Posts

There’s a new open letter in town of people who try to persuade Lindenlabs to stabilize SL. So far 569 Avatars undersigned it, a nice idea, at least.

There is one thought that hit my mind when I read again the news about the possible opening of the server side software of Lindenlabs: it would really, really nice to have regional datacenters at least. Ok, having the possibility to host the servers on your own would be even better, but at least this step would be really nice in addition to the two datacenters in the USA.

Why? Simple: physics at work. What we all dislike is the almighty lag. Though the internet has become very fast, the connections between the continents are very fast, too, they still cannot beat physics.

But how does the lag involve physics? Well, even if the internet is fast, the maximum speed data can be transferred theoretically is light speed (roughly 300.000 km/s). You cannot cross that border. This means, the longer your connection gets, the longer it takes for the data to reach you. That’s quite simple physics.

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.

Today I tried to teleport in the sim of Wales. Yes, that’s the sim which had Sinners Paradise in it and closed in January for the public due to massive and repeated griefer attacks. There’s now also a new, adjacent sim in the making, Welsh Falls.

Well, I tried the teleport, it worked - interesting, since it was closed for so long. Seems it is open again for the public, the entrance area has changed, landscape looks more or less the same like before, now I wonder if this is wanted, and if it is really back in business again, how long it takes before this place kicks ass again.

Here’s a little photo of me made today sitting in the entrance area of the teleport at Wales. Enjoy.

Eric Kintz, the vice president of global marketing strategy and excellence for HP, is running a very critical blog entry about second life. Taglein: Top 10 reasons as why I still need to be convinced about marketing on Second Life.

While he raises right points there, there’s one point missing: this is going to be the next big thing[tm], if done right, the start of something new in that kind of matter, if done right, so getting experiences in SL will help you adapt later to other virtual worlds more easily.

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.

Well, that’s it for the moment, more to come shortly.

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).

Just did a fun test at a website, and look what I’ve found out about myself:

Well, that explains, why I enjoy so much running through Second Life as Barth Vader! The force is with me! And now bow before your master… bwahaha!

There is a new search tool available as beta for Second Life, being developed of the Electric Sheep Company at the moment and open for public now since a few days ago.

What’s this thing and how does it work? Well, the searching part of it is a bot named Grid Sheperd, that runs from sim to sim, scans the objects of a sim and connects them with avatar names. The part available on the world wide web at the moment is a search interface, that enables everybody to lookup the items owned by the avatar. It is only showing the items of the avatar though that are tagged as “for sale”. So the Sheeps are telling us: it’s adding value to all of use, since it’s automated and it’s opt-out, if you don’t want those infos available at all. They’re very excited, announced the availability of this service here, described the options and doings of this search bot in this FAQ and an progress update in this blog entry. Important: opt-outs are now taking effect immideately!

In the Avastar #14 there’s a comment of Gwyneth Llewelyn about the scaling of Second Life on page 6. She’s claming that one possible move to relieve the grid of stress would be to store the texture data, which seems to go into the hundred of Terabytes (wonder where she got this number from, I thought all data is around 34 terabytes at the moment according to this article, so I stuck with this number, so hundred of terabytes is wrong on a great scale), from outside the grid, perhaps even allowing users to store them on their own servers. While I don’t see the textures stored on the own servers, because of possible protests, she continues.

She’s stating that if that move occurs the 2000 servers of SL would be able to hold 20 million simultaneous users and this could be achieved within a month with the work of one developer!