When people can freely copy any content, this will destroy the economy as there isn't really any incentive for people to create and sell items.
Just like how music and movie industries were destroyed a few years ago after online file sharing took off, right?
You do realize there was a time in SL's history before you could cash out to US$? People made nice content back then too, and they were a hell of a lot more willing to share it as well. All of this hysteria is a kneejerk reaction to an overwhelming state of greed that has developed in the past three years.
But unless they find a way to really stop it from the server side, the code will find a way out and ruin SL as we know it.
There is no way, short of Trusted Computing, and even that's not 100% secure. LL doesn't need to waste their already overwhelmed devleoper resources playing cat-and-mouse with DRM.
Except the issue here isn't with the C&D. The C&D came and was complied with well before the second message demanding a retroactive $9k in licensing fees, to close their entire store permanently, and logs of the last 12 months of sales.
What apparently happened is that Universal sold T-shirt rights to a third party, which is now either enforcing on behalf of Universal, or demanding that Universal enforce the Firefly/Serenity copyright.
Whoever that third party is, good luck selling many T-shirts now.
With recent developments like adding.mono, it's really moving faster towards being a fully open source system
How can SL go open source and still maintain the DRM (aka "permissions system") that is a constant source of drama? Either they will piss off a lot of content creators, or they will likely not go as "open" as they claim.
And as far as mono goes, it's starting to look about as likely to happen as upgrading beyond Havok 1.0 or the "2.0" rendering engine that was "previewed" almost two years ago.
The LL development model is basically "work on whatever you feel like today" which means "shiny" simple things get implemented, but big, boring, and/or tedious stuff never gets finished. Also, they're so busy pushing up their population numbers, they have very little time to dedicate to anything other than bugfixes and scalability issues. They've been that way for well over a year now, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Even if they had no significant problems with bugs or scalability, they would still be unable to make revolutionary updates (such as mono, havok, or the 3d engine), becuase it would certainly break tons of legacy content. For example, the 3D avatar meshes have not changed a bit in three years because doing so would affect the UV texture mapping on the >6TB (yes terabytes) of clothing textures that are stored in their asset system.
from what I know each SL client is a grid application that does some of the processing
SL's clients are thin clients, and don't offer any significant processing to assist the grid itself. They bake avatar textures and convert image and sound formats before uploading them, but currently the servers don't offload any grid processing to the clients.
Which is a shame because SL's grid model is quite inefficient. Regions are (by default) set to handle about 30-40 agents, but most are empty or only have a couple of agents in them at any time. If you could take the average CPU utilization of the entire grid, it would likely be no more than 10% even at peak hours. An overloaded grid region can be sitting right next to a completely idle one and there's no facilities to offload any processing from the overloaded region to the idle region.
Given the incessant scalability problems and legacy roadblocks, now would be a great time for someone to come along and open a new virtual world which can avoid some of SL's mistakes and break some legacy roadblocks. We see how crazy people are to spend so much money on virtual stuff, it's almost surprising that there isn't any real competition to SL yet.
That would mean that that you research each and every company you purchase from, for every item you purchase. It also means that you boycott radio and TV stations on the basis of their advertisers -- because surely you research all of the advertisers as well, to avoid consuming product that they are paying for.
You seem to have things quite backwards. With television, *you* are the product and advertisers are the consumer. So this statement is completely erroneous.
The SL grid had an unscheduled shutdown at about 6:15AM (Pacific) this morning, after the grid "Gods" as they call themselves gave only a 10 second warning that it was kicking everyone off. This did not allow time for people to take up their projects back to their inventory, save their scripts, or even finish a conversation.
As of this writing, it has been down six hours, but apparently the person in this marketing promo was admitted back into the closed grid, while a few thousand residents are all shut out while LL hobbles around looking for yet another permissions exploit.
This sudden grid closure thing has been happening a few times a week lately due to replicator attacks, exploits, or just random centralized server failures. It seems like LL's only goal lately is to hit that 1,000,000 total registered users milestone, everything else be damned. Nevermind that their concurrency:registered ratio is 1/4 of what it was a year ago this time. Nevermind that stability and customer service is at an all time low. Nevermind that they have to spend all of their time on fixing scalability problems instead of fixing long-standing bugs and feature requests. All that seems to matter anymore is that "total registered" number on their home page, which is really only a gauge of how many net-monkeys filled out the "gimmie a free account" form and logged in maybe once.
But it's nice to know the third party marketing promo accounts still get first class access to stay on the grid while they kick everyone else off because they can't be trusted.
Why would anyone pay one or two orders of magnitude more money to get into an office, than they are legally paid back in salary for the job--unless they were getting some kickback out of it?
The problem with elminating riders is that you need to pass legislation to do so. But then it only takes a simple majority to repeal that legistation the moment it gets in the way. It needs to be a constitutional amendment, or it will just be repealed shortly after it's created.
