Hello everyone and welcome to the 1.30pm session in the business and enterprise track. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and tweet all your questions or comments to atopensimcc with the hashtag OSCC14. This hour we are happy to introduce a terrific panel on Does OpenSim have the critical mass to survive. Our speakers for this session are Kim Anubis, Walter Balazic, David Cramar, Therizar Ember and Stephen Gassier. My name is Maria Korolov and I am the editor and publisher of HyperGrid Business and of the HyperErica Directory of HyperGrid Destinations and I will be the moderator today. Welcome all, let's begin the panel. I'd like to start with Kim Anubis, owner, designer and producer of The Magicians, a top solution provider for Second Life and OpenSimulator. She is also the author of the Second Life Grid, the official guide to communication, collaboration and community engagement and co-author of Creating Your World, the official guide to advanced content creation for Second Life.  Currently OpenSim owes a lot of its popularity, at least compared to some of the other open source virtual world platforms, to its compatibility with Second Life. With a new version of Second Life coming out, how will things change? Thanks Maria. OpenSimulator allows you to back up your build. You can immortalize it for as long as you are able to maintain a computer system able to run it. It's impervious to policy changes and if you like, there will never be technical changes to the way your content behaves. Those developing projects in Second Life today can, with a little extra work, make OpenSim backups of content they create or which is created for them. If Second Life 2, as some call it, takes off like crazy and leads to the demise of Second Life, your Second Life project can continue in OpenSim. I've already seen increasing interest and participation in OpenSimulator among people who want that sort of continuity and assured platform stability. The lab hasn't given us a great amount of information about their new offering, and I would doubt we will learn much until the middle of next year. However, they have stated repeatedly that backwards compatibility with user created Second Life content is not at the top of their list of priorities. They intend to port friend lists, avatar names, linden dollars, social connections will remain. The terms of service they revised last year would probably allow the lab to move user created content from Second Life to their new platform, but that would raise concerns about protecting IP rights so the lab has a real challenge regarding policy and messaging surrounding it. Technically, they could potentially move snapshots and other textures, mesh, sounds, note cards, and in theory they could develop a built-in export tool for converting prim models into mesh optimized for the new platform. If they do that, it's likely it will be a direct pipeline between linden platforms respecting the in-world permissions flags on content. I doubt they'll offer a tool that exports content outside of the lab's own ecosystem. However, there are third party tools for exporting Second Life prims as mesh, so converting some content is already doable with or without linden support. I would be more surprised to see the lab provide an automated way to convert LSL scripts to whatever language the new program supports. Script heavy projects would likely transition much more smoothly to open simulator. I don't expect a sudden or quick transition of users from Second Life to linden's new platform. While access to things like legacy friend lists will help smooth the way, some users will stay in Second Life as long as possible because they don't want to leave their inventories, builds, or familiar personal avatar. Some will linger because they have friends who are staying or ongoing projects to maintain. Also, as we have seen with the transition in Second Life to mesh, many people will not want to start over with new content creation tools. Many of them may well show up in or are already in open simulator where their existing content creation skills are useful and in demand. Much will depend on what resources the lab makes available for porting content, their new platforms terms of service and economy, and how early they offer enough thorough documentation about content creation for the new platform. Many developers and merchants in Second Life have had years to get up to speed, both skills wide and as far as building product lines and reputations. Transitions to the lab's new platform will kill some of those businesses, but it offers an opportunity for others. Some will jump to other platforms and OpenSim will be the easiest place to go. Some merchants will already be established on marketplaces like Kitely offers by then. And most Second Life content can be made to work in OpenSim. Regardless of what Lyndon offers, some projects will transition to or stay in OpenSim because they're stable and functional. newer isn't always better and OpenSimulator insulates your project from change because you can host it yourself. Thanks again, Maria. Thank you, Kim. Next up, Walter Balazic is the founder of Little Field Grid, one of the top ten most popular OpenSim grids, known for its unique content and strong community. He has been involved in virtual world since 2008 and has been working in technology, specifically in IT infrastructure and network design for more than 30 years. Walter, we seem to be looking at a large number of technological changes coming down the line in a year or two. It's not just Second Life. For example, high fidelity promises a completely new way of doing distributed virtual worlds.  Thank you, Maria. Actually, no, we're not worried at all, particularly after seeing some of what I saw at Phil's display yesterday. Although the high fidelity product is very innovative, it has quite a bit of forward motion that we don't have eyebrows moving, the ability to move your hands with gloves, et cetera, et cetera, from listening to what he said. I don't think you're going to find a lot of what we call the classic users, the SL1 users, are going to want to be involved in any of that. I mean, it's going to require several pieces of hardware they may not be interested in getting. Some people don't want to stare at a camera in order to give themselves facial expressions. Or they're content with what they have now. I think these newer technologies that are coming out, SL2, high fidelity, things like the Blue Mars project, the way that went, essentially it's like comparing a car to a train. I mean, right now we're driving in a car and a train and a car will both get you places or carry goods and services or whatever the case may be, but that's where it ends. They're different and somebody who is a car person might not necessarily want to own a train, let's say. So what I think is going to happen is you're going to have a large cross-section of the community, and we see this on our grid now, that are content creators and people that have been within the Second Life infrastructure for years, that are happy with what they have, right? And people have a tendency to have a comfort zone, much like you would have a home coming where people have come to our grids, seeing regions on our grid that were replicas of regions that we had hosted in SL, and they go, ah, I'm home. And I think a lot of people are going to drift away from SL when SL goes to the SL2 platform, and rather than reinvent themselves, reinvent their content, reinvent their lifestyle, they're going to want to find something that's what they're used to.  