Yeah, I've often thought that if one wanted to look for alien tourists the best place to do so would be in the path of a total solar eclipse. Not only is the earth's moon probably rare'ish, but it's also fortuitously at the right apparent size at the moment to produce one - the moon does migrate in it's orbit and so the window for this to happen is quite small on a geological timescale (a few million years).
Of course any space-fairing alien could see a total eclipse at any time by positioning their spaceship accordingly, but so see one on a planets surface where there is there is atmosphere and complex life to react would not be common. In fact I'd go look at the point of maximum totality and duration.
It's real hard to guess how rare the earth/moon/eclipse/life combination is, but current figures would suggest we probably have to only such combination within several thousand light years. We're probably on some magazine list in the Epsilon Eridani IV library as '10 things to see before you die':-)
Except it is perfectly reasonable to blame whichever Government has failed to oversee the department correctly such that the necessary systems and education is in place that people do not send public databases in untraced courier packages on unencrypted CDs.
Given that Labour has been in power since 1997 the blame lies firmly with them. Frankly it should be the minister who was in charge of the overseeing department for the bulk of the period who should resign, that is Mr Brown himself.
True the immediate cause a incompetent junior member of staff, but the Goverenment is to blame in allowing the situation where this can occur to arise. And this lot want us all to have ID cards?
I've developed several pieces of software over the years. If I want a review I do precisely this - write the review myself and send it off. 95% of the time if the journalist uses the piece they will alter the first and last paragraphs slightly and publish the rest verbatim. On the other 5% of cases they will write their own introductory of closing paragraph.
You simply need to work on the basis that your journalist would rather get his copy in quickly and get down the pub than do any real work. Given the choice between using your ready made review, and reviewing rival product X which he's got to do the work for it's your product every time. Of course not all Journalists like admitting this, so it's usually a good idea to wrap the review up as a 'Press Release', but everyone knows what that fig leaf means:-)
Yes, I once asked a techie Lindon about the L10 charge to upload, he said it wasn't a way for the Lindons to make money, but simply to act as a throttle on people uploading thousands of files (as the would if it were free). Besides as pointed out, the few cents it costs are not unreasonable data storage pricing.
You are correct to some degree, in that the Second Life 'Grid' is made up of about 10,000 'sims' each of which equates to a cpu and holds an area of land int he grid. Your avatar is always located in a sim, and you move between them when moving around the world. One of the issues is that a sim can currently hold about 50-70 avatars in one place (although you can hold a meeting at a corner and up this to 250 or so).
However in practice this is a relatively minor consideration. More specifically anyone inworld can talk to (IM) anyone else logged on at the same time, and all assets are held in one database, so neither people or possessions are sharded in any way whatsoever.
Lindon Lab have apparently declared that the current architecture should manage up to 100,000 concurrent connections. I'm not sure I believe that, but one of the reasons I've come around to thinking that Second Life in whatever form it evolves into over the next few years, will be the dominent virtuality going forward is because LL have faced and tackled the scalability issues so far with reasonable (not brilliant, but ok) success. There's more first mover advantage there than is commonly realized.
Obligatory to mention it, but this is of course what Second Life does, and one of the reasons why it's interesting. With SL all assets are stored online, not on your local PC (preloaded from CD or whatever) and everyone is in the same world. Anyone who witnessed the growing pains of SL over the first part of the year when concurrency went from under 10,000 to 30,000 plus will be more than a little aware that what they had didn't scale, although they do seem to have a handle on it now and conccurency of 50,000 is just about bearable.
The current Scottish Parliment is arguably a direct result of Thatcher. The imposition of the Poll Tax as an experiment in Scotland a year before England, and other similar action led directly to a feeling in Scotland that we didn't want to be ruled by an English party against the common will. By 1987 there we no Tories in Scotland yet we were ruled by the Tories directly fom the (widely perceived as neo-colonial) Scottish Office. It would only take another such period of confrontation - and with the probability of different political power in Holyrood and Westminster that's *more* rather than *less* likely - to turn that minority for independence into a majority. The only other concievable outcome is a Catalan-like settlement whereby we're independent in all but name, certainly the current settlement is not stable in the long term - I don't think there's any serious politician on any side of the political spectrum who now thinks it is.
