Second Life To Open Source Server Code

mrspin writes "Having already taken the timid steps of open-sourcing the code for its client software, Linden Lab has confirmed that they'll be going the whole way, and will soon be opening up the server code for Second Life. This furthers Second Life's ambitions to be a fully distributed 3D network — built on interoperability and not owned by one company — a bit like the Internet itself. ZDNet's The Social Web asks: 'who will be the first to offer Second Life hosting or use the server code for their own internal purposes? IBM would be an obvious candidate, perhaps offering corporate Second Life services. And for the rest of us? GoogleLife, free virtual land — ad supported of course. It's certainly a possibility.'"

Comments

So what's there angle?

[rednip]

The real buzz over second life is the ability to create wealth playing the game. Seems to me that they will always be the 'Federal Reserve' for their creation, and their intention is to make money by creating it. If anything kills second life, it will be a widely distributed unlimited money hack.

Re:So what's there angle?

[Carnildo]

Untrusted third-party servers will not be able to connect to the Linden Labs servers, so you don't need to worry about an unlimited-money hack messing things up: currency records, user inventories, and the like are separate. As a real-world comparison, widespread forgery of Iraqi Dinars isn't going to upset the value of the British Pound.

Re:So what's there angle?

[Speare]

I think you mean, "So what's their angle?"

So as not to be a complete git and only respond on the basis of a grammatical error, I am also wondering what they get out of this. As virtual as it is, they were selling real estate based on its perceived scarcity. With anyone setting up a server, and likely FAR improving upon the aesthetics over the SL landscape, who would continue to play in SL? As the saying goes, "there's no 'there' there."

Re:So what's there angle?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

What's their angle?

What is free software's angle?

Does anyone remember Wolfenstein Enemy Territory? This is a fully functioning game that ID software released for free - completely! I'm not going to search, but since I know that ID often (always?) releases the source for their games and engines after a certain period of time why not then other software companies?

ID is still in business because they continue to innovate and make new games. By offering the sources for free and even entire games, ID has created a reputation that is very favorable in the eyes of their consumers. This can only be good for Linden Labs' rep, and it very well may simply be a preliminary move indicating that they have something in the works: probably a Third Life or something like that.

Re:So what's there angle?

[epiphani]

That might be their angle, but forget that. I'm very interested in seeing their source so I can use it for a starting point for my own ideas in MMOs. I just want to know more about their licensing. I have several ideas in that area, and look forward to some examples on how to actually handle the 3d mapping.

Haven't played second life though, so I dont know how applicable it will be to my ideas.

Thanks SL!

Re:So what's there angle?

[toleraen]

I took it more to mean that since you can see the server code, you could find flaws in the way the server handles the information, and then create a hack to exploit that on the live servers.

Re:So what's there angle?

[jofny]

The real buzz about something isn't the same as the real value. (Id wager it usually isnt, in fact).

Re:So what's there angle?

[jackbird]

Actually, ET was released because Activision killed the project (which was to a be a boxed retail game) when the multiplayer component was finished but the single-player campaign was not. The developers released the multiplayer version free so that it wouldn't be a total loss, and won themselves and their publisher some brownie points in the process.

Re:So what's there angle?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

Ah, I was unaware of that.

Even though it was unplanned, I still wonder if perhaps ID has unwittingly uncovered a powerful and affordable PR tool that would work to a development house's advantage in general.

I mean, it certainly seems a powerful gesture, releasing a free game. But as for affordable, I wonder what the net loss was for ID and Activision.

Re:So what's there angle?

[lazy_playboy]

Isn't this the same situation as with all open source software? Flaws could be found in the linux kernel and exploited on live systems for private gain. However, many (even us bipartisan /. readers...) would agree that security is increased by being open sourced. Security by obscurity is no security and all that.

Kudos to Linden labs for this, it's a fairly grown-up attitude to their IP.

Re:So what's there angle?

[drinkypoo]

People are already exploiting flaws in SL. By open sourcing both client and server they will probably end up with a multitude of contributions that enable them to make the system more secure. The question becomes (to me) what will happen first: Either second life gets cleaned up and nice, or the code is forked and someone else makes it far better and steals the show. Only time will tell, I guess.

Re:So what's there angle?

[Deorus]

The userbase is Liden's, if you want to "publish" your land on Second Life you'll have to connect your server to their network (and possibly pay for the privilege), otherwise you'll not benefit from their population. That's probably what they are aiming at.

Re:So what's there angle?

[jackbird]

id won. Activision had already paid for the Q3 engine license. Activision lost.

Re:So what's there angle?

[toleraen]

I wasn't necessarily agreeing with the GP, that's just how I interpreted it. Personally I don't think it's likely to happen for the reasons you describe. Especially since it seems that there's enough people familiar with programming that are playing the game that the source would get looked after.

Re:So what's there angle?

[Unoti]

Then go check it out! It's free.

Re:So what's there angle?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real buzz is the ability to earn money? I don't know about that. The FAQ on the Second Life page says that 85% of the 5 million members don't even have a premium account, and therefore can't own land or run a business. I'd say the real buzz about the game is the ability to create a fully customized avatar and chat with other people. Socializing is more appealing to most people than making $4 USD a week selling jewelery.

Re:So what's there angle?

[CronoCloud]

The FAQ on the Second Life page says that 85% of the 5 million members don't even have a premium account, and therefore can't own land or run a business.

Although a a premium account is rerquired to "own" mainland land it is not required to rent or "own" land on an Island Estate.

Some businesses don't require land at all. Scripters, sex workers, models.

Re:So what's there angle?

[torxic]

I think the bigger problem here is market segmentation.

As more and more SL servers are set up, the market will be widely partitioned. While more competition may be good, it also means that there will not be a single one-stop place where you can find everyone.

Also of great concern, will such operators allow inter-server transfer of Lindens? Who will determine the exchange rate? Is it possible for all derivative SL server to use Linden's central database?

All in all, i think that there is some good and some bad to come out of it.

Re:So what's there angle?

[bjorniac]

ET got a HUGE number of players with its free release. It was immense for a while back there, and it was actually quite an innovative and fun game. Now its probably going to cash in a lot of its goodwill when ET:Quake-Wars comes out, making money for Activision. I don't know if the extra interest it'll generate will pay for the development costs of ET, but I'd imagine it might - without ET I don't think Quake Wars would have quite the interest it does. This model does seem to happen quite a bit - see Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike Source, Team Fortress to TF Classic and TF2. Even single player games are acting similarly - They Hunger was originally a free Half-Life mod (originally on PC Gamer disks, the released for free IIRC) and the new version is a full commercial game.

Re:So what's there angle?

[jackbird]

Yes, they turned their loss into a win-win, but ET was intended from the start as a commercial sequel to RTCW, not a mod, and the six-figure Quake3 license they bought would have gone completely to waste otherwise.

Re:So what's there angle?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't "own" land on a private island, unless you own the island. Oh, Island owner will say you can... but you can't really, just get some silly promise not to take it back whenever they feel like it.

Re:So what's there angle?

[Workaphobia]

Opening up their server takes away my power to despise Linden Labs. Previously, I had little respect for them, because their business model is based on passing off as valuable something that has no inherent worth. This is either alchemy or counterfeiting depending on your point of view, but it struck me as a bit shady, even if they were ethical about it. But open sourcing the client showed me (as someone who has had no dealings or knowledge of them outside of these articles) that they weren't all bad. Now that they're going to do the same with the server, I feel like I have to forgive them and let them try to turn a profit.

Does anyone know if they're choosing a free license, or is it possible that they're releasing the source code only under a restrictive license?

Re:So what's there angle?

[dreamchaser]

Well, since the client code is released under the GPL, there is no reason to expect anything else for the server code. Of course they could use a more restrictive license, but from their press release and comments on their website I'm thinking it will be GPL.

They also offer a commercial license for those who prefer it.

Real Open Source

[Trevor]

The Second Life open client code is already out of sync with the production code because Linden Lab just threw it over the wall and then went on happily producing private versions of their software.

Instead of waiting for them to do the same with the server, sidestep them altogether with libsecondlife.org's OpenSim or pick a new platform altogether from the growing list of real open source projects: Open Croquet, Ogoglio.com (my project), or Verse.

Re:Real Open Source

[Rei]

I'm interested in the prospects of a distributed MMOG. The world is split up into regions. Instead of an authoritative server doing the processing tasks and stating what is and what isn't, specific clients are granted authority about the regions. Multiple clients, that is. Everyone listens to all of the authoritative clients running a region, and decides what's true based on a simple majority vote. The key is that clients don't get to pick what regions they're authoritative for; it would be distributed by something like a Kademlia network. The only way to take majority control of a region would be a massive DOS, kicking off a large percentage of the network.

Bandwidth requirements are certainly notably higher (due to the fact that there's not one authoritative server per region, but several), but on the other hand, it's everyone's bandwidth being used; no one company has to pay for it.

It's actually more complicated to this, since the loads for a given region will vary greatly. You'd likely need realtime tesselation and merging of regions to keep the loads reasonable for a given client -- either that, or very small regions, with each server running a large number of them (when the load gets too high, a server starts offloading some of its regions). Still, the basic premise seems feasible.

Re:Real Open Source

[John Hurliman]

That's not true at all. There are two full time employees at Linden Labs that are responsible for maintaining the GPL licensed releases and they are kept in sync with the production releases within a few days. Right now, April 19th 2007 @ 1:40PM, the GPL releases are in sync with both the production grid and beta preview grid.

OpenSim is a great project, I work with those guys frequently, but contrary to popular belief it is not a child project of libsecondlife. It is an independent project that happens to use libsecondlife. It's also an important project because the simulator code will likely be released as GPL, while OpenSim is a BSD licensed project. I'm not a big Croquet fan, but I'll have to check out Ogoglio.com and Verse.

- John Hurliman, libsecondlife lead developer

Re:Real Open Source

[Trevor]

You're closer to this than I am, but it's my understanding that new proprietary things like the voice client aren't in the GPL'ed release and that you don't have even anon access to the source repository. This is what I refer to as out of sync and being thrown over the wall.

It's interesting that you're having a good experience with them, though. Do you think LL is going to get a point where the community has more of a role in an open source fashion than it does currently?

OpenSim is hosted on OPENsecondlife.org (not LIBsecondlife.org), so it was just a typo of the URL.

Re:Real Open Source

[Yoozer]

Why stick with a world? Everyone wants to have a huge swath of land. No, make planets and introduce space travel :). That way, smaller communities can buy their own planet and divide the continents; larger ones can buy a solar system.

Then, link it up to Spore.

Say hello to Sin City

[zappepcs]

Once its all open, guess who will be in the line to download the code and get programming? Yep, the pr0n industry!

Re:Say hello to Sin City

[SQLGuru]

Why bother? They already use the LL servers for that.

Layne

Re:Say hello to Sin City

[doctormetal]

How will they call their version? Second Wife?

Re:Say hello to Sin City

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's the version hosted in Utah...

(ducks)

Second Life socializing

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Social Web asks: 'who will be the first to offer Second Life hosting "

I think the Antisocial web will beat them to it, actually. 'Third Life, now furry- and dancing-penis-free!'