I mean, you have mesh, et cetera, et cetera, a couple of little shiny things, shimmering water, but the fact of the matter is it's remained more or less unchanged, okay? And people have been very satisfied with that. That's not to say that there's not a large group of people that aren't going to go the other way, but I think you're going to find that generally and in a lot of the cases with content creators, they're going to want to move to a platform where they can pick up their existing content with very little adjustment to their life and move it to a platform that's exactly what they're used to and sell their products. And given Kitely Market and some of the marketplaces that we're starting to see online and the ability for some of these things to come into Open Simulator and the quality of Open Simulator, which is getting better and better every day. I think that you're going to see a lot of those content creators that may not be interested in trying to create things that would be compatible with Oculus Rift or people that create animations don't want to be, they want to continue to create animations. The animations will be valueless if your animations are based on hand movement, face movement, et cetera, et cetera. So I think you're going to see a lot of those people come over to Open Simulator. And frankly, I think that's the bulk of the SL1 community. I mean, I've seen in conversations I've had with people, there's a lot of people I know that are not looking forward to SL2. If they're not looking forward to SL2, they're not looking forward to it for a reason. They don't want to change what they have. So just because Phil Rosdale is coming out with high fidelity, it's still something different and new to them, all right? It's not different and new going to, they're not going to say, oh, you know what, I'm going to give up my whole life and move there for that. There's going to be some people that are technologically driven and that's what they're going to want to do. But I think all in all, the way people behave now in SL1, they're going to want to continue to behave that way. And I think there's going to be a big place for that in Open Simulator, particularly because it's something everybody's used to, building has a low learning curve and it's very inexpensive for them to do it. And that's it. Thank you, Walter. David is the next panelist here on the couch after him. David Cramer has been developing virtual worlds for education since 2009. Currently, he's the president of the Venture Learning Network and is using Open Sim as a soundstage and rapid prototyping tool for instructor led online classes teaching data center design. In addition to Second Life, version two in high fidelity, we're also seeing the emergence of Oculus specific virtual platforms. Plus, there's the big elephant in the room, Facebook. Will Facebook be building its own virtual world as well? David, can you give us your view on where you think Open Sim fits into this broader metaverse? Does Open Sim have any particular advantages as it's going into this more competitive climate? Thank you, Maria. Well, the short answer is yes. Open Sim does have unique advantages and will fit into the metaverse. But let's talk about how I came to that. We've got some hurdles to cross. Open Sim will exist, but maybe not in its current form. Technology is constantly changing and innovators will always come up with new ideas. We still need better promotion because regardless of all of us early bleeding-edge people, we're still a niche market. We still need to remove the barriers to entry. Most people, most new people still won't take the time to become proficient in driving their avatar. Things like Oculus Rift will help, but we still need some better ways of interfacing with Open Simulator. And from my standpoint, one of the biggest problems is mainstream business still doesn't see the benefit. Now, I've tried promoting this for the last three years and I typically get the deer in the headlight look when I try to explain it. So we still need to work on that. When we look at the social and the community aspect of Open Simulator, it's still not quite there. As massive as we are, it's still a pretty lonely place and we don't have a large community there yet. Some people seem to think that realism needs to improve. People still think it's too cartoonish and we need more realism to attract non-users. And some of my recent concerns is the turmoil between the hosting companies and some of the grids. Seems to be a lot of turmoil there and of course the temporary laws of OS Grid has caused a confidence problem for many. So we need to have things like that resolved and mergers may be a good thing. Then we have the issue where Kylie has announced that they will support Phillip Rosedale in High Fidelity. Now, this is really good for the industry but possibly bad for Open Sim. So does this mean that we're doomed? Well, definitely not because we had a lot of things going for us. I was real excited in the opening of March yesterday when Chris just said that with SL's changes, Open Sim will no longer be constrained by SL's direction. Now that's great because we've got a lot of very innovative people on the development panel and even though Justin is more conservative, this tells me that Open Sim will continually innovate and we just don't know what things will see coming out of the development group in the future. Melanie talked about a new viewer with new avatars. I think that's also a positive. So even though I've had some success in helping universities set up virtual worlds, I've temporarily backed away from that and what I'm doing instead is using a blended approach in my data center training courses. Let me post a link to YouTube and chat right there. You can take a look at this when you get a chance and this is what I'm doing. I look and I mock up things like data centers through simple scripting. I can show air flows. I can talk about data center thermal management and I can video this and show it to my students without them having to come in world. So I use it for that kind of soundstage. I can use it for rapid prototyping. You also see at the end of that video I can use it to demonstrate or animate bar charts. So there are multiple things that can be done there in the interim while we get people interested in actually coming in world. Now while I'm totally satisfied with the realism and the graphics of Open Sim, it could be better with Blender or Maya or something like that but it's terribly time consuming. So I'm very happy with the way Open Simulator works and ultimately I want to transition those students to come into world. So where does that leave us? I see the big differentiator is that Open Sim is not scene based like some of the other platforms.  We can travel that world. We can explore. We can have businesses in multiple areas. There's so many things we can do there and just as I don't live on a box in real life why should I live on one in my virtual life? So that's what I see as our differentiator Open Simulator as a world. It's forward thinking and that's why I think it fits into the metaverse. Thank you, Maria. Thanks, David. Next up, there's the ember as the founder of Hypergrid Safari, a travel club for explorers of the Hypergrid. She has also been blogging about art and destinations in Second Life in Open Sim since 2008. There's in your travels, you must get to see a lot of the creative design and community building going on in Open Sim. Are people continuing to invest time, money and effort in this platform? Should they be? Thanks, Maria. Yes, they definitely should be doing more and over the last few years we've certainly seen a huge difference in the way that Open Sim is used by builders, by artists, by performers. The Hypergrid Safari that we began about six months ago has visited about 40 different grids so far and what we do each week is we try and see three different places and those places, obviously we go we try and go and visit something of particular interest. We try maybe to have a theme and we've really discovered there's so much art and so many activities that are available out in Open Sim that are just waiting for a public to come and visit.  