[sldev] Re: Exciting reuter's post about OpenSim - project to create open source version of SL Servers

Tim Shephard tshephard at gmail.com
Fri Sep 7 21:59:45 PDT 2007


btw, that was just me doing reductio ad absurdum.   if an assumption
leads to an obvious fallacy, that assumption can be proved false.   I
wasn't trying to be a cheeky monkey :)

On 9/7/07, Tim Shephard <tshephard at gmail.com> wrote:
> ok, you're right, Linden Lab is going to have a billion gazillion
> pentabyte harddrives to manage the entire world's inventory.   That
> scales so well - I mean really, it's worked out great so far.
>
> On 9/7/07, Dale Glass <dale at daleglass.net> wrote:
> > On Saturday 08 September 2007 04:22:20 Tim Shephard wrote:
> > > Well, if OpenSim moves to a model where all inventory is open, like
> > > images on a web page,  but not transferable (enforced by DMCA), then
> > > this whole concept of central inventory servers becomes irrelevant.
> > Heh. Enforced by DMCA. What about countries without it, and how would the
> > DMCA apply anyway in a system with no effective protection? I doubt very
> > much it applies to something like downloading a picture from a website.
> >
> > > Inventory can be free .. in order to get it, you need to visit Coke
> > > Island or IBMLand or
> > > whatever.
> > Hm? Don't we have this already? Lots of free stuff in SL
> >
> >
> > > People will write plugins for the client and server, but everything
> > > else, like images, will be basically free.  And maybe we'll have some
> > > bytecode that will phone home to check if it is registered,
> > Heh, and how are you going to enforce that?
> >
> >
> > > but this
> > > concept of a centrally managed inventory server?   I think it was an
> > > error  in judgement..
> > Well, how are you going to do it otherwise?
> >
> > An alternative seems to simply copy everything about an object to the new
> > region. When you cross a region in a car, all its prims, textures,
> > scripts, sounds, etc get uploaded to the new sim. That sounds like some
> > major border crossing problems to me.
> >
> > It also makes a lot of caching impossible as with no central server there's
> > no universal ID for an object (probably fixable by using content based
> > hashes)
> >
> > Inventory becomes complicated, if there's no central server, where is it?
> > On the user's computer? And what if they log in from another box, or lose
> > their local copy?
> >
> > Then add lots and lots of possibilities for griefing to this system. Sims
> > which change every texture on you to something disgusting, except to
> > yourself. Sims that corrupt data slightly as it passes through them. Sims
> > that monitor chat on all channels and actions of all scripts.
> >
> >
> > Now don't get me wrong, this is very cool, but by removing a central server
> > you'll remove one set of problems, but also put a lot of new annoying ones
> > in their place.
> >
> >
>


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