Category: tech

Alright… picture this. Shortly after waking up this morning, before even my first sip life-giving coffee, I stumble to my desk, still blinking in the morning light. I crank up the computer (hand-crank computers are very rare these days), and open my mail client. Oh, I see a message from Second Life — from a customer! Let’s see what they — Aaaa!

Bleh I hate No trans dealers.. Above all its egotistical and self rigious to put so much value on a something so insignificant that you seem fit to make it exslusive and Monogramic
I personally enjoy yhr frredoms of being able to pass down used goods to new players or even paw it if i am In a bind, to deem it that you are so important that some primitives… which are tiny lights on a screen are so imporant that you feel the need
to make them exlusive.. is just selfish and pathedic
I No longer have the will to do bussiness with you, and I have given you my 3 cents

Ouch. Somehow I’d lost a debate and a customer during the night.

The heated debate over permissions is usually driven by ignorance and fear on both sides. In the Second Life forums it’s not uncommon to see an angry consumer demanding to know why greedy content makers try to rip people off by removing the right to resell items. Content makers fire back and then it degenerates into the usual poo-flinging forum drama shortly before the thread is locked by moderators.

As Yoda says, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” And “The path to the dark side, fear is.” Backwards-talking, Yoda always is. Wise, it makes him sound, I think.

The truth is, it’s not about greed at all. (Greed, it is not at all about.) It’s about a goofy permission system that doesn’t do an adequate job of protecting both the seller and the buyer.

SL permissions have two checkboxes: Copy and Resell/Give Away. These checkboxes allow sellers to remove the buyer’s ability to either copy or transfer an item. Why not sell with both the Copy and Transfer permissions enabled? It’s like MP3s: Joe Musician sells one hit MP3 and suddenly everyone’s sharing copies. Joe’s earnings in this scenario amount to approximately… one pittance. Plus or minus a cent or two.

Permissions are the Digital Rights Management (DRM) of Second Life. If you acknowledge that content makers have the right to prevent rampant copying and sharing of their work, then you’ll understand why SL products need to be set to either No-Copy/Transfer or Copy/No-Transfer. Because either setting adequately protects content makers, the seller needs to choose which permission is best for the customer.

Here’s a forum post from December in which I attempted to explain my choice of permission settings:

Buy the permissions that best fit the item

It doesn’t make sense to refuse to buy any no-transfer items, because no-transfer is often not a good idea for you as the buyer.

Here are examples from items I sell…

Vehicles – Copy, No-Transfer.
Never ever buy a no-copy vehicle, because vehicles go missing so easily in Second Life. Cross a sim border too quickly, and that L$500 helicopter you bought could unexpectedly become a L$500 hole in your inventory.

Attachments – No-Copy, Transfer.
Whenever it’s reasonable safe to assume that items won’t go missing (like vehicles do), I want my customers to be able to give away or resell items. Not only is this helpful for gift shopping, but it’s also good for entrepreneurs who want to set up shop.

Regarding reselling items…

There’s only two kinds of reselling that I dislike:

1.) Buying items and reselling them at a massive markup. Don’t be greedy, don’t cheat people. Take a modest markup to cover the efforts of distribution, but don’t gouge.

2.) Collecting full-permission freebies, and reselling them at a high price as no-copy items. That’s just scummy, and deserves at the very least the frowning of a lifetime. The customer hurts by paying unnecessarily for a crippled item, and the item freebie creator (you know, the person who supplied you with the nice goodies to sell?) wrongfully gets a bad reputation for distributing crappy, overpriced items.

Finally, how do you buy a no-transfer item as a gift?

The web shops (www.SLExchange.com, www.SecondServer.com, and www.SLBoutique.com) all have an option for delivering your purchase to another avatar. That’s the best way to buy a no-transfer item for a friend.

Why not get the creator to change the permissions? Your friend probably won’t appreciate losing their brand-new no-copy helicopter on the first flight, would they? (LINK)

So to protect the buyer, all SL vehicle makers — at least the ones who care about their customers — should set vehicle permissions to Copy/No-Transfer.

While it’s a confusing issue that’s difficult to explain clearly — especially before my morning coffee — permissions are not about greed or ego or mean-hearted content creators who just want to block people’s right to resell. (“Always with you what cannot be done,” Yoda says.) Yes, DRM exists principally to protect the seller, but the specific choice of permission is driven by customer needs.

And now, I’m going to stumble over to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. A Jedi’s strength flows from the coffee.

Yesterday, to the collective relief of the entire SL population, Linden Lab released Second Life 1.7.2. Immediately — after the servers settled down, anyway — everyone noticed the improvement in framerate. Sims that previously ran at a snail’s pace with a handful of avatars now run smoothly with a couple dozen visitors.

And of course, over at Abbotts, the aviators of Abbotts Aerodrome took to the skies again. Arrekusu Muromachi is putting the finishing touches on some sleek-looking blue-and-white planes, and the recently-promoted Commander Jillian Callahan has stocked her new hangar with goodies. I had the pleasure of trying out Arrekusu’s flying wing and biplane, myself. After trying a few rolls and loops, Arre and I met up with Rei Kuhr over in Balance, where Wupatki was taking a look at Mike Westerburg’s brand-new orange Husky (a plane, not a dog). I didn’t see it in the air, but it the model looks quite realistic. Jakal Sauvage, as well, has a new P-51 Mustang that I saw only in passing as I crashed hard into the ground, but the blurry outline on my screen looked quite convincing. I’ll have to bug him later for a better look.

It was in Balance that Rei showed me the latest SL bug: out-of-position bounding boxes. Where there’s a moving prim on a model, the prim moves one way, but the invisible physics bounding box moves another. That means that collisions between the object and avatars, the ground, and other objects will occur in the wrong place.

This new bug affects my Cormorant plane-sub, as well as the doors Noir SkyLife modules. I’m sure it affects others as well, but I haven’t had time to check my inventory. So if you notice that your plane acts like the landing gear are in one place, but they appear in another place, it’s the bug.

On another entirely unrelated note, several of Second Life’s most well-known residents have glommed together to create SLOG. It’s a collaborative blog about the goings-on in Second Life, and very much worth bookmarking.

Since the recent release of SL 1.7, and subsequent lag issues, Second Life has seemed a little quiet. From time to time, there are surges of activity through Abbotts when a group shows up to go skydiving or maybe try out a few planes. I supposed they’re not bothered by sudden, crippling bouts of lag, but for myself, I’m going to avoid aircraft until the next patch, which — according to Philip — will address the root cause of the lag.

As much as these issues can be annoying, I take the more philosophical view. The bugs are a good sign, in part — they’re a sign that the code isn’t stagnating. We wouldn’t see new bugs appear if the Linden Lab devs weren’t constantly improving code. Every time you add something new to a complex system, it naturally reveals new and unforseen bugs which, over time, can be trampled out of existence, one-by-one. Add feature, reveal bugs, kill them, repeat ad infinitum. That’s the software development cycle.

In the meantime, it seems like many SLers are biding the time to the next patch by turning their attentions to other pursuits — politics, forum drama, and real-life meetups. That’s the sign of a healthy online community. Give SL another couple of weeks, and this whole 1.7 kerfuffle will be forgotten, and we can once again take to the skies.

Say, that’s the first time I’ve used “kerfuffle” in a blog entry.