I agree, I cannot see a Scottish / English divorce ever decending into the violence of the Irish situation, and whilst once or twice over the 25 years I've lived here as an ex-pat English person I've come across some nasty extremist flyer or sentiment, the cross border mix is far to great for that to catch hold without the most extreme provocation imaginable. It's a rare Scot who doesn't have an English relative or neighbour. Still, over 30% at the moment support independence, and there's a majority for more power to be devolved, so it's certainly conceivable.
I see something along the lines of the Czechoslovakian velvet divorce. It seems that eventually we'll decide to go our seperate ways from mutual agreement, although the cynic in me is sure the British state will make sure they've extracted all the oil first.
They don't, but saying for a moment they did, would you be prepared to send in the Army to enforce compliance? And then it'd be only a matter of time before someone got shot and then it's a whole different ballgame.
We've been there before of course. In 1916 popular opinion in Ireland was strongly against independence. When Pearse and his ragtaggle bunch of rebels took the GPO they provoked a massively disproportionate response from the British which completely turned around opinion and subsequently ended up with the Free Irish State.
Yorkshire is of course unlikely to want to break away in even the wildest fantasy, and at the moment it's difficult to imagine Scottish opinion changing to a majority for independence. However just as the experience of being run as a near colony by Thatcher in the 80's moved opinion here from a majority against our own parliment to a significant majority for, it'd only take another experience of the English handling Scotland as a troublesome client state to turn that around. Personally I think it's only a matter of time - it won't be this year, of next, or maybe not even the next decade, but sooner or later I fully expect the English to attempt to impose *something* on Scotland against popular will and we'll have mass crowds outside Hollyrood and a popular rebellion to match those seen elsewhere across the world in recent decades.
Well yes, but we've had heavy mobile use by the general population for what? 10 years at least now, probably nearer 15 and by some sectors for 20. And yet any risk is at the level where we need really large statistical studies to find the mearest hint of any problem in practice.
Now sure this could be because the effects take longer than 10-20 years to appear, or are at very marginal levels, or both. But in any experiment of this type the results are always a bell curve, and if there was a significant effect lurking with say 30 years exposure required you'd expect to see greaters sign of it by the outliers now. But we don't. So the conclusion has to be that there is no risk at any significant level. This isn't to say that some effect in the order of low n per million over 40 years or more exposure might turn up, but it'll be of the same or lower level than taking a long distance flight and that's regarded as perfectly acceptable by most people.
Not to say that there might not be an issue, but The Independent was the Newspaper that first ran the WiFi scare in the UK - a couple of weeks ago and well before the BBC - and last Sunday's scare in the paper was over baby alarms. Both pieces were examples of really bad science journalism with widespread scattering of the term 'radiation' throughout and cleverly writen to wrap as much scaremongering as possible up in pseudo-objective and precautionary language.
Today's leader article is a classic 'For The Sake Of The Children' rant (http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles /article2586569.ece)
I've been using Zetnet since 1995 (www.zetnet.com). They used to be Shetland based, but moved to Manchester in a buy out a few years back. They are very much a small independent ISP undoubtably reselling feeds from another company and with that you get the positives and negatives. On the positive side their techies - of which they only have a few - are available by IRC as well as phone and email and they're more than happy to go the extra mile with you. If you like being on first name terms with your support staff, and knowing you can email the guys directly fixing the problems instread of going through a call centre in Bangalore then they are ideal. On the negative side their cover is real sparse (i.e. none) outside business hours.
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?
"1) On behalf of every European who does not know what you are talking about: Please expand on this!1) On behalf of every European who does not know what you are talking about: Please expand on this!"
Actually I'm a European, keenly interested in politics, and I'm totally clueless as to what you are on about or trying to imply.
If your still in SL and coding then I'd highly recommend getting over to Zero Lindon's office hour in Grasmere on Tuesdays/Thursdays (check the SL Wiki for times). Fascinating stuff.
It's easy to miss the point of Second Life, because the eyecandy is nowhere near the same level as WoW or similar. Graphically it's certainly around desktop game circa 2000 and the Lindons certainly do have a bit of a blind spot about upgrading it - largely because they seem predominantly focused on server-side issues at the moment.
