Hidden behind the daylight
I got home, fired up the laptop, and saw a boot error message.
Yup. My speedy-zippy OCZ Vertex-2 solid state drive is bricked.
Didn't take long to put in the old boot drive (48 seconds instead of 20 seconds... oh well... back to doing litterboxes during bootups), run Windows update, update apps, load Exodus Viewer (it rocks!), and get going again.
All my data is on a data drive, so the only issue was the usual fuckaround with iTunes and the iPhone because Apple and Microsoft make it oh so fun dealing with authorizations and libraries and shit, right?
The fact that I spent some time partitioning and planning so that I could lose a boot drive or a data drive and have a backup ready is why I'm totally calm about this and laughing instead of freaking out and going all ape-shit and such.
(If only more people did that kind of thing, right?)
Oh well. RMA time.
You know that joke that ends with "I am Pagliacci." right?
I used to say "Oh, can I have tickets?" at the end of it.
Instead, how about adding the line "... then go listen to Evamoon." to it.
(I think it works.)
It should not come as any surprise that today's blogroll addition is Evamoon.
Sometimes, it's what's not posted that comes through the clearest.
Even though she sends out most of her updates via her Facebook fan page, the Thursday jokes and other occasional entries on the blog provide a rare bit of amusement in the face of...
Challenges? Awareness?
Hope.
(And that wraps up the month... tomorrow's addition was meant for today, but I wanted to get Eva's up... just because.)
I'm listening to George Harrison's Cloud 9 a bit too much.
(Or maybe not enough?)
So, Hamlet's posting the latest freakout over falling numbers of private estates and Linden Lab's revenues dropping slowly?
Here's my take on it:
Yawn
When it comes to hosting/reselling, Second Life is horribly overpriced and burdens the private estate owners with the costs of keeping all kinds of freetard and dead-end bullshit development going.
Because even if you're grandfathered into Jack The Ripper's old Atlas Program, you're still paying for a huge markup.
Based on my notes and rough guesstimates with what few bits of information leak out from the Lab on their infrastructure (they sure are paranoid, and I don't blame them!), Second Life is:
- A huge cash cow for funding development of "the next product" or testing various microlabor strategies.
- Getting sucked dry by the investors.
- Spending a hell of a lot of money on lawyers and lobbyists.
- Flushing a ton of money down a lot of toilets.
- Stuck with some really, really bad overpriced long-term cololcation contracts.
Looking at what should be their footprint, yeah, I'm thinking they have some pretty sweet deals on hosting, bandwidth, and other infrastructure.
Sleeping unused Mainland sims, stacking them on to CPUs deeper... the regions aren't server-dependent, you know. More savings, even if it takes a bit more infrastructure/service hardware. And eliminating Class 4 and Class 5 and other class-for-cost connections means they can slide you around anywhere.
If they're leasing their hardware, well, retiring old hardware for even greater core and CPU counts per buck is a win for them. (Since private estate land purchases are mostly automated with minimal monkey-intervention and hardware is already in place with the declining burden simulator-wise, setup and transfer fees are free cash for them at this point, I'm guessing.)
Asset servers? Profile and account information?
Ah, those cheap SANs and clouds... whoa, Nellie!
M Linden and SL Enterprise was not for business... it was for military and the PTSD and other modular training/prototyping.
(If an organization is so inefficient and corrupt it'll buy thousand-dollar toilet seats, then it'll buy virtual ones and the platform to run them on, right?)
When they bumped the private estate cost from $195 to $295? Go back, do the math for the hardware and the servers, and that's the point where pain turns to greed.
The layoffs? Outsourcing support to a cheap and disposable layer of drones running on outdated scripts while commoditizing development and QA.
Yep. Based on Philip's, Bezos's and Mitch's push for deprofessionalization and commoditization of development and system administration work with Coffee and Power, I'm pretty sure their core development staff isn't paid what they're really worth, but they're not cheap, either.
Dumb? No smart. After all, they gut-check conned us into paying for Qarl's Mesh deformer project, guys... once again, the plan remains "Instill a false sense of ownership and responsibility on a core user community while doing the absolute minimum to maintain the platform, adding new features and innovations only if they are cost-saving measures or the bare minimum necessary to retain the core business."
Third-Party viewer developers working on all the fixes and patches and code and features for free and then having to hand those off to get them "officially" adopted... sheer brilliance, although the Emerald folks kinda put them in a corner with the additional attachments gambit to force their hand to adopt that feature... to admit that they were holding some features/capability back, perhaps?
Bryn asking for a pass on tier when she's helping run the Linden Endowment For The Arts and could easily make the case for keeping the work going there? That's integrity with a bit of desperation and dedication... easy pickings... get that pushed back on the "community" and... presto... the pixels are "saved" instead of having to go to the so-called ghetto of OpenGrid/OSGrid/Other Grids, etc.
And it's working. *golf clap*
Marketing? Advertising? Pardon me... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! VAMPIRES! VAMPIRES! VAMPIRES! TRENDY CHIC MEME OF THE YEAR UP HERE! (Then get the die-hards so pissed, they do better and THAT lures a few leftover stragglers in.)
And the Will Wright/Rod Humble deal? Dude's too smart to make a move without knowing next two moves in advance. He knows what the next step is.
What shocks me is the utter ballsiness Rod showed for private estate owners at SLCC 2011 by refusing to talk about pricing. If these are the primary source of revenue for the Lab, telling them "I won't talk about it!" and then following with "We won't increase prices" at the end of the year is... well... well, played, sir.
Calling their bluff appears to have worked, because instead of a mass emigration and flood of development and innovation at InWorldz or Reaction Grid or elsewhere, you're just losing a trickle for now.
As was said in Citizen Kane:
"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in, 60 years."
So, in the end, yeah... if they were truly interested in Philip's "everybody will have an avatar in the future" bullshit story, they'd drop the pricing and go gangbusters on a reduced profit margin trying to get those avatars into SL.
The avatars are going elsewhere... the people are going elsewhere... Twitter, Facebook, Wii, Steam, Skype, Skyrim, Minecraft... you name it.
But I think everybody with half a brain has figured out that the underlying technology just can't scale, the maximum avatars per sim is pushing the legacy code, and introducing Mesh for efficiency is more of an exercise on seeing how consumer and creator markets react to new technology than any actual service benefit.
It'll "limp" along, ignoring what you'd think are opportunities for growth because it can't really grow without major restructuring... costly restructuring and rethinking, as many have said, we're the fringers and the weirdos, and there's still money to be sucked out of us to fund Linden Lab Project #2.
All together now: moo.
Oh. Right.
My guess on what Project #2 is...
Nah. That would be telling.
For now, I enjoy my tree... my friends... the music... the storytelling and poetry...
But I have no illusions about any of it.
It's not an investment... it's an entertainment expense.
The dice are loaded, the wheel's rigged, the cards are all marked, the buffet's loaded with dog food, and the table's slanted so much to the house that Batman's thrown a rope over it and he's climbing it with Robin.
But still, people go to Vegas, and if they set a budget and know their limits, they have a good time.
Another five bucks on red, Rod... let it ride... let it ride... let it ride...
Sure, it's all going in your pocket in the end, but that just makes my walk back home that much easier, right?
Besides, I'm feeling lucky tonight.
Blow on the dice, baby.
And let it ride.
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