Second Life is a 3D online world with a rapidly growing population from more than 100 countries around the globe. Residents create and build the world, which includes homes, vehicles, nightclubs, stores, landscapes, clothing, and games. In January 2007, Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) released the source code of the client (viewer) application under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Rob Lanphier, Linden Lab's Open Source Busybody, and Mark Lentczner, who directs a software engineering studio at Linden Lab, will talk about the release of the Second Life viewer source code: what that means, what it might mean, and what it doesn't mean. He'll provide a brief overview of the technology and history of Second Life, discuss the astronomical growth in use of Second Life, and explain what Linden Lab is doing to cope with the ever-increasing stress on the system.
Sections of the world are divided up among different simulators.
You can buy avatar versions of American Apparel's real-life clothing. Buying a jacket gave him a coupon for 15% off American Apparel's real-life clothing.
All of the images are JPEG2000, regardless of what format they're uploaded in. The viewer is open-source. This has been a boon to the JPEG2000 folks.
Linden Labs' business model is that they sell the land, and they are
the ones who create
new land (by bringing up new servers).
They don't create new parcels of land unless someone pays them
x initially (currently $1650) and promises to pay them
y (currently $350) weekly. They are creating hundreds
of new parcels of land a week. You do the math.
Second Life has a level of transparency that is like few other companies. For example, Mark holds open office hours within Second Life. Moreover, he will take technical notes from real life meetings within Linden Labs and publish them in his Second Life office.
Second Life uses MySQL for its backend database?
Voice is in beta. Voice is a form of localized chat, which means that voices are positional based on the location of the characters' avatars.
As soon as they got voice, Linden Labs started using it internally for their own conference calls. According to Rob, the difference is night and day—conference calls in Second Life blow away every single real life service they've tried.
Second Life has perceptual cues (e.g., your avatar looks at what your cursor is pointing at), and a Stanford study concluded that they are used just as heavily as in real life.
rudeactivities, or handling [un]intentional DoS attacks?
There are mechanisms to do this. Most DoS attacks are unintentional, because most of the people who are programming aren't programmers.
As generic as possible. They're all dual-core quad-CPU servers with 4GB of memory. They don't even have video cards in them.
There are two levels of privilege. The second level of privilege is granted only to Linden employees, period. All users are equal.
That's a good question, and we're still grappling with it.
But one of the things that we feel we have a very good grasp of
is the the technial requirements and challenges in evolving this
type of infrastructure.
Linden Labs believe the walled garden
approach doesn't
work. This is why Netware, Compuserve, AOL, didn't take over
the computing world; the Internet did. They are not afraid of
open source; the value they provide is the service.
You own your own creations. Period.
For example, Tringo was first created in Second Life. The game
was so successful that the
owner licensed it for Game Boy Advance. Linden Labs'
reaction? Great!
You can go to the index of my Usenix notes.