So yes, I think people are bringing art in. I think they have for a long time but sadly, a few years ago, it tended to be that people from Second Life would just bring their objects and use Open Sim a little bit like a warehouse. They would show up on the first day for the opening and then never come back again so they sort of left a trail of art all over the metaverse but that's really changing now with the people coming in and expecting or hoping to experience something more than just the wandering around alone. That's what we try and do. We try and have performances. We try and encourage grid owners too to raise the stability of their grid so that it can hold an audience and that just happened again and again over the past months. We've seen people being able to tweak their grid so that we're able to visit 20, sometimes 25, even 30 people in places like Franco grid who've really made us very, very welcome. The other thing, of course, with content being available is you have to know where it is and I'd like to point out your wonderful website. That helps a lot of people know what's going on. Another really good one is by Paul Merkin. He is set up the Hyperset which is a very simple site, just a blog where pretty much every single day Paul goes to a place and tells you what's there so that it's a huge resource for anybody who wants to explore OpenSim and for us as a group, the Safari, really it's become a bit of a family. Our aim is to get people to be able to dress their avatar, to be able to organize themselves in a way that is similar to Second Life because so many of us are from Second Life and so it's really important that people can, as Kim has pointed out, have those familiar faces, have that ease of movement and even Walter said the same thing. People do want to feel at home and so the way to do that is really on a one-to-one basis and it's forming the friendship that we found within the Safari. It's been really wonderful. There's plenty of art out there and there's plenty more to come. We have the next three, four months already booked up with events on the Safari so come and join us on a Wednesday. We'd love to have you. Thank you, Marina. Thank you, Therza. And if you can please post a link to the Safari community in local chat. That'd be great as well. Our last panelist is Stephen Gaziar, founder of Virtual Islands for Better Education and a biology instructor at Ball State University. As Stephen Nuzutfly, he has taught several college courses in Second Life and is currently promoting collaborative work for STEM education via Virtual Islands for Better Education. And Stephen, I'm really sorry if I got either of those last two names wrong. Stephen, you're not only someone who runs several grids and open STEM but you're also one of the people who organized this conference so you're very much aware of what's going on in the community but also in education specifically. What do you think of Open STEM's long-term prospects in education? Thank you, Maria. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be on the panel. I'm gonna show a couple slides on the presentation board to give a little bit of a background on how a lot of educational technology gets adopted in the educational space. And there's a cycle to it that if you have a new technology that at a small level, either from investments or grant money or in some cases, just lots of time and effort on the part of a faculty or partners, you can pilot just about anything you want. And that's because in a lot of cases, there's a lot of freedom for a faculty member or a teacher in K-12 to try new things that they think will help their students. But what needs to happen over time is that the adoption of that technology needs to be taken up by the entire school or university. And that usually requires the largesse of the administration. But it's really only at that point where larger institutions are adopting a technology where you can really start getting money flowing back to the people who are developing the content, who are doing the hosting or the programming. And this initiates a cycle in which as some places adopt a technology and it works well for them, then through the combination of marketing, sales force, reputation, effectiveness, then that can branch out to more institutions where they then do their own pilots to see how well it works and then eventually adopt it and then keeps branching out. And of course that's where the big money comes in. If you're a popular technology, people believe in it, lots of people are adopting it, then that's where a lot of the critical mass for really taking off and profits can come in. And this is one thing that's evidenced by, again, I'm here in my office, I'm teaching a couple of classes, but book publishers will call me, will email me because I actually am as a faculty person the point of contact to adopt something into the classroom. Now, the situation that I see and is relevant to OpenSim is that it does a very nice job of being something that a faculty person can pilot, can use, can do their own development, maybe at a small scale have money that goes into the ecosystem of OpenSim, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of adoption that takes it to the next step. And I think that that's where, again, I don't have a good sense per se from a very objective point of view, why that is not the case. I can anecdotally say that combinations of factors that would include not having people that are really solution providers, again, book publishers don't call themselves book publishers when they come into your office, they call themselves solution providers that they make your life easier. And that's a big part of selling a faculty person is making their life easier or enhancing their reputation in terms of what they're doing, in terms of publications. Again, one thing that's different about education is that just like with prison where cigarettes are the currency, in education, it's not so much about the money, it's much more about the reputation, the journals, the papers, the conference presentations you give that are the cigarettes of the education space. So, and it just seems to me that with the exception of a few solution providers like designing digitally, there aren't a lot of that market and sales force that's getting people into the wider adoption of OpenSim. But in terms of the basic question, does it have the critical mass to survive? I would say that given the small scale costs, given the ability to pile of stuff, there are lots of great places piloting this and that will always be contributing and there'll always be new people coming in to maintain OpenSim in terms of interest and education value at that level. And I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Steven. So I have some questions that I would like to ask of in the next couple of minutes and then we'll open it up to public questions. And this is for anybody. What are some of the things that OpenSim needs to be really competitive moving forwards? I could speak to that, Maria. I think that it used to be that any time somebody conducted a large successful project in Second Life, they would mention it in the press. The name Second Life is splashed everywhere. It would be a boost for everyone on the platform. These days developers don't prominently name what platform they've done their work on. So if they've done a Second Life project, they don't mention that. We need to work together on this and mention what platform we're using when we're promoting our projects. Remember, a rising tide will lift all boats. There was a session yesterday where Julie talked specifically about how to get customers to talk about that. Yes, Steven? Yeah, I was gonna say that I think there just needs to be a few situations where either prominent publications or companies that are willing to knock on doors and start getting the studies out, start getting use cases, start working with more content providers to get them into the education market and to really say what are the advantages of OpenSim? Because one thing that we have to be cognizant of is that with these other technologies, OpenSim's real big advantage, very much like Minecraft, is that you can provide spaces for students or artists build their own stuff with relatively low technology bars and that we've gotta push that aspect of it and then recycle when things work well to make sure people know about it, just like Kim was saying. And I think if I may also add something, I think we need to celebrate our diversity. When you travel from grid to grid, you discover that there are people of all kinds and all different mentalities and it's quite possible to go and visit three different grids on a single night who have three completely different ways of running OpenSim, of the kind of content, of the kind of activities that they want to encourage on their grid and you can have a great time. So the diversity is really our strength and it would be a huge shame if by trying to form some kind of federation or unification, that's lost because it's a huge advantage for us all. Say something better than OpenSim comes along. Some new technology provider comes up with something that offers everything else that OpenSim does but does it better. What would you personally do? Can any of you guys take that? I'll go ahead and answer that too. Okay. Yeah, I could do that too, go ahead, go ahead. Go you can go first. Thanks, Walter. Yeah, you know, I'm a bleeding edge kind of guy so I'm gonna try everything that's out there but just because somebody says it's better than OpenSim I don't know. I've got a lot of time invested in OpenSim and Second Life and all that. I've explored Open Wonderland and Unity and all the other ones out there but I'm not gonna jump just because it's a new shiny thing in the grass is greener. So it's gonna take a lot to pull me from OpenSimulator. Go ahead, Walter. All right, well, you know, what I was gonna say is first thing you wanna do is define what does better mean? You know, what makes it better? Is it because it performs better?  