How come no one's talking about GOM?

I mean, seriously... I don't see any threads anywhere.

omg gom

What?????

Optical 3D measuring and digitizing is an important and oft overlooked topic, but I don't see the relevance to these forums. That said, GOM offers the world's best digitizing techniques and should you be starting up in industrial manufacturing, you should consider using them for any quality control, reverse engineering and 3D visualisation applications.

Gesellschaft für Optische Messtechnik rocks!

We was waitin' for you to start the thread - and eventually the DVD Boxed set!

Oh yeah!

GOM's dead, baby. GOM's dead.

But, seriously, I wonder how much of the rapid devaluing is due to LL deciding to do something direct and so people are cashing out now with a "known" value, rather than when LL come in, which is an unknown.

I'm gonna hold onto my L$ for now I think and ride it out. I'm a bit dissapointed that LL are coming into this direct, I've always used GOM and have always had a good experience. Whether the chronology is right or wrong, GOM was a catalyst here for many.

LL: Bring out yer dead.
[Moopf puts GOM on the cart]
Moopf: Here's one.
LL: That'll be ninepence.
GOM: I'm not dead.
LL: What?
Moopf: Nothing. There's your ninepence.
GOM: I'm not dead.
LL: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Moopf: Yes he is.
GOM: I'm not.
LL: He isn't.
Moopf: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
GOM: I'm getting better.
Moopf: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
LL: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
GOM: I don't want to go on the cart.
Moopf: Oh, don't be such a baby.
LL: I can't take him.
GOM: I feel fine.
Moopf: Oh, do me a favor.
LL: I can't.
Moopf: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
LL: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
Moopf: Well, when's your next round?
LL: Thursday.
GOM: I think I'll go for a walk.
Moopf: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
GOM: I feel happy. I feel happy.
[LL glances up and down the street furtively, then silences GOM with a whack of its club]
Moopf: Ah, thank you very much.
LL: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Moopf: Right.

hehe, nice post Eggy

Brilliant post, Eggy.

And Moopf, I love your "Gom's dead, baby. Gom's dead."

Meanwhile, in the threads Philip is participating in, I am so completely mind-blown by all the acrobatics currently going on to justify the Lindens taking over whatever they want, whenever they want. Something, even, about how we aren't customers, really, but partners paying for the privilege, and we should expect for the big gorilla partner to take over stuff now and then.

Then there is some talk about "Developers" and that brings up the questions I had last week about the Developers Directory, which as yet haven't been answered.

I wish they would all come clean about all this one way or the other.

Meanwhile, I'm left with the distinct impression it's "Our World, Your Labor." Just who is all this supposed to be for anyway, or going to be for? As far as I can tell, only two classes of people count: (1) the Lindens and (2) those individuals they consider for God knows what reason to be Developers, which they are going to select and put in a Developers Directory, but regular peons like me are never gonna know what, why, how, or who.

And we're also given to understand that group (2) can well expect (and should plan for) being taken advantage of by group (1), no holds barred, cause, apparently, businesses aren't nice, or something to that effect.

So where does everybody else go? What do they do? Why are we here? Now, the mantra I've been force fed since I joined - they provide the platform, we provide everything else is - making no since anymore at all. Including the part where I thought "we" meant all of us.

Looks like what's going on is everybody is jockeying for position to be Named a Developer and Let In On Things (and agree to get their stuff taken over if necessary) and the rest of us can go hang. In the dark. So why are we here? To be second-class citizens? Second-class developers? Can we have a Second-Class Developers Directory maybe, and maybe get let in on half the inside info?

Meanwhile, I come across this nice thread here, which makes a heck of a lot more sense to me than any of the other rationalizations, justifications, and excessive verbiage I've read put together.

coco

/120/b7/59503/1.html#post623007


/invalid_link.html

I hate to bring this up (well maybe not ), but are they then "partners" with SLEx or are is SLEx a third party website over which they have no jurisdiction. I know this is unrelated, I just felt like pointin' it out.

Now, back to the nonsense!

What is the air speed velocity of a Cocoanut laden SwaLlow?

um um .. wait a minute, let me think . ...

OK I got the answer: Zero.

coco

Spoilsport.

LL clould introduce it then allow the users to decide if they want to do either or. only reson the gom makes it hard for new resident to purchase lindens is because they have been robbed too manny times and they probly have to insure the linden$ which cost them

but to keep gom alive they should limit how much you can buy from sl directly such as you can buy 100k on the gom if some one sells it but if sl dose the same thing for cheaper who would buy.

I think a large number of people are growing increasingly weary with the sheer volume of ill-informed nonsense that's been posted on the subject.

Many, many times now, the Lindens have said they'll be creating *no* new currency. People need to stop asking that question over and over and listen to the answer.

The system they propose will simply be an open market which will allow *users* to put up their extra currency for sale to *other users* who want to buy it for money. They've said many, many times. People need to stop asking whether or not SL will be selling currency directly, because the answer has been "no" every time.

