tax rate of around 34% (when it’s been as high as 94%) to an effective tax rate of just 17%. And somehow we’re complacent when they award themselves record bonuses and profits while not generating job growth. For the record, the job growth for August was absolutely zero, and unemployment in September rose 126% – a number not seen since April 2009.

Let us recap – 94% tax on the wealthiest Americans shortly after the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression, because prior to that, the tax rate was as absurdly low as it is now, and now all the way down to an absurdly low 17% effective tax rate for the wealthiest few at the top. And you’re dumb enough to believe them when they cry “Class Warfare” and “Socialism”?

“The way you get rich in this world is not by working hard,” said Marty Sullivan, an economist and a contributing editor to Tax Analysts. “It’s by owning large amounts of assets and having those things appreciate in value.” - Washington Post, Sept 11, 2011

Class warfare indeed. They have the terminology correct, but are apparently good at convincing you that they are truly the victim as they continue to squeeze you for everything you have. They’ve convinced you that you have no right to protest, and even to the extent that you’re willing to repeat their message even if it’s hurting you. It’s class warfare alright, but we’re the ones they’re fighting against on every front, taking increasingly all they can get their hands on and convincing you with slick ads and lies that you’re oppressing them. Telling you that if you want change, all you have to do is vote – knowing full well both parties are deeply in their pockets and answer to them and not us.

Michael Moore said it best – we’ve developed into a Kleptocracy.

The people who stand in solidarity across the Occupy Wall Street movement, and in 164+ cities around the world are fighting back. Being patriots now didn’t get us into this mess – it’s the inaction all along from us to fight back that got us in this mess. It is the complacency and ignorance against our fellow Americans acting as true patriots that got us into this mess – because the 53% are too cowardly to earn their right to be called American Patriots.

We’ll continue to stand and fight for you, the 53%, even when you are not brave enough or smart enough to stand with us. In the meantime, educate yourself. Your country needs you, and now is not the time to act like a coward.

Cowards don’t deserve the freedoms of this country. They deserve the poverty and slavery they will be crushed under because of their ignorance and apathy. Patriots fought to give you this country, and Patriots are fighting to get it back.

Support Occupy Wall Street – it is clearly your Patriotic Duty.

Taking Diaspora Seriously

2011-10-01T04:46:00.001-05:00

Why social is a large part of our virtual future. #IEEE #SecondLife

I’m a strong advocate of privacy and our ability to choose individually what level of privacy we believe is adequate for ourselves. Sure, there are constant arguments over how anonymous representation can lead to bad behavior in many, but I’m a realist about the entire situation. I see the glass as neither half empty or half full, because there is equal potential for both good and bad in everything we do.

In the case of Diaspora, I won’t say that they are the end-all to be-all social network. They may or may not have a long standing chance in the grand scheme of things – especially when facing giants like Google+ or well established social networks like Facebook, both of which have far more clout and resources to throw around to gain favor. However, that being said – I do absolutely believe in the power of privacy, choice and above all else, that just like the Internet itself, a virtual environment collective would make up the very thing which we today consider a Metaverse.

In order for a virtual environment standard to really take hold and be beneficial to all, it must be addressed from the standpoint that all will be involved or affected by it. I’ve played a part in many virtual environments in my life, and have seen some truly amazing things whether it’s creative content from individuals or truly innovative paradigms from research initiatives.

One of the research initiatives that really helped cement and shape my beliefs on virtual environments for the future was one called Solipsis Decentralized Metaverse (INRIA), and while they went with the notion of a fully decentralized architecture, I immediately recognized then that even if it was technically feasible, the reality would be more of a hybrid approach.

An early look at Solipsis from 4 years ago

I keep this understanding today during my tenure as object interoperability lead for IEEE Virtual World Standard Workgroup, in that in order to truly foster in a full Metaverse, we must take into account that no single entity should be holding the keys to the entire kingdom.

Whether this is concerning the underlying technology, the components, or a myriad of other aspects which are bound to interoperate with the ecosystem that is a virtual environment, I take these ideals into account in that it’s never as simple as defining a single thing when it comes to the Metaverse.

A Metaverse, for the most part, is the conglomeration of many types of technologies, filetypes (assets) and protocols that come together in a hyper-media environment that even transcends the web today. There is no simple answer for what components make up a Metaverse, because the further you scrutinize in detail the more obscure it becomes. What number of image formats could we support for textures? Are we taking into account emerging standards that are dynamic like procedural methodologies? Will centralized servers really play a role in future iterations or will a more decentralized approach reign supreme? How many protocols for simple text message transfer are there, and then what about VoIP traffic protocols? What sort of protocols and techniques should be used for the social media facing aspect of a virtual environment?

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, and that’s exactly what the IEEE Virtual World Standard Workgroup is aiming to do, to the best of our abilities. I imagine the Metaverse as a hybrid of decentralization nodes – each system on a common standard, even if internally they are all very different. Walled garden mentality, in my mind, really is a hindrance to a truly open Metaverve – but if they must continue to exist, then they should at least be willing to offer some sort of compliancy to the overall network of virtual environments if they wish to retain any semblance of standards.

Being a de-facto standard isn’t enough, because in the end it’s self-serving to the company or entity that holds that de-facto, but offers little in the way of worldwide benefit in the grand scheme of things. Much like the days of AOL, Prodigy and other such services, the walled gardens are doomed to be eclipsed by bigger and better things (in this case it was the world wide web), and it was only reluctance and willfully keeping their clients ignorant of the things that are bigger and better than their own walled garden service that kept those services around as long as they were.

We live in a similar age today but have the benefit of hindsight where we can look back at those early walled gardens before the true explosion of the world wide web came about, and we benefit today from that evolution into open standards. Virtual environments today are much the same, in that they mostly are closed and walled gardens – nobody is interested in talking to each other from virtual environment to another, because it simply is not in their best interest.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

We have hindsight now, and we know that walled gardens are only the precursor to a global standard which will foster a revolution and explosion of a new paradigm. Nobody really holds the keys to the Internet, not even Google. There are countless services and products, billions of sites and pages for all manner of things (good and bad).

Remember, this is all from the standpoint of a decentralized methodology we call the Internet. No single entity owns all of the servers of the Internet, and no single entity owns all of the content. Everyone is free to make their own space as they see fit, and by and large it has been an overwhelming boon to human society as a result.

A Metaverse Standard for all, holds the ability to foster similar results in the synthetic environment age. This is why I officially acknowledge such endeavors as Diaspora on the metaversestandards.org wiki, and as a legitimate social network to be taken serious.

It isn’t because I believe Diaspora itself is an end-all to be-all winner, but more because the ideology and methodologies behind that system are the ideal brass ring we should all be acknowledging for every aspect of our virtual environment going forward. I acknowledge Diaspora officially in whatever capacity I may be allowed, simply because it is the paradigm shift which I believe will foster in a better generation of privacy, decentralization and methodologies which are beneficial to all.

Diaspora tells you that you are free to start your own node as part of the entire network, that you own the content and information that is yours. They tell you that they respect your privacy, and want to help you protect it – even saying they respect your right to personally decide if being anonymous, pseudonymous or completely authentic (as in using your real name) suits you. They do not believe in a single entity being the only option, and in fact make their source code open to everyone, while actively encouraging everyone to start their own “pods”. They respect not only you, but the very foundation that made the Internet amazing – and for this the least I could do is tip my hat to them, and the many hard working people behind it. Their ideals and goals are in line with those of the IEEE Virtual World Standard Workgroup; what they want for a social network, we want also for a virtual world standard, and I highly believe social networking is an integral part of the entire virtual world construct.

I acknowledge Diaspora because I believe in the paradigm and ideals which they stand for. In a world where Facebook is being sued because they still track you even after you log out of their system, and Google insists you don’t have a choice in whether or not you must divulge your real name, it is refreshing to see there is a beneficial alternative for all – where everyone is on a level playing field with access as they see fit.

If anyone deserves my praise for upholding the values set forth in the creation of the Internet, then I gladly give that praise and recognition to Diaspora. Clearly, among the countless ‘nyms and their avatars, so do you.

An Island Unto Themselves

2011-09-27T17:52:00.001-05:00

#Marketing in the Prosumer Culture

For many of you, this post will seem a bit dull, but the implications from it are far reaching and profound. I'd like to state up front that this sort of topic is my forte' and I regularly advise on this to what often seems like an entirely baffled room full of executives (not to mention lawyers who are ready to grab pitchforks and torches) - but as I've often said in those situations: Bare with me, because what I'm about to say is probably the most important thing you could hear on the matter.

We live in a digital culture of sharing and mashup, where 1's and 0's are interchangeable and cheap. It doesn't matter to the prosumer culture whether those ones and zeros are configured in a manner that yields a photo, mp3 or streaming video - what matters is the sharing of ideas and media that pertain to their topic of interest at that moment.

On the subject matter, the best advice I can give stems from what I like to refer to as the Gospel of Virtual Environments, but for most you would know it as Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat. Written by Chip Morningstar and F. Randal Farmer in 1991, this synopsis addressed the lessons they learned from running a massive multi-user virtual environment in the late 1980's on the Commodore system known as Habitat, and while the graphics were definitely paltry by today's standards, the lessons are just as important today as they ever were - because they address the underlying nature of technology as well as the attitudes of people that use those types of systems.

One of the most important lessons from that synopsis was simply:

Work within the system

And while this lesson is open to interpretation, the story that accompanied it really set the stage for understanding how not to address prosumers in a digital age if your goal is to protect IP, or system type mechanics/rules.

I won't go into the entire story here (it’s available at the end of the post as a link for reading), but I will address the fundamental understandings that came out it, and how they still apply today in the digital world context.

Essentially what it boils down to is this:

If you are a company with a brand and IP to protect, you have more options today in order to enforce it than you did twenty years ago utilizing traditional methods. The landscape has changed quite a bit, and the 1's and 0's of today are agnostic, while the mentality of the prosumers is that of simply sharing for the sake of conversation or furtherance of devotion to a particular brand or image. In modern context, this still holds true on a much wider basis than it did twenty years ago, and so our defacto arsenal of "cease and desist" and litigation often times is met with an outstanding backlash in the wider sphere of digital culture, causing more damage and loss than had the entity utilized the "Work within the system" lesson.

No better example of this sort of backlash (humorously named the Streisand Effect) can be given than that of the RIAA and MPAA with many years of fighting and litigation efforts to curb or eliminate the acts of piracy among Peer2Peer networks. It is now over ten years later and such an approach has not only cost those entities more than it's worth to enforce, but has had the opposite effect to curbing the "violations" worldwide - eliminating single file P2P systems like Napster, Limewire, etc but giving rise to massive file collection P2P systems like BitTorrent where no longer single files are shared but large quantities of files as a single "set".

Where the RIAA wanted to stop music piracy by shutting down places like Napster which offered single tracks per download, they ended up fostering a worldwide backlash that is BitTorrent where finding a single track is unlikely versus searching for the entire discography of the artist for download. Clearly, this is throwing gasoline on the fire and acting surprised that the fire did not go out.

The interesting thing about all of this is simply the fact that digital culture and mashup mentality often do a much better job at proliferation of ideas and content than even multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, creating new content from multiple sources that transcend the originals – beneficial to multiple entities all at the same time, as we see in the Gwen Stefani vs Britney Spears music mashup below titled “Tick-Toxic”.

Whatcha’ waiting, whatcha waiting, whatcha waiting for? Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think.

Working within the system entails an unorthodox methodology, in that the proper approach to "infringement" no longer is a black or white scenario, but instead many shades of grey for the negative approaches (and in methods that offer mutual gain, 16.7 million colors of awesome) - often entirely dependent on the situational context. While cease and desist options and litigation are still a part of that arsenal of enforcement, it no longer constitutes the cut and dry option, and in fact should be the absolute last option to be enacted - instead of the first or only.

When you find yourself looking to protect IP or a brand, the first question that should be asked is no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" but instead should be "How do we monetize this situation, foster its growth and make it work for our own benefit?" - aka: Working within the system.

Working within the system entails a willingness to work with the people involved in that system on the same grounds and foundation that those people utilize within that particular system, whether that be business or individuals (prosumers) in order to foster a mutually beneficial situation while limiting the constraints that would cause a backlash and do widespread harm. Think of it like trying to disarm a nuclear weapon - you wouldn't go in and bash it with a sledgehammer for fear that you could cause a massive explosion. Instead you handle it delicately and with foresight for the bigger picture. Cease and Desist (litigation) is your sledgehammer, and should only be used as a last resort.