However SL isn't really a WoW competitor. It's more like IRC in 3D - think of it as a chatroom where you can actually do things with the other people there. And of course virtually *everything* in SL has been constructed by the people in it. True the building tools have limitations and there's vast amounts of crap. but equally there's some very imagenative stuff too. The scripting language is by no means a toy too, even though that has some major flaws.
It's also an interesting question who does play it. I see several groups:-
1. Newbies. Vast numbers of people sign on, hang around the public welcome areas briefly, do a little touring then never play it again. It's quite common to see later reactions from them on/. and the like saying 'I looked and the graphics were crap' - which misses the point about SL being a social thing as above.
2. Wankers. Literally. A friend of mine who owns a SL club believes 50% of signups do nothing else but cybersex fot the first month. I think she's proberbly right.
3. Designers, Builders, Coders. Although the tools are limited with imagination there's a lot that can be done. SL seems quite a common outlet for amateur designers, coders and 3D artists. It may not be cutting edge, but you tend to get a lot of attention and feedback. If you're a professional coder then SL is well worth a look as it does have potential and some of the Lindons actually hold open office hours so you can talk to the game designers directly if you wish.
4. Roleplayers. There's large communities of roleplayers - most of whom spend 90% of their time in roleplay sims so will never be encountered by newbies. A quite common scenario is for a group to jointly buy a server, construct an enviroment, then play in that. Sort of like design your own game and play it using SL simply as an environment to do that. Roleplay covers a wide range from extreme characterization to mild 'wouldn't it be nice to live in environment X' types. Tends to be very hardcore players who spend a lot of time in SL.
5. Social players. Similar to roleplayers in that they have a community of friends but without the roleplay angle. Again these people hardly ever go near the common meeting places so a newbie will never pick up on them. A large part of the 'core' SL players are in this group.
People can belong to more than one group of course. Myself I am uncertain about the future of SL. Against it it has
a. Relatively poor graphics b. Architecture limitations - the *bloody* asset server is a major pain point. It's not clear how far it can scale. The 50 avs in a sim limit is laughable for example. c. It has a certain reputation in some influential quarters d. The Lindons appear to be a bunch of bloody hippies:-). Certainly their business methods need to take a step up.
But for
a. Because the world is user constructed and designed to be at a fundemental level - and not given, as in WoW or other games, then in theory it can evolve. Games with Everquest, WoW, Eve etc cannot move forward in the same way. b. It is one world and not sharded c. It does provide enough tools that there is room for professional level interest in it. d. It's totally generic e. It has an established user base of people with graphic, building and coding skills who can jointly take it forward as the tools and capabilities improve. Real first mover advantage that.
On balance I think it likely to be here to stay and evolve as the prime metaverse. However I expect it to be the first among many (possibly with interconnections) and remain a minority interest for many years yet. It is worth your time though to look at it on a deeper level than simply 'ooh the graphics are crap' or 'it's just full of wankers'.
Because every article they do on it seems to consist of nothing more than setting up Straw Men and knocking them down. SL is a social game with pretensions - at core basically IRC plus a 3D environment so there's more to do and talk about with friends then simply hang on channels. I've never met anyone stupid enough to invest in SL in the way their 'Financial Advisor' suggests and it's difficult to imagine anyone with more than half a brain who would do.
There may be business opportunities in SL on RL scales, but they are rare. Many more people are content to play at running a business in SL and make money on SL scales, and if that's how you have fun who's to say it's wrong? Even the 'escorts' who charge only one or two USD an hour can hardly be doing it for a living.
SL could develop into something more interesting (and if you code the scripting language, LSL, whist broken in places is sufficiently powerful to be really rather fun) or it may not. Anyone who plays SL at this point who isn't primarily adopting a "I'll have fun a see where it leads" attitude is an idiot, but equally it'd be wrong to insist there's no potential there at all.
Case in point, myself and a friend are trying to develop something in LSL that we think could have potential and wide appeal using RL development standards (most stuff coded in SL is hobbyist level). If by an amazing longshot it succeeds and I make significant RL money then great, if it succeeds less so and makes significant SL money (i.e. a few hundred $ in RL) then equally great, and it it fails then no problem - I'm only investing the amount of time I would be playing another game anyway, and I'll have made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun in the process.
Your sort of missing the point. SL should not be compared to WoW or a multiplayer game. If you logged on expecting that you are certain to be disappointed.
Instead think IRC. Now most people don't 'Get' IRC, but despite a 1980's protocol efnet appears to be just about as popular as ever. Indeed the coding channel #delphi which I helped run for 5 years back in the late 90's still has as many people on it now (and I just checked) as we did 10 years ago - actually considerably more by the look of it.
The regulars inhabit any irc channel because of the social thing. SL is the same. There's only so much flying around you can do by yourself - its your friends that keep you coming back to it.
So if SL isn't for you then that's fine. Pretty good in fact because Linden's servers are way overstretched and they could really use a whole lot less publicity at the moment. Most people don't get IRC when you show it with them and I'm absolutly sure the same is true of SL. Personally I really like SL, but couldn't be bothered with WoW finding it purile, tedious and frankly shallow. Oh it may have better graphics than WoW, but it has no real depth to it.
In terms of statistics as to logging in then off I'm sure you are in the majority, and a large one at that. Another large group logs on for a month or so then looses interest too. Only a small minority - less than 10% and probably nearer 5% actually stick around, but that's fine.
Actually my understanding is that Second Life is to some extent decenteralized as the load is spread between areas (sims) on different machines. The part of the system that isn't decentralized, and so has been causing them major headaches of late, is their asset server which is a single cluster.
So Asset Server aside (a pretty big aside) it would in theory be possible for Second Life to grow beyond Linden Labs by additional sim servers being attached to the network. In a sense they partially already do this as they do host servers on the grid for 3rd parties, but they are inside their datacentre so more of an indication of possibilities than an example as yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I've often thought that if one wanted to look for alien tourists the best place to do so would be in the path of a total solar eclipse. Not only is the earth's moon probably rare'ish, but it's also fortuitously at the right apparent size at the moment to produce one - the moon does migrate in it's orbit and so the window for this to happen is quite small on a geological timescale (a few million years).
:-)
Of course any space-fairing alien could see a total eclipse at any time by positioning their spaceship accordingly, but so see one on a planets surface where there is there is atmosphere and complex life to react would not be common. In fact I'd go look at the point of maximum totality and duration.
It's real hard to guess how rare the earth/moon/eclipse/life combination is, but current figures would suggest we probably have to only such combination within several thousand light years. We're probably on some magazine list in the Epsilon Eridani IV library as '10 things to see before you die'
Except it is perfectly reasonable to blame whichever Government has failed to oversee the department correctly such that the necessary systems and education is in place that people do not send public databases in untraced courier packages on unencrypted CDs.
Given that Labour has been in power since 1997 the blame lies firmly with them. Frankly it should be the minister who was in charge of the overseeing department for the bulk of the period who should resign, that is Mr Brown himself.
True the immediate cause a incompetent junior member of staff, but the Goverenment is to blame in allowing the situation where this can occur to arise. And this lot want us all to have ID cards?
So, isn't this *exactly* what everyone does?
:-)
I've developed several pieces of software over the years. If I want a review I do precisely this - write the review myself and send it off. 95% of the time if the journalist uses the piece they will alter the first and last paragraphs slightly and publish the rest verbatim. On the other 5% of cases they will write their own introductory of closing paragraph.
You simply need to work on the basis that your journalist would rather get his copy in quickly and get down the pub than do any real work. Given the choice between using your ready made review, and reviewing rival product X which he's got to do the work for it's your product every time. Of course not all Journalists like admitting this, so it's usually a good idea to wrap the review up as a 'Press Release', but everyone knows what that fig leaf means
Yes, I once asked a techie Lindon about the L10 charge to upload, he said it wasn't a way for the Lindons to make money, but simply to act as a throttle on people uploading thousands of files (as the would if it were free). Besides as pointed out, the few cents it costs are not unreasonable data storage pricing.
You are correct to some degree, in that the Second Life 'Grid' is made up of about 10,000 'sims' each of which equates to a cpu and holds an area of land int he grid. Your avatar is always located in a sim, and you move between them when moving around the world. One of the issues is that a sim can currently hold about 50-70 avatars in one place (although you can hold a meeting at a corner and up this to 250 or so).