GOM did not invent currency markets. You can trade USD for yen and bhat and CDN and rubles and so on in this exact same manner, and have been able to do so for quite some time. Folks need to stop acting like the Lindens are somehow stealing their idea. The Lindens are doing this to increase the stickiness of the system, because like PL said in the Town Hall meeting, there's a problem where new players come in, spend their initial amount of Lindens on something, and then have to go through some hassle exposing their credit information to even more parties, get the currency in the game (which generally means going to an ATM), remember where the item was that they wanted to buy in the first place and go back there... and by this point we're *way* beyond the effort most people are willing to put up with to buy something that's going to cost them $3 because it's an *impulse purchase* in the first place. The Lindens are looking to make impulse purchasing simple again is all.

Frankly I begin to suspect that the majority of the useless noise is coming from professional currency traders and other lazy people trying to make a buck by just shuffling around money without doing anything productive, and they don't like what's being proposed because it threatens to make it harder for them to so effortlessly sieve the economy. I consider IGE's rather massive accumulation of L$ to be more than a little suspect, and figure they may even start dumping it soon just to cause the exchange rate of L$ to plummet so that people can say "look! The Linden exchange killed the economy!". Don't think for a moment that such things don't go on. People tend to fall right out of the "game" and "fair play" mindset when _real money_ gets involved, and will resort to practically anything to get what they want.

However, the proposed change is going to mean *lots* of shuffling and flux as suddenly new players actually have easy access to more liquid assets, which is going to cause the people who don't pay very close attention to what their stuff is doing to miss opportunities. Those folks who've finally gotten their online stores set up and are now trying to sit back and "watch the $$$ roll in" don't want that to happen because it means they'll have to discover how to "maximize their profit potential" all over again, which means *work*, and it's absolutely amazing how much work people will put into running their mouths just to avoid doing "real" work that increases the value of anything.

If anything, content creators should be 100% behind the Lindens in making it easier for real players to get their hands on more $L, particularly for impulse purchases. If impulse purchases didn't make money for vendors, you wouldn't be seeing ten feet worth of impulse items for sale next to every line in every grocery store, mini market, and boutique store around the nation. Liquid capital being more readily available to newbies is going to mean an increase in stuff being purchased across the board. That in turn will result in more people wanting to sell stuff, and basically a more robust economy all around. The people who stand to lose from the change are those folks who've decided that they've got a solid bit of control over the economy, because they're going to have to work harder to keep that control. Land-barons won't want lots of new players, because new players means First Land opportunities, which means they'll face privledged competition for interfering with their land grabs and artificial scarcity. Currency speculators won't want the change because a higher volume means smaller margins for them, and they'll stand to lose a lot of money if they don't pay even closer attention to "market value". Several stand to lose a lot of money if just _one_ of their number decides to get out and sell off all their currency, because to get rid of it quickly they'll have to sell it for slightly cheaper than everyone else. Take a look at the list of top 10 richest players, and compare it with the volume of trading that GOM does. Any *one* of those accounts emptying out would put a stop to all GOM sales for several days, all by itself.

Personally, I say to hell with those people. In SL there's some flexibility to handle rapid economic flux in ways the "real world" can't. In SL we can have a massive technological change and violent economic fluctuations, and no one goes homeless and no one *starves to death*. The moment people start to treat it like nothing more than a moneymaking engine is the moment it becomes just as soulless and restrictive as those other pay for play "games" that are basically no better then overly complex slot machines. (Sweat farming, anyone?)

Um, Madame Marcus, have you been reading more than the thread titles. If you read you will be able to cash out lindens just as easy as get them if LL does an EXCHANGE. LL is letting residents trade with each other. This means every person that buys Lindens helps another person "cash out" Lindens. There was a post just before yours explaining this.

GOM HAS NOT SHUT DOWN. Everyone is guessing GOM will shut down when the new exchange opens, but they are simply assuming that GOM will loose all their business. There are still ways GOM can survive. LL said specifically that all other currency exchanges will continue to be ALLOWED. GOM's site went down shortly, but it came back up.

If you actually read about what is happening, your post is just a bunch of misinformation.

I apologize. I was frustrated at all the posts mentioning things that aren't true, and I read your post which sits right after someone else's attempt to answer some of your questions in this same thread. I have some links that show how LL plans to actually keep allowing trade of the Linden and continue to allow GOM and other exchanges to be open without creating any new currency.

Town Hall transcript
/3/dc/59668/1.html
My attempt to abbreviate and highlight points in transcript
/130/21/59810/1.html

Thread discussing trust in GOM and GOM going down temporarily.
/130/8b/60171/1.html
Look through the tread you are in to find out what is going on...

In reality about 75% of the posts from the last few days in Land and Economy seem to have something to do with the issues you bring up. Answers are everywhere right now.

GOM has not shut its doors. Our server went down a couple of nights ago, and was back online by the morning. If we ever *do* decide to close down our L$ trading infrastructure, we will give our users ample notice to close out their positions, and withdraw any L$/US$ they have in their account. We have *never* kept a single cent that wasn't rightfully ours, and we have no intention of starting now.

#1 - We're afeared to.

#2 - We're busy wasting time over justice for avs in a Linden owned world.

#3 - We're making enough money to cover tier and don't otherwise care.