Instead we should first think about ways to work within the system at hand, for our own benefit (because we are still self-interested as companies) but also in a way that addresses the underlying and fundamental need of the prosumer mentality to spread and share IP, Brands and derivatives of those properties.

One of those many shades of grey happens to be simply allowing the proliferation of the IP or brand to continue while adding only monetization or supplemental marketing to the situation. This can be seen today in the general approach by Youtube where music in the user created videos is now more likely to come with a link saying who the artist is, the name of the song, and a direct link to purchase that music. This, in turn, offers a solution to working within the system and IP infringement in that the question answered was no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" and instead "How do we utilize this infringement to our own and their benefit?".

In the case of Youtube, however, while the approach is sound there is still no method to actually handle the mashup and derivative offerings that spawn in abundance from this culture – as we can see from the Tick Toxic video where both Tick Tock from Gwen Stefani and Toxic from Britney Spears is put together for a new take on two songs, Youtube only recognizes the Gwen Stefani part as the music to tag and offer for purchase (catching only half of the potential).

In the long run, prosumer integration of your IP or brand in derivatives or outright is the best form of free marketing for your brand or IP that you could ever hope for. You would never think to shoot down free marketing on your behalf, especially when things like videos on Youtube have this wonderful habit of "going viral" wherein hundreds of thousands if not millions of people share and view those videos, giving the brand or IP massive amounts of free exposure. The trick to all of this is to look at it from a marketing perspective and not a legal perspective.

Prosumer culture is the predominant force in the digital age, and we are best served by allowing that system of understanding to proliferate with little or no negative intervention. While this flies in the face of the crack legal team on call at most companies who want nothing more than to fight the good fight, the benefits far outweigh the costs in the long run - and only serve to offer additional revenue models, and widespread marketing and goodwill among this global system if approached properly with complete understanding.

What we have today are companies that essentially shoot first, and ask questions later (if they bother asking at all) with their DMCAs, Cease and Desists and litigation. This is detrimental on the whole because of the prior notion of the Streisand Effect, moreso because it fosters an "island unto yourself" mentality, cutting you off from the system in ways that would otherwise be beneficial on a massive scale, turning instead to a methodology that actually harms you and your brand/IP.

In order to succeed in the digital age, we must understand that we are not an island unto ourselves. This is true not only in social media of all types, but in the greater scope of the digital culture we rely on today. The rules of engagement here are different than we were taught traditionally, and we need to be willing to think creatively and innovate if we want to truly excel. While cease and desist, as well as possibility of litigation still remains, we need to keep our perspectives in check, resorting to that route only when all other possibilities are exhausted and explored in context.

Remember: Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think they are. They could very well be the fountain of youth to invigorate your brand and IP on a global scale.

Further Reading
Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat: http://bit.ly/oPbUdr
The Streisand Effect (Wikipedia): http://bit.ly/r5FY8L
Prosumer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer#Producer_and_consumer

Minecraft Mayhem

2011-09-25T14:17:00.007-05:00

Things I’d love to see @Notch add in future #Minecraft updates

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Minecraft, that wonderful indie game from Mojang that has millions of players who have paid twenty dollars for a perpetual beta. It’s not that the graphics are something unbelievable, because honestly it is a game that is decidedly low resolution. I think it’s actually the fact that it is low resolution gaming that really interests me.

John Smith Texture Pack 32x32 resolution

Instead of putting their effort into some graphical extravaganza, Mojang is focusing on what actually matters in a game – the actual gameplay. Modern gaming companies can learn something from this today, because we end up with all of these games that are essentially knockoffs or re-hashing of prior games except with better graphics. There’s a reason why games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man and a myriad of classics persist today as genres which we continually find ourselves coming back to.

It’s about the innovation of gameplay, and less about the graphics.

While the “vanilla” Minecraft game is 16x16 resolution for the textures, there are “HD” modifications and texture packs which enhance the game further, even if they are not officially supported. This brings me to the point of this post, in that there are quite a lot of things which seem like a no-brainer to officially add to Minecraft but continue to be overlooked.

Official support for HD texture packs

While the base game itself should always be 16x16 textures, officially supporting high definition texture packs doesn’t seem like something too much to ask. MCPatcher is a de-facto method to effectively patch your Minecraft JAR file so it can handle texture packs up to 256x256, but it also adds HD Font support, custom texture animations, and incorporates Better Grass, among other things. These three things should be a staple of Minecraft natively.

Not everyone is interested in the high definition texture packs, but it couldn’t hurt to officially include support for them built-in. At the end of the day, the point is to look at the most common things that the players are modding and reduce their need to jump through those hoops.

Craftable Obsidian (and more)

It has continually baffled me that you can craft items out of diamond in Minecraft but you can’t craft anything using Obsidian (other than a Netherportal). There is, of course, modifications that allow this to be possible such as Obsidian Plus but I think this idea needs to be better thought out and also expanded on. For instance, Diamond is supposed to be the hardest natural substance in the world, and so it should remain that way, with Obsidian armor and items being made to be as tough as Diamonds are now, while Diamonds are made 1.5X tougher

Not just tougher, but tougher to mine. Obsidian takes a disproportionate amount of time to mine with a Diamond Pickaxe, when Diamond should be tougher than Obsidian. In this case, it should be required that an Obsidian pickaxe or better be required to mine Diamonds. Obsidian should also offer some protection against fire damage, maybe reducing fire damage by half if the player is wearing a full set of Obsidian Armor. In order to get an Obsidian block, you would do the same thing as if you were making any other block – fill the crafting grid with 9 obsidian shards (much like you’d fill it with 9 diamonds to make a diamond block, etc) which brings me to the next point, which is that breaking Obsidian should not yield an obsidian block, but instead obsidian shards. These shards are then used to create armor and items, or on a grid of 3x3 filled then make an entire block like we do with Diamond, Lapiz, Iron, Gold, etc.

But let’s not stop there… I’ve seen the idea of Netherite kicked around, and I believe this is an excellent idea – at least the base of it. A minable block type found only in the Nether that can only be mined by Diamond Pickaxe or Obsidian Pickaxe (but not Iron because it’s too weak), which is craftable into Netherite tools and armor. Netherite would be 2x as tough/strong as diamond and be immune to fire damage (obviously because it’s a native resource of the Nether). The reason that Netherite is twice as strong as diamond is because I said earlier that diamond is the toughest natural resource in the world, but Netherite is not from the normal world. Netherite would look like a bright purple obsidian shard, and the Netherite Ore would look like the image here. The Netherite tools would require Blaze Rods instead of sticks (because sticks would catch fire), so for instance, a Netherite Sword would be a single Blaze Rod at the bottom and two Netherite shards on top.

On this scale, we can say that the resources would be reconfigured as follows:

Wood < Stone < Iron < Obsidian < Diamond < Netherite < Aetherite (Skylands)

In the event that the Aether becomes part of Minecraft officially, then a resource exclusive to Aether should be the top end – maybe something like Aetherite where only Netherite or equal Aetherite can mine it. The idea is to balance the durability of resources in accordance with how much effort a player has to go through in order to obtain it. In this instance, something like Aetherite would be one of the hardest to acquire and such should be the best durability overall. You’d have to first make a portal to the Nether to get Netherite and Glowstone in order to make an Aethergate, and prior to that you’d have to mine your way up the durability scale to get to the Nether to begin with.

In this manner, Aetherite tools and armor would be 3X the durability and strength of Diamond today, but it would be very hard to get ahold of (being a rare resource much like Diamond is today in the main world, but in the Aether only). Netherite would also be the same rarity as Diamond in the main world, but in the Nether. So the Nether and Aether would both have their equivalent of Diamond resource. From what I recall, the Aether mod has a special set of craftable tools under the idea that your normal tools won’t work in the Aether. While I understand this mentality, there has to be some sort of agnostic resource like Aetherite which has a universal durability which makes it worth travelling to the Aether to get and return with items made from it.

Of course, being that Diamond, Netherite and Aetherite all would have increased durability and strength, we would adjust the strength of certain blocks to accommodate this new-found strength, making blocks in the Nether much stronger, such as netherrack being half as strong as Obsidian, but nowhere near as weak as dirt. This is, after all, the equivalent to Hell, and all that fire and pressure down there would expect things to be a lot tougher and hardened.

Which also means that it would be more likely to find Diamonds in the Nether because of perfect conditions. In the Nether, while you could find diamonds more readily (say on the same occurrence as Iron in the main world) you would likely be more interested in finding Netherite, which is the nether equivalent to Diamond and is much tougher and more durable.

Plausible Alchemy (and Craftable Glass)

With the introduction of 1.8 came also the Cave Spider. These are blue looking spiders that hang out underground and have a chance to poison you when they attack. From my understanding, the antidote to being poisoned happens to be a bucket of milk, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

A more believable antidote would be made of a mushroom, redstone, and a glass container (from top to bottom). Since redstone is also one of those superabundant resources in the game, it wouldn’t make it too hard to craft a stock of antidotes to take with you into the caverns below. Of course, the antidote item would look sort of like the icon for the combined dyes in the John Smith Texture pack (a colored type glass container). This introduces a couple of things into the mix, most notably being the glass container (ie: craftable glass), and of course a combination use of mushroom and redstone powder in a manner of alchemy to create a plausible antidote to being poisoned – whether that is food poisoning (eating zombie flesh or raw meat) or whether you are poisoned by a spider.

The other interesting thing about the craftable glass/antidote combination is that it opens up Minecraft to other potions down the road that could be useful and plausible (at least in terms of minecraft, without getting into full out magic). Let’s say this is more like an Alchemy addition.

I can imagine an elixer made from bonemeal and netherrack that acts as a Mob disguise (changing you into a type of Mob temporarily) – working only for one night per use, but having no effect in the Nether or Aether. The plausible alchemy idea creates quite a lot of uses for plants and powder combinations.

Added Balance

I have to say that while Minecraft is a wonderful game, there are a lot of things about it that simply don’t make sense from the perspective of gameplay mechanics. Obviously the inability to craft useful items from Obsidian is one of them and how Obsidian is disproportionately tougher than Diamond to mine, but more so there are little things that bug me about the balance of items and availability.

Take for instance the common apple.

Apparently you can only find apples at random in dungeon chests, but not from breaking leaves on a tree. This never made sense to me, because apples commonly grow on trees. On the Raven’s Oddizzy server that I play on, there is a mod installed that takes care of this and makes it so breaking leaves on trees gives a small chance to drop an apple, but this should be something that is native to Minecraft out of the box. The same goes for Pumpkin seeds and Melon seeds, where they are apparently only found in chests in abandoned mineshaft biomes. Breaking Pumpkin and Melons themselves should give a chance to recover seeds normally, with the plant stems attached to the pumpkins or melons naturally. While the seeds and apples could still be an item in the dungeon and abandoned mineshaft chests, I fail to see how making items that logically are common instead uncommon makes any sense. The same goes for Cocoa beans… there really needs to be a Cocoa tree added to the game that only spawns in the Swamps. Just like real cocoa trees, they only grow in hot, rainy areas.

In dungeon chests, I’d instead recommend a chance to find Golden Apples, since these items truly are a rarity and very expensive to craft normally, they would make the perfect treasure to uncover for successfully raiding a dungeon or stronghold.

Tamable Horses

I’d also say that Leather should also be craftable into Saddles as well, but only if saddles are given more of a purpose, such as adding Horses to Minecraft that we could ride only with a saddle. When I say “ride” horses, I mean it in the sense that they should be controllable on land and give a bonus to speed for movement, unlike trying to ride a pig which essentially is just you wandering around aimlessly with little or no control. Of course, horses should first be tamed before we could ride them, and so feeding them Sugar Cubes would attain that.

Sugar Cubes would be made by placing 3x3 sugar on a crafting table to yield 4 Sugar Cubes. As for feeding the horses (because you would need to do that in order to keep them alive), I’d suggest being able to feed Horses only Apples, Sugar Cubes, and Grain. Grain would be obtained by placing 3x3 Wheat on a crafting table to yield 4 Grain. Horses would also fall in line with the addition of breedable animals that @Notch is working on, except in this case there is more of a need to breed horses than sheep.

