Bulk Upload

AAAAAaaaarhklhkjhrhhdj!!!!!!!!!!!

So I spent the last hour and a half typing up an interesting and enlightend reponse to a resident's question tonight, only to accidenlty hit a button on my keyboard that took me back a page, eating my post....

I'll try again, but I think it will be written in an external editor...

...just as soon as I can get my fist out of this CRT.

By the way...

If you have a question you would like to see answered here, just email me at ben{commercial at}lindenlab{full point}com.

I think I am up to 4 readers now, so if I become swamped with requests, please be patient - I will try my utmost to get to yours (unless I already answered it).

If I ruled the world

Oz Spade asks "If 1.8 was going to be the "Ben Linden" edition of SL, what would it have in it?"

First of all, let me qualify this list as being what I would want in 1.8 if we had infinite resources, and nothing else to do.  I like bug fixes as much as the next 40+ hour a week user, but they aren't very exciting!

1)  mozilla onna prim
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG.  They had this almost working in the Pre-preview for 1.7.  Unfortunately, there were too many issues with it at the time to ship it, but I got to play with it a bit before it was taken out, and the possibilities were just driving me crazy.  A fast toy I made was a "Subtitler" - basically, you wore a HUD that covered the top and bottom of the screen in black, making SL look letter-boxed.  The bottom prim actually displayed a page translation result from bablefish of the last line of chat in world, in whatever language you wanted.  It was a quick, dirty hack, but it showed me that I could send data out of SL very, very easily, and produce a visual result quickly. 

Another hack I was playing with (because standard uses are boring) was installing an Apache server on my machine, and letting the HTML on a prim access files locally.  This meant that I could execute code on my own machine, and display the results on the web page in SL.  Not all that secure, but fun to think about - I was going to try and create a skype plug-in for SL that used the web on HUD to provide proximity based VoIP.  Quick, dirty hack, but doable.

2) Whatever JJ Ventrella is working on in his dark corner of secrets.
That guy is a wizard, and I'm pretty sure I can't talk about what he is doing yet.  But I will say that I want it yesterday.  We had a demo of it a few weeks ago, and at the risk of being a torus-tease, I will just say that I was bouncing up and down and giggling like a schoolgirl again.

3) Endorphin in SL
This is kind of far fetched, but I saw Natural Motion's demo of Endorphin at siggraph this summer, and it looked hawt.  Natural motion blends between key-framed animations - like the poser files we have, and full springy, balancey, collidably animations. 

Now, this is imagining that we could even hope to somehow include this in SL  - you choose to hop on a hoverboard, and your av runs over, jumps on, and flails a bit as it gets it's balance.   None of it was preanimated, but maybe you want to do a handstand on your board - endorphin blends perfectly between the uploaded animation, and the "natural" motion of a person on a buoyant board.

6) Self run servers
open up teh metaverses already!  We know that ownership == better, faster, stronger content.  Once we open it up, it will become almost impossible to compete with us.  We know there are ways to make money even while letting residents have all the code - so why are we waiting?

Mostly, because we have so much damn other stuff to do, we haven't had time to work on what it means to run the grid with hostile servers attached.  And by hostile, I mean any sim we don't have in our physical control.  How should things like L$ balances work, or inventory?  Right now, a sim has access to both of those, but if we don't run the sim, you need to trust the person who does not to take them. 

Yes, open source can solve these issues - but it will still take time, and as soon as we release the code for the server, we need to expect hostile servers to connect. So either we are ready for them then,  or we do it now, and keep the grid in "preview" mode until we are satisfied that it is secure.  That is not an option for a company that is still not profitable.

None the less, we will need to do it eventually - the only question is when.

4) better outbound script communication, o2o, etc
Yeah, need to stay true to the streets.

5) Caves
I think they would be cool!

6) User made UI
The mind boggles at the possibilities.  Of course, how would SL users react to a SL Thottbot?

7) A jack in the back of my neck so I can just plug in.
So... probably not 1.8

/re/revolt

I'm reposting this, I wrote it for Be The Change before I got my spin-off show.  It has a few ideas that I want to explore in more depth in the future, so I'm re-posting it here, so future blogthropologists can get a better idea of the chronology of my thinking.
___________________

ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 24, 2005

The first draft of this got wiped out when I clicked on a link to Bebop Vox's latest movie.  This is pretty ironic.

I was reading Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees the other day.  It is a beautiful old fantasy novel, and worth reading.  As she describes the setting of the story, she presents us with a quick tutorial on what happens when a feudal system develops a middle class.

Bourgeoisie is probably a better term for it - even though the meaning is slightly obscured by the communist associations.  Basically when peasants moved into the cities, a new class arose of traders and artisans.  These people started to make money, and decided that they didn't like monarchy so much.  The traditional feudal model - King owns land, and thus the peasants on the land - did not apply in the cities, and the bourgeois were becoming powerful enough to compete with the ruling class.  The ideals of individual rights, private property, and democracy as we know it came out of this. 

Is this happening to SL now?

With the 2 year anniversary this week, I was feeling reflective and checked out the SL history wiki.  Pre 1.2, we treated residents as peasants.  We owned everything, and expected them to produce for us in return for somewhere to live.  Instead of charging for land owned, we taxed per prim - making it almost impossible for anyone to make a large group project. 

Then we moved everyone into the city.  The decision to let residents keep their intellectual property rights and trade Linden Dollars for real money was meant to create artisans and traders.  The land and tax changes meant that land was controlled by residents instead of us.   We were promoting a middle class.

This is fascinating - it's like watching some wacky history simulator.   Right now the forums are full of discussions on freedom of expression, and one of the top proposals is for a bill of rights.  We are no strangers to civil disobedience - see Bebop's movie.  These are the ideals of the bourgeoisie, ideals that historically have been fought for.