I've been thinking about this. Maybe we could pass some sort of "common sense" law It would only take about 20 seconds for 50%+1 of congress to repeal a "no unrelated riders" law, and then we are right back to where we are.
every time one of these echanges is made, the game's publisher takes a share. that's why people are pissed about their designs being copied - it's actually costing them profits.
You are probably thinking of There.com. LL does not take a cut on each item copy (there is a fee for using their currency exchange when you cash out, but you aren't forced to use theirs and there are alternatives).
I'd like to point out that the catalyst behind this particular instance of net-drama was with an issue of fair use, not copyright infringement.
Someone purchased a skin texture from an "artist", ripped it using either an OpenGL interception tool or a cache parser, applied makeup to it, then re-uploaded it for their own personal use. They didn't sell it or give it away, they just modified it for their own avatar. That's fair use. But the "artist" who created and sold the skin texture freaked out at the realization that SL's DRM isn't 100% perfect.
SL has gradually become a haven of greedy and self-righteous DRM advocates and paranoid fair-use-hating prima donnas. And yet so many of them photosource their clothing textures from images they ganked off the web without permission, upload music clips from copyrighted songs, movies, and television shows, and build avatars based on trademarked characters. Yet the moment they find out someone has "ripped" them off, even a buyer who wants to modify something they paid for, they start a shitstorm on the forums.
I have never seen such blatant hypocracy.
SL is the only "community" where I've seen people join up, copy someone else's real-life work without their permission, sell it (making real world money in the process), then get self-righteous about "their work" when someone else copies their copy; and this behavior is accepted, expected, and re-enforced by their peers.
And it's only been getting steadily worse, ever since the "make real money!!1" economy was introduced in 1.2
Why not design a multicore system so that if a defect occurs in only one core, the chip can still be sold at a discount as a n-1 core chip, instead of tossing it in the trash?
Paper represents carbon that a tree took from the air by converting CO2 to O2
As you pointed out, a plant's mass comes from CO2 rather than nutrients in the ground, which goes against what most people seem to intuitively believe. However, what's fascinating is that the excess O2 that plants produce comes from *water*, not the CO2. So, both concepts are counter-intuitive. =)
Oxygen is a product of the light-driven water-oxidation reaction catalyzed by photosystem II; it is not generated by the fixation of carbon dioxide. Consequently, the source of oxygen during photosynthesis is water, not carbon dioxide.
LL generally doesn't get involved in any transactions between residents. If you got scammed, then it's your fault. If you bought something you dont't like and the seller refuses to offer a refund, you're SOL. If you go into a contract with someone and they violate that contract, LL usually will not act unless handed an order from a real-life judge.
Scenario 1: Person runs Ponsai scheme. Person collects $1T Lindens through Ponsai. Just as with EVE, LL would probably not seize the money unless it were obtained by a bug or technical glitch in the system. (However LL is pretty responsive to community demands and so may take action if enough people protest the situation)
Scenario 2: Person runs Ponsai scheme. Person collects Lindens, but promptly sells all Lindens for USD$10,000 cash. The main currency exchange is owned by LL and has a 5-business-day delay for retrieving your US$ out of your account.
Scenario 3: Well, I'm trying to think of something that could happen in-game which results in real criminal acts, I think our imaginations can run wild here. I don't know, hit contracts through SL to gain Lindens? So far, DoS attacks against the service, and someone making serious threats to harm someone else in RL have both resulted in police action.
I did something similar almost a year ago with a strand of 100 white LEDs, which I confirmed uses only about 4 watts total. BJ's club was selling them for US$6 per box right before xmas. A few LEDs in the stand have since burned out, but considering how much I leave them on and how cheap they were, it's not the end of the world. The only major complaint most people here might have is the 60Hz flickering, but it doesn't bug me.
My first thought when reading this article was that it was meant as a roundabout way to bring up the subject of Trusted Computing.
For those who haven't seen it yet, this is a very concise video to show to your friends and relatives about Trusted Computing - http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
You're comparing $2000 in sales to $300 in margin. If you're going to compare sales to sales, then it's $2000 vs $3000. Even if you compared margin to margin, I would suspect they would be in the same ballpark as well.
I guess this product does not have any real application.
I love how you picked the two most overhyped potential applications, combined them into one example, and then declared the technology useless because that one example doesn't seem practical.
I suppose you've never heard of embedded systems or disk write caching?
Slashdot Mirror
The CopyBot drama is an orgy of hyperbole.
When people can freely copy any content, this will destroy the economy as there isn't really any incentive for people to create and sell items.
Just like how music and movie industries were destroyed a few years ago after online file sharing took off, right?