Cactus Candy

While I’m on the subject, Cactus should also be craftable further than simply Green Dye. I suggest a recipe using Cactus that creates a Cactus Candy – Sugar and Cactus (maybe the same recipe as used for TNT but instead cactus in the center and Sugar on the 4 cardinal directions). Cactus Candy would be edible by the player for 1 food point replenish, but would also have the ability to Tame Mobs that you feed it to, where the mobs that you tame would act like pets and defend you when attacked. This would be a brilliant Halloween Secret Update for 2011. Tamed Mobs would of course only last until daylight, when they would burst into flames and perish, and Cactus Candy wouldn’t work on Creepers (obviously). We could use the same recipe for Chocolate Candy, but instead substitute Cocoa instead of Cactus to create a Chocolate Candy that would not only make a mob friendly like a pet but would make the mob immune to Sunlight. The Chocolate Candy wouldn’t work in the Nether simply because chocolate would melt in that environment.

While I’m on the subject of game balance, there is of course Bedrock which you cannot break. I’d like to see that you could not break bedrock with even a Diamond Pickaxe remain true, but using a Netherite Pickaxe you actually should be able to mine bedrock (and collect it). What happens if you jump into the hole you just made from mining the Bedrock? Simple, instead of falling endlessly and dying, you would be transported to the Nether (you essentially fall into Hell), and if you don’t have any Obsidian on you when you do this, you’re pretty much screwed because there is no way to get back to the main world from the Nether (unless you’re lucky enough to come across one of your old Nethergates). Bedrock wouldn’t be craftable into anything other than to be able to build with it in blocks, which comes in handy for making an near impenetrable building.

Before we worry about whether this makes Nethergates useless, we have to realize that in order to even acquire the Netherite Pickaxe to begin with, we’d have to make a Nethergate, survive and mine in the Nether long enough to find Netherite, kill enough Blaze to get Blaze rods, and then make it back to the main world with our new tools alive before they become an awesome source of mining power. With a Netherite Pickaxe, mining Bedrock would take as long as Diamond Pickaxes take today when mining Obsidian. Anything less than a Netherite Pickaxe still would be unable to mine Bedrock.

Endermen

I absolutely love Endermen. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t use some tweaking. For starters, they should definitely be made more rare in the main world than they are today. I was under the impression that Endermen would rarely spawn, so it would be that much more scary when you did actually run into a murder of them, (I’m using Murder to describe a group of mobs, as in a Murder of Crows. It just seems really fitting).

So making Endermen more rare in the main world would obviously need a plausible reason, right? Absolutely, and of course I have one here for you. Endermen have those glowing eyes and they give off the Nethergate particles, and they are tall, slender, and flat black. To me this indicates that Endermen actually come from the Nether and are native there, and that any which are in the main world (rare) have somehow escaped the grips of the Nether only to wander the main world aimlessly. While they are rare in the main world (as in, they should be made much rarer than they are now) they should conversely be common in the Nether.

Nothing says “Holy s*^tballs!” like being in the Nether, and seeing Endermen in abundance. Think about it, their entire purpose is to move blocks, right? And with the 1.9 update it looks like @Notch and Jeb are adding actual structures to the Nether, like strongholds and whatnot. So who actually built those structures?

Endermen, that’s who.

It makes absolute perfect sense. Endermen are the lost souls of Minecraft. Doomed to forever wander a cursed world and build tirelessly. In the Nether they are the workforce creating all of the structures, so it makes sense that they are much more common in the Nether than the main world. But also because they have Nethergate particles coming from them and possess the ability to teleport at will, it would stand to reason that some actually escape the Nether (or just accidentally teleport out), and not knowing anything else, they just continue mindlessly collecting and building like they did in the Nether. This gives us also a plausible reason why Strongholds exist in the main world as well, built by lost Endermen who are roaming the main world.

Aside from this obvious sort of back-story for Endermen, it also makes sense to include them more abundantly in the Nether simply for the fear factor alone. In the main world, you at least have a chance to run long distances and have enough space to really fight and move, but in the Nether… just look at all the unending lakes of lava and you quickly realize that on the Endermen home turf, you don’t want to mess with them.

Another thought also goes back to the idea of the Cactus Candy. If you can feed Cactus Candy to an Endermen and not get killed in the process, you deserve to have an Endermen protect you. It’s going to take balls of steel to walk up to an Endermen, stare it in the eyes, and feed it Cactus Candy. Since there are way more things in the Nether that can kill you and a mob, I believe Cactus Candy should also work in the nether as well. With all the things that want you dead in the Nether, you’re going to need all the help you can get.

Golden Opportunity

Gold is one of those ores that seems to have been completely neglected in Minecraft. While you can make tools and armor from gold, the durability is pretty pointless to make it useful for anything other than decoration or looks. However, what if Golden items became useful in the Aether? What was essentially useless in the main world, would be hardened in the Aether (upper atmosphere and colder), making golden armor and items the equivalent of Iron items and Armor on the main world below, where Iron would become too brittle to be used in the Aether (Skylands), gold would have a useful purpose up there. Considering you need a Glowstone Portal to get to the Skylands (Aether) it would make sense that Gold becomes the staple commodity in that area. As an aside I am using Skylands and Aether interchangeably. I know that Aether is an extensive modification to Minecraft and Skylands are just native biomes of floating islands. Just wanted to clear that up.
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Rope (Obviously)

Made from vines, ropes let you create the equivalent of hanging ladders that you can climb. I’ve already seen a mod for this, so it shouldn’t be a big deal to officially add it. Vines growing on the sides of walls should also be climbable, but should work much like trampling crops, in that if you climb vines too much, they break.

Hookshot (Grapple)

I know this isn’t Zelda, but you can already use a fishing pole to reel in mobs (assuming you’re that creative). A craftable Hookshot would be a mechanical device you can make that officially does what a fishing pole already does to mobs, but with the added function of pulling the player if they hookshot an immovable block-type (much in the same way that pistons cannot move Obsidian or Double slab). In this manner, a double slab on the ground with an Obsidian block on top of it would make for an excellent Hookshot target, and also make dungeons really interesting to get around.

Boomerang

Again, this isn’t Zelda, but a boomerang would be very useful in Minecraft. The crafting recipe would be essentially an upside down bowl, and using a boomerang would shoot the boomerang out in front of the player a certain distance and return in a straight line. Hitting a Mob would stun it , and if the boomerang comes into contact with collectable items (drops) it will bring those back to the player from a distance.

Block Switches

Block switches would be essentially like a lever except that they are full blocks with a blended square indent on them. They would come in stone, mossy cobble, cobble and wood types with an indent state to denote being activated. Having block switches would make secret passages utilizing pistons (like moving bookcases, etc) more secret without having to use a wireless redstone sort of modification to make regular blocks act like switches.

Redstone Powered Lamps

Using Glass surrounding a single Glowstone, we’d create a single Lamp Block that is powered by redstone to turn on or off. When off, the Lamp is clear glass, and when turned on it becomes Glowstone (lit up). Don’t get me wrong, I really do like Minecraft, but one thing that bothers me is that the way the game is geared it seems that the most common mentality is medieval at best. Lots of castles and villages, but no real opportunity to progress into a more modern age if you wish. Redstone powered lamps would allow that to a further extent.

I’d also add in Light sensor blocks that a player could craft in order to detect when the light level falls below a certain range and activate. This would be useful for lampposts using the redstone Powered Lamp block, in that a light sensor block could power a lamp block up to 4 spaces away (including vertically). In this manner we could create lampposts with a light sensor block in the ground at the base that only activates the lamppost when it becomes night. Of course, if you buried the light sensor block, then it wouldn’t work (or would always be “on”) so in order to get it to work properly you’d have to have at least one of the faces of the block uncovered.

Conclusion
While there are probably many more things I could suggest for Minecraft, I think this list is long enough to make the original point. There are a lot of things that still need to be balanced and shored up with the game that seemingly have been forgotten in the rush to add new content, and I’d like for Mojang to go back and seriously re-evaluate the things they left behind.

If you can think of other things that would greatly benefit from being added to Minecraft as a native inclusion (that obviously wouldn’t outright break the game mechanics), please feel free to add them (and a link to the mod if it exists) in the comments below.

Moving Forward

2011-09-15T20:41:00.001-05:00

It’s time to dream bigger, because we’re all in this together.

We are one people, on one planet. This tiny speck of dirt we call Earth is of finite resources, yet we act as though it will never end. We are divided, and pitted against each other at every single level of the social and economic ladder. We fight for resources, we fight each other, and those who fight the most and break all of the rules set into place in order to level a playing field for all of us are obviously the winners.

Yet the price we pay is global. No person will escape the costs of this broken global society.

When we have nothing left. When all the things we take for granted today as having worth simply collapse and leave us with nothing. That is when we will begin to understand the things which truly matter as a society.

A global society.

Until that time, we will likely remain in denial… because change is too hard to accept when we have no incentive to do so. But there will come a time soon, when all of those superficial worths will be stripped from you and I, and we will have no choice but to accept change, or die. There will be no other choice, no more excuses or tomorrows.

That time is coming quickly, and we’ve already far surpassed the point of no-return. If you believe that multi-trillion dollar debts that continue to accumulate based on money that has no meaning, let alone do not exist until called into existence as further debt and interest are somehow repayable, then you fail to understand the magnitude of the situation we lay under today.

This is no longer about countries, and this is far past the point of redemption or bailouts. While Wall Street, Banks and Corporations received bailout money in the hundreds of billions of dollars, they alone are posting record profits while unemployment remains stagnant at a total of zero… zero jobs created.

Nothing has changed from 2008… but soon it will, and we will have no choice but to change with it.

It’s time to think like a global species for the benefit of everything and everyone that calls this magnificent planet home. It’s the only way to move forward.

We cannot live without this planet, but this planet can surely live without us. It’s time we take responsibility and step up to the plate as a global entity, united as one, for the betterment of all.

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward | 2011 Release

Download the DVD Torrent here: http://zeitgeistmovie.com/torrents.html

Existential Blues

2011-09-11T20:01:00.001-05:00

Time Travel, God and The Wizard of Oz.

I Believe in Time Travel

I’m going to just put that right out there in the open. I know many people will tell me that time travel is some sort of impossibility, but I like to address that as nonsensical gibberish outright. Arthur C. Clarke is known for saying “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and I wholeheartedly believe this to be true.

If we travelled back in time to the 1950s and presented them with our laptops and iPads they’d be utterly bewildered, if not think we were extraterrestrials in disguise. Likening us to the Roswell incident, and trying to whisk us off to Area 51 for examination. Worse yet, they might think we were communist spies. This is an example of how much changes over a mere 60 years of time. We’ve gone from room sized computers that can do basic math with vacuum tubes to handheld tablets that can access the sum of human knowledge via the Internet on a whim.

Let’s go back a little further, to around the 1800s. Electricity was just catching on as a way to power the world and to a latter extent we were just introducing the new fangled automobile as an alternative to horse-drawn carriages (give or take twenty years).

Even further still, and what we find to be common would have gotten us burned at the stake for witchcraft.

We’re really good at hindsight. We can look back and see how the advancement of our civilization seems so obvious, yet looking forward we immediately discount things we don’t know as if it were impossible. In a way, we’re no better than our ancestors who believed demons had to be let out through the blood in order to cure people. The notion of modern medicine to those people was as impossible as time travel is to us today.

In the same manner as proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice-versa, we brandish those thinkers as heretics for thinking outside of current conventions. What we widely believe is true today is not the sum of all knowledge, and it is all subject to change at an ever increasing rate as time moves forward.

So, time travel is definitely possible – we just don’t know all the details at this moment. Possibly.

Some would say that if time travel were possible, then we’d come back and tell ourselves about it, thus proving the existence of time travel in some cyclical proof. But of course, this is based on a conjecture about how time travel would theoretically work in our wildest dreams and has no real basis on how it would actually work in some future time. Much like trying to imagine that if time travel were true then somebody would come back in time on a magical unicorn crapping time-dilation rainbows to prove it.

Time travel, in a basic sense, would mean that all points in time – past, present and future, are of an infinite nature and do not simply include our own timeline but every variance in infinite capacity in a multi-dimensional infinite expanse. Travelling through time would then include the idea that there is world-line divergence, which is a huge variable in the equation that would likely exclude the idea that at this exact moment somebody from the future would come to have a chat.

In the world-line I write this in, there hasn’t been a future version of myself knocking on the door and it is very likely that this hasn’t happened for you either. But the real question is whether or not we’d even know what a time traveler looked like, or if we’d even believe them if they did show up.