I think you're gonna see that same kind of thing happen in OpenSimulator and it'll progress, you know, the way it progresses. Anything further than that, you're talking about an entirely different technology. I mean, you know, there are a lot of things that do what we do here considerably better than the way we do it. But so entirely different than how we do it and the environment that thousands of people are using that it just isn't, you know, a feasible thing for us to say, okay, everybody throw everything out in the trash that you have and we're gonna start over here. It just, it wouldn't be worthwhile. I can think of. I have a question from the audience from Mal Burns. Maybe OpenSim doesn't have the critical mass to survive but can OpenSim generate their critical mass to survive? This is a different question. Can one of you take that? Yeah, I would like to take that for a second. That at least in the education space, there are a lot of institutions that have built up programs, educational activities that are in Second Life. And so whatever sort of transition that actually does or does not occur, people can also fear that transition and will be looking to OpenSim. I know of lots of people on my network who are starting their university OpenSim grids to see what they may be able to do with it because universities have almost limitless self-infrastructure. So that's not a barrier in terms of the cost. It's in terms of the training and maintenance. So I think that when Second Life transitions over and universities say, we wanna host our own grids, control the content, be able to make archives, which is really important, like Kim was saying, then that's a real opportunity for people to move in and launch and create critical mass for OpenSim, at least in education. And I think education reaches out into lots of places so that that coordination with artists or performers or mathematicians, 3D visualization, that's real big opportunity for everyone. Walter, what's your take on this? Well, from what I can see, as far as critical mass goes, critical mass is a very speculative type thing. I mean, in my opinion, Second Life has what is perceived as a very big community. And a lot of times a lot of people come in and go, oh, you only have 1500 users. Well, the factory means, I don't know about the rest of you, but I spent a lot of time in Second Life. And when I was in Second Life, I saw the same 15 people every day and visited the same five sims, except for if there was an event going on, okay? Just say critical mass. I mean, if the comparison is always gonna be, what is the critical mass of OpenSimulator as compared to SL, then okay, we're not going to have 7 million users and 70,000 people on a grid at any given time, okay? That's not to say that 100 people on each grid running at the same time isn't enough critical mass to keep it supported. I think that's plenty. I mean, we've got hundreds of grids out there. And if you put a hundred people on each of these grids simultaneously, now you've got the critical mass that SL has just spread out across a bunch of different grids. One of our audience members, Ada Radius, has just suggested that one problem is hostility between grids. Does anybody here have any suggestions for how to address that? We're very tolerant of each other and let's face it, we're not, we're kind of like the Greek city-states. Everybody's grid has their own flavor and this grid doesn't like that other grid because maybe there was some event that happened in the past, but at the end of the day, we have in front of us an empire that would love to take us over. So we need to stick together and we need to just embrace the fact that yes, people are a little different. They have different ideas, but that's okay because they're doing their thing on their grid and they're not trying to impose it on you and if you don't like what they're doing, there are so many other grids out there. You can go and join another. Mel Burns asks, should promotion and advertising be focused on the hypergrid or on open sim? Which of these terms do you guys think can get us more traction? Can I take that one? Yes, Stephen. One of the education needs is to be able to have private grids or to strongly control the content, at least when you have grade schoolers in there. And I think that, I think infusing open sim in terms of what you can do and what you can build may be a better advertising point than the community in terms of hypergridding between those, partly because, but I would say it depends on the situation and the space. I think there may be cases where, I mean, as a university, I would wanna have a grid where anybody could come in and potentially find the university interesting enough to then wanna send their kids or come there and spend tuition. So in certain cases, communities key, but in other cases, it's not. I think maybe both and depending on the situation. Let me add to that too. Oh yeah, okay. This is David, let me add to that too. Yeah, I agree, we should promote open sim, hypergrid to somebody that's not in our world is Greek. And I think promoting open simular and what it can do is a great deal more benefit that way. Walter, what's your take on that? I agree with it completely. As a matter of fact, a lot of people on our grid are from Second Life and have no idea what hypergrid means. And to further that, I think we need to disconnect the name open sim from OS grid because a lot of people think that's the same thing.  And they don't know that open sim is not OS grid. They don't realize that there's an entire community of open simulator grids out there. So I think really we really need to focus more on the word open sim and stop using the word hypergrid because people don't even know what a grid is, let alone a hypergrid. Do you guys have any suggestions for how to do that? Well, I think you need to advertise the stuff people use. I think you need to advertise the stuff people do. Oh, sorry. Well, that was weird. Well, I think pointing people to, oh, go ahead, I'm sorry, I can't even hear you if there's a, you're quiet. Sorry. But you need to get the word out there. And really the only way to do that is we've found is on a one-to-one basis because it's exactly what Walter said. People hear stuff, they don't really pay proper attention to what they're hearing, open sim, OS grid, they don't really know the difference. And so really the message is, go and find your friends in Second Life. Let them know that there is a huge opportunity for them to spend less money, find their friends, have more freedom, have a lot more fun and come and join us in open sim. And it's really, it's an evangelizing work for me to do, to get people to understand what's going on and that there are events and that there are possibilities for them to continue their Second Life, more or less the same in open sim and to contribute too to the community. But yeah, I agree with you completely. As a matter of fact, I don't really think that enough focus is put on and people might not think this, but I point a lot of people to the opensimulator.org website when they ask me about open sim because they wanna know what does that mean? And I'm like, well, look, first place you should read is here. This will explain what open simulator is. And the opensimulator.org page has a ton of information on other grids