You do realize there was a time in SL's history before you could cash out to US$? People made nice content back then too, and they were a hell of a lot more willing to share it as well. All of this hysteria is a kneejerk reaction to an overwhelming state of greed that has developed in the past three years.
But unless they find a way to really stop it from the server side, the code will find a way out and ruin SL as we know it.
There is no way, short of Trusted Computing, and even that's not 100% secure. LL doesn't need to waste their already overwhelmed devleoper resources playing cat-and-mouse with DRM.
Or, you could just change the time on those systems twice a year.
Four times if the device follows the old DST formula.
What if they use the old system and want to add a new exit between exit 40 and 41?
So, if you get permanently banned from Second Life as part of a guilt-by-association political move, can you claim your L$ balance as a capital loss?
One of my favourite recent reads was Snow Crash , but I don't expect the Metaverse to happen anytime soon.
Except the issue here isn't with the C&D. The C&D came and was complied with well before the second message demanding a retroactive $9k in licensing fees, to close their entire store permanently, and logs of the last 12 months of sales.
What apparently happened is that Universal sold T-shirt rights to a third party, which is now either enforcing on behalf of Universal, or demanding that Universal enforce the Firefly/Serenity copyright.
Whoever that third party is, good luck selling many T-shirts now.
a.k.a. Second Life
With recent developments like adding .mono, it's really moving faster towards being a fully open source system
How can SL go open source and still maintain the DRM (aka "permissions system") that is a constant source of drama? Either they will piss off a lot of content creators, or they will likely not go as "open" as they claim.
And as far as mono goes, it's starting to look about as likely to happen as upgrading beyond Havok 1.0 or the "2.0" rendering engine that was "previewed" almost two years ago.
The LL development model is basically "work on whatever you feel like today" which means "shiny" simple things get implemented, but big, boring, and/or tedious stuff never gets finished. Also, they're so busy pushing up their population numbers, they have very little time to dedicate to anything other than bugfixes and scalability issues. They've been that way for well over a year now, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Even if they had no significant problems with bugs or scalability, they would still be unable to make revolutionary updates (such as mono, havok, or the 3d engine), becuase it would certainly break tons of legacy content. For example, the 3D avatar meshes have not changed a bit in three years because doing so would affect the UV texture mapping on the >6TB (yes terabytes) of clothing textures that are stored in their asset system.
from what I know each SL client is a grid application that does some of the processing
SL's clients are thin clients, and don't offer any significant processing to assist the grid itself. They bake avatar textures and convert image and sound formats before uploading them, but currently the servers don't offload any grid processing to the clients.
Which is a shame because SL's grid model is quite inefficient. Regions are (by default) set to handle about 30-40 agents, but most are empty or only have a couple of agents in them at any time. If you could take the average CPU utilization of the entire grid, it would likely be no more than 10% even at peak hours. An overloaded grid region can be sitting right next to a completely idle one and there's no facilities to offload any processing from the overloaded region to the idle region.
Given the incessant scalability problems and legacy roadblocks, now would be a great time for someone to come along and open a new virtual world which can avoid some of SL's mistakes and break some legacy roadblocks. We see how crazy people are to spend so much money on virtual stuff, it's almost surprising that there isn't any real competition to SL yet.
Humanity's undoing: the legislation excluded machines.
That would mean that that you research each and every company you purchase from, for every item you purchase. It also means that you boycott radio and TV stations on the basis of their advertisers -- because surely you research all of the advertisers as well, to avoid consuming product that they are paying for.
You seem to have things quite backwards. With television, *you* are the product and advertisers are the consumer. So this statement is completely erroneous.
The SL grid had an unscheduled shutdown at about 6:15AM (Pacific) this morning, after the grid "Gods" as they call themselves gave only a 10 second warning that it was kicking everyone off. This did not allow time for people to take up their projects back to their inventory, save their scripts, or even finish a conversation.
As of this writing, it has been down six hours, but apparently the person in this marketing promo was admitted back into the closed grid, while a few thousand residents are all shut out while LL hobbles around looking for yet another permissions exploit.
This sudden grid closure thing has been happening a few times a week lately due to replicator attacks, exploits, or just random centralized server failures. It seems like LL's only goal lately is to hit that 1,000,000 total registered users milestone, everything else be damned. Nevermind that their concurrency:registered ratio is 1/4 of what it was a year ago this time. Nevermind that stability and customer service is at an all time low. Nevermind that they have to spend all of their time on fixing scalability problems instead of fixing long-standing bugs and feature requests. All that seems to matter anymore is that "total registered" number on their home page, which is really only a gauge of how many net-monkeys filled out the "gimmie a free account" form and logged in maybe once.
But it's nice to know the third party marketing promo accounts still get first class access to stay on the grid while they kick everyone else off because they can't be trusted.