Let’s say for a moment that a time traveler has actually visited our world-line and there are records of it. First and foremost, as a time traveller I would already assume the above in that the prior generations I’d be visiting would have little to no comprehension about what I was talking about, and would likely say I was a crackpot, so it wouldn’t really be my mission to come back and tell everybody how the next twenty years go. I’d be on an actual mission of importance and you would just be something to amuse me while I was passing through for a pit stop.

You Can’t Change Infinity

There is also the idea of divergence in that no matter what my future looked like in comparison to yours, there is always some sort of divergence which would make this time-line unfold differently among many aspects, but possibly to a similar outcome. There are many paths to the end-goal, they would say. How you got there is pretty inconsequential if we all end up at the same destination in the end. At least many of us, but not all of us.

Being a time traveller doesn’t mean you come back to give yourself the winning lottery numbers. I mean, you could, but that has no value to you in the future because of divergence. The same holds true for trying to assassinate Hitler or kill your parents before you were born. You may succeed but you’ve only done so on a 1 / infinite capacity and wasted that much time of your own in the process, and have had absolutely no change to your own time-line in the process for doing so.

So let’s put that notion out of our minds in relation to time travel. In the end, it’s really a lot like traveling across dimensions that have no real connection to your own. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so to speak.

Back to the idea of whether we’d actually recognize that we’ve been visited by a time traveller, let alone believe them if they said so. The answer to this question alone is self-evident. I can cite examples like John Titor and despite the revelations he put forward, most of the world has never heard of him, and those who have are strongly divided as to whether he really was a time traveller or just an elaborate hoax. On a personal level I actually believe he was a time traveler, because I have no real reason to believe he wasn’t.

I do not subscribe to the idea that simply because something seems impossible to us today that it will remain impossible into the future. If anything I can quite easily see how somebody like John Titor would make an excellent candidate for time travel, and also how nothing he said while he was here on our world line made any real difference in the grand scheme of things.

He was around during 2000 – 2001 and today at 2011 the world is wholly none the wiser for the things he has put forward as indications of what is to come. That doesn’t mean that everything he said was 100% accurate, either. Again, world-line divergence of even 1% will obliterate anything specific that a time traveller tried to tell you about the future, however the base of the information would remain quite true despite the differing details.

For instance, John Titor mentioned travelling up and down the coast maintaining wireless internet towers, and in 2000 – 2001 this didn’t make much sense. It barely makes sense today with our limited cell towers and mobile data plans, but in the context of 2036 it makes perfect sense. In the time between 2000 – 2001 to 2011 we’ve gone from rinky dink bandwidth on mobile consumer communications to high bandwidth options just now being standardized but yet to be implemented. IEEE standards have released the specifications for the next generation of Wi-Fi (WRAN) that is 802.22 and has a 60 mile range. I think that is promising to a point where those wireless internet towers that John mentioned now suddenly make sense to have all around the United States.

But they have yet to exist, still. As of 2011, those long-range wireless access points aren’t in wide use (though there are some companies that offer it as a point-to-point communications option that is limited by comparison). The underlying idea here is that a self-proclaimed time traveller told the world about long-range wireless Internet towers at least ten years in advance and now we’re at a point where just the standards are in place to start building the hardware required for it.

I refer to that sort of revelation as agnostic information – short of a global meltdown, the progress for it would not be changed, thus making it a safe bet to talk about. It still has no real connection to your own world-line in the future, except a commonality thread despite two different dimensional spaces.

If a time traveller did come back and happened to cross through this specific world-line variance on his or her way through we still remain to ask the question of whether anybody would notice or care.

I apply this same questioning logic to religion where the devoted faithful believe their savior will come back. Let’s assume they already have come and gone, passed judgment and continued on their way. Would we have noticed? More to the point, would we even care until it was in hindsight and too late?

Witchcraft Trials

We’re about to make a left turn into religion, please fasten your safety belts.

If somebody came up to you and said they were the son of God and were on Earth to deliver mankind, you’d probably think they were out of their mind. Most religious today would still think that person were a heretic and condemn them, and if you’re Christian that’s not too far from what happened the first time around, now is it?

I’m not anti-God by any stretch of the imagination. I do believe there is God, but while I have unwavering faith in God, I have minimal faith in mankind. Mankind assumes way too much about God in their attempt to rationalize this entity. God doesn’t play favorites, so your religion is probably null and void. Any entity powerful enough to create absolutely everything on a whim doesn’t really give a crap about whether you’re a Christian or if the neighbors are Muslim. You’re all just humans who don’t play well together, like fighting children all trying to gain favor with their parents as some sort of one-up over the other.

Religion, to me, is the ultimate form of global childishness. We tell children that ghost don’t exist, and neither does the Easter Bunny, and that it’s childish to have imaginary friends – but we as adults drag those children to church and tell them about our own imaginary friend who we need to have unwavering faith in. The children at this point are being less childish than the adults, because they give up on at least twenty imaginary friends before they hit their teenage years while the adults can’t seem to give up a single one.

Worse still, is that our children never start wars because of their imaginary friends, and never use those imaginary friends as an excuse to hate another human being, or send our fellow humans off to die for that imaginary friend.

I am struck by the saying that “The meek shall inherit the Earth”, for entirely different reasons than the common person seems to be. On the face of it, it seems like those who are the most faithful, docile, loving and tolerant of others will in the end inherit the entire planet, and this is true, but we never seem to make the correlation as to what shape the planet will be in by the time we inherit it.

It’s like a cognitive chasm that prevents us from putting two and two together.

If we read further into things, we find that the planet will be overcome by corruption, sin, destruction and peril. Misery and woe, famine and flood. Disease and suffering will abound. Wars will rage on. A planet ravaged by mankind’s ignorance and malevolence is what the meek get to inherit, followed by countless generations of continued suffering as those who are left try to put it all back together again.

That’s a hell of a reward for being faithful. Unless, of course, you believe in the rapture. In this case, people believe the most faithful will be magically whisked away by God during that time, leaving the suffering to all the non-believers who are left.

I doubt highly that an omnipotent God would give those people, who spent their lives praying instead of actually helping the rest of mankind through action, who did nothing in their willful ignorance of others of culture, race and creed around the world, a free pass. We’re all in this together, and there is no back-door to sneak out of when the damages are done.

No, if anyone is going to stick around for the clean-up, it’s them. Just ask the last batch of people who said the Rapture was coming… everyone is still here, and God didn’t give them a cop-out to shirk their duties on this planet, or to each other.

The wages of sin is death, so the most wicked have it coming to them – call it karma. When you sit on the fence, however and let the battle rage on, you end up like Azreal the demon. Preaching things you know to be a universal lie is also a sin, and so I point to religion in that aspect – because a universally loving God wouldn’t choose sides and pit mankind against each other, but instead demand we live together in peace, as one. I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible already, but it gets drowned out in the political and manipulative crap that it’s buried under which divides us as a people.

There is no Muslim, no Jew, no Christian, No Buddhist, no Taoist, and no religion. There is only humankind, on a speck of dirt in the cosmos that we call Earth, with a handful of universal truths meant to foster a global unity. There is only us as a collective consciousness together, sharing the finite resources that this speck of dirt has to offer. I cannot see that any omnipotent God in any capacity would have wanted it any other way. There is no good or bad, because each fosters the other in duality – mass murderers raise awareness of those remaining to enact understanding that such should not be tolerated and so global awareness is raised in defiance of evil, and so too does good lead to evil through complacency and apathy over time. It’s not about good or evil in the grand scheme of things, but a global awareness of why in perspective of it all. No God would rob you of perspective or wisdom through experience if they truly had your best interests in mind, and so asking God to change things is kind of pointless and of course, as effective as believing a gallon of milk will answer your prayers. In the slim chance you’ve eaten habenero hot wings, the milk may be your momentary savior, but outside of that moment it’s pretty mundane and doesn’t interfere.

Our savior… whomever that may be, is simply the sort of people through history who continually try to tell us these truths. It isn’t one man, woman or imaginary entity – it is within all of us, and every once in awhile one of us gives the rest a reminder. Unfortunately we have such low cosmic self-esteem that rarely does anyone ever believe they are equals.

The truth is, we are all equals. We’re just too caught up in the fighting and divisions to see that in the end the only thing that matters is life, unconditional love, compassion, and each other.

Back To The Future

The interesting thing about time travel is that in order to understand it you have to first realize that time is infinite, and so too is existence. This is where the idea of spirituality merges. Infinity in this aspect also plays on the earlier post I did concerning dividing by zero as a thought experiment because in the grand scheme of things, there are multiple infinities within the greater whole of existence.

In the context of time travel, dividing by zero to yield a negative infinity is a lot like saying reaching a point where time reverses in correlation to your current world-line minus divergence factors. We can look at black holes as a manifestation of negative infinite, or infinitely small, and dividing that black hole (dividing zero) yields a cross section of two negative infinites.

While we’re venturing into the realm of astrophysics and Roy Kerr, just because today we cannot achieve a Kerr Black Hole or divide it for a collapse of causality doesn’t mean it is less possible than the very understanding that predicted the existence of black holes to begin with, even during a time when Einstein himself doubted black holes existed.

Is time travel possible? I’d say very much so.

Somewhere in infinite infinities it was worked out (and possibly within our own world-line), and with those sort of odds it becomes likely that time travellers in our own world line have passed through. I have the same sort of confidence that time travel is possible that a religious person would have on the return of their savior, and if they can believe in something of such odds that a person would return two thousand years later to lead them, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch so say that time travel should be higher on the list of plausibility.

But that’s the fallacy of humanity. We believe in things we cannot prove, and instead demand faith, but when something has plausibility (even if it’s outside our current level of total understanding) we say it’s silly to believe it is true, and mock others for pursuing it. What a strange world I live in. I’d rather believe that nothing is really impossible, just improbable at the moment, and eventually we’ll catch up in all aspects.

I say to either side – Tempus Edax Rerum.

Unconventional Conventions

2011-09-09T15:56:00.001-05:00

When chaos theory applies, only those who seek heretics win out. #SecondLife @Rodvik |

Years ago when I was the CTO of VR5 Online, my boss at the time came to me with an interesting and possibly impossible challenge. At the time, I answered to the CEO of the company who was Mr. Clark, and he was an interesting and sly individual. One of the major purposes of VR5 Online was to explore and research methods in virtual environments while taking extensive notes on the outcomes for future applications. During that time we were engaged with ActiveWorlds as a technology, running our own world called VR5 | City of Nidus for which this blog is originally named (cityofnidus.blogspot.com).

There is a deeper story behind the name City of Nidus, in that the original project was run by @AdamFrisby (who went by the name Gwala). As far as I can remember, it was originally a world owned by ActiveWorlds called Flagg007, named after the AWI employee who provided the world for experimentation – Flagg (the community leader of AW). Now, Gwala at the time was experimenting with different ideas in AW with the Flagg007 world such as ideas for design and lighting, and a little bit of modeling too. There were a handful of people in that project, specifically hand-selected to participate purely for the ability to innovate ideas in a virtual sense. At that time, I remember I was invited to work in Nidus with Gwala and I brought along a friend Wesley Seay (whom to this day I call Capri).

Capri was a name I came up with because when he was a kid (he started using virtual environments when he was around 13 or so) his nickname was Liquid Cool, and my first impression was to say “You mean like Capri Sun drinks?”. Well, the nickname stuck and over the years he just kept it which is in many way how I came to use the Darian Knight nickname – I originally chose Aeonix as a nickname back in 1996 but I became known among my friends in real life for watching way too much Sailor Moon (and to be fair, it was the only thing remotely interesting on television when I was getting ready for school) so I ended up with my nickname being Darian out of habit, versus Aeonix.

This is still related to the post, by the way… it’s just a bit of context and backstory.

But I Digress

When my boss at the time, Mr. Clark, proposed some research at VR5 Online, he came to the conclusion that I should run a virtual world in ActiveWorlds by which he would give me a list of things I had to accomplish and research each year in order to validate another year renewal for that project. That went on for a few years before it was decided to close the project, but in the beginning of it, I was to find the best ways to do certain things on that list.

Now, as a professional you would normally see things in a manner which excludes all of your options. This is your scope and vision, more or less. Some of us have a wider scope than others, while in many cases we become specialized and thus myopic in our scope. There is a place for both types of thinking and scope but we first have to understand that a limited scope and ability can be detrimental to a project or endeavor if we aren’t careful to identify that ahead of time.

I remember one of the points on the list for Nidus was simply to launch a behavioral study and utilize it toward marketing in virtual environments. The “impossible” aspect that he threw in was that I had to do so in a manner in which nobody would ever realize they were being studied, in effect I had to blend it all together as if it was perfectly natural.

What I came up with was pretty ingenious, even to this day.

It was a small town, and it had lots of different stores and aspects. But then on a more minute detail there were other studies and aspects underlying and they all worked together. The important part about this is the team that put it together.

It was a motley crew of individuals, and I’m proud of them to this day – many of them went on to become successful media designers, while others remained rogues and unconventional assets to projects. The most interesting part was that many of them were teenagers, or recent high school graduates who had simply accumulated years of experience in a virtual environment and how to create within them. I intentionally saw the merit of experience versus traditional education and decided that the experience of the individuals far surpassed the qualitative assets they could have brought to the project if they were simply of traditional education. It was a voluntary basis, and its own little community, and those teens ran circles around even ActiveWorlds Inc as a company.

Now, when I say they ran circles around AWI, I’m talking to a point where they put ActiveWorlds to shame as a company with the things they could do versus what the company itself was doing with their own technology. To this day I’m proud of their accomplishments, and I learned quite a lot over those years as to the best manner to work within a virtual environment setting. Years later, the things that were discovered and innovated in VR5 | Nidus continue to shape the direction of ActiveWorlds and even contribute to virtual environments as an industry.

This is what I like to call “Unconventional Conventions” in that the best approach, and the best way to get deeper insight and progress is often times (in virtual environments and elsewhere) to abandon our preconceived notions of scope and ability. I could have put in a budget request to my boss in order to hire a staff related to the project, but I wouldn’t have progressed anything. The band of rogues did things that to this day are extraordinary and pretty amazing, and they did so because they wanted the challenge, and furthermore knew that I was a hard-ass that would push them above and beyond to do better. In the end, they did things that to this day have yet to be replicated in an open ended virtual environment like SecondLife or ActiveWorlds in any official capacity.

Oh, they often hated me when I was telling them they could do better, or when I pointed out flaws. But they learned over time that the best compliment for a job well done is when somebody like me says “This is fantastic!” or when the rest of the community looked up to them as innovators, however much a set of rogues they were. Nothing said that more than when we put together a live concert, not once but twice in ActiveWorlds with the band Aztech Rising.

The first concert pushed the limits of conventional ideas for “events” in ActiveWorlds by introducing the idea that a live concert could be played in a virtual environment on a large scale, while on the second concert a year later we revamped the entire stadium with particle effects and a custom arena, complete with a fireworks show and lasers. The latter concert took it a step further by introducing the idea that a virtual event can be linked to real life merchandise, and as a result, a shop was available at the stadium during the concert to allow the concert goers to get real life swag such as concert t-shirts, hats and more. Remember, this is an innovation that came out of the minds of wild card prosumers and not traditional education.

Later on in places like SecondLife, we take these sorts of ideas for granted. We have events and giveaways, and there are plenty of live performers on a nightly basis. But in those early days, this was totally unconventional, let alone the idea of selling real life merchandise in conjunction with a virtual concert. In an unofficial capacity, this idea continued to blossom, but in a conventional and official capacity that is Linden Lab themselves, the idea has yet to catch on. If anything, the wild cards are still innovating despite Linden Lab constantly trying to put on the brakes.

Full footage of the first concert can be watched here on the Aztech Rising archive.

The idea here is that even to this day, the rule of unconventional conventions continues to work with the same brilliant results as they did in the late 1990s and through to 2007 when Nidus reached its end goal and shut down.

Recently with IEEE Virtual World Standards there has been an ongoing project among the group to create demonstrations for the public in order to show the ideas of interoperability. The original idea for this demonstration was to build a multi-universe game of PONG where you’d hit a ball in maybe SecondLife and have it go down the play area, and at the halfway point, disappear and show up in say, ActiveWorlds for instance to be hit back to SecondLife.

Now, the people in IEEE Virtual World Standards are some extremely talented and brilliant men and women. However the case may be, I still had an inkling ahead of time that a game of PONG between multiple virtual universes may be entirely outside of their scope. Initially, it should come as no surprise that I asked Jon Bee to contribute on my team in the IEEE group to make this happen, after all he was also one of the people in Nidus and even today he contributes in Andromeda Media Group. I knew this man would be the unconventional convention that was needed.

After a number of weeks (maybe a month or two) the group wholly decided it really was outside of their ability to create a PONG game across universes, but luckily for myself and Jon, neither of us attended that meeting to hear a collective defeat. Instead, on a random day the following week, he spent a few hours doing what some of the brightest men and women in virtual environments just recently washed their hands of out of frustration. In a few hours, Jon Bee, the rogue aspect to the high professional aspects of the group, sped through and had a working demonstration of PONG, and later that night he began the link-up between SecondLife and ActiveWorlds.

When the early demonstration was given to Tom Starai to show the initial stride in progress, I remember that he was impressed but also assumed that such a stride in progress must have taken a lot more time to accomplish than it did. In his scope of understanding, and based on the efforts prior by the rest of the group, he was under the impression that such an advancement must have interfered with real life endeavors and projects over a longer period that the rest of the group simply could not afford to give attention to, but in the scope of Jon Bee and our unconventional conventions approach what seemed like it should take a few weeks of constant work actually took a few hours in one night.

By choosing an unconventional convention, or wild card, the promise of an inter-universe game of PONG was given life in a short amount of time, thus advancing the group as a whole forward where they previously had given up on the idea.

Why is this unconventional convention idea so important? Well, by widening the scope and being willing to look for unconventional solutions and people who may not fit our preconceived notions to solve our problems, we often find a wealth of untapped talent and insight. What would seem like an insurmountable challenge becomes trivial, and often with wildly successful outcomes.

We find determination, drive and persistence but most of all we find people who aren’t blinded by preconceived notions, training or scope. This is crucial, and ultimately so when we deal with virtual environments like SecondLife or ActiveWorlds.

Unconventional SecondLife

The reason I’m writing all of this is to lead up to a current conversation I had with one of the Phoenix Team developers recently about why what Linden Lab has been doing all these years actually makes perfect sense when you understand the limited scope of operations they are restricted to.

For instance, it seemingly makes no sense to fire Philip Rosedale and replace him with Mark Kingdon, only to fire Mark Kingdon and put Philip back in place, only to replace Philip again with Rod Humble. All of the interim maneuvers that Linden Lab has taken during this constant changeup seems like a company without a clear understanding of virtual environments, and this is ultimately true but for reasons many don’t realize.

For instance, Philip Rosedale was more of a visionary than a business leader. He had the charisma and cult of personality aspect down pat, but in business he likely did not speak the same language as those which Linden Lab are indebted to. He looked at things in a manner which would say “This is good for people” but likely had little to say in describing how it was good for the bottom line or how a long tail approach would balance the scales of business versus community.

In that frustration, and lack of communication, we saw the introduction of Mark Kingdon who is arguably of a high business pedigree – and his scope for business was shown immediately as he began to shift Linden Lab away from a community aspect and into an Enterprise aspect. I don’t fault Mark Kingdon, because he was merely working within the constraints of his scope, and he really didn’t know the intricacies of a virtual environment ecosystem, nowhere near as well as Philip Rosedale.

The problem was that Philip spoke as a visionary but not as a business person. Mark Kingdon spoke as a business person but not as a visionary. When Mark took a lateral step aside and Philip resumed where he left off, we had a visionary at the helm again – but those who Linden Lab are indebted to wanted faster ROI and expansion, even if that meant cannibalizing the ecosystem to make it happen. Philip likely had a crisis of conscience which led him to leave again, being replaced by Rod Humble, who speaks the business of Video Games.

Rod is the closest we get to a hybrid of business and visionary, but there is still a lack of ecosystem understanding, and that is very dangerous for Linden Lab in the long run. His scope is video games, and while video games are close to what virtual environments like Second Life are, it isn’t a good enough match to apply the same methodologies, because ultimately the things that work for a video game scope will backfire if applied to a virtual environment scope like Second Life.

Subtractive Value

An excellent example is the recent announcement of the new benefits for Premium membership in SecondLife where you get a free “exclusive” gift and access to Premium Sandboxes to build in. The problem is that the “exclusive” gifts have no added value when free users have access to a plethora of content from the community both free and paid for, and likely those in a free membership would have half a dozen similar sets in their inventory by the time they decided to upgrade to Premium.

The other issue is the Sandboxes because this is yet another indication that @Rodvik and those in the marketing group are clearly outside of their scope of understanding. One of the reasons people upgrade to Premium accounts is for the ability to purchase land of their own, which immediately negates the usefulness of a Premium Sandbox. Even as a free user, the private sandbox idea is all but a moot offering in that even free users can rent land, and that again negates the private sandbox idea if even free users can rent their own land, effectively eliminating most of the need for a sandbox up front.

The same issue applies to giving Premium Members their own premade “Linden Homes”, in that whatever Linden Lab is offering in that aspect is a pale shadow to what a free or premium user could get on their own. Prefab houses and skyboxes are plentiful on Marketplace, making the selection that Linden Lab offers for Linden Homes look like a joke to the community.

Again, if the major added value to a Premium membership is the ability to purchase and sell land, then Linden Homes become a moot offering. Even as a free member you can rent more land and have more options than Linden Lab gives you as an added incentive to become a Premium user. What makes this worse is that leveraging access to legitimate support as a Premium user “added value” tells each and every new user with a free account that you simply don’t give a toss about them, and the last time I checked, that’s a horrendous first impression to be making.

So we have Linden Homes being an attempt at relevancy in the already existing homes, land and accessories markets maintained by the userbase ecosystem of prosumers. Sandboxes that miss the underlying understanding that Premium accounts can buy and sell land, making premium sandboxes an error in judgment. Even free users can rent land, and nearly eliminate the need to use sandboxes. Giving “exclusive” gifts is also a moot point since nobody really cares about an exclusive furniture set when they have a mountain of options otherwise, free user or premium.

More importantly, however, is that while this does show that their scope is extremely myopic at best, and their understanding is lacking, the worst part about all of this is that these seemingly innocent mistakes in succession have lasting and long term negative effects on the ecosystem that is Second Life. At every step of the way, Linden Lab continually turns in on itself to cannibalize the ecosystem and that’s a very bad thing for not just you and I, but for Linden Lab itself.

What we have here, is failure to communicate.

I don’t mean that @Rodvik isn’t listening to the community. No, he’s doing an excellent job on that front. However, there is a difference between listening to the community and actually knowing how to interpret what you are hearing into actionable outcomes that foster a balance of understanding for the ecosystem that is Second Life.

I do not suspect that even @Rodvik is in a position to be effective at that part, and it’s not a negative thing. Of course it’s not necessarily a positive thing either. What it is, is a lack of proper context in overall fashion of this system.

@Rodvik has a lot of business insight pertaining to video games. He’s not a virtual worlds visionary like Philip was, and he’s surely no Chip Morningstar, F. Randal Farmer, or Jaron Lanier.

However, that’s what is missing from the equation. This is precisely why Linden Lab continues to falter. You need balance… you need a sound business mind who at least partially understands virtual environments running the place, but you also need a visionary to guide that leader.

The visionary, or advisor, shouldn’t be the CEO in this case. No, that job is taken and should be held by somebody who knows business scope. The advisor or visionary position, guides and acts as a mediator between the chaos that is a virtual environment system like Second Life, and the business sense that is traditional thinking and scope. They are the person who can read the tea leaves and explain to the CEO. It’s also the sort of person that is comfortable doing that in reverse as well, as in interpreting the business scope into the ecosystem of the virtual environment.

It’s a complimentary sort of role, and nobody needs to be fired to make that happen.

I could argue that Philip Rosedale holds some sort of advisory position on the board for Linden Lab, but I doubt it’s an active involvement. If anything, it’s simply a courtesy sort of thing and Philip is likely wanting to put SecondLife behind him and concentrate on his other projects, like Coffee & Power.

So what we are left with is the understanding that what is needed to bring balance and healthy expansion back to Second Life is an unconventional convention. There are often times when conventional scopes have little impact, or even negative outcomes when applied, and these are the times when it is prudent to start looking for a rogue to guide you.

