What is CSC ?

There are several islands, CSC Innovative, CSC, CSC1 ... CSC 6, where an event is being tomorrow and the day after.

Anyone know what CSC is?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=CSC+Innovative+second+life

fake edit: sorry couldn't resist when it popped right up

CSC = Computer Sciences Corporation

They just opened up a place inworld. I think today was their grand opening.

Strange as it might seem, I did Google it, and I got to the company website, yet somehow managed to not find anything about Second Life.

I think, sadly, it may have to do with my eyesight.

It's apparently an employee only event, so I can't go. Oh well.

So Anti, I have to say, thanks for the Let Me Google That For You, I'd already tried Google and given up. I looked for a fairly long time. I got distracted by a corporate propaganda piece i thought should mention SL but it only got as close as talking about virtual worlds in general.

I'd been looking inside Second Life to start with, looking at groups and other irrelevant stuff, so I might have been worn out to start with.

I grew up in Silicon Valley. I remember when Cupertino's big claim to fame was that there was a shop with ads on TV with a catchy jingle, and one of their stores (DeNevi Camera & Video I think) was located in Cupertino (Dublin Berkeley San Lorenzo, Cupertino San Jose)

I've never heard of CSC either. Of course, that's not surprising, since they're based in Virginia.

My first thought was "Customer Service Center".. apparrently it stands for "Computer Sciences Corporation".. and their website is the kind of website that you'd find in a dilbert cartoon. Stock photo, blatant template, corporate speak about logistics, solutions, and so on... saying as little as possible, in as many syllables as possible.

"we are a global leader in providing technology enabled business solutions and services"

"Our purpose is clear: Deliver innovative business and technology solutions that help our commercial and government customers worldwide achieve what they want most — Results."

a-do-what-now?

Check it out: http://www.csc.com/

http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/csc-in-second-life/

http://www.csc.com/insidecsc/ds/21294/24550-csc%E2%80%99s_virtual_celebration

http://www.csc.com/insidecsc/ds/21294/24558-frequently_asked_questions_for_csc_s_virtual_celebration

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=prnw.20090416.LA99378&show_article=1

http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?ID=361996

Are they the people that want a "more predictable SL experience (tm) ?"

I think "technology enabled business solutions and services" might mean staples, paperclips, hole punches, and other such pieces of business technology. Don't you?

Aha! I got to the CSC Australia website, where putting Second Life in as the search term does not yield anything at all about Second Life. That's where I went wrong.

<--- points to her edited post above.

The CSC site has a nice "live search" feature we ought to have for searching searching for SL info. As you type your search words, matches appear while you type.

Wouldn't that be useful for people with questions like "Why is my avatar invisible?"

It's sort of like it works when you enter a question on getsatisfaction.com, I think. Every time you ask a question, a search should automatically be done and displayed to the asker. Readers should be able to click on a "Search the question" and see a similar result list.

I'm completely off track now, but I do so much searching for answers to my and other people's questions, something that speeds up the process seems pretty neat to me.

Ehh, I happened on the right combination of search terms right out of the gate and I'm a smartass. And if as Maureen says today was their grand opening in SL, google results may even have jumped around in the past few hours.

Regardless - the mystery is solved, I learned something new, and I'm still a smartass. Yay!

The let me google it for you thing is a pretty good piece of smartassedness.

We should have voice to text conversion going on while we talk and a heads up display showing us search results on statistically improbable word combination all the time.

Hmm, I had a keylogger running for a while, owing to the tendency of this forum to crash and lose posts a few years back. A program that can intercept and store all your keystrokes could also could send your keypresses while you are typing to a search engine and show the result, whether you are typing here or in facebook or your word processor or what have you. Might be interesting.

Well, the timing coincides with the 50th anniversary of Computer Sciences Corporation.

They are holding a short-term event, and renting a bunch of sims to celebrate that anniversary. Found this quip elsewhere in their site: "All employees will also be invited to a day-long virtual celebration, hosted in Second Life." as part of their 5oth anniversary celebration. It's a corp with over 90,000 employees worldwide, and can assure you that the vast majority of their employees neither know what SL is or have access to computers cabable of running SL's client software. Sounds like a typical Corp boondoggle in SL, sinking a lot of money into a flash-in-the-pan that will most likely not get a fraction of the result they had hoped for. If they get even 5% of that employee base to sign up for temporary accounts that can access that in-world expo site, I'll be amazed.

http://www.csc.com/newsroom/press_releases/25382-csc_marks_50_years_of_technology_leadership

Not particularly. I'm aware that they have a few clients that have toyed with use of SL, but for the most part SL doesn't meet any need that CSC would have.

This appears solely to be some gala they have cooked up for their employees. The sims are not open to the Public, and are probably still under construction.

