Rating my predictions for SL over the last year – Part 2
So my first prediction was kinda on the money, what about the rest of my crystal ball gazing for 08?
2) SL service will continue to improve:
Last year ended after a long period of tinkering under the hood with SL. Major scaling problems had been hit repeatedly, and it had reached the point where The Lab were turning off basic SL services (such as inventory or teleports) to keep the grid under control. Though things were improving, the consensus was they were getting worse.
I’d put those issues down to solvable scaling problems, and many instabilities due to the infrastructure and code shifts of the Het-Grid project (designed itself to stabilize the grid once finished). I figured once that was further along things would start looking rosier. This turned out to be the case.
What I couldn’t have predicted however was a new CEO popping up on the scene, who would, as his first major action, wave his arms around and shout to the world about stability. This is a message we’ve been hearing from Phil since the go-get, but Phil’s an engineer, so his utterances about stability were always to the tune of: “We’re juggling these cats you see and we know you want the cats to stay in the air, which they mostly do, but hey, it’s cat juggling…. but we’re improving.”
Kingdon however comes from a marketing background, and in a battle for minds between marketers and engineers… well, it would be more humane to just put the engineers out of their misery quietly in their sleep beforehand. Kingdon’s stability message has been constant and unfailing. More importantly it’s been simple: “stability is our highest priority.” This has improved the incredulous public’s view of Linden commitment to stability, and probably the engineers working for LL as well (though we can’t know that for sure). Certainly the hire of Frank Ambrose who kept AOL straight shows some commitment.
So yep, stability has improved, and though slower than some would like, the SL network has grown. Just as importantly LL has been devoted to evangelizing this fact. This will come into focus next year as we see the next round of stability issues hit grids… particularly the opensim grids which some see as competition with SL.
2008 was also the “year of opensim” seeing a mass exodus from SL towards opensource alternative grids. If I had a lindy for every time I’ve heard folk say “a grid is just a database, it can’t be too hard to set one up” I’d be richer than Stroker now. Of course a grid is a database, but an SL like grid is a database which has difficult issues with exponential complexity. If it was easy, SL like grids based on other technologies would be all over the place by now.
So this year we’ll see the “stability problem” move from SL to opensim. Scaling issues will be the first indicator of the immaturity of the opensim platform, and so we’ll see scaling and stability as the main proving ground for opensim as a viable alternative platform to SL. Opensim hasn’t been built particularly defensively when it comes to scaling problems, so expect them to hit hard.
Opensim will also face stiff competition from, well SL itself, which if things go well will be packaged up into a turnkey solution you can install yourself wherever you want and run your own grid. Given a choice between running an immature and unproven platform, or buying an off the shelf system that’s had 5 years to mature, to solve problems the OSS server hasn’t even thought of yet. Well if you have no money you’ll go opensim, but if you do have money you’ll buy your way out of future headaches with the LL solution.
Interesting times ahead.
Ok I got this prediction pretty much right again. I’ll call it 2/2 so far. Looking good 🙂 Tune in for the next episode to see if I get a hat-trick 😛 *crosses fingers*
Someone invented virtual worlds and has the patent to prove it!
As Terra Nova previously reported: Worlds.com has filed United States Patent: 6219045 claiming that it invented virtual worlds.
Unfortunately for them they invented virtual worlds some time around 1996. I personally invented virtual worlds some time around 1992, and have the documents to prove it. Many of my friends also invented virtual worlds. In fact if we organized a meet-up of all the people I know who invented virtual worlds we’d need to hire a second bus to drive us to the venue.
So what does the worlds patent have that all of us didn’t invent? (Apart of course from mysterious unlabeled diagrams.) Well Worlds patent covers making sure the client isn’t overloaded with too much stuff, or it their words:
The client process also users an environment database to determine which background objects to render as well as to limit the number of displayable Avatars to a maximum number of Avatars displayable by that client.
