Say what? When it comes to uptime, 'Second Life' founder is on cloud nine
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Blog: Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale encourages users to be optimistic about the virtual world's frequent downages.
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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Blog: In an attempt to better organize the news coming out of Second Life, a new streaming radio station emerges to disseminate information about the oft-fragmented virtual world.
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Members of the Second Life online world criticise the handling of a serious security breach.
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My avatar's more militant than your avatar IBM's Italian workforce is set to strike in Second Life tomorrow (27 September).â¦
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Back in the go-go â90s, business meetings were awhirl with arcane buzzwords clearly inspired by last-minute visits to Dack.comâs Web Economy B.S. Generator. IT workers were often left to raise a brow and wonder just how much commitment was required to feel fulfilled in a virtual partnership.
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Intel researcher Jerry Bautista defends the practicality of the massively multi-core chips that his company is working on. He makes the case that these chips could help make 3-D worlds like Second Life look far more realistic.
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Websites such as YouTube and Second Life won superstar status in 2006, helping to transform the Internet from a window on the world into a stage on which people play out their lives and dreams.
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The French location services firm likes the 'bird's eye view' offered in Virtual Earth.
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(InfoWorld) - As the number of virtual environments increases, standards and vendor collaboration will help make teleporting between different worlds a smooth experience, ensuring, for instance, that your avatar arrives in a new world still wearing the clothes it donned in your home world. Currently, Linden Research Inc.'s Second Life is the most popular virtual world, outshining a number of alternative universes such as Active Worlds and There. "A lot of people are looking at Second Life and saying, 'Let's do one of those,'" said Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM Corp. "The last thing you want is a lot of different ways to do the same things. You need standards for how to teleport between different virtual worlds and to bring objects with you." Besides an avatar's clothes, those objects could include the money it was using in your home virtual world as well as a presentation you might want to share with your colleagues or potential customers. Issues to consider include the mechanics of teleporting between worlds, Sutor said. If you invite someone from another world to come and visit your world, would they need to become a member of your environment or could you simply issue a guest pass? Can a person retain their home world identity in a new world? He also wondered how people will communicate across worlds, for example, via IM (instant messaging). That could be achieved by agreeing on a common service or setting up gateways between different IM systems. IBM's set to debate these issues on Friday at a virtual worlds event it's cohosting with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. Sutor will be there along with Mitch Kapor, the chair of Linden Lab, and a variety of academics and companies including Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. and PepsiCo Inc. Sutor applauded Second Life's move in January to make the source code for its end-user viewer application freely available. The viewer enables users to do a variety of things in the virtual world, including controlling avatars, communicating and buying and selling objects. "They've set a very interesting precedent," he said. Sutor expects that other virtual worlds will follow suit. Like the open-source movement, "virtual worlds are fundamentally about communities coming together," he added, looking forward to the establishment of a global community of developers focused on building worlds based on open standards. Sutor has been using Second Life actively since November and has been detailing in recent blog postings his virtual world requirements . That's a common experience for users once they've adjusted to moving around in a virtual world, he believes. "After they've finished walking into walls, they probably say, 'This is OK, but I really wish it did X, Y or Z'," Sutor said. "The odds are other virtual worlds have that. Looked at in total, we probably have much of what people would like implemented already available somewhere." For example, World of Warcraft, a hugely popular multiplayer online role-playing game, has many features that could be applied in other virtual worlds, he added. Businesses are experimenting with virtual worlds, particularly inside Second Life. "They're mostly translating 2-D marketing ideas into a 3-D world, which is more or less successful," Sutor said. But looking ahead, questions arise around the meaning of the retail experience in a virtual world. For instance, what kind of artificial intelligence will companies use to determine how sales assistants in virtual stores behave when a customer walks in? Will the customer be approached by the sales assistant closest to them or by the assistant who looks the most like them, Sutor wondered. Alternatively, will the sales assistants be programmed to examine the customer's avatar to determine what you're likely to purchase and therefore which assistant could be of the most help to you? Â
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Tech-savvy Baltic state Estonia is to open an embassy in the Internet fantasy world Second Life, joining the likes of Sweden and the Maldives, the foreign ministry said Friday.
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Second Life, the fast-growing online   site where hundreds of thousands of people play out fantasy   lives online, has suffered a computer security breach that   exposed the real-world personal data of its users.
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The code for the first open source "intimate interface" to connect sex toy hardware to Second Life is posted by qDot Bunnyhug. Have at it. In Sex Drive Daily.
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Titled 'The Entrepreneurs Guide to Second Life,' the book is a how-to guide to building a profitable business in the popular virtual world.
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Careful, we're armed with doughnuts Letters An anti-poverty campaign has set up its stall in Second Life, the online virtual world game that is so popular with so many. Our short, and somewhat cheeky, story on this collision of the most and least real of places to live (poverty vs. Second Life, for those only on coffee no. 1) has provoked quite a storm:â¦
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Fans of open-source programming and multiplayer gaming explore ways to bring the concept of the metaverse -- an infinitely expandable virtual world -- closer to fruition. By Daniel Terdiman.
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Al-Qaeda may horn in on horny teens US intelligence officials are growing increasingly wary of Second Life and other virtual worlds, which they say could soon become havens for terrorists, money-launderers and criminals engaged in corporate espionage.â¦