[sldev] Linden Lab Navigations and Landmark Project

[Dale Mahalko]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Jason Giglio <gigstaggart at gmail.com> wrote:
> Linden Lab hosting every byte of content is not a viable plan for the
> future.   I think I heard the asset servers are hosting something like
> 300 TB already.   "Uploading the entire web to Linden Lab" is not a
> viable plan.

This drifts into the philosophical and technical discussion about
virtual-world implementation. For a virtual environment to have a
consistent legal standing and governance, it may be necessary to have
everything contained within one system, vs just a client connecting to
hundreds of disjointed and independent servers.

Heh, I am now reminded of some science fiction where a corporately
developed virtual world becomes so large and globally important that
eventually the UN takes over operation of the system because it is so
central and crucial to the operating of commerce and society.

How can you have a consistent avatar appearance across a distributed
system with no ultimate central authority to store your data? Would
the lack of a global inventory and permissions system be a detriment
to the use of a distributed virtual environment? Will distributed
servers be willing to allow uploading of your avatar from your
untrusted client? And if you're traveling, are you required to drag
that personal client data around with you to use the distributed
environment effectively, vs just sitting down anywhere and having it
already made available from a central inventory authorty?

This is still all so new that there is no way to answer these
questions yet. We're going to have to wait for Croquet to fully go
live across the planet, to find out if a distributed virtual
environment can work.

-Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko