SLOOP - THE TREE HOUSE

It is quite obvious that the modern Western culture gives us immediate access, almost instantly, to whatever may seem of interest to each one of us. It is also obvious that our attention span is shrinking as fast as our capacity to absorb new information keeps building up.

I dare say this has a price: we don’t have the time to build all that knowledge into a solid subjective structure, an inner house, a solid place, full of surprises, hidden corners, basements and attics and secret passages.
The fleeting contact we establish with all the info we absorb creates in us the false illusion of knowledge.
Those of us who are old enough not to have been cyber kids, can tell the difference.
We are fascinated with everything that’s new and State of the Art technology, but we miss the kind of time we used to spend trying to figure out everything the world has to feeds us.
So we feel our inner self is getting stuffed with knowledge, but it’s not getting deeper, it’s getting thinner.
The Spanish writer Manuel Vincent says that people are afraid to seek refuge within themselves, because that inner construction is “shaky”. So it doesn’t makes us feel safe, but quite the contrary.
And that is a shame, because being able to seek refuge within ourselves is a fantastic relief against adversity.
Like those “cabins” we made under the bed, with blankets and a flashlight.
Or the wonderful tree houses, where we felt safe, masters of the fortress, and open to fantasy.
When we loose our innocence, we loose the safety those tree houses gave us.

“When we stop playing –says Vincent-, we remain unprotected, alone in the wilderness, far from the world of dreams, having to face real enemies”.

Full of hope, he points out that there are privileged human beings that are still capable, no matter what age they are, to build that tree house inside their soul and make themselves strong and invincible against adversity.

There are many ways to do that, as long as we build it strong and keep in there some strong feelings, some strong knowledge, and keep out aggression and barbarity and inhumanity.
And, as you might have guessed by now… let me tell you: Second Life is one hell of a tree house.
The one that made us feel so strong when we where kids, the one place we felt safe to dream in.

Lets play.

Lets take care of our tree house. It’s a chance to have that magic place when we are too grown up to go climbing real trees.

Covadonga Writer

Stability, a real boon

It is funny how one thing has changed over the last year. Not so long ago, you would hardly see 40000 people online, perhaps on a good day. Nowadays, it is common to see from 60000 to 80000 people online on a regular basis.

What happened? It looks like the Lindens' efforts to make the Second Life grid more stable have paid off. Gone are the days when you would have to wrestle with your client and connection just to log in. Unexpected grid crashes, unplanned restarts and downtime are now few and far between.

It was annoying for grid residents to deal with a grid that wouldn't let them get in or would kick them out at any time because it couldn't withstand large-scale traffic. This made people delay projects, lose sales, and miss events.

Stability is a real boon but let it be clear that all challenges did not find their solutions. If SL wants to "make it big", it has to be adapted for mass-scale use.

In RL, you can get thousands of people in a sports stadium. The only real limit to the number of people you can squeeze somewhere is actual size. In SL, a sim usually slows down when 40 to 50 people are around. Avatar rendering costs play a role in this, so do textures and "physical" objects that interact the everything around them.

People with more technological knowledge than me would say that SL has to be scalable. If works nicely when few users are around one particular place. But if you try to squeeze 100 avatars or more around a sim, the experience is atrocious.

This might even be the biggest challenge for Linden Lab. You can make the grid as huge as you want, but if you cannot concentrate avatars in one place for a special event, you lose much appeal. And we have yet to see real progress towards that.

Frank Ambrose (FJ Linden) introduces himself on the Blog:

"Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.
By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.
More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals."

Read the full introduction HERE

The main point seems to be that Linden Lab are working on stability - but we have all heard that before, right? So let's sit and watch the fun begin as the recent, fairly stable, grid gets pulled apart in the hopes of finding a long term solution.

"One of my initial observations is that many components of the infrastructure are “over engineered.” That’s not a criticism, its just a fact.

There are a lot of reasons for this and we’ve already taken steps to remove some complicated code that was deployed and contributed to some of our recent instability. It was designed with the right intentions, but just didn’t deliver.
Finally, I want to restate that we are committed to fix the grid. It’s my singular focus. But I also know that words are cheap and we need to start delivering on these promises.

If my days at AOL taught me anything, its to have a thick skin, and sense of humor. Whatever the comments may be, I’d much rather have an active group of passionate residents (frustrated as they may be), than a silent, disengaged group."

Great start FJ keep up the communication, good and bad news, and the residents will help you as much as they can!

Dana