that are out there and products that go along with things and viewers that work with it. I mean, just about anything open sim related, you'll find there. So I think that's a great starting point really to get people out to know what's going on and what the product is. And then from there, they can find what grid they want or what they wanna do from that point forward. Let me add one thing too. What I did for this conference is I contacted all the people through my LinkedIn account and everything that are non-users and mentioned this conference and said I was good speaking and gave them the Ustream link. In past conferences, I tried to get them to come in world and that was just, that was a wasted effort. But if they can easily look at it on Ustream, that gives them a taste of what it's about and maybe generate some interest in open sim that way. One of our- That's always exactly right because you can have, you can be in Second Life at open sim. It's not an either or situation. And I think that's another thing we really need to emphasize to people. You don't have to choose. You can have both. You can have the best of both worlds. One of our audience members, Raymond Ben, suggested that we look at Second Life as a model. Second Life is obviously been a success to do exactly what we do but for a large amount of money and with tight rules we do not have and obviously they hit critical mass. Has anyone looked at or mapped out their path to success to see how it works for them? Do you think that Second Life's business model has application in open sim? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you the truth. We modeled our grid and we say this all the time. We tried to model our grid after what Phil Rosdale's initial view and plan was for Second Life. I mean, low money, high community, high content, high building artwork. I mean, I think, I'll tell you there's another really bad situation that you mentioned, SL again, that goes on within the open sim community and that's SL bashing. And really, I think we should stop it. I mean, let's be honest. People like open simulator because it looks like SL. They're looking for SL just to be what they had in SL one at a better expense with their own control, with their own variables.  It's in bad form. There's nothing wrong with SL at all. Open sim is just SL in the early days without all the high end commerce and without the corporate structure behind it. That's all it is. So to bad mouth SL, you're just bad mouth in the open simulator, in my opinion. We're getting close to the end of our presentation. We have time for maybe one more question, but meanwhile, I would like people to go around and say if they have any final remarks. Kim, is there anything you'd like to say before we close things out? Yeah, I would say make backups often, be platform neutral, expect change and embrace it because change brings opportunity. Walter? Sorry, I had my mic muted. You know, all I can say is, you know, just like this conference, I've shown a couple of people this conference and I think if we continue to get the word out, frankly, as much as everybody's, you know, afraid of, and that's what this particular panel's about, people are afraid of the amount of people and are we gonna be able to continue open simulator with the amount of people we're gonna have. When SL2 comes around and SL1 goes by the wayside, I think we're gonna have no problem keeping people here and education and nonprofits. This is the perfect platform for them. So I don't think we're gonna have any problems keeping this alive. David? Absolutely, keep supporting open simulator, use it, promote it in your blogs, your websites, whatever, and tell Justin to listen to Krista. And, Steve, Thuza? Help your friends, bring them along, take some time, be patient and show them what's here and you'll be surprised how much of your family wants to join you here in open sim. And Stephen? I would just say that the thing that's always amazed me about Second Life in open sim is how it creates this flowering of expression and artistry and productivity in some people because the tools that are easily available and possible. And open sim allows you to do that on your own, hosted in private grids as well. But I think that every time we hear bad news or negative material about Second Life or virtual worlds, that we always try and turn the conversation back around to the amazing things people do, the amazing opportunities, and especially in education that students really love it. And there are opportunities, especially for those students, if you tailor your worlds correctly to deal with learning disabilities or even just shyness in ways that you can't do in the real world. Well, thank you, everybody. As the moderator's prerogative, I'd like to add one final comment before we close out today. And I spoke about this at the previous session, the hypergrid growth trends. I would like to point out that open sim has the biggest in the most diverse community of users from all different kinds of users, all different kinds of grids, developers from corporate to individual volunteers, to the military, to government, to academics. We have a wide variety of vendors supporting open sim, both hosting and development and consulting services. We're open source and we have the hypergrid and no other platform that exists out there today has even a fraction of all these features that if somebody's gonna be the platform for the metaverse, open sim right now has the best shot at being that platform. So thank you, panelists, for this terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. In this room, the next session will be studying economics in a virtual world from the lab to the class with Kevin McCabe at 2.30 p.m. Thank you again to our speakers and the audience. We'll be back shortly with the next session.


This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Dice. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. We are joined this weekend by our friend and colleague, Lucas Engelhardt, whom I'm sure many of you know. He is a professor of economics at Kent State University in Ohio, obtained his undergraduate degree at the Great Gross City College and his PhD at the Ohio State University, a team which will not be playing for the SEC championship this weekend, nor any weekend, but only the Big Ten championship. So that being said, Lucas, great to see you. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. How are you? Well, I'm doing great. And we wanted to speak to you because there's a lot going on with the Fed right now sort of behind the scenes because other things are in the news, sexual harassment and all these other topics. And I fear that sometimes the important news gets a bit buried. But yesterday before Congress at the Joint Economic Committee, Janet Yellen made a statement to the effect that, well, this $20 trillion in debt sort of keeps me up at night or ought to keep Americans up at night. Does this rub you the wrong way, given what we know about the Fed's complicity in all of this? Well, I mean, I wish it had been keeping her up at night longer, really. The way things are running at the moment, like a lot of this debt at the moment, I don't necessarily need to worry that much about the debt itself, just as a normal person, because the reality is the government is borrowing this money, but they're not borrowing it from me. Instead, the Fed is printing it and handing it to them. So it's having very little impact as far as that goes on me personally. Now eventually though, every debt has to be paid. So I'm going to end up paying this debt one of two ways, either they're eventually going to have to raise taxes on me. And then yes, we will actually have to pay it in an obvious way, or perhaps all this new money that has been created will actually start having impact on prices. And then it's much less obvious how we're paying it, but I'm going to pay in higher prices. So like you said, the complicity of the Fed in this whole scenario, we're going to end up paying one way or the other, either taxes or because of the Fed's actions, we're going to pay in higher prices. Well, the $20 trillion number, a lot of people in the general public are aware of it. People are less aware of the Fed's balance sheet itself, which as you know, went from