… though that might mean something apart from what I imagine, as I can’t quite understand their grammar. Putting limits on a client-server system to make sure you don’t overload the client seems like such a sensible idea. I’m amazed nobody thought of it before!
In fact they did. It’s standard best practice in designing any non-trivial client-server system. Before Worlds first mentioned thinking it up the problem in their patent, the United States Military had set up a team to solve the problem. Not long after this team became a member of the Web3D Consortium to work their draft spec towards an ISO standard.
For a patent to be upheld I believe there is a requirement for the idea to be novel. When five minutes googling can turn up countless prior-art examples (such as the above) there’s obviously no novelty here.
That’s not to say that Worlds.com hasn’t innovated in some ways. Everyone designing software must innovate – coding is a process of creative problem solving on many levels, so software development is innovative by nature. The patent though describes nothing that hadn’t been done before.
Folk who know me understand that I have a jaded view of intellectual property law, and expressed it in a piece for the international justice commons. To quote:
The use of patent law to stifle technological development is well documented. Arguments of this sort cite a “negative right” the patent holder gains, allowing them to exclude competitors from exploiting a similar invention they may develop independently. The legal burden of producing prior art in such cases can preclude the competition from proving their case even when they may have developed the invention first. When this is the case and a patent is contested, the competitor may be forced to cease development of the invention, or pay a licensing fee for use of the others’ IP.
I can’t see how this patent could be used any way apart from aggressively. Worlds, as an early entrant into the virtual worlds game, would be well aware of the other early developments in their emerging field. No honest software engineer would ever dare claim they were the first to invent the generic wide reaching processes described in the patent.
So this begs the question… what are Worlds.com trying to do here? Is it just trolling? Did the lawyers knock the technical guts out of their innovations? I’m not quite sure.
— UPDATE:
Tateru Nino posted quite a good article on the subject before me it seems. Much less ranty than mine.
Rating my predictions for SL over the last year
Now my original post of predictions for SL and virtual worlds has had a year to incubate, its time to see how I scored… hmmmm. (I’ll address these one per post)
1) Linden Lab will experiment with other service providers:
Originally I foresaw LL creating “mini colabs” at international ISP partner locations. I pointed out Australia’s Telstra as a likely early test candidate, as it is a national ISP and telco, was throwing a lot of resources into SL, and a great test candidate on the technical front. Australia is about as far from the USA as possible, so if they could extend their current California-Texas link to Aus and make it work, they could make it work anywhere. (They have a third colab currently at another location but I don’t know anything more about it.. testing servers?)
Well I got it half right, that was their actual strategy it seems, but Telstra is still waiting, and the hosting package they had been promised is about 18 months late. Australia probably started to look like too much of a liability too along the way when it became evident that internet service was so poor that it became an election issue. Singapore is now looking like they’ll get first dibs on a local colab, and as the most broadband connected small nation on the earth they’re a good initial market.
The Lindens are currently alpha testing a “behind the firewall solution” for SL, which means they’ve packaged up the server side so it can be run elsewhere. They have two alpha testers, but of course nobody can tell us who they are for due to confidentiality of course. When it is announced I’d bet a few lindies one of them has telco or ISP interests.
So, did LL experiment with other service providers? From a business perspective yes. It seems they had already quietly laid the business foundation to work with Telstra Australia when I made this prediction. … as far as having any practical outcome from this initiative… maybe not so much. Everyone is still waiting on the tech.
Recently however LL has started making a lot more encouraging noise about the infrastructure required to support a more distributed grid so it would be unsurprising to see announcement about practical non LL hosting initiatives pretty soon.
So I’ll be charitable to myself and say I got this one right. They have obviously laid the business foundation for it, but were let down on practical implementation by the technology. They’ve been working throughout the year though to fill that technology gap so it appears to still be a strategy. Lucky I called it an “experiment” in my prediction … the experiment failed, but it appears they’re still trying 😛
Pavig Lok 