Angles of angels

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wondered what the point of Second Life was. I don't get it at all. Going to a virtual world and playing a character? I understood that was the venue of Everquest and World of Warcraft.

But, if you're suggesting there's untaxable income to be made, then perhaps I've been looking at this thing completely wrong.

Still, what in the world are corporations doing playing games? I won't understand that... unless it's the same money thing.

Re:Angles of angels

[omeomi]

But, if you're suggesting there's untaxable income to be made, then perhaps I've been looking at this thing completely wrong.

There is real-world income to be made, but it is most certainly taxable. If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.

Re:Angles of angels

[MindStalker]

For some its the money, for some its the scripting (its got a MUSH like scripting engine.. hmm MUSH..) and for many its the furry sex!

Re:Angles of angels

[cowscows]

SL offers a few things that I find occasionally interesting. First off, it's a fancy chat service. I can talk with a bunch of people, and the 3D world it takes place in allows for a lot of creative ways for you to express yourself beyond just text.

Second, it's a big sandbox, and it gives you a fairly pervasive ability to create stuff. Although there are definite (and often times very annoying) limits to the modeling system and scripting system, you can still use them to make just about anything that you can imagine. If you enjoy that sort of free creativity, then SL offers it in a reasonably straight-forward package. If you spend a little bit of time being social, then you can easily find people to help you create, or just to share your creations with.

A third thing that I enjoy about SL is its potential for just ridiculousness. Parts of the SL world are a lot like those stupid, random, and often very amusing photoshopped pictures that people email to each other, except it happens in real time. I wouldn't say that spending time there makes me any smarter or a better person, but it's at least as amusing as watching most of the crap on TV these days.

If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.

Re:Angles of angels

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.

It's interesting - I can see your point. But if you replace "SL" with "Website" in your above statements, you can easily see how the attitude might change in a few years.

After all, at first I imagine many companies failed to see the relevance of a corporate website. They may never have imagined hiring someone specifically for managing it: let alone an entire staff for some.

The future hasn't happened yet. This makes it very hard to talk about what happens in it.

Re:Angles of angels

[JesseMcDonald]

If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.

What if you never do sell them for real-world dollars? What if, for example, you simply take your Lindon Dollars to the (hypothetical) iTMS SL store and exchange them directly into music downloads? Of course the IRS theoretically taxes direct exchange based on the "market value" of the goods (which is 100% arbitrary), but can you imagine the overhead of trying to track all those online transfers?

If you think about it, though, the whole point of an income tax is to take a cut from every transfer of currency from one person to the next. (One person's income is another's expenditure.) By performing most of the exchanges in Lindon Dollars one can avoid being taxed at every point along the way. Even if the tax on the final exchange remains it's still a major improvement.

Re:Angles of angels

[cunina]

Let me know when I can download some tasty, nutritious iFood and I'll be all over it.

Re:Angles of angels

[WaXHeLL]

As per "barter" in the tax code.

You have a market price for linden dollars, this is available on Linden Lab's website. That's your "market value" of the goods.

Re:Angles of angels

[cowscows]

I don't want to say that there's no future for businesses in a "virtual world" that might share some qualities with SL, but as for SL itself, as I have experienced it over the past few years, no thanks.

Various people have been getting excited about the idea of "virtual reality" over and over again at least through the past couple decades, and while the reality has consistently fallen short of the hype, there's certainly a potential that's very compelling.

Second Life makes some of those potentials even more apparent, but that potential that it causes me to imagine makes its flawed current state even more obvious. Just a few of those flaws inherent in SL; crippling lag once you get any reasonable number of people into the same area of the grid, the ability of random people to perform unwelcome acts against your character or your land (and the meager amount of safeguards that you can protect yourself with), the random interpretations of acceptable conduct by the devs/GMs/moderators, the fact that most of these problems have existed for years and still haven't been fixed (meaning that the underlying structure or Linden Labs is unable/unwilling to change in ways necessary to solve these issues).

But the biggest difference between the web and SL is that a company could pretty much entirely control their website. They could own the server, write all of the webpages/scripts, etc. In SL, you're always reliant on Linden labs, which is in one sense, the unaccountable government that lords over the grid. This could change now that they're open sourcing the server. But at that point, I would argue that it's not SL anymore. Until now, SL has really been a service, and not a software package.

So it's not to say that no companies can find a use for a 3D based, open-ended, "virtual world" software platform. Just that the service that Linden Labs offered and called SL has not been well suited to the business related projects of the sort of scale that would justify the resources needed to develop it.

Re:Angles of angels

[Ravon Rodriguez]

If you think about it, though, the whole point of an income tax is to take a cut from every transfer of currency from one person to the next. (One person's income is another's expenditure.) By performing most of the exchanges in Lindon Dollars one can avoid being taxed at every point along the way.

I think you may have just made a compelling argument for the taxation of virtual goods. wtg :p

Re:Angles of angels

[JesseMcDonald]

If you think about it, though, the whole point of an income tax is to take a cut from every transfer of currency from one person to the next. (One person's income is another's expenditure.) By performing most of the exchanges in Lindon Dollars one can avoid being taxed at every point along the way.

I think you may have just made a compelling argument for the taxation of virtual goods. wtg :p

I guess that depends on which side you're on. If you want to be consistent you'd either have to tax virtual goods every time they change hands, or eliminate the income tax for "real-world" exchanges as well. I'd argue for the latter on the grounds that the income tax is inconsistent (among other reasons, not least of which is an ethical objection to taxation as a variant of armed robbery). For example, in barter you only pay a percentage of the difference between the market values of what you received and what you gave up, but in a transaction involving labor and currency you aren't allowed to offset the market value of your labor against the currency you received in exchange.

Re:Angles of angels

[JesseMcDonald]

Let me know when I can download some tasty, nutritious iFood and I'll be all over it.

You can buy food online and have it shipped to you. I chose music on purpose, since it can be exchanged entirely online and still has a real-world value associated with it, but there's no reason why you couldn't substitute any physical good purchased in Lindon Dollars through a Second Life storefront.

Re:Angles of angels

[joshv]

You are incorrect. The IRS has a section of their website dedicated to debunking these sorts of claims:

http://www.irs.gov/taxpros/article/0,,id=159932,00 .html

I believe you will find reference to 5 different cases that disprove your assertion.

Re:Angles of angels

[2short]

"in barter you only pay a percentage of the difference between the market values of what you received and what you gave up"

You're taxed on income. It's really pretty straight forward...

"an ethical objection to taxation as a variant of armed robbery"

Oh, we're talking at that level of abstraction... Well, since on a fundsamental level, everything is mine (I called it) your owning property in the first place is a form of armed robbery. Please give my stuff back.

Re:Angles of angels

[pclminion]

If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.

Maybe, maybe not. To me it looks like currency conversion. If I take 50 euros and convert to US dollars, I don't get taxed on "earnings." If Linden dollars can be directly traded for real world goods, then they are a currency just like any other, and converting them into dollars is not the same thing as "earning income."

Of course, it's a two way street. If Linden dollars are viewed as a legitimate currency (which really depends on whether people believe it is or not), then they should probably be subject to real taxation.

Re:Angles of angels

[mrchaotica]

Court cases notwithstanding, there are those who argue that income tax is unconstitutional because the 16th Amendment was never actually properly ratified.

Re:Angles of angels

[omeomi]

Maybe, maybe not. To me it looks like currency conversion. If I take 50 euros and convert to US dollars, I don't get taxed on "earnings."

True, but that's only if you already owned the 50 Euros. If you start the game by buying L$1000, and decide you hate the game and cash it out for US Dollars, there's been no income, so you owe no tax. If, however, you start the game by buying L$1000, and you invest in some money-making opportunity, making another L$1000, and cashing it out for US Dollars, you do, in fact, have to pay taxes on the income. I would argue that, provided you never cash out your Linden dollars for real currency, you've made no real income, and don't have to pay taxes on it, but if you embark in any activity that earns you more real money than you started with, you're supposed to pay taxes on it. Whether or not you actually pay taxes is up to you, but I think the law is pretty clear here.

Re:Angles of angels

[cruachan]

So true. There are places in SL where you can rent a video then watch it on an in-world TV set

A while ago I spent a fun hour with my avatar sitting on a couch with friends watching a ridiculous thai martial arts film in SL doing precisely all the wisecracking that you'd do in RL. If the money is earned inworld, and spent inworld on entertainment, that's a whole work/purchase cycle completely outside the tax loop.

Not to mention questions over precisely what was happening with the movie - public viewing?

Re:Angles of angels

[joshv]

The link I provided debunks this argument as well.

The simple fact of the matter is that no court in the US will take these arguments seriously. If you don't pay taxes, and are caught, you will pay the consequences. There is not a single example of any person who has successfully applied one of these frivolous arguments to avoid prosecution and or conviction under US tax law.

Re:Angles of angels

[omeomi]

there are those who argue that income tax is unconstitutional because the 16th Amendment was never actually properly ratified.

You can find someone who will argue just about anything...

Re:Angles of angels

[TekPolitik]

If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.

Actually, if you're earning significant numbers of Linden Dollars your earnings may already be taxable even without converting them to hard currency. This will almost certainly be the case for anybody operating as a real estate mogul in SL - each transaction will be a tax event. It will depend on a lot of factors, but if you're setting out to make money out of SL your earnings there will be taxable and they will be taxed according to the time of each transaction, not according to when you convert the assets to hard currency.

Re:Angles of angels

[jejones]

>I always wondered what the point of Second Life was. I don't get it at all. Going to a virtual world and playing a character? I understood that was the venue of Everquest and World of Warcraft.

Nope. SL isn't like those. There aren't hit points, or spells to cast (unless you're in the universe of Rick Cook's Wiz Zumwalt stories), or monsters to kill, and there's no final boss to kill off. Somebody else defines the goals of those games.

SL is what you make of it. It's only a game in the sense of the discussion at the end of David Gerrold's _When HARLIE Was One_.

Re:Angles of angels

[DeepHurtn!]

...not least of which is an ethical objection to taxation as a variant of armed robbery

You know, you're free to leave whatever country you happen to be in (somehow I suspect you're from the States). Perhaps you actually enjoy the benefits in living in a stable *society* funded through taxes?

Seriously. You're *choosing* to live where you are: a more or less democratic society that provides a certain set of services. These services are funded through taxes and are essential to keep a modern economy afloat. Things like upholding the property laws which some people think are absolute or god-given.

And you really are free to leave (well, practically you're limited by *where you'd go* -- there's a lotta people on this planet and I hear most cool places already have dibs called on them!). So how is that at all like armed robbery? If you like the tax-funded society you're living in, stick around. Get involved. And not just by voting, but by joining a political party, going to meetings, writing letters, speaking at your union, whatever. Maybe you do these things already, I don't know...but taxes really aren't anything at all like armed robbery.

Re:Angles of angels

[FLEB]

What about the fact, though, that you're not buying the money from and selling the money to the same people? (Anyone?)

Re:Angles of angels

[CronoCloud]

There aren't hit points, or spells to cast (unless you're in the universe of Rick Cook's Wiz Zumwalt stories),

backslash emacs artoodetoo.lsl exe

The emacs spell is too bloated, he should use vi/vim.