OK, after much searching I finally found the link for employees to register for access to those sims. Which I can do, since I work for that company. Looking around there now. Apparently it's been under construction for a month, and I can tell you for sure there has been NO announcement yet for how to get there, sent to employees.

Their starting LM does dump you in an orientation area where you can learn how to move and chat. And it is possible to register an existing avatar as a member of their employee group, so those who really care will most likely use existing avatars, and not inflate the alt counts much.

"CSC Innovative" is a sandbox
"CSC" is the main celebration sim
"CSC 1" through "CSC 6" are mirror sims fo the CSC sim, to handle anticipated avatar load. So they can handle a concurrency of 700 employees, since they jacked the allowed avatar limit to the full 100.

There's a bunch of information displays, a dance area, a bar, several presenattion areas with multimedia... They have a scavenger hunt and several other games to play. It's not a bad build, but clearly one that wsn't made by a long-term resident. They used about 1/3 of the available prim count, and buildings and walkways are pretty simple construction. Functional, but not spectacular. Very much oriented to an employee party celebrating the 50th anniversary. I doubt the build will exist once the party is done.

For the curious...


The "CSC" Sim


The "CSC" Sim - landing area, and a very basic SL Orientation. Building ahead through arch is a theatre with anniversary celebration presentations.


The "CSC" Sim - Dance Venue. White building to left through arch is a bar.


The "CSC" Sim - Guest book and scavenger hunt. Find all the items, and get a badge. Woo hoo! *eyeroll*

I'd have to disagree. I battled CSC to the mat throughout most of my previous career. We split about 50-50, which is not up to my (previous) batting average by a long shot. In my experience you could throw a rock into a random group of their employees and hit someone with more technology skills that 99% of the people currently in SL. Don't get me wrong...Don't like 'em, but I have to admire anyone who beat me in RL! That is a highly selective group. Jackie (finally out of the IT business and glad of it).

Skills, certainly, but not the hardware! The typical desktop computer or laptop computer issued to CSC employees, even in critical high-end sysadmin jobs, falls far short of the requirements to access SL. While many of the employees likely have spiffy personal systems at home, like me, many also do not, or will not take the time to access this celebration site from their home.

And they have done a TERRIBLE job of getting the word out to employees that this virtual celebration even exists. I had to burrow down through several search results and several nested links before I found a page that had info on how to attend the celebration and access this set of sims. The majority of their employees are very unlikely to even know this virtual site exists.

Today is their 50th anniversary. There were precisely 5 avatars in that sim while I was there, counting me. And none in the mirror site sims. Unless they make a splashy announcement soon, most employees won't have a chance to see this.

I rather assumed that, as in the case of my former employer, an internal electronic invitation (Outlook or Lotus Notes Calendar) would have been sent. Wow...maybe they'll invite the general community Do they have free food and giveaways? Think they'd notice if I slipped in? I sort of miss those old Corporate Cheerleading Sessions (I just lied through my teeth, sorry) Cheers, Jackie

I think if I can just plug the Internet directly into this little socket in the back of my skull it would make interacting in SL and the fourm much easier.

We've had about 6 missives about the 50th anniversary events in general via Lotus Notes (our corp-standard e-mail and calendar solution), and not ONE of them mentioned Second Life.

The "give aways" that I found were colored T-shirts with a CSC logo on the breast, a champaign flute glass that had NO drinking animation script (you wear it and it just sticks to your hand, like you already finished it and can't figure out where to set the empty glass), and a printable calendar for 2009, and some sort of "goodie bag" that I didn't even bother looking in yet.

You can't register your avatar to join the group or attend without a company ID number and password for the company Intranet single-sign-on app.

LoL... I just took a good look at the free t-shirts they are giving away. They didn't even bother to do an alpha texture to control the neckline or sleeve length! It relies solely on the slider settings for both!

At least they did do a separate texture for each color, and not just tint a white shirt. But they had to do that, so the logo on the shirt would remain the correct color.

Goodie bag was just one shirt, a computer Wallpaper texture, and a printable calendar.

Wait a minute! They have YOU working for them, evidently have no idea what all you do here and they never thought about asking you for help or advice? Sounds like a few companies I have worked for.

It's a company of 90,000 + employees, scattered worldwide. They didn't put out a general recruiting call to all 90,000 employees to see if anyone happened to have experience as an SL Builder, or experience in SL at all. They most likely just had a few people on their PR staff that had some interest, or tapped some person who blogs about SL in their CSC Blog... I haven't tried to determine who actually did their work for that project. I don't blog at all, so they would have no way to know that SL Building is something I do on my spare time.

If you were an HR person setting up a special event, would you look among senior sysadmin staff and managers for someone who *might* also be an SL Builder? Or would you ask a low-level blogger who had already expressed interest in the possibilities of using SL?

Honestly, if they had asked me, they would have had to pay my department for my time, rather than hiring me on the side. That would have made the project far more expensive that my normal rates.