Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Once its all open, guess who will be in the line to download the code and get programming? Yep, the pr0n industry!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
Does anyone else think that this could be the beginning of "The Metaverse" as envisioned by Stephenson? (see Snow Crash)
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
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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...
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.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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.)
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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)