And for those who haven't read them, the books are good reads. Read the first two via the library years ago, never got around to buying them. Thanks for reminding me of them. ahh, the first two are available as free downloads at Baen. Cool!

http://www.baen.com/library/rcook.htm

Re:Angles of angels

[geminidomino]

I always wondered what the point of Second Life was. I don't get it at all. Going to a virtual world and playing a character? I understood that was the venue of Everquest and World of Warcraft. Not exactly.

EQ and WoW let you play a game. There's little role-playing ("playing a character") involved. Very much like a graphical MUD.

Second Life is more like a graphical MUSH. The difference is subtle in definition, but night and day in experience.

Re:Angles of angels

[real gumby]

I don't know about getting iHamburgers, but I have been lead to understand that Second Life is full of tasty hot grits!

Re:Angles of angels

[giorgiofr]

taxes really aren't anything at all like armed robbery The gov't pays people to kill me if I don't pay my taxes. In what way exactly is that different than armed robbery, exactly?
Somehow I suspect you're a parasite.

Re:Angles of angels

[lanswitch]

You can find someone who will argue just about anything...

No, that's not true.

Re:Angles of angels

[l0b0]

What if you never do sell them for real-world dollars? What if, for example, you simply take your Lindon Dollars to the (hypothetical) iTMS SL store and exchange them directly into music downloads? Of course the IRS theoretically taxes direct exchange based on the "market value" of the goods (which is 100% arbitrary), but can you imagine the overhead of trying to track all those online transfers?

Couple that with the RIAA's idea of the value of a song, and the IRS will sue you for DOS-ing their tax servers!

Re:Angles of angels

[JesseMcDonald]

You know, you're free to leave whatever country you happen to be in (somehow I suspect you're from the States). Perhaps you actually enjoy the benefits in living in a stable *society* funded through taxes? . . . Seriously. You're *choosing* to live where you are: a more or less democratic society that provides a certain set of services.

Sure, I'm free to leave. But why should I have to? I was born here; what right does anyone have to make me leave? I have as much right to be here as anyone else. Let's review:

1. I was born here through no fault or choice of my own.
2. Others institute "services" I never asked for, along with regulations ensuring they remain the sole providers of those services.
3. When the bill comes in for the services they wanted (almost certainly above the market rate, if anyone else could legally compete) they demand that I pay up.
4. If I refuse, they pay guys with guns to kidnap me and hold me without just cause, and increase the amount demanded.
5. We got by quite well enough without a federal income tax for the first hundred-plus years of this country's existance. Society would not simply collapse if the income tax were eliminated.

These services are funded through taxes and are essential to keep a modern government afloat.

There, fixed that for you.

Things like upholding the property laws which some people think are absolute or god-given.

Property rights predate government in general, and were present in the common law and privately enforced long before the United States was founded. Government does presently enforce property rights (when it's convenient for them to do so), but only because they actively prevent others from fulfilling that role. Property rights do not originate with or depend on the government.

Re:Angles of angels

[ultranova]

If I refuse, they pay guys with guns to kidnap me and hold me without just cause, and increase the amount demanded.

Yes; it is indeed a pity that you don't have a government to protect you from such criminals. But of course if you did, it would require funds to hire a police force to stop these criminals, and would likely end up taxing you to rise those funds; and then you would complain on Slashdot of how you are being billed for services you never requested.

Property rights predate government in general, and were present in the common law and privately enforced long before the United States was founded.

Government predates law. The earliest societies were ruled by the entirely arbitrary decisions of their governments, be those governments single dictators, tribal councils, or whatever. The rule of law was only introduced when society had grown to the point where the ruler couldn't oversee everything personally, and needed to delegate some of the task to his underlings.

Besides, if you have sufficient power to enforce your rules - be their property laws or anything else - on others, and do so, just how are you not a government ? Government is simply whoever has the final say in the matters, after all. This seems to be something various anti-government people fail to realize, at least judging from what they post here on Slashdot.

Government does presently enforce property rights (when it's convenient for them to do so), but only because they actively prevent others from fulfilling that role. Property rights do not originate with or depend on the government.

Property rights, as well as all other rights, originate with someone who is both capable and willing to uphold and enforce them against whoever tries to violate them. It is customary to call that someone "government".

And we have plenty of private organizations trying to enforce their own set of rules; the Mafia, for example.

Re:Angles of angels

[JesseMcDonald]

Yes; it is indeed a pity that you don't have a government to protect you from such criminals. But of course if you did, it would require funds to hire a police force to stop these criminals, and would likely end up taxing you to rise those funds . . . .

Obviously hiring a security force would require funds. The payment isn't a tax, however, unless the "security force" is the one threatening me. That's the difference between a private defense organization and a government; the government threatens you directly if you don't pay, without any prior agreement, whereas the private security force is (a) offering to protect against external threats, and (b) only demands payment in accordance with a prior defense contract you voluntarily accepted which specified in advance, among other things, the amount to be paid for the service.

Government predates law. The earliest societies were ruled by the entirely arbitrary decisions of their governments, be those governments single dictators, tribal councils, or whatever. . . .

Sure, by definition government predates law. Irrelevant, however, as the principles behind property rights -- homesteading (initial ownership by first user) and voluntary exchange, and their opposites, theft and trespass -- also predate law. The early governments merely codified the existing practices and claimed them as their own. In any event the history is less important than the fact that time and again we have seen that common-law property rights are a sound basis for resolving disputes, whereas civil-law edicts in violation of property rights serve only to create more conflict. The trend throughout history is toward more-absolute property rights, not less. It's hardly an accident that those countries with the strongest respect for property rights, and particularly those based on the system of common law, are the ones with the highest standards of living and visa-versa.

Besides, if you have sufficient power to enforce your rules - be their property laws or anything else - on others, and do so, just how are you not a government? Government is simply whoever has the final say in the matters, after all.

What I am opposed to the the use of aggression (initiation of coercion/force/violence). As far as I'm concerned "government" is any organization which claims the authority to employ aggression, which obviously includes such things as collecting taxes and making laws which interfere in the non-aggressive use of one's own property. The definition overlaps with "criminal", which is any group or individual that actually employs aggression. If a "government" does not employ aggression then I have no problem with that "government", although I wouldn't call it such myself. It's the actions and not the labels that are important.

Re:Angles of angels

[Stanistani]

No, it pays people to first remind, fine, annoy, and if you're a real hammerhead (I served on a federal jury in a tax-evasion trial) prosecute you, and if you're completely devoid of common sense, incarcerate you.

Now mind you, if at any point during this process, you point a gun at a cop, you're dead - but that's true even of a jay-walking ticket.

"The gov't pays people to kill me if I don't walk inside the lines. In what way exactly is that different than murder, exactly?"

Oh noes.

Re:Angles of angels

[ultranova]

Obviously hiring a security force would require funds. The payment isn't a tax, however, unless the "security force" is the one threatening me. That's the difference between a private defense organization and a government; the government threatens you directly if you don't pay, without any prior agreement, whereas the private security force is (a) offering to protect against external threats, and (b) only demands payment in accordance with a prior defense contract you voluntarily accepted which specified in advance, among other things, the amount to be paid for the service.

You do realize, of course, that such a security force is going to force your rules on someone - namely those "external threats" you mentioned - since otherwise it isn't going to do you any good ? You could claim that you never initiate force, only defend yourself; and that works fine until the first time there's a dispute over the ownership some piece of property. At that point, if you use your security force to enforce your claim to it, you are - from the other sides point of view - taking their property by force; in other words, stealing. And if that other guy also has a security force, and is unwilling to give up his claim, you have a war on your hands.

That's why there needs to be an impartial (as much as possible; complete objectivity is likely impossible for human beings) third party to rule on such issues. That party also must have sufficient force at its disposal to enforce its decisions, or it will simply be ignored by the lost side. The government claims monopoly on violence because the other choice is constant war; not because people are evil, but because you get situations where both sides think they're correct and neither is going to back up unles forced to.

Besides, while you may be moral enough not to use your security force to raid your neighbours food supplies even if you are facing starvation yourself, not everyone is as nice, and even a saint may be tempted if his children are starving. Those private security forces are easily turned into raiding parties, and there are no guarantees that the agreement with them stays voluntary - after all, without a government which can enforce contracts by force, just what are you going to do if your security force decides to alter the deal Darth Vader style ?

Sure, by definition government predates law. Irrelevant, however, as the principles behind property rights -- homesteading (initial ownership by first user) and voluntary exchange, and their opposites, theft and trespass -- also predate law.

No they don't. Sure, before the governments you could claim any piece of land as your own, but you had no right to it - anyone stronger than you could kick you out of it, and you had no recourse, except perhaps get your friends to help kick him out; in other words, "might makes right". It is the government which grants you a right to some piece of land and, if neccessary, backs that claim with overwhelming force. The same goes for all other possessions: without a government, they're only yours until someone stronger wants them.

The trend throughout history is toward more-absolute property rights, not less. It's hardly an accident that those countries with the strongest respect for property rights, and particularly those based on the system of common law, are the ones with the highest standards of living and visa-versa.

Those countries are also the ones with a strong central government, capable of crushing all opposition and enforcing its rules, property rights amongst others. Is that a coincidence, then ?

What I am opposed to the the use of aggression (initiation of coercion/force/violence). As far as I'm concerned "government" is any organization which claims the authority to employ aggression, which obviously i

Re:Angles of angels

[cyclop]

I want to agree with you. I'd be OK if you stop pay taxes, but also stop benefiting from all tax-payed services.

This means, when you are struck in an incident, no tax-payed ambulance will bring you at an hospital. No police will help you if you are robbed: better pay your own bodyguards and private investigator. Stay off the roads and streets, please, or pay a fee each time you walk/drive on them. Oh, and please stop voting -after all, you don't want to choose people you should pay with taxes, isn't it?

If you are ready for it, go for it, but please be coherent with your opinions.

Re:Angles of angels

[giorgiofr]

I hope you were not being sarcastic. That's EXACTLY the society I'd want to live in. It stands to reason that if one stops paying taxes, one would also stop benefitting from the so-called services that the gov't pretends to provide. I would count that as a gain, oviously.

Re:Angles of angels

[cyclop]

Are you really sure you want to live in such a society? I would hope you could try. I doubt that, unless you're some kind of tycoon, you would really love that. Especially the day that -$DEITY forbid- chance will make you economically ruined for some reason.

Re:Angles of angels

[giorgiofr]

There are ways to protect yourself from financial ruin, and I don't think you'd need to be any sort of tycoon to enjoy such society.
Think about this: the gov't forces you to buy lots of services that you don't need, don't want, or are forbidden to use. If all such services were provided by private industries, you'd only buy the ones you want, of the quality you choose. You'd save a lot because there'd be no corruption in the system, only a free market where people would be free to buy and sell as they like. No subsidies for industries whose business model is failing. No taking responsibility for other people's mistakes. Very much taking responsibility for *your* mistakes :). Heck, it might be possible to actually respect people in such society.

Re:Angles of angels

[cyclop]

There are ways to protect yourself from financial ruin

Oh really? Well, imagine you have $50.000 in your bank, and now you need all those money to pay an immediate, life-threatening chirurgical operation. Now how do you pay your bodyguards? Sure you could have a health insurance, yet I think in such a society its price will skyrocket after they know you are not healthy as you thought to be. And now, again, how do you maintain other services?

If all such services were provided by private industries, you'd only buy the ones you want, of the quality you choose.

Yes, but with all the problems of free market that, alas, is not really "free" as people thinks to be. There are monopolies. There are cartels. There are things hidden from the public. And for example, certification organization like, say, FDA, how would these work in your world? How do you enforce industries not to put mercury-contaminated fish in your supermarket? After all, you wouldn't have any police able to enforce that -every one is protecting himself with bodyguards. You get sick from mercury intoxication? Too bad, you'll pay for the hospital. And free market won't help you saying "ok, I won't choose brand X for fish anymore because has mercury": first, because it could well be that ALL brands of fish have mercury, because it is convenient for them to fish in contaminated sea; second: because you'll only notice the effects tens of years later, when it will be too late.

Free market doesn't work for people: work for marketers. It has had a hell lot of nice side effects on people, but these are just side effects, and it can work even without these effects.

No taking responsibility for other people's mistakes. Very much taking responsibility for *your* mistakes :). Heck, it might be possible to actually respect people in such society.

This I agree, but in another way. For example, I'd want smokers to pay for their heart or lung operations, since they were warned, and if they don't follow that warning, well, OK, but it's up to them to take responsibility. But it's an entirely different thing.

Re:Angles of angels

[giorgiofr]

I will only try to address a few of your points because you raise a lot of good ones but this isn't the perfect place to discuss them.
First of all you seem to be fixated on this whole bodyguard thing. I don't see people going around with bodyguards today; you seem to imply that this is because of the police keeping thugs at bay. Bad news: thugs are free to do whatever they like, the police only care about the easy targets - like me - and laws most certainly do not stop criminals. So why is it that nobody uses bodyguards? Doing away with public police services will not make the criminals crawl out of the woodwork, in fact they're walking around unmolested already. Besides, why do you keep implying that private security would cost more? Everything the public sector does costs more than private by definition, so why would the police specifically be more expensive?
Secondly, why on earth should all industries start using poisoned fish? Look around and you'll see a Mercedes, a BMW and some crappy car out there. Why is that so, even though *nobody* forces the automobile industry to differentiate its offer? And while we are at it, why is it that everyone with half a crappy job can afford a car, but at the same time the rich can buy very nice models? That's because private industries look at the market, segment their offer and then customers choose what to buy. I don't see why it should be any different for every other industry. By your reasoning, there should exists no good cars, only crappy ones.
As for free markets not working, well, you buy most things in reasonably free markets and they seem to work quite well.
Finally: how can you agree on *that*, and not on the rest? o.O
In sum: mine is a very standard anarchocapitalist position. You can read up on that on the web easily. Thanks for the civil confrontation!

Re:Angles of angels

[cyclop]

I will only try to address a few of your points because you raise a lot of good ones but this isn't the perfect place to discuss them.

True, but I can't find your email :)

you seem to imply that this is because of the police keeping thugs at bay. Bad news: thugs are free to do whatever they like, the police only care about the easy targets - like me - and laws most certainly do not stop criminals.

The whole fact that "thugs" and non-thugs exist depends on the existence of a police. Without that, me -usually not a thug by any definition- could easily poison my next-desktop collegue that I hate and get away with that. I don't do that because I know I'd be jailed and my life would be ruined. In your world, well, what bad could happen to me? His private police can put me in private jails? So, IIUC, we have a privately paid paramilitary organization, without any control, that can put me in jail for any reason (because if I can pay police to jail people killing me, why don't I end up paying it to jail people I don't like)? Would you like that? And how can't you see that such paramilitary organizations wouldn't end up to get control of anyone and build a state that -in the best of opinions- is as bad as this one?

Besides, why do you keep implying that private security would cost more? Everything the public sector does costs more than private by definition, so why would the police specifically be more expensive?

I don't think it's "by definition". A private corporation must *profit*, while a public service can happily stay at 0$ balance. Multiplying private corporations means multiplying CEO's, commercials and the like, that all end up in costs for the final buyer. These are intrinsic problems, while the problems of public sector are just mismanagement. The problem is that usually public mismanagement is so bad that private can become actually cheaper, but it's not at all "by definition".

why on earth should all industries start using poisoned fish? Look around and you'll see a Mercedes, a BMW and some crappy car out there. Why is that so, even though *nobody* forces the automobile industry to differentiate its offer?

You didn't get the fish example. Crappy food and luxury food are already offered and would be. On the other hand, you wouldn't get a taste difference between mercury-poisoned fish and not poisoned one. Problem is, a lot of fish is naturally accumulating mercury and heavy metals, and this mercury (unless in large amounts) becomes toxic by accumulation, on the scale of *years*. Fishing corporations would have no true incentive to avoid fishing on mercury contaminated seas (that are a common problem, so common that almost *all* fish sold today contains a little mercury nonetheless), without a law explicitely prohibiting them.

Coming back to your car analogy and still using heavy metals :) : I don't know in the USA, but in Europe there is a lot of legislation against the use of lead-based car fuels. (Let alone the issue that lead-free fuels can be even worse) :), but: how do you enforce that if there is no law prohibiting companies to sell cheaper lead-based fuel? The problem is not crappy or good, the problem is that sometimes action that go against market tendencies must be made for the good of the public.

As for free markets not working, well, you buy most things in reasonably free markets and they seem to work quite well.

Most of times, yes. But that's also because the public keeps it under eye. A recent example: in Italy ALL cell phone companies had the habit of charging 5 Euros of "recharge costs" for a recharge. That is, for a 25 or 50 Euro phone recharge, you paid 30 or 55 Euro. It was a definite oligopoly, and no company, even newer players, offered to avoid them: it was convenient to no one to "play hard" this way. The state had to intervene and prohibit this.

Finally: how can you agree on *that*, and not on the rest?

Harsh Realm

[HTH NE1]

GoogleLife, free virtual land -- ad supported of course.

How about applying GoogleMaps to a Second Life server, a few alterations to allow weaponry, NPCs from census data, and create your own Harsh Realm?

Re:Harsh Realm

[hotdiggitydawg]

GoogleLife, free virtual land -- ad supported of course.

How about applying GoogleMaps to a Second Life server, a few alterations to allow weaponry, NPCs from census data, and create your own Harsh Realm? ...then have the server wirelessly transmit your avatar commands to a DARPA contest vehicle fitted with a webcam and a wide range of heavy artillery, and hey presto! You've got the most realistic version of Grand Theft Auto anyone has ever seen...

N/T

[PatrickThomson]

Second life is the new IRC? I can see it happening. I propose an interface to allow people to be present in second life from an IRC client.

> look
You are in a room of user-created content. Exits are north, south, and dennis.

Re:N/T

[sammy baby]

You can't get ye user-created content!

Re:N/T

[omeomi]

look You are in a room of user-created content. Exits are north, south, and dennis.

> go north

Re:N/T

[$RANDOMLUSER]

> go north

It is very dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by glue.

Re:N/T

[omeomi]

It is very dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> light candle

Re:N/T

[bigdavex]

That's pretty darn funny. Nice post.

Re:N/T

[tsalaroth]

> eat glue

Re:N/T

[Bieeanda]

The W-Hat crew in Baku region have had a two-way IRC-SL link for ages now.

Re:N/T

[$RANDOMLUSER]

It is very dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

The topic was user-created content, so "glue" was not a typo, but an example of that, as was "...exits are...dennis".

Re:N/T

[PatrickThomson]

You are attacked by a flock of flying penises.

> duck

Re:N/T

[PatrickThomson]

It was partly in jest, but I have a history of inventing irc-to-other-crap bridges (my first big project let irc clients chat on DC hubs). I admire and use daily what bitlbee have done but one-on-one instant messaging is not the only application. I expect I might play with second life a bit.

Re:N/T

[Trevor]

I'm sorry, I don't see that here.

Re:N/T

[pyrote]

Pee in moat.

Re:N/T

[Lunar_Lamp]

Oh, sorry; You are attacked by a flock of flying ducks.

Re:N/T

[drinkypoo]

Let me get this straight, you're being attacked by a flock of flying penises, and your first instinct is to bend over?

Re:N/T

[glowworm]

Let me get this straight, you're being attacked by a flock of flying penises, and your first instinct is to bend over?

O.o ... Sure! ... =^.^= Yiffy!

Re:N/T

[Seek_1]

Just lovely... now I have coffee all over my desk. Thanks alot!!

Re:N/T

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're ejaculating coffee, it's time to cut back a few cups...

They are going to have to make it stable first

[joshv]

Distributed between two data centers, that they control, Linden Labs can't manage better than about 95%-98% uptime. Inventory items and sometimes even portions of entire sims regularly go into the bit bucket when the data centers have connectivity issues.

And to this mix we will add a heterogeneous server base, geographically dispersed, with network connections of unknown reliability?

Get ready for a Second Life experience akin to IRC in the 90s.

Re:They are going to have to make it stable first

[Carnildo]

Get ready for a Second Life experience akin to IRC in the 90s.

That's more accurate than you realize. Because of trust issues, most third-party servers won't be allowed to connect to the Linden Lab network. Instead, expect to see competing networks of servers.

Re:They are going to have to make it stable first

[Jesus_666]

We already had that with UO, RO etc... just without the network part.

It's all about the content

[savanik]

The truth is that so many people are trying to shove content down your throat in Second Life (mostly advertising, no less) that the servers just don't have the bandwidth capacity. I think that's why they're making this move - to distribute the bandwidth load among many, many users. I know I'd spend more time on Second Life if it didn't take five minutes to download 'Buy stuff NOW!!!' graphics every time I took three steps. And now we can all dream about 'how I'd run my private digital world', can't we?

Re:It's all about the content

[omeomi]

I know I'd spend more time on Second Life if it didn't take five minutes to download 'Buy stuff NOW!!!' graphics every time I took three steps.

I have to agree with this. I checked out Second Life awhile ago. I still have it installed, but I haven't gone back because the whole thing felt extremely slow and clumsy to me. Give me a Second Life with FPS-style speed/responsiveness, and I'll be interested...

Re:It's all about the content

[Androclese]

I could see that making sense. Linden Labs comes up with some sort of economic model where you install your own server software, supply the bandwidth, and are responsible for the patching and uptime; then you just pay a fee to make your island(s) part of their network. (Hopefully for less than the current ~$300 a month fee for leasing an entire sim). This lowers their bandwidth charges, their admin and maintenance charges, and they still have a viable income model to continue developing the software.

The biggest obstacle I can see would be figuring out a way to make the money supply come *only* from Linden Labs. Otherwise, the entire economic model within SL would collapse in a heartbeat.

Re:It's all about the content

[Lord Lemur]

This is actully akin to something I have long wondered. I'm certain there is a technical limitation I don't grasp, but most of this "lag" is actully a combination of true network latency and bandwith and frame rate issues. Most MMO's run into frame rate issues because they seem to go for tons of extra sexy textures. However after graphics cards get all the models for an area loaded up, the textures, the shaders, the widgets and the whatsits it seems that frankly, there aren't cards out which have enough RAM. For well optimized games... well the better optimized games this isn't a big issue. SL of course is a sand box, and is filled with crap, and because of this you can't put all those "BUY IT NOW" banners, furries and digitized emorphous genitals into video ram. The question remains, if a company like the guys who make KillerNIC can survive off fringe hardware, why hasn't some one produced graphics card that can address say 4GB of RAM, and sold them for a crack-smoking sum. It doesn't have to be top shelf in Operations per second, it just has to get around making hard drive / network / RAM calls all the time. Seems like with that much RAM to play with you could buffer on the fly for a pretty big area.

More on topic however, I imagine that they have a scenerio in which they can control the central database and use teleporters to move between Linden and Trusted 3rd-party servers. At this point the probably just want to be the PayPal of digitized emorphous genitals. Possibly integrating other features like streaming / selling media (Linden Movie Co!) and providing a "Brick and Mortor" store for every giant corporation and taking .001% every time you buy something on servers hosted by some one else.

Oh and micro-loans, so you can buy new digitized emorphous genitals.
Just my .02 Linden.

Re:It's all about the content

[daigu]

A FPS frame-rate for a glorified chat room....gotta say that I'm still not interested. It's all about the content indeed.

Re:It's all about the content

[alyawn]

It seems to me that they would use their clients as a peer network to distribute textures and content. Every client has a texture cache on disk. Why couldn't they simply act as a torrent and share the load that way. At least, don't decentralize the server infrastructure until the protocol is solid enough to handle the new modded servers.

The Street

[C. Mattix]

Does anyone else think that this could be the beginning of "The Metaverse" as envisioned by Stephenson? (see Snow Crash)

Re:The Street

[arcade]

My thoughts exactly. I started looking for my copy of Snow Crash when I read tis article.

I'm suddenly getting interested in trying out Second Life, not having been interested at all before.

This is just Cool(TM).

Re:The Street

[tsalaroth]

I had a hardcover copy of Snow Crash, and now I can't remember who borrowed it.

Damn.

Re:The Street

[brianeisley]

Agreed. The one thing standing in the way of building a real-life Metaverse was the lack of a widely used, freely available standard for creating virtual worlds (like HTML & HTTP in the early nineties). Linden is now giving us exactly that.

Just watch. As soon as the source is released, SL will explode just like the Web did in '94.

Re:The Street

[Cathoderoytube]

If by 'Metaverse' you mean my own personal world where I can ride around on a giraffe and shoot leprechauns then yes.

Re:The Street

[fbjon]

Do try it out, it somewhat interesting. Just be prepared: SL = Slow Life, or Sluggish Life.

Re:The Street

[Anonymous Coward]

The 90's called, they want their M*s back.

Seriously, SL is nothing new, everything old, and fairly bad at that. Lag is horrible, vast swaths of the world are entirely unpopulated (really wondering how they calculate their user statistics, heh) and everything's ugly. ...Then again, I'm apparently talking out of my arse, because I've just realized I've described MySpace, and we all know how popular that's gotten with the dumbass crowd.

Re:The Street

[vorlich]

Well, present company very respectfully excepted, the rest of us are either waiting for/or want to be The Dixie Flatline or that incredibly romantic (in the 18th century meaning of the word) Bobby Newmark.
Interupt
Decrement to zero.

Re:The Street

[Anonymous Coward]

The Web (and in a vaguer sense, the Internet, and before that... well, there's not much point to keep tracing things back much further) was the beginning of the Metaverse. Second Life is a proprietary dead end, like CompuServe or AOL. Now that it's open source just makes it another dead end, like the Netscape 4 or Pueblo code bases.

The Metaverse isn't going to come out of SL, although it could be inspired by it. What will bring about the Metaverse are open standards, designed around open networks, like HTML/HTTP were for the Web. Simply open sourcing SL isn't going to do that. I've been interested in the idea for a long time, but I've never been interested in having SL's code, simply because it was never designed to be opened. You have a whole host of new issues introduced when you try to build a network that scales to a distributed system, both in terms of managing authority and resources. SL isn't going to be that base, but its probable failure will serve as a lesson for the next system that does work, as the Web replaced proprietary online services, and Mozilla replaced Netscape 4.

Second Life will survive for a long time. But you're not going to have a thriving global system spring up from the work of a single company, or individual. Tim Berners-Lee may have invented the Web, but the Web as we know it today was created by a wide swath of individuals, not all working in some lab at CERN.

Re:The Street

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to wait til "Mr Slippery" contacted me...

don't forget the roots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=True_Nam es&oldid=116683982Vernor Vinge
And in case you've never read it...
http://home.comcast.net/~kngjon/truename/truename. htmlThe novella

- the mailman

Re:The Street

[SirTalon42]

LL is working to move SL to standard protocols (a lot of which will have to be newly created, since in a lot of ways theres nothing equivalent that they could use).

Re:The Street

[yeggman]

Absolutely, I had been discussing with friends that if Second Life remained a closed system it would eventually get left behind, very similar to the Internet and early private networks like AOL.
Now that they have gone open, I don't see why it couldn't become Stephenson's metaverse.

Re:The Street

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The one thing standing in the way of building a real-life Metaverse was the lack of a widely used, freely available standard for creating virtual worlds (like HTML & HTTP in the early nineties).

1996 called, they want their VRML hype back.

Re:The Street

[maxume]

Vrml? (It might not have been widely used, but it was available...in 1994)

Re:The Street

[brianeisley]

Very true. But back then the average home machine didn't have the power for 3D rendering. And, on top of that, we were all on dialup. Now, with broadband connections and decent video cards, there is a far better infrastructure in place.

Re:The Street

[tsdw]

Apparantly you didn't know that 'snow crash' was the inspiration for SL? It is the metaverse as far as our current technology can work

Re:The Street

[Anonymous Coward]

YTMND 3D ?

Oh and while you're doing that

[Mateo_LeFou]

Could someone build at least one world in which you purchase "land" based on the power/CPU requirements of the land, rather than its (virtual) area.

The "necessity" of getting a return on your per-square-meter fees causes SL to be overtaken by casinos and brothels. Make the fee dependent on something of actual economic value.

Just thinking aloud, don't have time to do it myself

Re:Oh and while you're doing that

[Trevor]

Don't worry, the market will soon sort that out.

I didn't need to see that

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet the developers even submitted the code to thedailywtf.com themselves.

Croquet?

[drinkypoo]

I would ask those actually excited by this announcement to please inspect Croquet, a collaborative, three-dimensional framework for cooperative computing that is built atop Squeak, the modern implementation of Smalltalk by Alan Kay and others.

Croquet is Open and Free now. It's in its early stages, but so is second life.

I don't know if Croquet is an excellent choice for building a metaverse, but I'm pretty sure it's a better choice than Second Life.

Re:Croquet?

[Temporal]

Err... I'm afraid not. Take a look at Croquet's design. It's an old fashion P2P protocol in which each user forwards only their inputs (e.g. keypresses) over the network to other users. Every user must run the full simulation locally, making total network traffic and resource usage O(n^2) with the number of users.

This cannot scale to more than a handful of users. Croquet's design is fundamentally incapable of being "massively multiplayer". I would say that that makes it not "a better choice than Second Life" in quite a few cases.

(Never mind the fact that Second Life is a huge, proven, production system with hundreds of thousands of users whereas Croquet is an academic experiment.)

Re:Croquet?

[RobertLTux]

im sorry but this porject has gone exactly no where from day 1
(speaking as a person that has a copy of Atmosphere (beta testers edition) which would have by now cremated SL There and most likely everything)

Re:Croquet?

[drinkypoo]

Never mind the fact that Second Life is a huge, proven, production system with hundreds of thousands of users whereas Croquet is an academic experiment.

An experiment much more likely to be successful and to evolve beyond its current limitations with a larger userbase. Hence my plea.

Re:Croquet?

[BeBoxer]

It's an old fashion P2P protocol in which each user forwards only their inputs (e.g. keypresses) over the network to other users. Every user must run the full simulation locally, making total network traffic and resource usage O(n^2) with the number of users.

No, that doesn't appear correct. From the very page you linked to "In Croquet, each simulation has one router designated on the network. All inputs are sent to the router, and never directly to the simulation running on the machine on which the input is made. The router puts its own timestamp on the message and sends it out to everyone." I'm pretty sure that makes it O(n), not O(n^2). Twice as many clients means twice as many packets on the network, not four times as many.

Re:Croquet?

[DragonWriter]

No, that doesn't appear correct. From the very page you linked to "In Croquet, each simulation has one router designated on the network. All inputs are sent to the router, and never directly to the simulation running on the machine on which the input is made. The router puts its own timestamp on the message and sends it out to everyone." I'm pretty sure that makes it O(n), not O(n^2). Twice as many clients means twice as many packets on the network, not four times as many.

I'm pretty sure its O(n^2): while all the messages get sent to the router, the router then sends them to everyone. The number of messages received by the router is proportional to the number of users, the number of copies of each it has to send out is equal to the number of users, so the total traffic is O(n^2) with the number of users.

OTOH, no one, here at least, has presented any reason to think that having network traffic that is O(n^2) in the number of users makes Croquet worse than Second Life.

Re:Croquet?

[bpb213]

um... Eww. We had to do a Squeek 3d map of campus during school, and it was painfully slow...

Re:Croquet?

[Temporal]

If N users each send packets at a constant rate R, then the number of packets received by the router is N*R. Since the router forwards every packet received to all users, the number of packets *sent* is then N*N*R. It's O(N^2).

Also, if we assume the total resources needed to run the simulation is O(N), and each user is running their own copy, then the total computing resources being used is O(N^2). More importantly, since a typical client machine is certainly far less powerful than a typical MMO serving cluster, and since it has to do other computationally-intensive things like render graphics, it's clear that this strategy cannot scale to typical MMO player counts.

Re:Croquet?

[Temporal]

OTOH, no one, here at least, has presented any reason to think that having network traffic that is O(n^2) in the number of users makes Croquet worse than Second Life.

It makes Croquet incapable of handling player counts as large as Second Life. If your goal is to create an MMO environment, Croquet would clearly be inferior. If your goal is something else, maybe not.

Re:Croquet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sounds about right. I think it's omega(n), isn't it? But of course that's a very unlikely case for an interactive system.

The alternative that's being discussed isn't really P2P as that term is currently used. It's a fully connected mesh, whereas P2P is only partially connected, and they have (AFAIK) vastly different performance characteristics. I think (but I could be wrong) that a fully connected mesh is O(n^n)! Blecch. I think well implemented P2P has O(log n).

Re:Croquet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it appears that it's not that bad. The maximum content that a client will have to handle is restricted to an "Island", the local interaction space. Islands can also contain portals to other islands and proxies for objects in those other islands.

They seem reasonably confident that it will easily scale to MMORPG levels, and given those involved, I'm hesitant to doubt them without a more thorough examination. The biggest problem I can see for that application is the amount of trust clients seem to have.

Re:Croquet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see. Are you saying that Second Life's network algorithm has a computational complexity of less than O(n^2)? I'm perplexed how that can really be, as they're based on a centralised server architecture.

Re:Croquet?