When we broaden the scope and start looking at unconventional conventions, we eliminate the artificial narrowing of scope we apply out of preconceived bias, and we find solutions that would normally be outright rejected under conventional means, but suddenly offer wildly successful outcomes as a result.

Just like a rag-tag group of teenagers can run circles around a corporation using their own technology, and how a wild card user can do what some some of the best in technology collectively wash their hands of in defeat, the solution of introducing a wild card into the mix is our unconventional convention for Linden Lab.

You’re not likely to find those wild cards through traditional methods, either. Looking through resumes that dictate traditional education instead of hands-on experience and real-world application will get you people who are classically trained to be blind to the proper solutions. They are trained to think inside the box, so to speak – and there is really nothing wrong with that when in proper context, just like there is nothing wrong with Rodvik, Mark Kingdon, and Philip Rosedale all having a narrow scope which excludes seeing the bigger picture. Those scopes are specialized and have a very important purpose, but without balance – without our wild cards, those narrow scopes change from being an asset to a dangerous destructive force.

The day Linden Lab effectively fills an advisory position with a true wildcard that isn’t traditionally educated, but brings a wealth of insight and hands-on experience with virtual environments (not video games) is the day that you’ll see the balance return, and Linden Lab surge ahead in to a second golden age.

A second life, for Second Life.

Divide By Zero

2011-09-06T17:16:00.001-05:00

This blog will now implode.

Mathematically it is said that dividing by zero is a logical impossibility. When you try to do the calculation on a calculator, it usually gives you an error or NaN (Not a Number) which is a result of the IEEE floating point standard. Furthermore, in the unlikely event you decide to divide by zero on paper or manually, you always end up with logical impossibility such as the idea that 1 = 0 or that any number can logically equal any other number.

In classical mathematics this isn’t possible. If we say that 1 equals 0 then what meaning does any number actually have if they are all equal to each other? Clearly two of something cannot equal one of something. However, I’d like to attempt a thought experiment.

In classical mathematics we say that 1 does not equal 2 because we treat them as unconnected entities with no common underlying basis. Let us demonstrate with two apples -

O O

So we have two apples and then underneath we have one apple (represented by the crude use of a capital O)

So how does one apple O equal two apples O O or vice versa?

I like to think of this in terms of quantum proofs instead of classical proofs. Just as in classical physics, things work very differently than on the quantum level where the same rules do not apply, we see a bit of clarity in a division by zero in this case when looked at through classical mathematics versus what I will call hyper-mathematics.

The underlying issue with zero is that in a function like [ y = 1/x ] as x approaches 0, y approaches negative infinity. This is a problem in and of itself because we really don’t like to think about the nature of infinity either. So in my mind, I believe the understanding comes specifically from the special set of numbers such as defining +∞ and –∞ respectively and also the duality of the opposing nature of +0 and –0

Is there such thing as a positive zero and a negative zero? Well, I suppose it would depend on whether we’re talking about the nature of zero to begin with. Zero is a representation of ∞ nothing or in this case –∞ , so I’d say that 0 whether it is +0 or –0 is inconsequential because it’s still 0 and 0 is interchangeable with -∞, while ∞ is an infinite positive of something. I suppose then we are talking about probabilities of something or nothing in infinite amounts and that the probability is actually both something and nothing at the same time, and thus leads us to declarations of 1 = 2, but moreover that anything is actually anything else and nothing at all in ∞ abundance.

The only thing I know about that exists and doesn’t simultaneously is in the realm of quantum physics where we have decoherence or the collapsing of dual wave into a single upon conscious observation. In this manner we say there are quantum computers where normal 1 and 0 become both simultaneous in a qubit configuration. Here is an inkling of something equaling something else at the same time in a manner that says it is both, and the determining factor is simply conscious observation. I’d say, then, that it’s not entirely impossible for 1 = 2 in the same manner that in a qubit 1 = 0 in a quantum state.

But what does this really mean in the end?

For practicality reasons, just like we use classical physics (Newtonian and Einstein) for the large stuff, when we get down to the building blocks themselves, that no longer applies and we switch to quantum physics where 1 = 0 in some sort of dual existence. I’d say that classical mathematics is for counting apples, while hyper-math is for counting infinities and probabilities within each construct.

But, you may say that infinity is simply that… there cannot be more than one infinity, can there? Again, I suppose this depends entirely on our understanding of infinity and reality itself. For instance, we can say that reality is infinite because it extends forever, but then we’re talking about a dimensional plane of existence which is infinite but only a level, wherein other levels are separate infinities and may not intersect our own layer of reality which is itself an infinite plane. So we get an idea of having multiple infinities in the greater construct of reality, which in itself comprises infinity when taken together.

I suppose then that ∞ + ∞ = ∞(2) which can still be represented as merely ∞

The devil is in the context.

If we wanted to demonstrate the notion of multiple ∞ we simple grab four mirrors. Face two mirrors toward each other and do the same with the other two side by side with the first set. What we have, then is a demonstration of ∞(2) where two spaces are separately infinite. This is a basic demonstration just to get the gist of the concept.

Let’s take this a step further and look at holography.

A holographic plate contains a three dimensional information construct of the item that was effectively imaged, but if we cut the holographic plate in half, we do not have half of the image, but two complete sets of the information, and no matter how much we divide the holographic plate we will always end up with a complete informational scene, as if holography captures the information in an ∞ state and no matter how much we divide ∞(x) we end up with many infinities all intact. In effect, we aren’t dividing the information, but only our available viewport of that information. This is a lot like understanding the difference between ∞ and ∞(x) in context.

Information about any given point in the scene is recorded across the entire medium, rather than one fixed area as in a photograph. Cutting a hologram in half results in two complete representations of the original scene, each merely having a more limited viewport. Think of viewing a street outside your house through a 4ft x 4ft window, and then through a 2ft x 2ft window; You can see nearly all the same things through the 2ft window, but you can see more at once through the 4ft window.

This is where the application of dividing by zero and the many natures of ∞ make sense.

Zero, in this case is the complimentary opposite of an infinite. Where ∞ is taken as a positive something in infinite capacity while zero is an infinite nothing in capacity.

When we say that 1=X where X is every possible number to ∞ and even infinite nothing (zero) we can represent this with holography where the plate can be divided ∞ and still retain the information of the whole in each division. But I suspect this goes deeper because then we start to ask what happens when we divide all the way down to atomic, subatomic, or quantum level?

I suspect then that we begin to understand the nature of ∞ and zero a lot better than we do right now, and the overall implications for what we call an understanding of reality and multiple realities.

It would mean, then, that the very stuff everything is made of contains an infinite amount of information. It is a probabilistic infinity, and that brings us back to 1=2. Everything equals everything else and is based on fundamental configurations to attain a specific probability at a higher level, but even at a higher level all things contain the infinite information to comprise infinite anything else including itself. While we can divide the apple infinitely, and we get fractional apples in classical mathematics, in hyper-math we end up with multiple infinite instances of informational constructs, just like the holographic plate – and the slices of said apple represent the limited viewport effect of the whole.

In the end, the question remains: Is it mathematically possible to divide by zero in a logical manner? The answer, I suspect, depends entirely on whether you want to deal with the nature of reality and subdivisions of infinity in the process. For all practical applications, the answer is no for the same reasons we don’t teach quantum mechanics to our middle school children. However, for a more inclusive answer, we can say that yes it’s not only possible but gives us an incredibly deeper understanding of everything by doing so.

After all, wouldn’t the division of ∞ into ∞(x) really mean the same thing as dividing a holographic plate? In both instances, we end up with all the information and just a smaller viewport to each individually. I think that sums up our understanding of reality at the moment. We see a smaller viewport of the full ∞ represented as ∞(1) or if we take a multiverse theory into account ∞(x) where our viewport on reality is simply narrowed. Our notion of “real” numbers are actually the abstract concept in the grand scheme of things, because numbers represent fractional viewports of the infinite information as a whole.

Do we need to calculate that on our calculators? Probably not, because we’re dealing with abstract concepts that fly in the face of traditional mathematics. Will dividing by zero create some sort of rip in reality?

I don’t think so… this blog is still here, and so are you. I’d say then it’s pretty safe.

But don’t attempt it on a calculator… because it will likely break its tiny mind.

Offerings for Akuma

2011-08-30T13:53:00.001-05:00

Demons ask not for forgiveness, for they know not that they are evil #nymwars

It was once said that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the world that he/she did not exist. I believe this to be untrue, because I contend that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was instead not that he/she did not exist but instead that he/she was God.

Think about it.

Would we not have religions that contradict their own words of enlightenment at the expense of others? I feel that our ideals are corrupt and that it is not entirely our own fault. We see these demons among us in many forms, coming to us in the guise of angels bringing our salvation and safety, but after we’ve given ourselves to them, they show their true nature – far after it is too late to change.

However true this revelation may be, I still refuse to condemn the entire human race for ignorance. No, we always search for deeper meaning and salvation, it is simply in our nature. There is nothing wrong with that driving force within us, but it is that which deceives the masses with false hope and promises that is to fault for this.

I blame the Akuma… the demon.

This is not a debate over religion or lack thereof. I merely wish to frame a related situation in terms which many of us can easily visualize. There is salvation, but not without a fight.

I speak of a special sort of Akuma, or demon… one which infiltrates nearly every facet of our lives. It makes us lazy, and increasingly dependent upon it. We grow weak with every passing day as it grows stronger at our expense and few are the wiser for it.

I am wiser for it, and I wish to shed light.

By nature I study and strive to understand the world of technology. It is a blessing and a curse to know the intricate details and force with which it controls our lives. I am a technology forecaster, a futurist, an academic researcher, but most importantly and foremost I am human. What surprises me most in my study of technology is the condition of the human race as a result of it.

Technology is the beast which demands offerings, and feeds upon us more and more. Much like a demon, it begins with the promise of salvation, and when we begin to trust in it, it asks for more. We do not see the dangers in the innocent requests of this demon because at first it seems so little to give for so much in return.

We receive these great devices and services which allow us to communicate, entertain, and access to all the world’s knowledge in a moment. But just like a demon, our technology grows by our submission to it. We give to it all of our lives, we feed it with images, video, audio, personal details of every part of our lives. We trust in this demon to keep us safe, and we trust this demon implicitly.

But just like a demon, it is never satisfied.

A demon cannot know that it does evil if it believes what it does to be good. Maybe it has worn the disguise for so long that it has begun to believe its own lies. It has become so convincing that a great many are willing to give themselves over without ever questioning the motives or intentions.

I speak of a great evil, an Akuma. A demon so powerful that it has control over most of our lives, and we would be nearly powerless without it. Akuma knows this already, which is why it has become so brazen as to no longer ask for our submission to it, but instead demands our sacrifice to it. When we protest the demands, Akuma is crafty in its response for it knows that words are easily twisted to meet its own ends. We do not stop Akuma… we merely slow the progress for a moment.

Blind progress leaves us frail and powerless. To burn bridges as we cross them in pursuit of our technological superiority is more blunder than blessing.

To know the true power that Akuma has upon you, simply turn off your breaker and shut off the electricity in your home. So fragile is your life and well being that a single button can threaten you.

Somebody controls that button, and it isn’t you. You merely have the ability to demonstrate to yourself that such devastation is possible by a mere button. Listen to your home, how quiet and still it has become. Think of how much you rely on that power to keep you alive.

No bombs are needed to kill you. Not a single bullet need be fired. There is no army to raise against you. There is only silence.

Deafening silence.

In this silence is where the seeds of fear are planted, and where our very sanity is engulfed. The demon knows it will not lift a finger save that to give silence, because many will willingly kill themselves and others in that breach of sanity and desperation.

Akuma is bad only because we are careless, it is powerful only because we are blinded by the distractions and gifts it returns, all with strings attached. Akuma is bad only because it knows nothing else to be true and believes it is doing good for us all.

Technology is not bad if we remain in control of it, and do not let it control us. Akuma is evil only because we allow it.

Akuma goes by many names in modern times. It is called by the demon of information, Google, whom came to us as an angel of order, telling us it would do no evil and now demands all things from us. It twists words and rephrases intentions in order to deceive those which it depends upon for power. It gives privilege to those which submit unto it, and punishes those whom dare defy.

A demon feeds on the lives of others, it collects the souls of its victims; even if it must do so in pieces. A demon punishes those who will not submit unto it when it believes that its power is absolute. It rewards you with things which do not exist, and will steal away from you all that truly matters if you let it. Demons are masters of illusion and lies. They take from you the things you can hold and offer in return the things which do not exist or matter.

