New blog post on LL's Content Management Roadmap

THIS !!

And it sucks. I've only recently started learning building and I'm enjoying it. I have thought about trying some clothing creation or maybe digging more into scripting, but all of the changes over the past few months make me wonder it it will all be wasted effort.

Create a bunch of alts and have them come buy your stuff?

Or start a service where you pay a bot runner enough to buy N copies of your stuff (+ 10%) and he sends a bunch of bots to jack up your numbers.

It was a very clear if slightly prolix post and, by the way (cf: your first post to the thread), Cyn's use of the term 'holistic' was very apt if you care to look it up in a dictionary. Taoism is a holistic practice but holistic approaches do not begin and end with that particular branch of Eastern philosophy.


This more or less describes my reasons for being enthusiastic about the new measures.

Now if they'd just introduce a new avatar mesh while they're at it ...

But then again I'd have to go lie down in a quiet room with some soothing whale music and a couple of slices of cucumber on my tired eyes to cope with the excitement.

Because it discourages people from learning new things?

Brilliant.

It's not wasted at all. The pure joy you will occasionally glimpse when you create something that resonates with you is something not to be missed. Seriously good for the soul.

As for the rest.. LL is notorious for cocking things up but we survive despite their best efforts.

Don't worry about this, concentrate on creation. Everything will sort itself out one way or another

Well there we have to differ because I think the status quo just encourages folk to hawk so much tripe before they have a notion wtf they're doing. Problem is that real cash is exchanged along the line and I see it as more of a crying shame than any fun at all.

Learning is one thing, turning a fast buck is another. I've had enough of that bullsh!t to last me a lifetime ... first, second or whatever. And it doesn't improve SL in my opinion. However, it does go a long way towards explaining why so many register, take a looksee and avoid logging thereafter.

SL remains plug-ugly and duff while this continues and newcomers like Blue Mars are latching on to a big market gap.

Reductionism (n): a term created by someone who didn't understand complexity theory to try and put down other people who also didn't understand complexity theory but were more interested in understanding what they could instead of sitting back and going "oh wow, man".

Holism (n): the alleged opposite of the imaginary philosophy "reductionism".

Whose definitions are these?

Be careful how you answer: I'm thinking mink stole if they're your own personal take.

Mine, of course. But ask any competent scientist or engineer, mathematician or ontologist, and they'll agree. Chaos and complexity theory have assimilated holism into reductionism as a side effect of computability. The apparent conflict between holism and reductionism is a leftover from Watt and Newton and Babbage, it's obsolete Victorian rigidity still echoing in the Victorian remnants of pre-relativistic philosophy. Einstein, Heisenberg, Godel, Turing, and Feynman have made it an outmoded way of looking at the world.

I don't even think Skinner qualified as a reductionist by the time he died. Karen Pryor said he reminded her of an otter.

Can't catch me, by the time you figure out where I am you've completely lost track of where I'm going.

Fair enough. I guess I never much cared for fur lining anyways and I am a big sissy for small furry critters.

All the rest aside (Newton was a frickin alchemist, for Chrissakes, what does that tell us?) I think it's fair enough to go with Murka's Princeton University definition, which is to say "emphasizing the organic or functional relation between parts and the whole".

Let's not split hairs here. There's enough bull flying from both sides on this thread without picking holes in the Linden's terminology.

Sig material!

I concur... on all of it, actually.

It doesn't appear that we'll be prohibited from selling our creations if we're not certified. It just means that we'll have to struggle a bit harder. LL might actually come down on us harder if there's a fark up. Otherwise, business as usual.

As for LL cocking up things? "Never settle for half@ssed when whole @ssed will do," seems to also be part of the Tao.

Unfortunately, it will probably be handled just like a lot of the current ARs -- shoot first and ask questions later. So, if I get really pissed off at you for some reason, I could claim that you stole my content and probably get some sort of action taken before LL figured out that you did not.


What you consider to be amateurish crap might be considered perfectly acceptable for the money to someone else. As they say about RL yard sales -- one man's trash is another man's treasure.


I saw nothing in the set of criteria that would tell me, the consumer, that other customers are satisfied with a product.

You seem to have moved from saying that Emerald can be used to make illegal copies of stuff to accepting that, in fact, it can be used to do no such thing, but now you're saying that it might be used to facilitate the importation of illegal copies made by some other means. So, I think, might some other viewers, like Meerkat and RealXtend (though I could be mistaken).