[Temporal]

I'm assuming:
1) The amount of bandwidth and computational resources needed to support one user are roughly proportional to the number of other users in that user's vicinity (e.g. the number of other users which are visible and thus need to be updated in the user's client).
2) The average number of users in the vicinity of any one other user is roughly constant.

Point (2) can be achieved by growing the world as the number of users increases, which should only require O(n) resources (on the server) to do.

With these assumptions, I see the server being O(n) and each client being O(1), for a total of O(n).

Re:Croquet?

[ethernode]

It may be an "old-fashioned" p2p, but SL has nothing P2P (except, maybe, internally, more something like clustering among their server farms). I'd add that croquet is considering adding DHT-based fixed/slowly-changing content delivery. The distributed router is a huge challenge too (partly related to NAT issues), but this may change in the future. As far as i know, it may be the only one computation replication peer to peer application...

Plus, croquet doesn't concentrate on massiveness, but emphasizes local collaborative islands. Just try the croquet collaborative demo, and you'll see things that make you say "hey? THIS is weird, but cool !". The MMORPG aspect may come handy on top of these islands.

SL is appearance-driven
Croquet is collaboration-driven

I guess the metaverse will come true when the various instances of 3D virtual worlds become interoperable.

Re:Croquet?

[johnnyoxford]

Perhaps you should take a look at the design. You clearly didn't, because you got it totally wrong. Read the manual. There is a complete description of the TeaTime architecture that Croquet uses and it does not match your description.

Re:Croquet?

[johnnyoxford]

Check out Qwaq Forums - an enterprise class collaboration application built on top of Croquet.

Re:Croquet?

[DragonWriter]

It makes Croquet incapable of handling player counts as large as Second Life.

Certainly, assuming (as someone has since guessed) that Second Life is effectively O(n) in number of players, that would certainly be true at some number of participants, and would seem likely to be true at a level that would be practically significant, too, though there is no guarantee of that. When I said no one had presented reason to believe SL was superior, I particularly meant that no one presented or linked to an overview of the SL architecture to make the comparison.

Re:Croquet?

[DragonWriter]

Also, if we assume the total resources needed to run the simulation is O(N), and each user is running their own copy, then the total computing resources being used is O(N^2). More importantly, since a typical client machine is certainly far less powerful than a typical MMO serving cluster, and since it has to do other computationally-intensive things like render graphics, it's clear that this strategy cannot scale to typical MMO player counts.

I'm not sure that's as clear as you think it is. The suggestion that "typical" MMOs or SL are O(N) seems to be based on the model that the client is O(1) since the complexity there is based on the number of objects in close proximity, which doesn't vary with the number of users in the overall simulation, and that the server complexity is O(N) in the number of users. This, of course, suggests that the amount of virtual real estate must scale with the number of users, and clearly breaks down in the case of places where everyone wants to be (unless there are users-per-area caps imposed).

OTOH, Croquet "Islands", which seem to be O(N^2) with the number of local clients, are not necessarily closed universes. They can communicate with external objects, including other Croquet Islands. Assuming a complete MMO universe is made up of a set of Croquet Islands which each correspond roughly to a land area, communicating with the neighbors to provide continuity, but not passing "broadcast" messages beyond their neighbors, you would seem to get a system that is overall O(N) in number of users, segmented into a number of Islands proportional to the total number of users. And, while it faces potentially dramatic slowdown if the user (or, perhaps more generally, object) load isn't distributed equally among Islands but instead concentrated in popular Islands, regular MMOs seem likely to face the same problems.

I don't think there is any practical solution to the environments where users interact being O(N^2) fundamentally, and only avoiding that through some kind of segmentation—each observer has to have their own rendering of the environment, and that rendering is likely to be at best O(N) in the number of objects in the environment, which in turn is probably proportional to the number of users in the environment. Any MMO solution has to segment the environment so that each users environment isn't really all that massively multiplayer to get effective O(N) scaling. But that seems to be possible in Croquet, though the method of segmentation may be different than in other MMO systems.

Re:Croquet?

[DragonWriter]

Worst case, though, in that case is O(n^2), not O(n), unless you have an O(1) algorithm for reassigning users "perception area" based on crowding.

Re:Croquet?

[Temporal]

The page I linked to says precisely this:

More specifically, Croquet runs every simulation locally. Everyone's executing on a computer, so if you give them all the same inputs at the same time, then you get the same results. This uses only local processing. The only thing that travels over the wire is the inputs: You type a key. I move my mouse. The other guy clicks.

If this is not, in fact, how Croquet works, then they should update their documentation.

good step

[freg]

This sounds like another key step to making the web how some had originally envisioned it. Back in the day when VRML was born there was the idea of creating virtual worlds where we walk to a clothing store like we would in 'first life', of course the technology wasn't quite there yet... Now with Second Life we're a hair closer but as long as proprietaryness is in the way that's just one more silly road block. Personally I want a Google Earth version of second life so I can travel the world and see a decent recreation of it made with actual photos and 3d satellite imagery, I also want to recreate my college campus and attend class virtually...

Re:good step

[sohare]

I have a bit of unfortunate news. Even if you can see a virtually rendered part of the world it still doesn't mean you've been there. There is a lot more to an experience than the visual cues.

Pessemists start your engines

[Danathar]

I predict we'll see all sorts of "glass half-empty" posts about this.

Guess what? Why not think of the "positive" aspects of this instead of taking a big steaming dump on it?

Re:Pessemists start your engines

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you're not exactly being positive yourself...

Re:Pessemists start your engines

[Logic and Reason]

Why not think of the "positive" aspects of this instead of taking a big steaming dump on it?

You're new here, aren't you?

Re:Pessemists start your engines

[Danathar]

No..but pissing a pessimist off feels good

Re:Pessemists start your engines

[Howserx]

Better to be pissed off then pissed on.

Cool! A Minnie Driver/Anne Hathaway love scene.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> The Social Web asks: 'who will be the first to offer Second Life hosting
> or use the server code for their own infernal purposes?

Fixed it for you!

Would the strike tag really kill things around here?

only thing left

[Chris whatever]

the onlt thing left is my fiber optic jack in my cranium and my Vr helmet.

Re:only thing left

[imageek]

If you have a fiber jack in your cranium, why do you need a VR helmet on it?

You're forgetting

[Anonymous Coward]

one detail... Second Life is intuitive and FUN to play with.

Re:You're forgetting

[SScorpio]

You haven't actually tried playing it have you?

Linden labs not in it to make money

[Danathar]

Those of you who can't understand ANY motivation if it does not involve making money will have a hard time even considering this possibility.

I've had the sneaking suspicion that Linden Labs may not be a for-profit company in that their goal is to get rich and IPO.

My conspiracy theory is that the people who are funding Linden Labs, primarily Bezos and other Internet rich boys with cash set up Linden Labs to PRIMARILY develop and get the tech of a 3d world into wide use. Then their companies (Amazon for instance which is ALREADY working heavily in SL) utilize it in their buisness.

My inconclusive evidence?

1. They just don't seem interested in IPOing, when asked it's not really a priority. If you are going to IPO you do it when the hype is big.

2. They are open sourcing the client and server. If you were going to make money you'd charge a small but significant fee. Open sourcing the whole thing makes no sense. No, I don't think they are going the sendmail or mysql model by providing "consulting services". They don't seem interested in that either.

3. In their own Ego driven way somebody like Bezos could change the world. Ego inflation feels great!

So there..poopoo on it all you want. Not everything in the world is primarily motivated by money and profit.

Re:Linden labs not in it to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not so sure. I think it's a last ditch effort to boost their users. I mean they have been spamming the hell out of SL for the last couple months/years and I don't think it has worked. They just never got critical mass for their system.

The thing is, while many people have checked it out, not many have stayed. Like Vonage they must have a huge turnover rate because eventually people realize that compared to alternatives it sucks. SL seemed pretty damn buggy (both in terms of performance and plain bugs) the times I tried it. The development environment sucked too. It doesn't have value as a game so you're left with "Why am I wasting time with this?"

Maybe eventually we will see something like Second Life take off but I hope it isn't SL unless they do a major rewrite.

Re:Linden labs not in it to make money

[alienmole]

So there..poopoo on it all you want. Not everything in the world is primarily motivated by money and profit.

Um... you're saying that billionaires like Bezos might be funding a company so that their companies can use its product for their businesses, presumably to make more profit. So how is this not primarily motivated by money and profit again?

Re:Linden labs not in it to make money

[CronoCloud]

Define critical mass, theres 4 - 5 times the number of simultaneious users now than when I joined back in July and about 15 - 16 times as many as a year ago. The number of residents is over 7 times as many today as when I joined.

Re:Linden labs not in it to make money

[Acer500]

Those of you who can't understand ANY motivation if it does not involve making money will have a hard time even considering this possibility.
Indeed, my first thought was that it doesn't make much sense from a financial point of view.

They'll have to rely on the network effect from now on, and woe of them if someone manages to make a better implementation than what they have currently.

On the other hand, that would require substantial resources, and it's likely those hypothetical others would rather have their own code, and I'm not ruling out Open Source or peer-to-peer, even if that is an option, it still applies (see the comments about some OSS implementations above)

Re:Linden labs not in it to make money

[Lumpy]

then why is it designed wrong?

It should be very much like webservers. the "world" is basically the DNS. IF I add in a server it should pop up as a doorway on one of the streets on the main world and if someone comes looking into my server they then when they enter my doorway jump to my server.

They are hell bent on making it a closed server system and that is not cool.

make it like web servers are right now. Anyone can plop one online and the doorway shows up on the main street or visible on a search engine and then you grab the window with the results and it takes you to the doorway, JUST like httpd, search engines, etc work.

They do not want to do that, these guys are not interested in complete freedom.

Re:Linden labs not in it to make money

[Danathar]

I guess you missed the big capital letters "PRIMARILY"

Re:Linden labs not in it to make money

[alienmole]

I didn't miss it, I just didn't think you made your case. Your theory seems to be all about profit in the end, which makes it seem like the PRIMARY issue.

Re:Linden labs not in it to make money

[Gwyneth_Llewelyn]

Danathar, I tend to agree with you on the primary interest of Linden Lab. Bezos (Amazon), and Omidyar (eBay), or even Kapor (Mozilla), early supporters of Linden Lab, have a completely different approach to Internet-based businesses: they're willing to wait a decade and grow hugely, well before they start to make serious profits.

Second Life may have close to 6 million accounts these days, but that's still "small". Sure, by the end of 2007, Second Life, completely disregarded by popular MMOG sites just two years ago, will have more valid accounts than the mega-monster World of Warcraft, always a reference in popularity. By the end of 2008, it'll have more users than most states in the US or countries in Europe. By the end of 2009 it will reach that comfortable plateaux that all Internet start-ups dream about: the "magic" 150-million-user-mark, something that MySpace, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, or YouTube all have, and that gives everybody the notion that they will be around forever (how many users does Slashdot have, btw?). So that's the goal for Second Life, and Linden Lab (and others!) will try all strategies that can further that goal. Until then, no, there won't be IPOs or selling out -- Linden Lab's investors don't "need" money, but they most certainly "want" to have a huge stake in defining the platform that will run the Metaverse.