something like $800 billion in the right before prior to the crash of 2008 and quintupled more than five times to about $4.5 trillion. Talk about what this means for the average guy or guy. Why should we care about the size of the Fed's balance sheet? This is something where I'm going to confess that I got some things wrong early on because I got very, very nervous immediately as this was happening. Because the Fed is increasing the size of its balance sheet. What that means is basically two things. One is that there is more physical money in circulation, so actual paper dollar bills that are being passed around, and that can naturally lead to higher prices unless people just want to hold these for some reason. Secondly, the other way that this shows up is as reserves in the banking system, which as long as the reserves in the banking system, it really doesn't affect me that much. But generally, historically, banks don't like to have lots of reserves because they don't do anything for them. Just having money sitting in the vault is not very profitable. So instead, banks will take the money they have sitting in the vault, we'll lend it out into the economy, and because of the way our banking system is structured, they can effectively lend this out multiple times. So they first make a loan, somebody goes and spends this money, that person deposits it, it's showing up in the bank vault again, so they lend it out again. To the point where we could end up with something in the neighborhood of 10 times as much money being created in the economy for each dollar that's sitting in the bank vault. When I saw that, I got really nervous because when we look at the reserves, those increased substantially to where at the moment there are about somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 trillion, $2.2 trillion in excess reserves that banks could lend out if they wanted to, and could lend it out multiple times. So you do the math interestingly, that comes to about $20 trillion that could enter the economy, that's going to have a huge impact on prices if it does. So when this first happened, I was really nervous, I was predicting significant inflation coming as a result. But it turns out we didn't see a whole lot of price inflation happening because of apparently two things, one being people did actually want to hold on to more physical money, it seems. Turns out in bad economic times, people do actually feel better holding on to physical cash. Turns out banks also were perfectly happy to keep money sitting in the bank vault, which at first I was puzzled by until I started looking at the timeline of when did banks start holding all these excess reserves and what else was going on. Right around the time the Fed was doing this quantitative easing, introducing this money into the economy, they introduced a new policy where they started paying interest on excess reserves for banks. So banks do actually earn something from holding on to this money over time. So they haven't felt any need to lend this out to anybody else, they're just holding on to it. As a result, we're not seeing the huge change in prices that I expected. Well, the fact that banks are sitting on these excess reserves and as a result of that emergency legislation from 08, they're being paid, albeit a small rate of interest. Doesn't this also demonstrate, as Janet Yellen has said, the limits of monetary policy. There's only so much you can do. You can't force banks to lend, you can't gin up credit worthy borrowers and projects out of thin air. Right, exactly. And at the same time, it turns out that I was wrong, I shouldn't have been as nervous, but these excess reserves are still there. Banks could, if they did actually see opportunities that they thought were worthwhile, this money could still come out into the economy, could still have these effects on prices. In effect, we've been lucky that the economy has been so bad that these opportunities haven't existed so that banks haven't felt a need to lend this money out. They'd rather take the guaranteed very small interest from the Fed that they've been paying. Well, while you mentioned that there hasn't been, depending on how you define it, perhaps significant price inflation, there has been consumer price inflation, I should say. There has certainly been some asset price inflation in real estate markets and in equity markets, especially the stock markets themselves. So talk about how new money hits the economy unevenly, the so-called cantalone effect. All right, so that's a big difference between the way we as Austrians kind of view the money supply and how money comes into the economy versus, say, a more mainstream notion. In the mainstream, they tend to be the inheritors of, I think they call it Gabriel's horn or more famously, more recently, Friedman's helicopter. Where we imagine that as new money is created, it's just dropped out of a helicopter evenly over the entire economy and as a result, we'd expect prices to rise basically in proportion to each other. So double the amount of money, prices all double, it really doesn't make much difference. Austrians would point out that that's not at all the way this works. Janet Yellen, maybe she owns a helicopter I don't know, but she hasn't been dropping any money out of it over my house. So this new money comes into the economy through a specific way and that is through the banking system. Now, the moment is basically been sitting in the banking system mostly, but that means the people that get it first are going to be those that interact with the banking system. Mostly that's the financial sector. So we do see lots of financial assets rising in price as they are getting some of this money. It's not all sitting there in banks and also it turns out one of the biggest borrowers in our economy, unsurprisingly, is the federal government also is first in line in getting a lot of this new money. And then we add to that other classes of borrowers as well, but certainly in terms of major groups, the financial sector gets the money first as well as the federal government. Now, since they get it first, prices haven't really adjusted yet. Because we haven't seen huge amounts of money in everybody's pockets. People that are just buying bread don't have more money. They're not paying more for bread because they don't have more money to pay for bread. So instead, we'll see the rising prices based on those things that the financial sector would buy, so these financial assets you mentioned, and also things the federal government would tend to buy. So we might see a lot of this money flowing into, as we're continuously fighting wars, say the defense sector might get a next in line, something like that. And eventually, now it does, as we have employees being paid and that kind of thing, it does eventually affect the entire economy. We do eventually see the employees of the federal government do go out and buy bread, so bread prices eventually rise. But that's not the first place we see it. So it really shouldn't be the first place we look either. Or put another way, people in the mainstream will accept that this change in the money supply affects the average level of prices with a lag. They don't really explain that lag, except in very vague terms. But as Austrians, we know that the lag happens because it takes time for money to move from its original entry point towards spread out through more of the economy. And we see prices move similarly. They move a lot at that entry point and less throughout the economy until time passes. But as you mentioned, it's not just that it's uneven. It's that it's political, right? There's a sinister element to this. There are people who benefit politically by being close to the belly of the beast, like a defense contractor, in a way that Main Street absolutely does not benefit. Absolutely. Now, as to your point about prices, is it not important to understand that there's still supply and demand for stuff that affects prices? Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, but there's still organic rising demand, let's say, in the San Francisco Bay area for housing. Right, right, exactly. And that's something that really makes our jobs as economists somewhat difficult. Because it's trying to tease out how much of a particular price increase is because of changes in what Mises would call the money relation. So money supply is changing, money demand is changing. That should affect the value of money, which is reflected then in prices. And how much of it is something specific to this particular market? So in San Francisco, we know that they're very restrictive of construction, right? So there's very restricted supply, besides just geographically, there's only so much space, right? So if we may throw into that, it might be that they have great job opportunities or something like that, or a culture that is very attractive to our current culture more broadly. So lots of people want to move there. These are not necessarily monetary things. It could be these job opportunities or the culture they've created are something that are specific to that particular good. Well, elaborate when you talk about Mises and supply and demand for money. Elaborate on that, because we don't talk a lot about that. We talk about supply and demand for goods and services, but not money. Yeah, I think this was one of Mises's great insights, was that we could take supply and demand analysis like we would apply to anything, housing in San Francisco or bread or what have you, and use the same kind of analysis to talk about money and its value. Now what makes things more complicated is that money doesn't have say one single numerical value that we can attach to it the way that the price of a particular house does. But we can still understand the general idea of the value of money in terms of its purchasing power by thinking about supply and demand, right? So on the one hand, we have a certain amount of money that is available to us or the stock or supply of money, and that changes in our economy based on what the Fed policy is and based on banks' decisions about lending. So that determines the supply side, which I think a lot of the time economists focus a lot on the supply side, ignoring the demand side as well. That is that people do actually want to hold money in its various forms, whether it be as cash or whether it be in deposit accounts or whether it be in my savings account, these various accounts that I can hold money in, I do actually want to hold money over time. It makes me feel more secure. It lets me spend money when I want to spend money. So I have to hold money to be able to do that. So understanding both of these influences allows us then to understand the value of money. So like I mentioned before, I really expected a lot of price inflation because I thought the value of money was going to fall very quickly as we were creating additional money that Federal Reserve was. At the same time, it turns out that people feeling insecure about their lives wanting to have a lot more money as a buffer against the bad times they were experiencing, the demand for money increased. Well, that would hold up the value of money. And this is something where, at first I was kind of baffled by it, but it shouldn't have been. Mises actually talks about this as something you will often see in the first stages before you get significant price inflation. You get a huge increase in the money supply, but people decide to hold some more of it, and that props up its value for a while. Eventually, people feel more secure or start realizing that money doesn't hold its value as well as they thought it would. And the demand for money falls, well, just like with any other good. If the demand for something falls, its value falls. If the demand for money falls, the value of money will fall. So that can lead then to significant price inflation that we may not see being able to be justified by an increase in the supply of money alone because people have changed their attitudes toward money. So one thing I love about Mises is that he's very aware that both sides can't have an influence, and that's something that I think too often I know myself, I don't always keep in mind and probably should keep in mind more. Well, on this subject, you talk about the value of money is hard to assign, but interest rates, in effect, are a price for money, a price for borrowing money. They ought to represent that, at least from a time preference and an Austrian viewpoint. Can you give us sort of the quick and dirty version of what happens when governments or central banks artificially keep interest rates low? How does malinvestment happen in layman's terms? OK, I guess the way that I would explain it, so it all starts right with central banks in the economies we have, deciding that they want to stimulate the economy. And the way they do this is by creating additional money and putting it into credit markets. As we have this additional supply of credit available, I really like to think of interest rates as kind of the price on credit that we have to pay. So for me to borrow, I have to pay the interest. And so if this additional supply of credit, which is really just new money, that drives down interest rates. And now this all feels very good, because now that I have this new money available, I can go and buy a house or buy a car or build a factory. What have you? And that's where we'd see the boom that we would every one from the mainstream through. Austrians agree that we get this boom kind of a fact. Now where Austrians would step in and is pointing out, this is unsustainable. Ultimately, we're going to see significant changes in prices as this is all depending upon this increase in the money supply happening over time. And if we stop doing that, say like in our economy, we've been fairly fortunate in the Federal Reserve has generally been become worried about inflation before it's gotten horribly out of hand. So they start slowing down the increase in the money supply. Well, once you do that, you're cutting off that additional supply of credit that was keeping interest rates low. Well, once you cut off that additional supply of credit, interest rates are going to rise, reflecting that there's a lesser supply of credit available. Once interest rates rise, then all these things that look like great decisions before look no longer look like great decisions. I don't necessarily want to buy a new house now. Interest rates have gotten too high. I don't want to buy a new car. I may not want to build a new factory and so on. So all of this activity we saw before gets cut off. Now, some of it may be sustained. So, for example, if I got a nice low interest rate in 2003, when interest rates were very, very low and I got a 30 year mortgage and bought my house, I won't necessarily leave that house when interest rates rise. At the same time, we know that there are some types of loans, for example, where they're very sensitive to what interest rates are at that moment. So, for example, we saw this a lot in the housing market with the adjustable rate mortgages. So people going out and buying a house in 2003 come to 2008. Interest rates are significantly higher because you have an adjustable rate mortgage. You find out you have to pay a lot more for the house. And it very well may be that you can't afford it anymore. It turns out because of, if you get a long mortgage, like 30 years is fairly typical in the United States, so much of that is interest that if I increase your interest rate from 3% to 6%, which in percentage point terms is not very much, we can talk about almost doubling your house payment. I know if I doubled my house payment, I would have to move. That house has to go on the market. But we all experience interest rates at the same time, which means looking at the housing market again, going back then to 2008, all of us with adjustable rate mortgages find we can't afford that house at the same time. We all try to sell at the same time. Come back to supply and demand in that particular market. Huge supply of housing going on to the market as people are trying to move out of these homes. The price plummets, eliminating people's equity. People find out that now they actually owe more on the home than the home is worth as the prices fallen so rapidly. So we end up with the bust where people end up where they're in effect bankrupt. They don't have the assets to pay off their debt. And this happens not only at the personal level, as we see more obviously in things like the housing market, but also the business level. As businesses have