However in practice this is a relatively minor consideration. More specifically anyone inworld can talk to (IM) anyone else logged on at the same time, and all assets are held in one database, so neither people or possessions are sharded in any way whatsoever.
Lindon Lab have apparently declared that the current architecture should manage up to 100,000 concurrent connections. I'm not sure I believe that, but one of the reasons I've come around to thinking that Second Life in whatever form it evolves into over the next few years, will be the dominent virtuality going forward is because LL have faced and tackled the scalability issues so far with reasonable (not brilliant, but ok) success. There's more first mover advantage there than is commonly realized.
Obligatory to mention it, but this is of course what Second Life does, and one of the reasons why it's interesting. With SL all assets are stored online, not on your local PC (preloaded from CD or whatever) and everyone is in the same world. Anyone who witnessed the growing pains of SL over the first part of the year when concurrency went from under 10,000 to 30,000 plus will be more than a little aware that what they had didn't scale, although they do seem to have a handle on it now and conccurency of 50,000 is just about bearable.
It is difficult to imagine though why anyone who reads slashdot would buy a laptop from PC World in the first place.
The current Scottish Parliment is arguably a direct result of Thatcher. The imposition of the Poll Tax as an experiment in Scotland a year before England, and other similar action led directly to a feeling in Scotland that we didn't want to be ruled by an English party against the common will. By 1987 there we no Tories in Scotland yet we were ruled by the Tories directly fom the (widely perceived as neo-colonial) Scottish Office. It would only take another such period of confrontation - and with the probability of different political power in Holyrood and Westminster that's *more* rather than *less* likely - to turn that minority for independence into a majority. The only other concievable outcome is a Catalan-like settlement whereby we're independent in all but name, certainly the current settlement is not stable in the long term - I don't think there's any serious politician on any side of the political spectrum who now thinks it is.
I agree, I cannot see a Scottish / English divorce ever decending into the violence of the Irish situation, and whilst once or twice over the 25 years I've lived here as an ex-pat English person I've come across some nasty extremist flyer or sentiment, the cross border mix is far to great for that to catch hold without the most extreme provocation imaginable. It's a rare Scot who doesn't have an English relative or neighbour. Still, over 30% at the moment support independence, and there's a majority for more power to be devolved, so it's certainly conceivable.
I see something along the lines of the Czechoslovakian velvet divorce. It seems that eventually we'll decide to go our seperate ways from mutual agreement, although the cynic in me is sure the British state will make sure they've extracted all the oil first.
They don't, but saying for a moment they did, would you be prepared to send in the Army to enforce compliance? And then it'd be only a matter of time before someone got shot and then it's a whole different ballgame.
We've been there before of course. In 1916 popular opinion in Ireland was strongly against independence. When Pearse and his ragtaggle bunch of rebels took the GPO they provoked a massively disproportionate response from the British which completely turned around opinion and subsequently ended up with the Free Irish State.
Yorkshire is of course unlikely to want to break away in even the wildest fantasy, and at the moment it's difficult to imagine Scottish opinion changing to a majority for independence. However just as the experience of being run as a near colony by Thatcher in the 80's moved opinion here from a majority against our own parliment to a significant majority for, it'd only take another experience of the English handling Scotland as a troublesome client state to turn that around. Personally I think it's only a matter of time - it won't be this year, of next, or maybe not even the next decade, but sooner or later I fully expect the English to attempt to impose *something* on Scotland against popular will and we'll have mass crowds outside Hollyrood and a popular rebellion to match those seen elsewhere across the world in recent decades.
HaHaHaHaHa
:-)
So true, if only I had mod points today
I think you mean is an indicator of, not determines
:-)
Let's not confuse cause and effect now
Well yes, but we've had heavy mobile use by the general population for what? 10 years at least now, probably nearer 15 and by some sectors for 20. And yet any risk is at the level where we need really large statistical studies to find the mearest hint of any problem in practice.