In effect, and further substanciating Danathar's claims, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that Linden Lab's venture capitalists are pretty cool-headed about the way they want to make money out of it. Squeezing out every possible cent out of Linden Lab right now to get a handful of million dollars, for people who have a few billions (directly owned or indirectly), is really a bad, bad business move. They're much smarter than that. The "competition" that may or may not appear will have to "fight" not only on the technology level (easier) but on the whole mentality and corporate approach. They have to be very long runners and not "hit-and-run" investors. Remember the lesson of Google: they survived the Internet bubble with very-long-term thinking. The bubble came and go, and Google started earnestly to grow like crazy after the bubble burst -- while the competition (Altavista?) was left behind, trying to figure out what went wrong with their business models.

So we'll need to look at what LL's investors are really after. Philip Rosedale, obviously, is after the fame and glamour -- he doesn't care about the money, it's really something he doesn't need -- he has plenty of it and is not greedy. After all, he could still be in the streaming business (having invented the technology) and launch, say, a profitable YouTube competitor, instead of risking everything on something that nobody knew, back in 1999 when he started, if there was already a "market" for it. Now it's easy to see there is one, but we also know that from the almost 6 million users, less than 100 thousand pay anything for using the service, and Linden Lab has to be a very small and lean operation to survive on just that. In fact, the overall investment in Linden Lab is trivially low, when compared to, say, a low-end game developed by an independent company. They're barely above the red line, and will continue to do so, by exploring different ways of achieving the same goal -- outsourcing technical support, outsourcing most of the grid, open sourcing software, establishing agreements with third parties to manage bits of their infrastructure while focusing mostly on their technology. All that to keep growing exponentially and hit the mystical 150-million-users mark before anyone else does, and hopefully in a couple of years.

Once they reach that plateaux -- without IPOs, without additional funding, without selling out to Microsoft or Google -- they will be in a position to dictate the rules, unquestionably. They already have strong ties to corporations like IBM to support their vision of the Metaverse. Yes, it's very likely that the "next" grid will be r

Visual MUD

[Wilson_6500]

This is a great idea. Hopefully someday something like this will lead to a free (or at least low-cost), user-generated, small-scale MUD for use by us small-time friends-only PnP-type role-players. It wouldn't need to be much more than a sort of visual IRC that can be run on a private server so that "spectators" don't drop by.

(Have a sort of RPGMaker-like toolkit for making custom effects and stuff would be nice, but I'm not holding out _that_ much hope.)

Re:Visual MUD

[ibecker]

This already exists: Neverwinter Nights by Bioware has been out for five years, and allows precisely this level of world-building and adventuring. Additionally, NWN2 (from Obsidian) came out last fall, with increased capabilities and graphics, but it's still pretty rough around the edges.

-Ian

Re:Visual MUD

[Wilson_6500]

Yeah, except that people have to purchase NWN, and I don't want to reshape my non-DND campaign around DND spells and classes and stuff if we did decide to put in some actual RP gameplay. From what I can tell, the scripting and modeling tools that SL uses should be much simpler than trying to make models and stuff to import into NWN, too.

Don't be an idiot

[jmorris42]

> After all, at first I imagine many companies failed to see the relevance of a corporate website.
> They may never have imagined hiring someone specifically for managing it: let alone an entire staff for some.

Huh? A simple minded idiot could see the potential for webpages the first time they saw one. For corporations, governments, individuals, anybody. Instant communication with a mass audience for close to no incremental cost. As soon as a critical mass of web users existed the one time cost to covert materials was a no brainer, witness the WWW of today.

At the time the web was invented companies were already spending good money maintaining complicated faxback services to distribute documents, millions and millions on telephone support operations, public relations departments, etc. To the extent any/all of those operations could be replaced or supplemented by web service the cost savings and efficiences over existing practices were clearly obvious. And many of the totally new ways of interracting with customers, potential customers, stockholders, analysts, the press, etc. we now take for granted were immediatly obvious.

Now compare and contrast to Second Life. Fancy virtual 'press conferences?' Not seeing too many advantages of tech support via SL. Explain what SL brings to the table other than media buzz for being a 'hip' company setting up a SL presence?

Re:Don't be an idiot

[cmacb]

Huh? A simple minded idiot could see the potential for webpages the first time they saw one.

You obviously have dealt with a better class of simple minded idiots than I have.

Re:Don't be an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

define "first time they saw one."

Did your simple minded idiot see their first website in 2000 or 1990?

Progression is always logical in retrospect.

Re:Don't be an idiot

[MontyApollo]

There is still a very huge number of companies out there that see no value in a website. Where I live, it seems like the majority of non-chain restaurants do not have a webpage, so you cannot look up their menu. I'm repeatedly wanting to check some business's webpage for more info only to find they do not have one.

Re:Don't be an idiot

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

Theoretically, what can a website offer which a Virtual Reality can not also offer?

Re:Don't be an idiot

[2short]

"Did your simple minded idiot see their first website in 2000 or 1990?"

If a simple minded idiot saw their first website in 1990, they must have been a simple-minded-particle-physicist-idiot working at CERN, since the web was first publicly accessible in mid 91.

That said, I (who may or may not be a simple minded idiot) first saw a website in 93. At that point, support for images was little more than a rumor, and Gopher dwarfed http in deployed base. Yet it was immediately clear to me that the web would be the dominant form of internet content delivery in short order. On the other hand, the idea that everyday un-geeky people would have heard of the web, much less see it as the natural, obvious way to get info from entirely un-tech-oriented organizations only a few years later was certainly not obvious.

Re:Don't be an idiot

[Lil'wombat]

Back in 93 at the U of M IO got my Gopher-Space T-Shirt listing all of the Gopher Server installs around the world.

I wonder if they wrote it in COBOL?

Re:Don't be an idiot

[Jellybob]

Where are you living? It sounds like it's time to open up a web design shop in the area.

It makes total sense

[unity100]

Just check out Ultima Online.

Ea hadnt been cramping on anyone who is running devised versions of their server in different emulator communities, and as a result there are zillions of free ultima online servers around and zillions of people playing in those. Despite the fact that there are also a goodly number of servers that are letting people play uo with them for a monthly fee.

But, almost all of them who keep on playing ultima online cease playing on free servers and goes signs up with osi, uo's official server at some later point.

this is due to the fact that, inevitably mishaps this or that way happens in those non-official uo servers, your account gets deleted, your items get lost, features never get completed to reflect entirety of osi's service and such. so, sooner or later players who really get hooked up with up get fed up, and go sign up for an osi account.

this is the only thing that has been keeping ultima online running for that long a time from 1994-5 to now, despite the fact that it was so outdated even 1-2 years after it came out.

second life is following in its footsteps. they are going to open source everything, let everyone run a sl server, and when people who are playing in those servers come face to face with bugs, issues, mismanagement problems etc (note that running an 3 d online world server is much more demanding than running an uo server), they will do what ? go for the real thing instead, and go sign up with SL in its original source.

simple as hell. fantastic marketing tactic.

Re:It makes total sense

[Adambomb]

Ding Ding Ding.

This is also the exact reason why i get a little annoyed with Second Life being seen as such an innovation. The larger chunk of the people still playing UO, especially on the OSI servers, use it in essentially the same way. It has become much more of a graphical IRC than the game it was originally (especially with the death of unregulated [read: player regulated] pvp).

This concept wasnt even new when UO came out, remember such things as Meridian 59? MUD's? granted MUD's werent graphical but it was still a virtual representation of physical space and social contact.

Not that I see second life's engine becoming available as OSS as a bad thing, but can someone out there point out to me what Second Life has done that is so innovative in this medium? I can see the value of popularizing virtual contact, especially for such things as telecommute meetings and Seaquest DSV flashbacks, but i dont see the technological innovation that everyone seems to be praising them for.

Re:It makes total sense

[Angostura]

It's an interesting idea, unfortunately, given Linden's record in keeping the grid up and stable, I think it is just as likely that you would see the exodus occur in the opposite direction. I have a great deal of time for the guys at LL - they are visionaries and have their hearts in the right place. However running a robust, bug-free, high performing online system does not appear to be their strong suit.

Re:It makes total sense

[unity100]

ehhhh. given the current state of many emus that are out for a long time for other games, i assure you it will be to the contrary.

What do you to call it? Third Life?

[wcspxyx]

How many lives does one person need? Most folks don't even have a first life.

Re:What do you to call it? Third Life?

[mehlkelm]

No. Third Life would is when someone creates the internet in second life and on this second internet an online role playing game. You would be able to sit down in front of your computer, log on to second life, fly to your house, go to your computer there and log on to third life.

Dibz

[teh_chrizzle]

Does anyone else think that this could be the beginning of "The Metaverse" as envisioned by Stephenson?

i call dibs on the victorian house on tank treads.

Second Life - Hype is just that....Hype

[Assassin_for_Atari]

Really, I tried out both THERE and SL at the same time. And sure SL had WAY more options for custom characters etc but it ran (and still does) like crap. You cant walk around because stuff takes about 10 minutes to spawn and then "OH NO, I'M IN A BUILDING" or you land in somone scripted zone etc. The way items work etc.....I'm really surprised at how big it is cause even I, as a tech guy was shunded by how complicated it was at times. THERE however gives you a much smoother experiance, granted not as custom, but also gives you voice operations and at the time, streaming music etc which wasn't available in SL but ..I'm sure is now.

Until they get their bandwidth straight, the whole thing screams of LAME and I love how SL is slowly turning into this Blade Runner world where ad's just stream about you and people seem to just eat it up. Once again....LAME.

Re:What do you to call it? Third Life?

[Anivair]

http://www.getafirstlife.com/

haven't tried 2nd life yet

[Adult film producer]

but some of the screenshots I've seen looking interesting.. I'm wondering though, can I go into the "2nd life" virtual world and buy some guns and proceed to shoot other players? or how about making a porn ? (use screencasting software to record the event.)

Re:haven't tried 2nd life yet

[Lord Bitman]

Yes. You would be the 637,000th person to do so.

Re:haven't tried 2nd life yet

[CronoCloud]

More like the 5,710,445 person to do so.

Re:haven't tried 2nd life yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and yes.

For guns, there's two different things that might fit what you're talking about. In either case, you don't need to "buy" - you can make your own from scratch, or there are many who go through the expense of giving stuff away in the spirit of FOSS.

The game does have a small degree of physics emulation, so you could get or make a "gun" that actually fires a "bullet" that reacts to objects and other players. These are called "push" weapons, and due to the fact that you can annoy people severely with them, are usually banned in the nicer areas. (Projectiles don't hurt or embed themselves in other players, but like billiard balls, can push them in the direction the projectile was going at the speed the projectile was going.)

If you're thinking more "act out an FPS with consensual players" type, they have certain areas that act more like laser tag than actual weapons, with optional hit point counters and stuff. I haven't had too much experience with it.

For porn, there's tons of areas out there that have "poseballs" - things that, when you activate them, animate your avatar in a certain way. Normally, you're just limited to the default walking, running, flying, and sitting animations, but these can override it temporarily. So yes, you could control two avatars, activate the animations, and do whatever your perverted little heart desires. If you don't find an animation you want, you're free to make and upload your own, to keep, give away to other interested parties, or sell for profit.