Be that as it may, is your position that, despite the clear fact there are plenty of legitimate uses for such a facility, viewers that offer it should be banned because they might be used in conjunction with other software to steal content? If that's the case, some people might argue that while, for example, crowbars can clearly be used in RL for all sorts of mischievous purposes, it's best to allow people to posses these implements so long as they use them for legitimate ends, while prosecuting them vigorously if they use them break into other people's houses or assault people.

Or are you saying there is some precaution that the makers of Emerald could make in their code -- short of removing the functionality to import and export objects -- that they haven't included? If you are, what are these precautions, and has the maker of any existing viewer actually coded them?

What do you mean by "organic"? Does that mean it involves long-chain carbon compounds, or that it involves complex multicellular life as opposed to single-celled or colony organisms such as molds and cnidarians?

Well first you have to drink this:

I understand that but it has nothing to do with the Greenlife viewer. Thats my point to her, she bashes that viewer for no logical reason.

You can rip content with other viewers full permission or not. Why single out one that only allows full perms? Especially being any viewer can be moded to take any content.

Anyone can steal a photo off a website and use it for their own gain on another website. So should be ban all browsers? I am just saying her using Greenlife in her agenda is beyond stupid and makes her look more of a fool than she would normally. Not to mention sets herself up for libel/defamation lawsuit.

The fact is Linden Lab not only allows things to be copied but states they want you to have the ability to do it. Their recourse for people that steal is DCMA and this new license program. If she doesn't like that then she needs to aim her focus at the root of the problem, that would be Linden Labs. They are the only one's that can change the permission system. However that is still not 100% fool proof.

She seems to be avoiding the facts...

I take SL very seriously as an entertainment medium. I see no reason to view it as a yard sale.


I'm not particularly interested in the Content Seller Programme but the criterion that creators have to have a proven threshold of sales is interesting because that *does* indicate some degree of customer satisfaction. Looking at it from a completely greenhorned newbie perspective, I see the programme as a good indicator of worthwile purchases that are unlikely to frighten the horses, so to speak, while not proving to be outrightly disappointing to the consumer in terms of quality.

I harp on this point because, despite my 'educated' eye, I fell prey to my own newbie ignorance of SL's potential on many fronts and, despite the fact my own reaction was to see if I could do better myself, I can see that this deficiency in trading standards puts just as many off persisting with SL as it also discourages potential content creators like yourself and myself.

Please excuse me but, strangely enough, the status quo has us both in the same boat although I don't assume for a moment that our shared reluctance is for entirely the same factors.

Or that they sold a bunch of crap to their own alts.

You mean "what does Princeton mean by "organic"?

I kindly axed ya not to split hairs, Argent. Please don't: anybody has a doubt about the meaning of 'organic' they can pull a dictionary off the shelf and flick a few pages for satisfaction on the point.

F@ck of a lotta alts I gotta say. More power to em if they wanna work that hard.

I have only recently started creating stuff, but as I understand things, anything that is full perm, I could completely recreate as my own right now. If I have a texture full perm, I can save it to my hard drive and then upload it as my own. Prim items I can completely recreate, piece by piece, and I am the new creator. So if this viewer is doing something similar with full perm items, how is that any different?

I'm pretty sure that the definition they use for "organic" is similar to my definition of "holistic". When philosophers start using terms like "organic" or "holistic", they really mean "oh wow, man".

And studying the functional relationship between the whole and the parts is what they used to call "reductionistic".

Splitting hairs is the problem. I take to holism like an otter takes to operant conditioning.

[Karen Pryor] tried to condition an otter to swim through a hoop. She put the hoop in the water, the otter swam through, and she gave it a fish. The otter swam through again, and she rewarded it again. Very good, but from the otter's point of view already old news. The otter swam through the hoop, and stopped half way through. And looked up for a reward -- no reward. It swam through the hoop, but as it was almost through, grabbed the hoop with its hind foot and pulled it away. And looked up for a reward -- no reward. OK. The otter lay in the hoop, bit the hoop, backed through the hoop, each time checking to see if that rated a prize. "See?", said Pryor, "Otters are natural experimenters". One bemused scientist replied that it took him four years to teach students to think like that.