About the last town hall meeting

Bartholomew Gallacher 6. Mai 2007 0 Kommentare

The Second Life Herald has a very interesting, but also opiniated, piece about the last town hall meetingearlier this week with Cory Linden. To put it simple: the writer was not impressed at all and thinks that the Lindens are working on the wrong priorities right now.

One thing I agree is, that we still need to see how this often referred next generation architecture is going to work. One of the main problems of SL is load, big, heavy user load. This is something you cannot get on the beta grid, where perhaps maximum 100 avatars are online at the same time. This is something you get either with automated test clients – lots of them on the beta grid, or on the main grid. Since automated test clients don’t behave like humas do, the real beta grid is the main grid. The beta grid is just there to iron out the real big problems you can already see there, but the rest is only going to be visible on the main grid under heavy user load. It’s that simple.

Back in the good old days of the home computers we had a term covering such software: banana software. This term was used for still green software, that came green to the customers and matured there. SL is a unique approach and therefore some things are just like that, when a new version comes out, the real test is the usage of the client on the main grid. You’ve got to live with it or leave it. Your choice.

A few thoughts on the age verification

Bartholomew Gallacher 5. Mai 2007 0 Kommentare

According to the Lindens there is coming an age verification to us in about one week. If I read the FAQ correct, it is done by a third party company and you’ve got to provide them some info, e.g. social security number, drivers license number, passport number, to verify that you are over 18 years old. If you provide the info successfully, then you’ve got the "age verified" flag and are allowed to enter parcels with "adult content" flag. If you don’t have an age verification, you still can play in Second Life, but don’t enter such regions anymore.

The question I asked myself can be split up in two parts: how is this going to influence the game and is this verification process going to be really secure?

Well, the first part is: I expect, who until now enjoyed adult content, are going to leave the game, since they are not willingly going to provide the necessary infos. I can understand them. If you take a closer look at the search and don’t check "mature content" in it and search for some things, like escort, you’re still going to find such content. Now the Lindens want that the people rate themself or they are going to take measures against them. If you take the big size of SL into account, it is not hard to predict that many people are not going to rate themself properly and that, if any, actions are going to be taken against them, this would take quite some time and they would still try after that, again.

Second: is the process going to be really secure, meaning, can I be really sure that the avatar if flagged "age verified" is played by an adult? After reading the FAQ: plain and simple no! It is no problem at all for most teenagers to lookup such infos, like a social security number, in the documents of their parents and pretending to be their father or mother. To be really sure that you are who you pretend to be you need a personal review of a trusted 3rd party in real life.

And even, if you would be checked up that way, there would be no security in it, since the son of the father just could have looked up his password with e.g. a keylogger.

So in short: while the idea of it seems nice, you are not going to have real security at all with such a kind of a system. In reality it is not going to be introduced to make SL a safer place for all, but to protect Lindenlabs better against possible lawsuits, which in result still benefits the community, though, since all of SL well being depends on LL. Period.

So I told you…

Bartholomew Gallacher 3. Mai 2007 0 Kommentare

…at Monday this week I’d like to see regional datacenters, like in Europe or Asia, today is technical town hall and what can I hear there?

[12:50] Cay Trudeau: Do you think arranging physichal server on other continents, like Europe for instance, would ease up on the server load, ease the connections and allow better performance for European residents? Would that also lift the load from sending texture data across the wire?
[12:40] Cory Linden shouts: We absolutely want to deploy servers overseas. We have an architectural quirk in how we talk to the dbs — a layer of single threaded dataservers —

Neat! And, another quote, by the way:

[12:44] Cory Linden shouts: As I previously mentioned — and was in the blog post — 69% of development is currently on bugs and scaling. That number will increase this month as we continue to hire.

Main priorities are now scaling and bugfixing. Hopefully. By the way, the group message system was broken so much again, it was not funny. And the Lindens held the town hall at Pooley Stage, all regions full already hours before the Town Hall. Perhaps it’s next time better when they’re going to hold it on four class 5 sims.

Over 6 million residents now

Bartholomew Gallacher 3. Mai 2007 0 Kommentare

There are now over 6 million residents now in Second Life since yesterday. Again, no big press release, nada, zip, nothing. I wonder…