Now sure this could be because the effects take longer than 10-20 years to appear, or are at very marginal levels, or both. But in any experiment of this type the results are always a bell curve, and if there was a significant effect lurking with say 30 years exposure required you'd expect to see greaters sign of it by the outliers now. But we don't. So the conclusion has to be that there is no risk at any significant level. This isn't to say that some effect in the order of low n per million over 40 years or more exposure might turn up, but it'll be of the same or lower level than taking a long distance flight and that's regarded as perfectly acceptable by most people.
Not to say that there might not be an issue, but The Independent was the Newspaper that first ran the WiFi scare in the UK - a couple of weeks ago and well before the BBC - and last Sunday's scare in the paper was over baby alarms. Both pieces were examples of really bad science journalism with widespread scattering of the term 'radiation' throughout and cleverly writen to wrap as much scaremongering as possible up in pseudo-objective and precautionary language.
s /article2586569.ece)
Today's leader article is a classic 'For The Sake Of The Children' rant (http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_article
I've been using Zetnet since 1995 (www.zetnet.com). They used to be Shetland based, but moved to Manchester in a buy out a few years back. They are very much a small independent ISP undoubtably reselling feeds from another company and with that you get the positives and negatives. On the positive side their techies - of which they only have a few - are available by IRC as well as phone and email and they're more than happy to go the extra mile with you. If you like being on first name terms with your support staff, and knowing you can email the guys directly fixing the problems instread of going through a call centre in Bangalore then they are ideal. On the negative side their cover is real sparse (i.e. none) outside business hours.
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?
"1) On behalf of every European who does not know what you are talking about: Please expand on this!1) On behalf of every European who does not know what you are talking about: Please expand on this!"
Actually I'm a European, keenly interested in politics, and I'm totally clueless as to what you are on about or trying to imply.
An explanation would indeed be appreciated.
Market share of Macs actually declined last month
If your still in SL and coding then I'd highly recommend getting over to Zero Lindon's office hour in Grasmere on Tuesdays/Thursdays (check the SL Wiki for times). Fascinating stuff.
It's easy to miss the point of Second Life, because the eyecandy is nowhere near the same level as WoW or similar. Graphically it's certainly around desktop game circa 2000 and the Lindons certainly do have a bit of a blind spot about upgrading it - largely because they seem predominantly focused on server-side issues at the moment.
:-
/. and the like saying 'I looked and the graphics were crap' - which misses the point about SL being a social thing as above.
:-). Certainly their business methods need to take a step up.
However SL isn't really a WoW competitor. It's more like IRC in 3D - think of it as a chatroom where you can actually do things with the other people there. And of course virtually *everything* in SL has been constructed by the people in it. True the building tools have limitations and there's vast amounts of crap. but equally there's some very imagenative stuff too. The scripting language is by no means a toy too, even though that has some major flaws.
It's also an interesting question who does play it. I see several groups
1. Newbies. Vast numbers of people sign on, hang around the public welcome areas briefly, do a little touring then never play it again. It's quite common to see later reactions from them on
2. Wankers. Literally. A friend of mine who owns a SL club believes 50% of signups do nothing else but cybersex fot the first month. I think she's proberbly right.
3. Designers, Builders, Coders. Although the tools are limited with imagination there's a lot that can be done. SL seems quite a common outlet for amateur designers, coders and 3D artists. It may not be cutting edge, but you tend to get a lot of attention and feedback. If you're a professional coder then SL is well worth a look as it does have potential and some of the Lindons actually hold open office hours so you can talk to the game designers directly if you wish.
4. Roleplayers. There's large communities of roleplayers - most of whom spend 90% of their time in roleplay sims so will never be encountered by newbies. A quite common scenario is for a group to jointly buy a server, construct an enviroment, then play in that. Sort of like design your own game and play it using SL simply as an environment to do that. Roleplay covers a wide range from extreme characterization to mild 'wouldn't it be nice to live in environment X' types. Tends to be very hardcore players who spend a lot of time in SL.
5. Social players. Similar to roleplayers in that they have a community of friends but without the roleplay angle. Again these people hardly ever go near the common meeting places so a newbie will never pick up on them. A large part of the 'core' SL players are in this group.