More importantly, demons in our lives exist only because we give them the power to do so. We give these demons control over our lives and offer no resistance or alternatives for salvation.

I am not a Luddite. I know that technology and progress have power to make our lives better. It is when we become so complacent in our submission to it and we no longer can offer control over it that technology and progress rule us instead of the other way around.

As Jaron Lanier once said: You Are Not A Gadget. You are bigger than your technology, and only you can find deeper meaning in the interaction and salvation it offers. You alone control whether it becomes a demon or an angel, as it is a reflection of ourselves.

It still remains that Akuma is simply a reflection. It needs us to have any sort of power, and it keeps this knowledge from us in hopes that we should never have this revelation.

Remember this the next time your power goes out, or these demons stop asking you to comply and begin demanding when it believes you have no other choice.

There is always a choice, and it begins with knowledge. Do not be afraid of Akuma, for it is powerless without your submission, and knowledge is its weakness. It is weak against the same things which all demons are – the light of truth and human spirit.

Be not afraid of our technology, nor compelled to give unto it things which would endanger you or remove your control over it. It is you who control this demon, and determine if it remains an angel at our mercy or becomes so corrupt that we are merely slaves.

There is Darkness

2011-08-26T17:12:00.002-05:00

A rare glimpse into the side of me that so many fear does not exist.

Life is one of those things that can be very cruel. I’m not one to mull around and pretend that somehow my experiences are worse off than another person, because honestly that would be pretentious at best and arrogant at worst. In the end, what I can comfortably say is that “I truly understand”.

Good vs Evil by DomMcCann

Maybe it’s empathy that drives us, a yearning to walk in another’s shoes just for a bit and bond closer? I’m not entirely sure about this, and that’s one of those things that you’ll rarely hear me say out loud. I have a fear… and it is a gripping fear. It is that someday I will not be able to help somebody when they need it most. The words “I don’t know” are like poison on my lips, because I may be sealing the fate of another by not being able to bring light into their life.

Not knowing is something that scares me more than anything. Time and again, it is the specter of not knowing that threatened people’s lives, people I dearly care about – family and friends. It’s not knowing that could make the world worse off, in my opinion. Contrary to popular belief, I really do have the best interest of others in mind, even when I’m being a hard-ass or deliberately disagreeable. It is in those times when I actually care the most for others.

I am hyper-critical in the eyes of many, but there is a deeper meaning behind exactly why I act that way. It isn’t necessarily for the sake of starting an argument, or creating some sort of ill-will toward others or even aimed at myself (although the latter is quite common toward me). I consider that collateral damages at best, but still worth the effort. It’s not the collateral damages I’m after, but preparing people to rise out of those ashes a better and stronger person.

That’s where the confusion comes… because many (if not most) only see the collateral damages or trials by fire as a result of my hyper-critical nature, but fail to see the extended outcomes of that.

It isn’t whether I’m criticizing others or even companies that matter – it’s the willingness on my part to rub salt in the wounds in order that we hopefully address there are wounds to begin with and focus our attention on healing them while we can, before we bleed out (metaphorically speaking). Nobody likes having those wounds ground in salt, nor should they… but if it was all roses and rainbows, we’d never get heated or passionate about the subjects at hand or bother to address them at all, and to me… that’s far worse because it’s “not knowing” that can be the worst damage.

I’m no stranger to darkness and pain, and my life has brought me much more than any one person should ever be asked to endure. No, I didn’t lose my legs in a war. I’m not living in a poverty stricken third world country. There are horrors and struggles that even I wouldn’t wish on others, and truly wish there was a solution to.

Over the past few months it’s been like that for me, and maybe a large part of the years of my life as well. A lot of strife and grief… unimaginable to a guy like myself who thinks there must be reason and logic to all things, and suddenly there is not. I’ve held a broken man in my arms in tears as he had a total nervous breakdown – afraid to go to the hospital because he thought they’d never let him out of the psychiatric ward, I’ve learned that my step-sister was murdered by her boyfriend in another state, and I’ve been to funerals that I never thought I’d go to so soon in my life.

I’ve had to wonder if anything I’ve done is worthwhile, if it really made a difference in the end. I’ve lost a lot in life… I’ve run into burning buildings to save people only to have them die a few months later of a heart attack. I’ve had love and lost it countless times, mostly because I’ve been lied to, stranded, cheated on, or worse.

Even in the darkness there is light sometimes.

I’m more of a realist, with a side of sarcasm. It’s not the realization that I’ve been cheated on or lied to that hurts most, because over the years that has become inconsequential to me, it’s instead when you have to let the person you love go in order for them to be happier without you, and to be a better person. It’s when you see there is a wound and you know the only way to make it better is to point it out and pour some salt on it. It’s knowing your name will be on their lips only in salt and vinegar from that moment on, but they will be stronger because of it, even if it means you have to take a hammer to your own heart to do it. That is a level of caring that I think few these days possess… often too selfish to let go even when they know they should.

I have a unique sort of perspective on things. Maybe it’s a curse… seeing the bigger picture and not being afraid to rub salt in the wounds when it’s needed. In the long run, people do change and become better for it, no matter how much they think I’m a horrible person in the short term. I can take that collateral damage if it means people will ultimately be better off for it.

I was asked in an interview recently what the best and worst parts of being an analyst and trend forecaster are, and my answer was cutting and truthful. The best part is that those situations are like a giant puzzle to be solved, something that begs to be worked out… the challenge. The worst part is knowing the solution is something that will never be acted on, and that you have no choice but to watch with your hands tied as a ticking time bomb counts down. Even worse when you have no choice but to rub salt in the wounds just to make things apparent, but know full well things will bleed out in the end because people are more interested in defending themselves instead of fixing what is wrong.

Sometimes there aren’t any solutions at all, and that’s even worse for me. Sometimes I have to lay awake at night knowing there is nothing I could have done to prevent a murder, and even the noblest of intentions did not save a friend in the end. Staring in to the hollow eyes of a dying relative who has made peace, knowing you’ll never see them again. Those eyes still haunt me today in my dreams. That’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

Inside my mind is often a dark place. There are screaming souls, strife and grief swirling and angry at the world. I’ve learned that pouring salt on those wounds is the best remedy even for myself, and trial by fire sets those dark specters ablaze in the inky void. Despite the darkness, there is always a shining light, and if I have to destroy hell itself to let it shine through, then so be it.

I’ll take being relegated to damnation if it means others are saved by that light.

“Demons”, my friend used to say, “are my only friend”. I remember he used to sit alone and cry, with the grip of addiction, anger and shame choking him. I could do nothing… I had no pearls of wisdom… I had no comfort to offer… it was his trial by fire, and I would do worse to him by stopping it. It was gut wrenching for me… and I cried with him many nights. Angels who have fallen have no choice but to become Demons… something I said a long time ago to him… and he had it tattooed on his back. There was no rehab for him… he’d been there countless times and it never worked.

He’s clean now, but only because he’s spent many years in jail. Sometimes what we think is the worst thing that could happen, really is what may have saved our lives or made us a better person because of it. This is a reality that I’ve come to understand.

I’m a better person for all the tragedy and suffering I’ve endured or had to witness. From my own trial by fire I’ve learned something invaluable – the ability to have perspective.

It’s made me a harder person, I will agree. But underneath all of that is somebody who cares deeper for others than many may even imagine.

Does this make me a lonely or bitter person? Sometimes. Some days I wonder what life would be like if I were just able to play ignorant and pretend everything was alright. Ignorance is bliss, and it’s a bliss I’m not afforded… It’s a high price to pay.

I remember when I was younger… in highschool. I watched helpless as a friend had his head blown off at point blank range. It was a pointless argument on the basketball court, and my friend didn’t want any trouble. He begged… he pleaded and cried… as the other kid pulled out a gun and held it to his forehead. I tried to intervene… and I was beaten horribly by the rest of his gang. I should have run for help… but instead I lay beaten and held down.

Later when I was in my early twenties, I worked at a bar. A friend of mine at the time came strolling in late one night, and there was clearly something wrong with him. I called for the bar owner to come down… was an older man in his fifties. The kid, and I still think of him as a kid today, snapped over something somebody said and went into a full out brawl. Eventually we managed to pull him out of the bar into the sidewalk, still beating on the bar owner… we tried to call the cops, but the bar owner told us not to. I finally jumped in and yanked the kid off of the bar owner and when the kid started swinging and fighting me, I tried to back off… but he had his sights set on me and would have no part of it.

I had no choice at that point but to fight back. I ended up slamming the kid’s head into the brick wall outside and beating the ever loving piss out of him until he would stop attacking everyone in arms length. Bleeding and defeated, he got up and started walking down the road… the bar owner went inside to get cleaned up and call the police. The kid and I were the only two outside in those dark and desolate streets.

I’ll never forget that night… as he wandered down the road… toward his home. Turning to yell things at me. I’ll never forget it because that was the last time anyone saw him alive.

The police went to his house later only to find he was slumped in his kitchen… blood smeared all over the walls and floors… he had committed suicide. His wife and young daughter were traumatized. I never felt so bad in my life… that I could have followed him home… I could have kept an eye on him… anything. But I didn’t and he’s dead. I don’t blame myself or beat myself up over it. I blame the drugs he was on, and the depression and guilt… It finally did him in.

I have scars on my my body that serve as a constant reminder that from that night on I would stand to defend and try to help people at nearly any cost. Even if that meant I would take the grief for it. I’ve been stabbed, beaten, burned, and more over the years standing for that ideal. But I stood tall and refused to back down. Because I know it could be worse… it could be a lot worse.

Despite all of this, I choose to embrace not the darkness but instead always search for the light. I choose to look for how to make all things better, but I’m not afraid of the darkness either… I’m not afraid to admit when you have to storm the gates of hell to get to that light, and face your deepest fears, anger, aggressions, insecurities, and all those demons that hold us down. I know that we all have to face those demons, and if we want to be better people we have to be willing to defeat them. We have to be willing to face them head on and not try to convince ourselves that those demons do not exist, or that we are somehow immune to their effects.

Salt in the wound is the least of our worries. It’s what happens when we bleed out and could have stopped it that we should be most afraid of. What I fear most is having no choice but to watch that happen.

I’m harsh and cynical at times, but it’s always a façade. I’m this way because I don’t want this world, and the great things you do, to be destroyed and tormented by the demons that haunt you, to overrun all the good things you are capable of and take them away from you. I’ve seen the horrible things that happen when they do. It isn’t because I’m angry… and it’s not because I like causing contention. It’s because I want less of those demons in this world, even if we have to face them together.

Whether that applies to love, business, or just personal lives… I want what is best for everyone. I’m willing to stand against those demons alone and fight against the things that shouldn’t destroy us in any capacity. Hopefully, one day… I will no longer be standing alone in that fight.

Until that day, I am glad for what little light there is in the darkness, and choose to shine that light (however painful) on those demons. I choose perspective.

Why I Dislike “Other” Grids

2011-08-24T12:39:00.001-05:00

Convincing Huck Finn to whitewash the #SecondLife fence.

This is one of those blog posts that will invariably be written from the top of my head, but definitely less technical. It’s about life experience, history repeating, and of course about why I really don’t like “other” grids in SecondLife. I understand very well that “other” grids aren’t necessarily part of SecondLife and it can be argued that they are separate entities unto themselves. For instance, OSGrid, ReactionGrid, InWorldz (which I have a particular distaste for), SpotOn3D (which is probably the only grid that actually manages to piss me off simply because of their arrogance and disregard), and others.

This isn’t to say that I dislike all other grids, however I do keep the whole thing in proper perspective, which seems to be a rarity with those who actually use those grids.

Let me tell you a story about my

first years in virtual reality.

I got my start back in the days of VRML and places like Blaxxun Contact, but the system I was using back then wasn’t exactly Blaxxun. Instead it was a place called Cybertown (which to this day most likely still exists as a digital ghost town). Cybertown could be described under the concept that I became very familiar with over the years called a White Label product, whereby the company responsible for the technology or service would license that technology to third parties without any branding. In the case of Blaxxun (and I’m sure BSContact can correct me if I’m wrong), it was a company that made a good technology product – in that they made a multi-user layer for VRML systems, and that technology was white labeled and licensed to third parties who would then create their “unique” systems powered by Blaxxun Contact technology.

