Downtimes

Im Osgrid gibt es nichts Neues, es ist nach wie vor seit dem Hardwareausfall vom 28. August diesen Jahres offline. Das Ausmaß des Ausfalls nimmt schon wahrhaft groteske und lächerliche Züge an, schön ist es nicht mehr. Eigentlich können sich die Macher danach am Besten gleich komplett einsargen lassen und sollten besser aufhören, so etwas noch zu betreiben ,da sie ja ihre Unfähigkeit grandios bewiesen haben.

Allerdings gibt es in den diversen Diskussionen zu Osgrid einige, interessante Blüten, über die ich nur den Kopf schütteln kann: so wird beispielsweise immer und immer wieder gebetsmühlenartig von einigen Leuten behauptet, Osgrid sei ja “nur” ein Testgrid und schon daher könne man nicht mit der Sicherheit seiner Daten rechnen.

Some days ago there’s been the news that IBM is going to build their own server farm with the Second Life server side on it.

Well, frankly said, I can understand them. That convoluted mess that Second Life today is is all but a worthwile investment if you’re a company. If you want to have a good experience with it, better stay away from the main grid and build your own farm, your own island.

The rollling restart today has been very unusual and a royal pain in the ass. Sims have been offline longer than usual, asset server is working slowly or not at all and teleport hiccups have been there, too.

All in all something we all don’t really need, I am glad when it’s finally over.

[Update]: There’s now a new blog entry by Neuro Linden (yes, a new one) about what happened and went wrong with the last update. Basically two things, first some errors in the way they made the new “aggressive” update (and Thursday is going to be another rolling update, but using the old system) and second an error with two VPN servers. So we are going to see what the next rolling update is going to bring us. Yeah!

It’s been a while since my last blogging spree that I’ve posted any new article at all. So, without much foreword, some new thingies:

• Dedric Mauriac blogged about the in world building of Packaging and Converting Essentials. Seems he really likes the place.
• The picture that I made of the P&CE building is now used in their in world ad with permission. Nice. Perhaps I should start a career as photographer in Second Life. Then again my photo editing skills are surely not high enough, I am more a technician than anything else.
• A change of one of the last updates that not everybody has notices comes into effect now - you can spend maximum 999.999 L$ per classified now instead of 99.999 L$ before. This means the maximum went from something like 357 US$ up to 3571 US$ per week. And there are already ads in the system where the author of it plays around 200.000 L$ per week for it, that’s about 714 US-$ for the sum in real money. So these guys are either very wealthy or making much money in world already.
• Some days ago the Second Life Herald run an article about ageplay. While normal ageplay is nothing to say against it, there’s also sex ageplay in the game (child escorts/teen escorts), and this seems to has a market, too. Now how sick is this? It’s even against the law in many countries. Of course, the normal ageplayers are not against the law at all, but the growth rate is amazing: 1 % per week. This means exponential growth of course and is something that cannot go on forever.
• The next planned downtime this week brings us again no update of the primary client, while the First Look client got some of them already. Could be, that they need the whole timeslot, could be not. But they should finally take some time to fix the most annoying bugs in the main client, namely the inability at the moment to offer teleports to avatars who are not your friends and the annoying water-bug. Or they should finally setup a source repository and give some well accredited programmers from the community write-level access. Then it would have already been fixed since ages!
• Here’s another blog entry from a journalist of the Handelsblatt about SL in general. The essence of it is: Second Life is mostly an Empty Life, sex is the most driving force behind the in world economy, rw companies normally don’t blend in real well and it’s overhyped at great lengths. Period.
• And now for something completely different: wannabe terrorists planned to attack a very important Internet node in London. They were captured before they could act on their plan. This still shows us: without a first life there’s no second life and we should be thankful they were captured beforehand.

What’s the use in running a scheduled downtime from 5 hours in under 2 hours, which looks first like great work, when then some hours later the inventory database has hiccups and issues are showing up again? I don’t know.

After not posting entries for some days, I’ve got to dequeue my queued posts now. So, with no further delay here they are:

• SL had terrible problems yesterday. They bunch varied from not being able to login to problems with teleporting up to problems with the assets. So it was unsafe to use the inventory at all. This reminds us: when you really want to do business in SL, the platform tends to be fairly unstable. Count that always in. The whole drama lasted over 10 hours. Hopefully it is over now.

  [Mehr]

Well, since SL was down over half the day (or even more…) and there was no possibility to login, what’s the addicts second best choice? Right: reading some posts in the blogosphere about Second Life and thinking about it.

So I here now present in no particular order my todays choice of articles about SL and stuff:

• SL History Wiki entry about Aimee Weber. Very interesting read about one of the leading content builders in here.

  [Mehr]

Well, another downtime of the server, again. What should have been only a small downtime turns out to be a major downtime - again. They are updating the central storage hardware - oh well. Since more and more business keeps getting into SL and is made in SL it is for sure time that LL thinks about some efforts to achieve a better availibility, since these downtimes lately simply said tend to piss off many residents.