So what does this mean for the future of Second Life?

With the 2 year anniversary this week, I was feeling reflective and checked out the SL history wiki.  Pre 1.2, we treated residents as peasants.  We owned everything, and expected them to produce for us in return for somewhere to live.  Instead of charging for land owned, we taxed per prim - making it almost impossible for anyone to make a large group project. 

Then we moved everyone into the city.  The decision to let residents keep their intellectual property rights and trade Linden Dollars for real money was meant to create artisans and traders.  The land and tax changes meant that land was controlled by residents instead of us.   We were promoting a middle class.

This is fascinating - it's like watching some wacky history simulator.   Right now the forums are full of discussions on freedom of expression, and one of the top proposals is for a bill of rights.  We are no strangers to civil disobedience - see Bebop's movie.  These are the ideals of the bourgeoisie, ideals that historically have been fought for.

So what does this mean for the future of Second Life?

Woop woop, thats the sound of the police

I'm "The Man" now, as in "down with The Man" not "You're The Man."  Jury Duty, real life. 

I can't talk about the cases at all, so don't ask - it's the law, but I can talk about the process.  I'm on a Indictment Grand Jury - one of the lesser known parts of our judicial system.  My job is not to judge whether you are guilty beyond a possible doubt - but whether there is probable cause to bring you to trial.  Fun! 

In San Francisco, the jury is made up of 19 people randomly selected from the populace.  As long as you understand English, and the jury is not an "undue hardship," anyone can qualify.  A typical session is a District Attorney presenting evidence to us to find a suspect indictable, and then the jury deliberating and voting on whether or not to indict.  If indicted, a warrant is issued for the suspect, and they will be tried in a traditional trial.

Some of you might be thinking right now "Hey! What about the defense?  What kind of due process is this?!?!"  In a grand jury, the defense is not represented, but we are still warned to be fair - after all, an unwarranted indictment can be very damaging to the life of a citizen, even if they are later found innocent.  How can we be fair?  The only people in the room are us, the DA, and the DA's witnesses. 

So it turns out there is a funny requirement that the DA must abide by - they have to mention any exculpatory evidence they know of.  That is, evidence that lessens the likelihood of the suspect being guilty.  The DA need not expand upon that evidence, unless ordered so by the jury.  The Grand Jury is powerful enough to order a witness be presented to them - it's a nice check to the State's power in this case - but is it enough?

As in everything I do these days, I try and find the Second Life parallel.  I don't have to look too far into our own "justice system," to find it in the Peer Review.  When we are trying to decide whether to ban a resident for life, we randomly pick 25 active users, and present them with our notes from the discipline log (stripped of private info).  We then ask the users if these offenses merit a lifetime ban - usually they do.  However, the system has been criticized for not allowing a defense to be presented. 

Now, there are plenty of differences - in Second Life, we have already found the target to be guilty of the crime, and are looking for input into the sentencing, while in the Grand Jury, the target is assumed to be innocent, we are deciding whether to charge them with a crime.  But I do like the idea of having to present the exculpatory evidence.

Now, before I go any further, let me remind my dear readers that I do not write the policy on these systems, but that all of us in the office are thinking about such things and we have a responsibility to be self-critical.  We want to be fair, and we need to efficient in disciplining infractions to the Terms of Service and Community Standards, so if we do change anything, it needs to satisfy both of those requirements. 

There is a certain due process to Second Life justice.  We do not suspend or ban indiscriminately, we require proof of misdeeds, we allow appeals, and we will deal with the suspect individually - that is, we will not discuss the supposed transgression with the community.  We consider the suspect innocent til proven guilty, but we will do as thorough of an investigation as our tools will allow.  The benefits of including exculpatory evidence would be increased transparency - and thus increased sense of fairness.  The cost would be the extra effort to produce this evidence, taking care to remove identifying information.  For instance - should we mention that the suspect claimed in a separate forum that is not under our control that crashing the sim was an accident, while a chat log shows they were bragging their sim bombing ability immediately before the crash? Keep in mind, we won't produce that post, because it would identify the user, just as we would strip any names mentioned from the chat log.

I think the above example is  good for us, because it shows how thoroughly we might look into a case.  I'm not sure what the abuse manager will think about it, and unfortunately, I'm not in a good position to know how much extra time it would take us. So it is something I will bring up with the abuse team as an idea - it will probably be bludgeoned some, as all ideas should be.  Meanwhile, any of my two readers are welcome to weigh in with their thoughts.

Please allow me to introduce myself...

Robin decided I was grown up enough to have my own blog!   No more Being a Change, now I can be as lazy and unchanging as I want to be. 

For those of you who don't know me:   I've been involved with Second Life since July 2002, and I've been working for Linden Lab for almost three years now.  I've held several positions - I started as one of the first Liaisons during the beta test.  Just before SL Launched, I started to work in the office as a full time Grid Monkey.  Back then, we only had about 30 sims (we just put 45 up in a single day yesterday!) and there wasn't much for me to do - so I started helping out the content team.  Eventually, I got moved to content full time - and I have been there ever since. 

I like it - it gives me a chance to work on a lot of interesting stuff; I've been involved with everything from land deployments to ponies.   Statistically, I'm SL's #1 griefer - more abuse reports than anyone else.  I've worked on every single mainland sim on the grid today.  There is a pretty good chance that I've logged more time in Second Life than anyone in the world. 

I plan to use this blog as a place to publish some of my thoughts about LL and SL, but I also want to use it to help people understand how and why we Lindens do what we do.  I'll be happy to answer any questions I can here, and if I can't answer them, I will tell you why.  So without further ado - welcome, and add this to your RSS aggregators!