Years later, I encountered this scenario while using ActiveWorlds technology. Their main universe, the Active Worlds Universe, was really of little concern to the company because they made a majority of their money (and probably still do to this day) licensing out their technology to third parties as a white label product and service. Just like the scenario with Blaxxun, there existed in the case of ActiveWorlds dozens or maybe even hundreds of third party “Active Worlds” based universe systems all rebranded with different company names and sold as unique services, all betting on the idea that nobody had heard of ActiveWorlds, or any of the other third party universes to begin with.

Concerning ActiveWorlds, at least they were partially correct in assuming nobody had heard of the parent company responsible for the technology. But during those years I wound up with a sort of virtual world fatigue. I’m sure any long-term virtual environment user will concur, that virtual world fatigue is real and it comes and goes, but often is triggered by oversaturation of similarity.

What brought this on in my AW years was this constant insistence by third party universe owners (white labeled universes) that I should leave ActiveWorlds and come join their universe instead. Clearly they were better than ActiveWorlds, would go the argument. They, of course, had essentially bolted on various additions to the browser at the time, maybe set up a novel registration system, or paid for certain modifications to the ActiveWorlds browser or server which made their version slightly different. Many of these third party, white-label universes were small fish in the ocean of virtual worlds and you’ve likely never heard of them before. Places like Virtual Celebrity Islands (Peace City), Virtual U, SpiralMatrix, Vectorscape, Galaxyworlds, Cybernet Worlds, and even the ill-fated Juno Internet Service had their own browser at one point. If you’re an ActiveWorlds user (or an old timer who remembers) those names should sound familiar, but if you weren’t in the ActiveWorlds scene, then it is highly likely none of those systems ring a bell, let alone remembering ActiveWorlds itself.

Part of the third party ploy to attract users away from other systems and from ActiveWorlds itself was to offer cheap land and server space for the object paths (sound familiar?) or tout how they had a better and easier setup and registration process that in some way had different features that made it better than what Activeworlds had offered. Many even introduced their own in-world currency system.

Is any of this sounding familiar to you?

This pretty much sums up what goes through my mind

In the end, the hard truth of the matter was this: No matter how much any of them tried to differentiate themselves from the main company responsible for the technology in the first place, they always fell short and instead were always seen as either short term flash-in-the-pan or (more appropriately) living in the constant shadow of Activeworlds, and thus perceived as a cheap copy.

There was, of course places that exist today like VirtualU, but despite the in-world hacking and paid additions to the software in order to add features and abilities, to this day the idea of a specialized system built for expos and business meetings never seemed to make sense to me (and even if it did, I can’t imagine that business is exactly booming). The modern equivalent to VirtualU today is SpotOn3D, who I’ve had the pleasure of hearing insist to me how they alone finally got this “virtual world” thing right when all else have not – however not realizing that it’s all been done before and has failed, and that I actually know this because I witnessed it myself over many years in the industry before SecondLife even existed. But moreover, the modern equivalent to all of those third-party universes from the Activeworlds white-label process happens to be the scenario by which we have all of these different “grids” and then SecondLife as the main example of the technology.

Just replace the word “Universe” with “Grid” and you realize we’ve repeated the scenario once again, and I’m seeing pretty much the same outcomes and attitudes replayed.

With InWorldz, they remind me of SpiralMatrix or Cybernet Worlds, where the land is basement priced, the service is on par, and the technology is two generations or more behind the main company responsible for the technology to begin with. The users of that system act like a cult from Utah, and insist it is far superior to even SecondLife or any of the other grids, and always cite things like “the land is so much cheaper here!”. Hell, they even created their own currency in world called I’s or whatever. Congratulations to the hard work of the team behind InWorldz, because it does take a lot of work to run and operate a virtual world environment. However, your “grid” is doomed to obscurity in the grand scheme of things, and if SecondLife itself is a niche audience, yours is a niche within *that* niche.

I have the same to say about most “grids” and even to many virtual environment systems on the whole like BlueMars and Kaneva, and (yet again) There.com. Let me address a few “grids” here. It’s not sugar coated, and it’s going to hit a nerve, but at least I’m being blatantly honest and upfront. I’m sure it is likely to offend, because I’m not about to paint a rose-colored picture of where we’re at as a whole.

I’m about to be very candid, and straight to the point.

If you wish to remain unoffended or stay within your rose-colored world where nothing you do is wrong, I suggest you skip the rest of this post, as it will be a realist viewpoint verging on the edge of cynicism. Any comments that are derogatory, flaming or just outright attacking will be ignored entirely. This is just my own opinion and analysis, without any sugar coating – it will likely be very harsh.

SpotOn3D – you haven’t gotten anything right. You’re just arrogant and ignorant. All the business acumen in the world didn’t save you from brewing the worst PR sh*tstorm you could have mustered, and a lack of actual understanding for the history and practice of virtual worlds as a whole has you repeating common (yet completely avoidable) mistakes. You don’t seem to understand the merit of how people react to what seems like subtle policies or actions on your part, and that it would cause trouble in the long run. Pride comes before the fall. You haven’t done anything at all different than when I called your idea “VirtualU” or any number of other virtual world environments who thought it was a novel and innovative idea ten years ago to set up a walled garden system to cater to business professionals and schools. You’re heading down the same path as your predecessors, gleefully and completely oblivious, if not outright self-assured. If anything, the recent PR nightmare should have been your wake-up call.

InWorldz – Put a leash on your community. It’s ok to want to grow your userbase, but not through sleazy practices like trying to get people to leave other virtual environments. I don’t hold you, as the company, at fault. I fault your community – but you can make a big difference in that perception by actually coming up with creative outlets to promote InWorldz *outside of the SL community niche* like an actual, honest to god, real company would. Right now, you (and many other grids) are giving off the perception that you’re a bunch of vultures fighting over users. That has to stop if you ever hope to be a brand and service that stands on its own merit, and not in the shadow of others – a footnote in the history of virtual worlds, if you even bother to warrant that much.

Avination: Start with what I just said about Inworldz and add to it this nugget of knowledge: An online marketplace isn’t the reason your in-world land sales falter. Banning magic-boxes isn’t any more of a solution than banning automobiles because you can’t seem to sell horses anymore. The problem isn’t the innovation in marketplace type systems, it’s the lack of added value in having in-world stores. Forcing the issue isn’t a solution. Instead, why not offer education to your business users or entrepreneurs to show them that actually running a virtual business implies many of the same things as running a real business, and that if they insist on making their “store” nothing more than a fancy vending machine, then they should not expect people to treat it any better than that. Having a privately held marketplace system that doesn’t interoperate with other grids unless they agree to a privately held agreement does more damage than good in the bigger picture – and is the same lesson I offer to SpotOn3D as well as Linden Lab, except in the notion that Linden Lab can afford to ignore this for the time being while you and other open grids cannot.

Kitely: While you have a good idea, I don’t believe it has really been brought to your attention that marginalizing and perpetuating the already damaging image of treating virtual environments as disposable and cheap is bad for the industry as a whole. The entire point of the virtual world industry is to try and convince the majority of the public that virtual worlds are a lasting, persistent and engaging arena for all manner of interactions – so much so that it has the potential to supplant or greatly augment current web practices. By offering cookie-cutter, on-demand, throw-away instances, you bring that higher understanding down to the level of “gimmick”. While you are poised to make money in the short term, and even make an adequate business model from doing so, the bigger picture is that the cost of doing so is near irrevocable damage to the overall perception and expectation of seriousness and persistence for virtual worlds as a whole. On-demand spaces serve a very small niche, while perpetuating negative ideals of what a virtual world should be to the masses.

Linden Lab: I don’t even know where to begin. You have a decent system, not the best. There is a lot to offer but it is buried in bad decision making, high employee (and CEO) turnover, and stagnation in innovation. You have a marketing leader who has done little to innovate the perception or lead of your company. Of the 150 brand names in virtual worlds as of 2006-2007 (as reported by KZero), considered the hey-day of SecondLife, possibly 2 exist actively in SecondLife today, while brand names like Dell Computer are a digital wasteland of inactivity, probably flying under the radar of accounting and existing purely on recurring billing. Searching for any of those brand names today is like reading a virtual worlds obituary. You control the most powerful marketing engine the world has ever known called Marketplace in conjunction with what amounts to the most ideal (for the time being) method of immersive experience, and fail to see the connection between real life brands as marketing and prosumer culture by which your system boasts in spades.

You literally have an army of content creators who would bend over backwards to accommodate your company in the unlikely event that you implemented an IP system which rewarded users for creating content on behalf of brand names instead of punished them. This should be your focus, and not expending inordinate amounts of time and money chasing down DMCA requests and playing virtual worlds Whack-a-Mole. Instead, your marketing director has spent the last year “getting acquainted” with SecondLife and has enacted what constitutes business as usual – all the while seemingly not understanding that SecondLife is far from business as usual and by no means should be treated like a video game. Instead of implementing a prosumer based solution to your dilemma you continue to approach this issue in brick and mortar methods; separation between producers of content and consumers – you’re thinking like a video game company and not like an open ended virtual environment company. In the process, you continually invoke the Streisand Effect, shutting down one or a group of IP infringing creators, only to have twenty or more pop up shortly after either on your marketplace or bypassing your gaze and selling directly in-world. Your IP “Pop Quiz” that every person needs to take and pass before they are allowed to upload content via Mesh is the thinnest veil of a solution, demonstrated by the Back to the Future Delorean Mesh car replica sitting on the Beta Grid – not just one, but half a dozen of them.

Instead of wasting money and time playing cat and mouse, or covering your ass in the thinnest excuse for IP protection action you could muster, it’s time to use your resources to work smarter and not harder. You need to give those brands a reason to come back, and this time actually stick around. You need to do this in a manner which celebrates the fact that you have an army of prosumers who are more than eager to do your bidding and win sanction for those brand names, to do the work for them, and hold their heads up high as the official outlets of those products in your virtual space, while giving those brand names inexpensive and viral capacity for marketing in the virtual environment. It’s time to turn your perception of negative into positive and use it to your advantage. Clearly Linden Lab didn’t give them a reason the first time when they had all the world as a stage, so you had better be willing to roll up your sleeves and work on being innovative and enticing to those brands that you lost, getting them (and far more) back into your system. It’s not as hard as you’re making it out to be, trust me.

When you said you didn’t understand why SecondLife had staying power, or why it continues to be popular, I knew you weren’t lying. It clearly has an appeal that has yet to be effectively quantified for you or your staff, or how to actually use that to your advantage. Just ask your marketing director, who doesn’t seem to have any more of an idea than she did a year ago when she began. Mr Humble, in all of your experience in the video game industry, even you have to admit that it didn’t prepare you for SecondLife – in many ways this digital nation is leaving you baffled and perplexed.

What you need, Linden Lab, is somebody who can explain this to you and give you a clear path to raise the bar. Somebody who can easily lay it out, and explain why consumer versus producer thinking doesn’t work in your business, and what is more likely to work in your favor instead. The problem is that the person you are likely to find for that position isn’t going to conform to your preconceived notions of who you think is best. They should be willing to tell the hard truth, and not sugar coat it. It should be a person with multitudes of experience in virtual world environments, not just SecondLife but across a very broad range of virtual world environments over the course of many years spanning almost to the dawn of virtual world environments themselves. You’re looking for people who have experience in technology or video games, but seem to not understand that you’re hiring people for the wrong job. SecondLife isn’t a video game, and hiring people with video game industry experience is a mismatch. Hiring the right person will be the hardest decision you’ll ever make, because your very core of being will scream and tell you not to.

That, however, should be your clear indication that you are about to get it right. I don’t really care who you hire, as long as they are capable of meeting or exceeding those requirements, however unconventional. Virtual Environments like SecondLife are new media, cutting edge, and there aren’t any degrees from any college that will prepare somebody for dealing with it – that is your first mistake. Mr Humble, you’re the CEO of Linden Lab and even your own years of experience at a video game company didn’t prepare you for SecondLife, so it’s time to start looking for people who meet unconventional and realistic expectations for the situation at hand. You should be hiring for that based on actual virtual environment experience in a business sense, not whether they can pull a college degree out of their butt on demand.

I’ll say to you what I’ve told countless other virtual environments and even game companies before you: You have the potential to be something far more amazing than even you can imagine right now. Unfortunately, potential is only one part and is often overshadowed by lack of action or understanding. It would be a shame if your potential were wasted like so many others in the history of virtual worlds. Just ask all the white label spin-offs who the world has wholly forgotten, and will continue to forget today.