General

Another unplanned downtime, again. That's a good time to move on the voice beta grid and have some fun. Today there were many people at Ahern and Morris, so it's always good to move to another sim.

I was at Pulveria, there was a Linden and some other guys, but not so much as in the laggy welcome area and he spoke to us and with us. No better way to meet the Lindens in world than on the beta grid at the moment.

So... one asked the question, why a region sometimes gets better when restarted. Seems it depends on the neighboring regions, when you're restarting a region it could be moved dynamically to another CPU, so that's why it can become better, again. Interesting detail in the architecture.

Since I've got again too much ideas for blog entries in my mind and don't want to post them all as separate articles, I'm doing another roundup. Here it comes:

• Pham Neutra is discussing the population growth of Second Life with a graphic from Chromal Brodsky. Thesis there: growth is still there, but it slowed down already in March, it's not exponential anymore. So it will be interesting to watch the statistics of April, when the month is over.
• There's an article made by a law professor about taxing virtual worlds. In essence it's this: players should be taxed like in the real world for commercial activity, but not game play.
• There's an article in Wired about the Nasa activities in SL, especially CoLab.
• A German article, tagline "Second Life is not going to be better than the first life".
• A gallery of RL brands in Second Life. Very interesting to get a picture which companies are already involved in SL. Big brands listed only!
• A very critical article about the so called casino investigations. Thesis: the FBI looked at one thing, but nothing seemed to happen at all, so where's the meat? Then again, Lindenlabs seems to be reacting before FBI is doing anything and installing a new registration/confirmation system.
• A new photo book named "Avatar Expression" has been released.

Simple: it is a big laboratory for trying out new approaches, getting new experiences that can be transferred to other, future projects, too. Though Second Life is not perfect, it is still going to be thrilling in the future and that is why it matters.

These are not only my words, but for example also the words of Sponto and Pham Neutra agrees with him (both articles in German).