6. Others - musicians, speculators, educators etc etc
People can belong to more than one group of course. Myself I am uncertain about the future of SL. Against it it has
a. Relatively poor graphics
b. Architecture limitations - the *bloody* asset server is a major pain point. It's not clear how far it can scale. The 50 avs in a sim limit is laughable for example.
c. It has a certain reputation in some influential quarters
d. The Lindons appear to be a bunch of bloody hippies
But for
a. Because the world is user constructed and designed to be at a fundemental level - and not given, as in WoW or other games, then in theory it can evolve. Games with Everquest, WoW, Eve etc cannot move forward in the same way.
b. It is one world and not sharded
c. It does provide enough tools that there is room for professional level interest in it.
d. It's totally generic
e. It has an established user base of people with graphic, building and coding skills who can jointly take it forward as the tools and capabilities improve. Real first mover advantage that.
On balance I think it likely to be here to stay and evolve as the prime metaverse. However I expect it to be the first among many (possibly with interconnections) and remain a minority interest for many years yet. It is worth your time though to look at it on a deeper level than simply 'ooh the graphics are crap' or 'it's just full of wankers'.
And I get tired of all these stupid Republicans who think that predicting the weather has anything to do with prediciting the climate.
Because every article they do on it seems to consist of nothing more than setting up Straw Men and knocking them down. SL is a social game with pretensions - at core basically IRC plus a 3D environment so there's more to do and talk about with friends then simply hang on channels. I've never met anyone stupid enough to invest in SL in the way their 'Financial Advisor' suggests and it's difficult to imagine anyone with more than half a brain who would do.
There may be business opportunities in SL on RL scales, but they are rare. Many more people are content to play at running a business in SL and make money on SL scales, and if that's how you have fun who's to say it's wrong? Even the 'escorts' who charge only one or two USD an hour can hardly be doing it for a living.
SL could develop into something more interesting (and if you code the scripting language, LSL, whist broken in places is sufficiently powerful to be really rather fun) or it may not. Anyone who plays SL at this point who isn't primarily adopting a "I'll have fun a see where it leads" attitude is an idiot, but equally it'd be wrong to insist there's no potential there at all.
Case in point, myself and a friend are trying to develop something in LSL that we think could have potential and wide appeal using RL development standards (most stuff coded in SL is hobbyist level). If by an amazing longshot it succeeds and I make significant RL money then great, if it succeeds less so and makes significant SL money (i.e. a few hundred $ in RL) then equally great, and it it fails then no problem - I'm only investing the amount of time I would be playing another game anyway, and I'll have made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun in the process.
Well, if that's your pleasure then who am I to criticize you :-)
Your sort of missing the point. SL should not be compared to WoW or a multiplayer game. If you logged on expecting that you are certain to be disappointed.
Instead think IRC. Now most people don't 'Get' IRC, but despite a 1980's protocol efnet appears to be just about as popular as ever. Indeed the coding channel #delphi which I helped run for 5 years back in the late 90's still has as many people on it now (and I just checked) as we did 10 years ago - actually considerably more by the look of it.
The regulars inhabit any irc channel because of the social thing. SL is the same. There's only so much flying around you can do by yourself - its your friends that keep you coming back to it.
So if SL isn't for you then that's fine. Pretty good in fact because Linden's servers are way overstretched and they could really use a whole lot less publicity at the moment. Most people don't get IRC when you show it with them and I'm absolutly sure the same is true of SL. Personally I really like SL, but couldn't be bothered with WoW finding it purile, tedious and frankly shallow. Oh it may have better graphics than WoW, but it has no real depth to it.
In terms of statistics as to logging in then off I'm sure you are in the majority, and a large one at that. Another large group logs on for a month or so then looses interest too. Only a small minority - less than 10% and probably nearer 5% actually stick around, but that's fine.
Actually my understanding is that Second Life is to some extent decenteralized as the load is spread between areas (sims) on different machines. The part of the system that isn't decentralized, and so has been causing them major headaches of late, is their asset server which is a single cluster.
So Asset Server aside (a pretty big aside) it would in theory be possible for Second Life to grow beyond Linden Labs by additional sim servers being attached to the network. In a sense they partially already do this as they do host servers on the grid for 3rd parties, but they are inside their datacentre so more of an indication of possibilities than an example as yet.