The client even has some nice built-in screencap as well as video recording features, so you wouldn't need any kind of third-party software to do it. Other players are told when you're doing this, though, so it's always good etiquette to ask other players' permission first before taking a screenshot including or nearby them.

I have a positive aspect right here.

[Jesus_666]

One of my professors is toying with the idea of working with SL for some lectures. The lectures are still in thr real world, but the assignments revolve around building stuff in SL. For example, one assignment might revolve around designing an automated "assembly line" that reacts to certain events Probably the biggest gripe he has with SL so far is that not everything is possible - he's currently trying to get a Petri network simulator going.

Having access to the SL source code would enable him to set up his own server at the university; that way we'd have much less (network-induced) lag. Also, we wouldn't have to worry about being interrupted by walking penises.

Re:I have a positive aspect right here.

[Hektor_Troy]

Also, we wouldn't have to worry about being interrupted by walking penises.

Ahh ... too many jock's on campus already?

Ender's Games

[x1n933k]

Second life reminds me of the computer game all the students had to play at Battle School. The data and traits collected from that world must give out huge marketing and personality habits.

Second Life Hype

[bjohn3x]

The main problem with Second Life is that everyone talks about it but nobody plays it. It makes for great news stories only because of the title. Even for people who don't play computer games, the name "Second Life" resonates with them. They see people who play games as playing in a second life anyway. When they read stories about Second Life, they imagine that all of their nerd friends are playing it and that it will be the wave of the future. You can see this with all of the advertisers and Presidential candidates thinking they are riding the wave of the future but are really missing the point.

Re:Second Life Hype

[SirTalon42]

There are currently 36,511 users currently logged into SecondLife right now. Somewhat hard to call that 'no one'. Back on December 29th they first broke having 20,000 users on at the same time. The population is growing quite quickly (much quicker than the Lindens can handle, though they have a few projects that should help greatly, such as switching to using MONO as the backend for their scripting system instead of their own hand rolled one, in testing they've had a 200x improvement in performance over theirs).

Re:Second Life Hype

[Jozef Nagy]

I second that. All of my friends and I have at one time or another had accounts on SL. I even have a yearlong paid account that I haven't touched. There's a lot of potential to it. I don't agree with you that it's hype like most social-websites nowadays where people join to be part of the crowd. There's a lot of potential real value in the SL world, it's just having implementation troubles. Lag is the only reason I don't log on anymore. Oh, and a quality Linux client would help too.

Re:Second Life Hype

[CronoCloud]

Sure seems to be a LOT of nobodies:

Total Residents:5,710,444
Logged In Last 60 Days:1,776,499
Online Now:28,889
US$ Spent Last 24h:$1,517,552
LindeX Activity Last 24h:$225,178

When I joined SL last July average Online now was about 7000 during busy times, now during busy times it's over 35000. Back then the number of total residents was around 700000. last March the number of simultaneous users was around 2000. We're talking MASSIVE growth, but not among the slashdot crowd which is why you see statements like "SL can't be popular, none of my geek friends plays it."

Slashdot style Geeks tend not to "play" it, stay at home moms with some Photoshop skills do. As do art students of varoius types and other folks with some creative skills.

Re:Second Life Hype

[Acer500]

There are currently 36,511 users currently logged into SecondLife right now. Somewhat hard to call that 'no one'. That's quite a lot, but it still pales in comparison to many online games.

Soccer sim Hattrick http://www.hattrick.org/ usally has more than that (not right now, it has 13.000 because it's 2 am in Europe but on weekends and Wednesdays, it reaches 50.000 users simultaneously connected).

I don't play it, but according to this site, World of Warcraft reaches 200.000 simultaneous users!!! and for all I know it could reach millions... http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december05/kirriemuir/12k irriemuir.html

Other games I know of like Magic Online also have 10.000 to 15.000 users online at certain times, and googling showed EVE Online can have 50.000.

Re:Second Life Hype

[tsdw]

Each tyme someone says 'plays SL', or SL is a weird GAME - they are missing the point. SL isnt' a game per se, its an environment. Sure you can code a game within SL as many many people have done, but SL is just a graphical mush/moo. If you call it an MMORPG you have to drop the 'G' Unfortunately the graphics are late 90's due to the bandwidth currently required, but if you get used to it you can discover some absolutely freaking AMAZING places. Like Svarda for example

Re:Second Life Hype

[cdh]

I play WoW and SL, and one big difference is that WoW is sharded. There may be 200,000 people online at once, but they are spread across X number of independent servers (called realms). Each realm has it's own copy of "WoW". SL, on the other hand, is one big world. Each "sim" runs on a server (not a 1:1 ratio though), but they all share the same backend inventory system and a bunch of other info to make crossing sim borders possible.

Don't get me wrong, SL needs to figure out the capacity issue, but it is a different system than WoW (and probably other MMOs).

Here's how I want this to work

[DaveJay]

I want it to work like this: I buy a small house in Second Life, and anyone who comes through my "door" ends up on my server, and the inside of my house is hosted exclusively on that server, and I can control who comes in and out. And it can be HUGE on the inside, a la the Tardis.

Re:Here's how I want this to work

[coofercat]

Absolutely. The thing is, I don't necessarily want a house (maybe I want a huge hotel/casino looking thing instead?).

I'm sure everyone has ideas of how this could be done. My favoured approach is like Elite. My server becomes a planet. The basics mean I have to provide a space station, but if I'm up to it, I can provide the entire planet surface too. The space station offers standard things, like a chat room, informational space, basic trading etc. If I run a planet surface, then it's all as I want it. Maybe one area is a first-person shooter type game (paintball?), another has a formula-1 race track, and another has loads of commerical entities on it. Somehow I provide ways for you to bring your special paintball gun, car or money along and go crazy in my made-up world. Of course, if my server goes down, then my planet disappears from the map (or becomes impossible to travel to).

Of course, if you don't like what I'm doing, then you can do it your own way on your own planet. A bit like if you don't like my website, you can run your own, in your own way. In fact, making this whole thing an "extension" to your website could also lead to some interesting possibilities - start by visiting a map provider (Google), then take their directions to (whoever), which causes your client to connect to their server and start the experience.

Re:Here's how I want this to work

[tttonyyy]

Which is exactly how Snow Crash describes the arrangement, though Neil goes one step further and suggests that even avatars are processed locally (so if you have a low b/w connection, you're black and white or low on detail).

creating a world within world

[unity100]

value of popularizing virtual contact, especially for such things as telecommute meetings and Seaquest DSV flashbacks

its exactly that. its not for gamers, its not for hardcores, its for all people. this is why sl is something. and that something it is is something that is important.

My own virtual world BBS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Schweet... now pisswars will be that much more entertaining.

Re:What do you to call it? Third Life?

[Constantine XVI]

How about we just write a MUD in LSL? (which I believe is based on Mono C#, so it couldn't be too terribly hard)

I know what they really hope for...

[Ayanami Rei]

is for some end-user to improve the server code so that they can support more than two clients on their leased server in a datacenter somewhere.

The server code is GODAWFUL. If a user can get it to scale on the limited resources he or she has access to, then Linden Labs can benefit directly from that.

isn't this a mistake for them?

[sentientbrendan]

If people actually start using other servers, won't they lost their income stream? If someone sets up free second life server for particular interest groups, what's the point of using the official one?

What benefit does linden labs get from open sourcing their server?

Re:isn't this a mistake for them?

[tttonyyy]

What benefit does linden labs get from open sourcing their server? Fame and a name in history? You can't just buy that.

Perhaps Croquet

[schmaustech]

Maybe Mark McCahill will reuse some of the SL code to patch his weak 3D interface Croquet.

What?

[robla]

Pardon me, but "throwing it over the wall" is not even remotely accurate. While I wouldn't characterize our effort as being 100% fully-collaborative yet, we're working in that direction. We have frequent releases, an active mailing list, and have incorporated a number of patches submitted by the community.

Re:What?

[Trevor]

A private source repository and the occasional tarball is what I could call throwing it over the wall.

I CALL SHOTGUN

[PaganRitual]

I BAG THE AVATAR NAME HIRO PROTAGONIST ...

although you know there will be hero, hereo, hi'ro, protaginist, profagonist, protagoni'st, etc etc, about a million of us, all with swords chopping up people as they walk thru the door.

Better work on the server security

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I played Second Life (2 years ago?), I walked around the virtual world reading people's scripts and cloning items straight out of their vending machines' inventories. I did this without seeing the server code at all, let alone source code. Granted, it was not very well-protected at the time, but it makes me wonder about what will happen when people can see the source code.

I made it a point never to give out things I cloned or attempt to convert them to real money due to the more serious implications of it.

- Anonymous because my Second Life name is part of my Slashdot name. Not that I play anymore.

The server code will be abandoned

[Morgaine]

>> Pardon me, but "throwing it over the wall" is not even remotely accurate. While I wouldn't characterize our effort as being 100% fully-collaborative yet, we're working in that direction. We have frequent releases, an active mailing list, and have incorporated a number of patches submitted by the community.

Indeed, it's still early days, and as I see it, you're making reasonable progress.

Although you're receiving some criticism for still being at the stage of "throw code over the wall" (no matter how frequent your tarballs), you're certainly heading in the right direction towards a full LL+community collaborative SL client, it seems. I hope. :-)

However, as far as your server code is concerned, the remarks about "throw over the wall" *WILL* apply, and for good reason, because you will abandon that server code in due course, by choice. The reason is that it's actually as dead as the dodo, even though it's still limping along on the grid, currently. It has no future.

The reason is simple: LL's current design model for powering objects in the grid is completely non-scalable for mobile objects, and most importantly, for the players themselves and their prim-laden accessories. When players go to events, they leave their home sim's CPU power behind them, idling away, while the event site's CPU is glowing red hot and unable to support any event beyond an extended family gathering. It's a classic case of static CPU resource mapping trying to address a dynamic CPU requirement problem.

To make matters worse, it's not only CPU power that is mapped statically in the grid, but storage as well. This has totally ludicrous consequences, such as the price of land being incredibly high despite the fact that storage costs are near-zero and plummetting all the time. Fortunately that can be changed using one of many network storage solutions, but it's just one more problem that arises from the original static resource design approach.

Crucially, Philip Rosedale has agreed that this non-scalability issue is a matter of concern, on his blog.

And since there is no possible transition path between the current static server-side model and a dynamic one that would place computing power where it is needed on the fly, LL will abandon the current server code -- it has to. In fact, the devs are probably already working on a replacement, since Philip knew about this 2 years ago. And nobody has ever criticized him for his inability to look ahead. He's a true visionary.

So, "throw it over the wall" will certainly be correct ... for the current server code anyway, simply because the grid's static resource mapping has no future whatsoever.

Giraffe+leprechauns vs Blackjack+hookers

[Anonymous Coward]

... my own personal world where I can ride around on a giraffe and shoot leprechauns ...

Yes please!

You must design your own world of giraffes and leprechauns once this kind of thing takes off! I'd love to visit. :P

There will be more than enough traditional "adult" themed worlds around, there's no doubt about that. Some different ones like yours will be a welcome change ... even if we hump the leprechauns after shooting them. :-)