Friday, April 25, 2008

Another Digital Rainout


Today, for the second time in as many weeks, Second Life became unavailable for the same reasons that 3rd party large-scale server-based architectures should not be relied on to support mission-critical virtual worlds in any serious way. The outage happened, once again, just at the time that Aaron Walsh of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative was trying to host a Second Life in-world meeting. Here is what Linden Lab had to say: Logins have temporarily been restricted to staff-only as Operations addresses a slowdown in the asset system. We’ve also broadcast a request in world for residents who are currently logged in to refrain from manipulating or transferring assets. We’ll have more info ASAP. Obviously, this company is in real trouble given the frequency of these problems in a system that so many have come to rely on....

1 comment:

Carlos Crosetti said...

Julian, your comment about Second Life is right. Thank you for reminding me that SL exist. I knew about SL on TV while in Colorado Springs back in March 2007. Now I got a S test account to see how it works, definitively is a nice consumer product, and I learned about the grid computing engine behind. I don´t worry abou depending on huge infrastructure if goes succesfful and keeps syndicating capital. I liked the content and see forward how to pick a SL-made 3D building and ship it with the same quality into Croquet.

The Cobalt project is considering the import of content made by 3D authoring. I´d like to see more focus on that. I believe that splitting Croquet coding from 3D authoring is key to success.