done the same thing and taking out these loans that looked pretty good at the time, making investments that looked good at the time. As times change and interest rates adjust back up, they still have the debt, the debt won't vanish. But the assets lose a lot of value. And they may find that they're also having serious problems, perhaps even in bankruptcy. Well, the final question for you, you have a lot of young students. I assume you teach micro and macro at various points. Mostly micro actually. How do we get young people especially interested in this? It's not as sound bite friendly to understand inflation and interest rates and business cycles as it is to get people worried about Trump or tax reform or the Supreme Court issues that are a little more friendly to political persuasion. How do we get people to worry about this and stay up at night? And how do we get people energized about money in the Fed? Right. One thing I like to do, especially when I teach money in banking, is point out just how unusual the times we're living in are. One of the most startling graphs that I show my students on at least a few times during the semester is looking, anybody who wants to can go, right? Google Fred, look for excess reserves of depository institutions. That's the money that's sitting in the bank vault. The banks could easily lend out if they want to. If you look before about 2009, it's sitting right at zero. Banks typically just did not hold excess reserves. It wasn't something they did. The only exception, you can see this tiny little blip around, I think it's about mid-September of 2001. So right around 9-11, OK, people might be nervous about the banking system. So in this case, was the Fed provided extra reserves, but they left right away. But then you come to what we're looking at today, where it's nearly vertical when you look at excess reserves. They just shoot up and now they're kind of gradually coming down. I think the peak was somewhere around 2.6 trillion, 2.5 trillion dollars. Now we're down to 2.2 trillion dollars. We're living in unusual times. And then once we get from the fact that things are weird right now, then we can start explaining, OK, what's the significance of this? Is there a danger involved? And then, yeah, but certainly not sound quite friendly, but we have to explain the process of relending of deposits and that kind of thing. How money actually gets into the economy and is going to have an impact could potentially have a very big impact. Then we realize this can be a real problem. And so I think you start with that excess reserves. That's a weird thing. Everybody can see it's a weird thing. And that raises the question of, OK, what's the significance? Well, I certainly hope that your students will spend the weekend on the St. Louis Fed website as opposed to Snapchat or some other time suck. But with that, Dr. Lucas Engelhardt, thank you so much for your time. And if any of you are interested in Mises University, Lucas is one of our summer professors. So you can come to Auburn and take a class or two of his. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.


Gamers, get around, we'll show you the HP Victus 15 or just a quick recap of our comprehensive review on our site. Link that link fast like it's a unique item draft from a bus, and you'll get the left of surprise, some sweet comparisons and all the juicy details. But if you're in the middle of a game and can't take a break, no problem, save with us right here, just for a few minutes. The Victus 15 is an affordable and compact gaming machine that weighs 2.29 kilograms while being 23.5 millimeters thick. The build quality is a little sacrifice, but the design is a top notch mix of office and gaming characteristics. The laptop is entirely built of plastic, which causes some flex from the lid and base. The bigger crime is the bouncing lid, which also doesn't open with one hand. Once open, we see a pretty big grill, which is used for ventilation, as the speakers are on the bottom. Below it, there's a great keyboard with a numpad for the number crunchers among you, long key travel, and clicky feedback. The arrow keys are a bit smaller than we'd want, but the rest is great. The touchpad can be a tad more responsive, however, the surface is smooth and the tracking is precise. Going to the sides, we're surprised to see an SD card reader on the left, along with the power plug, one full-sized USB 3.2 generation 1 port, and an audio jack. On the other side, there's an HDMI 2.1 port, one more full-sized USB port, a LAN port, and a USB Type-C 3.2 generation 1 port with power delivery and display port capabilities. The base configuration that we tested comes with a full HDTN panel, but there are IPS options as well, which we heavily recommend. For the designers among you, there's a version with 100% sRGB coverage as well. The TN panel just doesn't cut it in 2023, having poor viewing angles, a max brightness of 267 nits, and a very low contrast ratio of 400 to 1, so the blacks aren't really black. It shows 52% sRGB coverage, while the accuracy improves significantly with our design and gaming profile, going from a delta E value of 11, down to 3.3. On the other hand, the panel has a relatively fast response time of just 11.8 milliseconds and shows zero PWM usage across all brightness levels. We'll have our display profiles linked in the description below, and in the upper right corner. The speakers are a high point of the laptop, offering clear audio that's clear of deviations across all frequencies. Our laptop runs a Ryzen 5600H, which goes pretty easy on the 52.5Wh battery, making it last for 11 hours and 24 minutes of web browsing, or 8 hours and 50 minutes of video playback. Only 2 per 100 people watching this video are subscribers. If you decide to just start following us, we'll be able to reinvest more in our laboratory thus making even more helpful videos for you. Thank you, you're awesome. The Ryzen 5 5600H offers similar performance to the Ryzen 5 6600H from last year, but pretty much all 12th generation Alder Lake H series SKUs from Intel would put it in the bin. With that said, the 5600H is still a viable option, having the power to do video rendering, streaming, and other heavier work. Moving to the GPU, we have the GTX 1650, a pretty outdated card that was released in 2019. The 3050 and 3050 Ti cards that are available offer around 50% to 100% more performance in benchmarks, so if you can squeeze the cash for it, you definitely should. In our gaming tests, we want to highlight Days Gone, a game with beautiful visuals that the GTX 1650 runs with no problem. We got 63 frames per second at high settings, which is good. The gaming footage is right out of our laptop media benchmarks channel, which has tested almost every popular laptop GPU in many games, so you can get an accurate performance assessment before committing to a device. Looking at the cooling setup, you wouldn't guess that it's for a gaming laptop, as it's got just two heat pipes and two fans that sit next to each other. However, the Ryzen 5 doesn't need much, managing to maintain 3.66 GHz after 15 minutes of testing. It does reach 91 degrees Celsius, but that's within the CPU's operating temperature, so it's fine. The GTX 1650 also isn't very demanding, maxing out its 50W TGP, while running at just 65 degrees Celsius. At the same time, it reaches the highest clock speeds that we've seen from a 1650 card. The VIC-15 surprises us with its comfort. The fans aren't audible most of the time, while the base has a hot spot of just 35 degrees Celsius. Once inside, we have to show you what you're working with. The VIC-15 offers two Sodom slots for up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, as well as one M.2 PCIe slot for generation 3 SSDs. We'll leave our disassembly video in the description, in case you already have the VIC-15 and want to know how to upgrade it. The VIC-15 from HP turns out to be a real charmer of a gaming laptop, complimenting its low price with good hardware that performs well. It's surprisingly quiet for a gaming rig, which is another bonus. Just skip out on the TN panel and we think you'd be quite pleased with it. For more information about the VIC-15, swing by our website and check out our in-depth review of the laptop, with more tests and benchmarks.