But that's the Tao of Linden way I suppose.
This might actually have made some sort of sense if Second Life were capable of utilizing a multi-core system.
Too bad it isn't.
Why would anyone pay one or two orders of magnitude more money to get into an office, than they are legally paid back in salary for the job--unless they were getting some kickback out of it?
The problem with elminating riders is that you need to pass legislation to do so. But then it only takes a simple majority to repeal that legistation the moment it gets in the way. It needs to be a constitutional amendment, or it will just be repealed shortly after it's created.
I've been thinking about this. Maybe we could pass some sort of "common sense" law
It would only take about 20 seconds for 50%+1 of congress to repeal a "no unrelated riders" law, and then we are right back to where we are.
It needs to be a constitutional amendment.
every time one of these echanges is made, the game's publisher takes a share. that's why people are pissed about their designs being copied - it's actually costing them profits.
You are probably thinking of There.com. LL does not take a cut on each item copy (there is a fee for using their currency exchange when you cash out, but you aren't forced to use theirs and there are alternatives).
I'd like to point out that the catalyst behind this particular instance of net-drama was with an issue of fair use, not copyright infringement.
Someone purchased a skin texture from an "artist", ripped it using either an OpenGL interception tool or a cache parser, applied makeup to it, then re-uploaded it for their own personal use. They didn't sell it or give it away, they just modified it for their own avatar. That's fair use. But the "artist" who created and sold the skin texture freaked out at the realization that SL's DRM isn't 100% perfect.
SL has gradually become a haven of greedy and self-righteous DRM advocates and paranoid fair-use-hating prima donnas. And yet so many of them photosource their clothing textures from images they ganked off the web without permission, upload music clips from copyrighted songs, movies, and television shows, and build avatars based on trademarked characters. Yet the moment they find out someone has "ripped" them off, even a buyer who wants to modify something they paid for, they start a shitstorm on the forums.
I have never seen such blatant hypocracy.
SL is the only "community" where I've seen people join up, copy someone else's real-life work without their permission, sell it (making real world money in the process), then get self-righteous about "their work" when someone else copies their copy; and this behavior is accepted, expected, and re-enforced by their peers.
And it's only been getting steadily worse, ever since the "make real money!!1" economy was introduced in 1.2
Why not design a multicore system so that if a defect occurs in only one core, the chip can still be sold at a discount as a n-1 core chip, instead of tossing it in the trash?
As you pointed out, a plant's mass comes from CO2 rather than nutrients in the ground, which goes against what most people seem to intuitively believe. However, what's fascinating is that the excess O2 that plants produce comes from *water*, not the CO2. So, both concepts are counter-intuitive. =)
From wikipedia's article on photosynthesis:
LL generally doesn't get involved in any transactions between residents. If you got scammed, then it's your fault. If you bought something you dont't like and the seller refuses to offer a refund, you're SOL. If you go into a contract with someone and they violate that contract, LL usually will not act unless handed an order from a real-life judge.
Scenario 1: Person runs Ponsai scheme. Person collects $1T Lindens through Ponsai.
Just as with EVE, LL would probably not seize the money unless it were obtained by a bug or technical glitch in the system. (However LL is pretty responsive to community demands and so may take action if enough people protest the situation)
Scenario 2: Person runs Ponsai scheme. Person collects Lindens, but promptly sells all Lindens for USD$10,000 cash.
The main currency exchange is owned by LL and has a 5-business-day delay for retrieving your US$ out of your account.
Scenario 3: Well, I'm trying to think of something that could happen in-game which results in real criminal acts, I think our imaginations can run wild here. I don't know, hit contracts through SL to gain Lindens?
So far, DoS attacks against the service, and someone making serious threats to harm someone else in RL have both resulted in police action.
I did something similar almost a year ago with a strand of 100 white LEDs, which I confirmed uses only about 4 watts total. BJ's club was selling them for US$6 per box right before xmas. A few LEDs in the stand have since burned out, but considering how much I leave them on and how cheap they were, it's not the end of the world. The only major complaint most people here might have is the 60Hz flickering, but it doesn't bug me.
I bet it would make maniptulating things in 3D a lot easier, since now you have two 2D input axises.
My first thought when reading this article was that it was meant as a roundabout way to bring up the subject of Trusted Computing.
For those who haven't seen it yet, this is a very concise video to show to your friends and relatives about Trusted Computing - http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
You're comparing $2000 in sales to $300 in margin. If you're going to compare sales to sales, then it's $2000 vs $3000. Even if you compared margin to margin, I would suspect they would be in the same ballpark as well.
I guess this product does not have any real application.
I love how you picked the two most overhyped potential applications, combined them into one example, and then declared the technology useless because that one example doesn't seem practical.
I suppose you've never heard of embedded systems or disk write caching?